Climate Resistance

From the pages of the Guardian…

Use Rio+20 to overhaul idea of growth, urges EU climate chief
Connie Hedegaard says GDP model of growth causes overconsumption, drives up commodity prices and ignores the environment

Connie Hedegaard is the European Commissioner for Climate Action. It would be easy to think with such a role, and expressing such sentiments that she was something of a lefty, but she in fact belongs to the Danish Conservative Peoples Party.

The Graun continues:

The world must use a landmark environmental summit this year to change forever the current damaging model of economic growth, Europe’s climate chief has warned, or face future crises as severe as the one currently enveloping the eurozone.

Overconsumption of critical resources, and the rising prices of key commodities such as food, energy and natural materials as a result, risk derailing the world economy – but these problems will not be tackled unless today’s economic models are overhauled, according to Connie Hedegaard, EU commissioner for climate action. That is because judging economic growth purely on the basis of production and consumption, as happens now, encourages rampant overconsumption and fails to value the natural environment.

Fiona Harvey — who wrote the article — has little in the way of a faculty of reflection. I’ve met her, and she’s nothing if not zealous. This article is an argument for the complete change to the global economy, on the say so of some figures who are even more self-regarding than the author. Fine, Fiona, Connie (and Joseph Stiglitz gets a mention too), you want to change the world and save the planet. These are noble aims. But the idea that it should be changed at conferences in Rio, rather than by the actual inhabitants of the planet is surely a problem. Why doesn’t Harvey write instead ‘big-headed climate twonk wants to change the world through an entirely undemocratic institution’? Environmentalists, although bang on about ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ are the first to put aside such concepts when, as ends, threaten to deprive them of means.

Shock, horror, slightly thick Guardian eco-hack doesn’t think idea through. We’re talking about Hedegaard here… The journalism is merely disappointing, the politics is disgusting. Says Hedegaard:

“The 21st century must have a more intelligent growth model, or else it’s really difficult to see how we feed 7 billion people now and 9 billion people [by 2050],” she said. “Resources were cheap before, but it seems we are in for a period where resources become more and more expensive. Oil is coming up in price, so many other commodities are coming up in price. Food prices are rising. We need to deal with this.”

The Commissioner’s solutions are, of course, ways of producing energy that are more than twice as expensive as the resources they are intended to replace. But resources could be cheap once again, were commissioners to argue for R&D in sectors that could produce energy for less, in increasing abundance: new nuclear techniques, for instance, or new ways of exploiting gas, oil, and coal. The more expedient story for undemocratic and unaccountable commissioners, however, is that ‘stuff is running out’. It’s not.

“This is an opportunity to rethink [how we measure growth],” Hedegaard told the Guardian. “The knowledge is out there, the analysis has been done. We can take this decision in Rio.”

Current models of growth prize only consumption and production, rating countries’ performance according to their GDP.

However, there is a growing belief among some economists that this long-standing model has outlived its usefulness, and provides no protection for the natural world. The Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz has been one of the leading voices calling for a change, and world leaders including David Cameron, the UK prime minister, have heeded the call, promising moves towards a broader definition of economic value.

“This has a lot of relevance to the euro crisis,” said Hedegaard. “We’re trying to make it clear that the climate change crisis is an economic crisis, a social and a job crisis – it should be seen as a whole. If we do not tackle these, we will be in crisis mode for many, many years.”

This is what Rio is really about. Politicians have given up on the idea of growth. I haven’t. You probably haven’t. But politicians, left and right alike, have. They don’t know how to deliver it, though they certainly still know how to keep it amongst their own. Growth, in the West, is in reality, off the agenda. And once there is a political consensus that this is the case, and that the job of politics is not about economics, but to save the world and make people happy (apart from money), you don’t need to ask the public for a mandate. You just need to have huge meetings every N years, to make real the sense that the world is about to end and that Something Must Be Done, and that therefore whatever happens in the political sphere is legitimate. The mandate comes from above — supranational, planet-saving political institutions — not from below, us. The rest is sheer Disney – a product of cold, faux sentimentality delivered by people only too happy to tread on your face. “We care“, they want to tell you.

Hedegaard reveals the truth. It was supposed to be about saving the planet, protecting the environment. But it soon turned out that it was much more about changing the human world, and of legitimising political institutions that struggle to identify their purpose. Things are running out, she claims, yet all indications are that there are more fossil fuels at our disposal than ever before. Where prices have risen, it is because of political uncertainties, created as often as not by politicians like Hedegaard, creating scarcity where there might easily be abundance. Sanctions, wars, environmental regulation: these are the things that have pushed up energy prices, not its depletion.

A letter at the Guardian says,

Science is by its nature sceptical: scientists interrogate information and only on repeated investigation does data become science. The science of climate change has been established through numerous high-profile studies (IPCC, NOAA, Nasa) and was even verified by the sceptic-led Best report. In 2009 one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, declared climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”. Denying the links between greenhouse gas emissions and man-made climate change is akin to denying the links between HIV/Aids and unprotected sex, smoking and lung cancer, or alcohol consumption and liver disease. In each of these cases, well-funded deniers have had to be exposed and confronted before appropriate health-promoting legislation was put in place.

Okay. Let us agree, you shouldn’t ‘deny the links’ between causes and their known effects. But what if people claim that if you have unprotected sex you will get HIV? What if people claim that, as soon as you have just one puff on a cigarette you will get lung cancer? And what if people started claiming that, the moment you took a sip of beer, wine or cider, your liver simply melted? What then?

And what if someone said that this was so much nonsense? What if he or she suggested that you actually have to drink or smoke quite a lot to suffer illness, and that although one could theoretically have unprotected sex just once and contract HIV, it’s very very very unlikely? Would he or she be ‘denying the links’ between such effects and their causes? Shouldn’t we start to ask questions about the nature of the ‘links’ between causes and effects? And shouldn’t we ask questions about the extent to which they are stated?

‘Links’ between causes and effects have magnitude. It is incumbent on those wishing to bring those ‘links’ to bear over public policy to enumerate them. But often, risk becomes politicised. Any non-zero amount of risk becomes, in the official jargon ‘unacceptable’. ‘One death is too many’, and so on. Crusaders elevate themselves on the basis that ‘if I can save just one life, then my work is done’. This is how proportion is lost, and how the ‘links’ between causes and their effects get amplified from weak, to huge. Theoretical risk becomes immanent danger.

And just as it ought to be incumbent on those wishing to capitalise on risks for professional and political gain to enumerate risk, it should be incumbent on them to explain how a cheque for £50,000 represents a donation to a ‘well-funded denier’. Yes, this is all about the FOIA to the Charities Commission about the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The letter continues…

The Climate and Health Council supports Nasa scientist James Hansen as he joins the campaign to uncover secret funders bankrolling climate sceptic Nigel Lawson and his lobbying think-tank (Climate experts back unveiling of Lawson thinktank donor, 23 January). The public may finally discover who is secretly influencing UK climate policy – contrary to scientific consensus – today (27 January), when the Information Rights Tribunal hears this key freedom of information case. Some anti-climate lobbyists routinely misrepresent and cast doubt on the work of climate scientists. Although Lawson and his Global Warming Policy Foundation have been discredited and attacked by numerous scientists and senior politicians, his thinktank continues to receive significant coverage, wrongfully distorting the public and policy debate over climate change.

What is the extent to which the GWPF has ‘influenced policy’, as the letter’s authors claim? Nothing.

At every leap in the argument made by the authors, all proportion is lost. All ‘links’ between causes and effect are infinitely amplified, such that any amount of CO2 is indistinguishable from total Thermageddon. A cheque for sufficient money to employ someone on a decent wage for a year becomes the total failure of the UK’s climate policy. Never mind that, as I pointed out in the previous post, there are £billions available for the PR message in the other direction. £50,000 is all that it takes to completely subvert all policy-making in the UK. And it gets worse…

Perverting the course of evidence-based policy…

What?! When was there ever a ‘course of evidence-based policy’, such that it could be ‘perverted’? The complaint clearly borrows from the offence of ‘perverting the course of justice‘, but it has no analogue in policy-making. Having an opinion and wishing to intervene in a debate about policy might qualify as ‘perverting the course of evidence-based policy’. And as we have seen, the difference between opinions amounts to the difference between having a sense of proportion and not having one at all. And it is those without who seem, somewhat ironically, to be complaining about ‘perverting’ ‘evidence-based policy’. All the more an irony, that this climate inquisition are assembled from some leading UK scientific institutions.

… on climate-change adaptation and mitigation damages our health resilience, our economic prosperity and our environmental stability. Transparency around climate-sceptic funders is essential. We support freedom of information to reveal those deliberately preventing the UK’s sustainable future.
Dr Fiona Godlee Editor-in-chief, British Medical Journal
Dr. Richard Horton Editor-in-Chief, The Lancet
Professor Ian Roberts Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health
Professor Hugh Montgomery Professor of Intensive Care Medicine
Professor Anthony Costello Professor of International Child Health
Rachel Stancliffe Director, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare
Dr. Robin Stott Co-chair, Climate and Health Council
Maya Tickell-Painter Director, Medsin Healthy Planet Campaign

A few of these names are familiar. Ian Roberts, for example, was the subject of one of the first posts on this blog, back in 2007. He had argued in the New Scientist that the obesity epidemic is aggravating global warming.

We tend to think of obesity only as a public-health problem, but many of its causes overlap with those of global warming. Car dependence and labour-saving devices have cut the energy people expend as they go about their lives, at the same time increasing the amount of fossil fuel they burn. It’s no coincidence that obesity is most prevalent in the US, where per capita carbon emissions exceed those of any other major nation, and it is becoming clear that obese people are having a direct impact on the climate.

Roberts didn’t make it clear how it was ‘clear’ that ‘obese people are having a direct impact on the climate’, nor what the climatic effects of fat people were supposed to be.

Robert’s claims are sheer bullshit, of course, and the cost of allowing such bullshit to flow so readily from respected scientific institutions for the service of political ideas will be that science will ultimately undermine its own authority. If you think I over-state the point, examine the liberties that Roberts has taken with science so far in order to win a political debate.

As pointed out here:

When all that the best clinical minds can offer is the political idea that people’s desire for food and labour-saving devices (ie, higher standards of living) are expressions of a kind of false consciousness, small wonder that people complain about ‘health fascism’. Roberts has such contempt for the public that he assumes to know their political and material interests better than they do, and pretends that it is ‘capitalism wot makes ‘em do it’… that people are too fat headed to know what to eat.

It must be lean times at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, because this poverty-stricken argument is so bloated, it needs four bandwagons to wheel it onto the pages of the New Scientist: obesity, global warming, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. All that’s missing is a photo of a polar bear perched on a dwindling ice floe.

The conceit of the scientists — if that is what they really are — who have put their names under the letter to the Guardian is that their opinions, their prejudices, their politics are ‘science’. This is obvious, because not only do they fail to give proportion to their arguments, they also completely fail to identify what it is that the GWPF have argued that is so objectionable. It is merely the fact that the GWPF exists to scrutinise climate policy at all that bothers them. And this fact, when seen alongside the fact that the GWPF hasn’t influenced policy reveals the real object of their panic…

The GWPF has pricked the consciousness of some of the public, and given institutional credibility to the cause of policy-scepticism. Public opinion, however, has not had any real influence over climate and energy policy. Indeed, the point of supranational institutions such as the UNFCC process, the UN itself, and the EU also, is to overcome the problems of domestic politics. But the attempt to build international agreements has failed. (And that failure has nothing to do with either public opinion, or the GWPF). What the signatures beneath the letter to the Guardian have in common is that the belong to individuals heavily invested in public health and climate bureaucracies, whose influence is increasingly justified on the basis that it will mitigate an inevitable disaster. Such a disaster is epitomised by Roberts: climate and obesity — two of the biggest scare stories out there.

And if you don’t believe me about the scale of this absurd phenomenon, consider this BBC article today:

Miliband attacks Cameron over chocolate oranges
Ed Miliband has attacked David Cameron for failing to stop the sale of cut-price Chocolate Oranges – something the PM complained about in opposition.

In 2006, Mr Cameron criticised WH Smith for discounting chocolate rather than fruit despite the UK’s obesity crisis.

But the Labour leader told The House magazine the situation had not changed.

“If he can’t sort out the chocolate orange, he’s not going to sort out the train companies, the energy companies, the banks, is he?” Mr Miliband said.

With politicians like these, is it any wonder that public health bureaucrats and climate change fear-mongers are in the ascendant? There is a compact between them, in which the mediocrity of the former is offset by the scientific authority of the latters. The cost is democracy. The letter, entirely devoid of a scientific argument, uses scientific authority to make a political argument, and to close down debate. The substance of the relationship between these pseudo-scientists and their backers needs to be exposed.

In a moment of boredom, I watched a few minutes of this Channel 4 documentary on the Mayan prophecy that the world will end this year.

Prophecies of doom and destruction crop up in all cultures and at all times throughout history, with dire predictions about the end of the world, and even the end of time itself.

But one prophecy stands out from the rest and seems to be gaining more and more credibility: a belief that cataclysmic or transformative events would occur in 2012, pinpointed thousands of years ago in Central America by the Maya.

Film-maker Paul Murton explores what has become known as the ’2012 phenomenon’, travelling to the United States and the rainforests of Guatemala to find out if there is a future after all.

It’s pretty silly stuff. But a couple of interesting things emerged. First, it turns out that the descendent of the Mayans aren’t all that bothered about the prediction, and the end-of-the-world phenomenon seems to be much more located in the West. Second, a woman who runs a company specialising in providing equipment and training necessary to survive the coming apocalypse said that she didn’t want to sound like a religious fundamentalist.

Of course not, she just wanted to make some money. She was referring of course to the ‘End Time’ and ‘Rapture’ movements, in which the Earth will be cleansed of all the nasty people, etc. Unless they’ve bought survival bunkers, of course.

War and conflict was pretty high up on the list of things being discussed. Apparently, war is a sign that The End is upon us. But according to this book (which I’ve just added to my optimists-vs-pessimist-reading list),

the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.

I’m not sure about the cog-sci approach to these questions, but I’m looking forward to reading the book, nonetheless. What needs explaining, then, if Pinker is right that the world is a less violent place than it has been, is why does everybody think it’s all going to hell in a handcart?

The other theme of the Channel 4 documentary was, inevitably, ecological catastrophe. The film itself is unremarkable for its comments. It merely demonstrates the ubiquity of doom in today’s culture. It’s funny how secular liberals have developed their own Rapture movement. I came across a series of online films that reflect precisely that tendency. According to the Youtube channel,

Peak Moment is a biweekly series about resilient, locally reliant living for these challenging times. Programs feature host Janaia Donaldson’s conversations and tours with guests responding to accelerating energy and resource decline, climate chaos, and economic uncertainty.

You can find out what to eat, it seems…

And how to get around town…

And find out how big a house you deserve…

You see, doom has become the measure of all things for some people. It informs their choices about their lives, jobs, relationships, children… Everything. It’s all answered by the doctrine of doom.

I don’t think the claims made by Janaia Donaldson and her associates are worth debunking. They are as absurd as they are unpopular. Few are going to be convinced in the mainstream. There are some fairly extreme cases of environmentalism, but they’re generally completely alienated, rather than influential. What is interesting, however, is to see just how internalised the idea of doom has become for some people — how central it is to their outlook.

Back to the Mayans. If they really were so good at telling the future, it wouldn’t be 2012 they were worried about.

Following the recent post on Monbiot’s war on ‘liberatians’, Alex Cull points towards Monbiot’s latest article in his ….

Bruenig explains what is now the core argument used by conservatives and libertarians: the procedural justice account of property rights. In brief, this means that if the process by which property was acquired was just, those who have acquired it should be free to use it as they wish, without social restraints or obligations to other people.

[...]

Climate change, industrial pollution, ozone depletion, damage to the physical beauty of the area surrounding people’s homes (and therefore their value) – all these, if libertarians did not possess a shocking set of double standards, would be denounced by them as infringements on other people’s property.

It is frightening to think that Monbiot has taught politics and environmental policy at UK Universities; the students really would be better taught by simply being at the pub. Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons is a primary text in any course on environmental politics:

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance–that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of “like father, like son” implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust–but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

In 1968, private property was understood — by Hardin at least — as the way to best protect the environment from over-exploitation. How can Monbiot not know this?

Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons lays the ground for much environmental regulation. Carbon markets are owed to the logic he proposes: the privatisation of the ‘commons’ — the atmosphere. What Monbiot doesn’t get is that you can use the ‘environment’ to make an argument for the abolition either of the commons, or of private property. The argument made on this blog is that between Hardin’s and his own times, political arguments are increasingly framed in terms of their environmental ‘necessity’, precisely because advocates of the arguments fail to make them persuasively on their own terms. It is moral blackmail, in other words… ‘Abolish private/public property, or the planet gets it…’ rather than an appeal to your conscience or ability to reason.

And that is why those of a greenish bent also seem preoccupied with the general public’s faculties of reason. Monbiot questions it routinely. Chris Mooney goes even further, suggesting that the differences between individuals on the left and right can be explained biologically, as can such individual’s attitudes towards scientific evidence. As discussed previously on this site, the fact that Mooney, the liberal, finds that liberals are more rational hardly needs an explanation. What is interesting, however, is the tendency of many — not just of the left, as it happens, as Hardin shows — to form scientific perspectives on the political/social world.

I feel somewhat annoyed that I may have flattered Monbiot by making him the subject of the last three posts here. In fact, I think he gets too much attention. It would be generous to say that he has even a mediocre grasp of his subject. The fact is though, that in this respect, he epitomises environmentalism. Ideas such as Monbiot’s and Mooney’s are in vogue amongst a narrow, sector of society. But it would be a great mistake to imagine that Monbiot and Mooney had much to do with their success.

Monbiot’s attempt to explain ‘denial’ as an expression of a particular political idea or philosophy is an attempt to draw lines over the debate: to give it dimensions and coordinates, not unlike ‘left and right’. As long as he can make ‘libertarians’ and conservatives just look greedy by their emphasis on private property, he feels he can explain the climate change debate. Never mind what libertarians actually believe, what they have traditionally argued for, and that the history of these ideas crosses with environmentalism’s development. Monbiot wants simple categories — nouns, to which he can put faces, at which he can shout. And he wants simple coordinates to the debate: goodies and baddies. It’s not really a matter of his simplifying matters for expediency, it’s more a case of him struggling to fit the world into a schematic that already exists in his head. His rants about ‘libertarians’ are an attempt to have a debate without understanding it, and thus it reduces ultimately to being about the world’s failure to conform to Monbiot’s will. It’s all the fault of ‘libertarians’.

The fact that Monbiot has no idea what ‘libertarians’ are, nor what they say or stand for, nor how they were able to engineer the world as they wanted it is immaterial. They’re just against him, on his view. And that’s enough, for someone who can’t tell the difference between Monbiot and the world, to think that ‘libertarians’ want the end of the world. Environmentalism, if it is anything at all, is mediocrity and narcissism combined.

Often, environmentalist’s sense of triumph belies their actual intellectual reach. George Monbiot calls himself the winner of a debate with director of the Institute of Ideas, Claire Fox,

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

The debate is available here. George opens with the classic litany of ecological alarmism, concluding that the ‘vast majority of climate scientists believe that climate change is happening’. The mistake, of course, is to forget that many — perhaps even the majority of — climate sceptics believe that ‘climate change is happening’, too. What is at issue is the degree to which it is happening, and what kind of a problem climate change is. ‘Climate change is happening’ doesn’t mean anything by itself; it’s an entirely empty claim. Complex debates, presuppositions, prejudice and claims are collapsed into one neat axiom, and allowed only to be ‘true or false’. George looks at the ‘opinion of the majority of scientists’ and ‘the weight of scientific evidence’, but is unable to discuss the object of all that ‘science’ and scientific opinion. It means whatever he wants it to mean.

Given that the substance of arguments like Monbiot’s are put beyond reach — in to the hands of some scientists, somewhere, according to him — it is inevitable that any attempt at reasoned discussion will end in an impasse. And so it was, really, with the debate between Monbiot and Claire Fox. Here’s how it continued…

Monbiot: Do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?
Fox: Um. Rarely.
Monbiot: So what about the situation for instance that I witnessed in Romania, where lead smelting plants, because they’re not properly regulated, are free to produced toxic fumes which are greatly shortening the lives of peope who live nearby? That’s one type of freedom intruding on another, is it not?

Impasses such as these are often more interesting than arguments that reach a resolution. ‘Freedom’ is of course a much contested concept. And it is telling that ‘freedom’ in Monbiot’s argument is an essentially problematic thing in itself. Monbiot is convinced that Fox — a libertarian — will want to defend merely the freedom to pollute. But Fox has a more sophisticated understanding of freedom:

Fox: Well, I don’t think it’s freedom. I mean, I think there’s problems of pollution. I think no doubt that behaviour of certain big, industrial, corporate organisations is not beneficial to people.
Monbiot: I’m talking about a clear case where regulation would be reduced in the name of freedom that you’re discussing, where industries are less regulated and so more able to produce pollutants, like the lead smelters I saw in Romania. Do you not accept that those enhanced corporate freedoms to do as they wish, or enhanced freedoms of the rich people who run those plants, limit the freedom of the people who live nearby?
Fox: It’s very interesting because you said ‘those enhanced freedoms’. Freedom is not about enhancing or not; freedom by the way is a political freedom, and political freedom is not divisible. I want people to be free. And that, by the way, means …
Monbiot: [Interrupring] You’re talking about being free to pollute in this case…
Fox: Yeah… In that instance…
Monbiot: [interrupting] You want people to be free to pollute.
Fox: I want freedom. You’re… I appreciate that you are keen to get me to say that I am on the side of the nasty polluters…
Monbiot: [Interrupting] No no no no. I’m just trying to persue this question with you…

This ‘clear case…’, it seems, is a reflection on experiences that Monbiot had in Romania, in 2000. Let us put ourselves in Romania in 2000. What would we be interested in? Ever the environmentalist, rather than heading for the huge expanses of wilderness — apparently the largest and least ‘disturbed’ in Europe — he heads for the environmental disaster: people living near lead smelting plants. My question would probably be: why are people forced to live in such proximity to this kind of industry; it’s not as if there’s no space in Romania. But if we really wanted to understand the condition of Romanians in 2000, wouldn’t the events of just a decade earlier provide a better account of them?

Just ten years before Monbiot’s visit, Romania was ruled by one of the most brutal regimes in the Soviet Bloc. The context of people being exposed to fumes from lead smelting then, is a nascent democracy in the aftermath of decades of oppression. The legacy of Ceausescu’s tyranny is not the subject of the discussion, however. But shouldn’t that be the discussion? If we want to understand why there are smelting works next to human dwellings, and why people are unable to either move, or force a change of practice at the factory, we surely have to understand the political and historical situation in Romania. But George — like most environmentalists — prefers a much more simple model of the problem. The case is not as clear as Monbiot wanted us to believe.

Fox: What I’d like to then persue back to you, as you were good on asking that, is, you see regulation then, constantly, top-down, regulation, limits and so on as the way to free society. Is that right? You think that will ‘enhance’ freedom? That will allow people in Romania to have a freer society?
Monbiot: I think that if the lead smelters that I saw in Romania were less free and more regulated, then the people living around them would be more free of the horrible diseases and shortened life expectancy which they currently face. Now, I’ve answered your question, in a very straightforward way, you still have not answered mine.
Fox: They wouldn’t be less free by the smelters being regulated, because freedom is not the same as, in the way that you’re describing. Freedom is political rights question…
Monbiot: [Interrupting] Yes, and at the moment the political rights of the smelters is to be able to produce these fumes which are doing other people in.
Fox: Yes, but I’m actually talking about… I mean if you want to talk about the political freedoms of the people in Romania, what you need is actually a sense of freedom in Romania, to fight for your rights, equally. And you might then go out and fight the smelters, as it happens…
Monbiot: [Interrupting] Wait a minute, you’re dodging the question again. OK. You say…
Fox: Listen, George, I’m answering it in a way that you don’t find satisfactory. That is not quite the same as dodging it…

Fox is about to answer Monbiot’s question. Sensing progress, Monbiot interrupts. As Fox explains — or tries to — people in Romania should be free to challenge the polluting effects of lead smelting.

George’s sense of triumph was misplaced. Fox had not argued that people should be free to pollute others. But in Monbiot’s head, that was what she had been arguing for. It’s what he came prepared for. Monbiot had imagined that libertarianism stood for nothing more than simply being ‘against regulation‘, rather than an idea about what constitutes political freedom. Again, ‘freedom’ is a contested idea, but in Fox’s argument it was that a free society creates the possibility of autonomous citizens challenging polluting industry. Fox was not against ‘regulation’ after all.

This speaks about the very narrow conception of ‘freedom’ in environmentalism in general, and in Monbiot’s perspective in particular. He simply doesn’t understand the concept of political freedom, let alone the nuanced discussions about it. On that eco-centric perspective, ‘freedom’ is understood merely in terms of metabolic function: your freedom to emit substances interferes with my biological processes. Metabolic freedom, not political freedom. Absent from this view is the possibility that lead smelting can become a mutually-rewarding enterprise. No. Lead smelters can only be greedy bastards, and can only be stopped by regulation. Never mind that lead has utility in a free society, as do many other materials.

Monbiot: I don’t find it satisfactory becuase you’re not answering it. And in this particular case, what people… The very people I met… were doing were demanding that the factories should be restricted, through regulations imposed by the government. Were they wrong to do so?
Fox: I would disagree with them as that being the priority. Let’s bring it closer to home, because you will know that one of the things that happens here is that whenever there’s a dicussion for example about climate change, or the environment in this country, one of the things that is constantly urged is that people, for example, curtail their use of energy, change their behaviour, and the government are asked to impose those changes because you can’t trust the democracy to do it themselves. Now do you think that what we should do is actually have no regulations about energy use in this country — we should be able to be free to use whatever energy they want. You can try to persuade them something, but we should get rid of all green regulations, from this country, ‘cos that would be free wouldn’t it. They would be free then to make decision based on genuine political choices, rather than having it dictated by a government.
Monbiot: You precisely illustrate my point. We would be free to limit other people’s freedoms in that case, because we would be to reduce the quality of life of people who are much poorer than ourselves, who have much less agency than ourselves…
Fox: [Interrupting] No, I’ll tell you what you need for cleaner technologies, you need to actually argue for greater investment in R&D, actually have a vision that is not about limits, and natures revenege and worrying about cutting down CO2 emissions, a vibrant, healthy, future-oriented society that says the way forward is to develop lots of new technologies, to industrialise everything.
Monbiot: But let’s look at what’s going on in the UK for a moment, where we’ve got a situation right now, where we’re faced with a very clear choice. We either go down the fossil fuels route, and replace current generating capacity with gas and coal. Or we go down the low-carbon route and go to a mixture of renewables and nuclear technologies such as integral fast breed reactors and so on. Route two is not gonna happen unless route one is regulated away, because at the moment the cheapest option is to go for gas and coal.

Monbiot, the new advocate of nuclear power, argues as if he’s the first person to have ever thought of it, not as the person who campaigned against it for years. And even now he has no insight into what drove his anti-nuclear impulse. The same arguments persist in his claims about climate change that characterise the anti-nuclear argument: that it is too dangerous, that it allows profit to be made at the expense of safety, that it was being undemocratically foisted on a population that were lied to about the risks. The idea that he should have convince people of the merits of nuclear, or even the dangers of climate change, is lost on him.

Back to George’s Guardian article — an attack on Libertarianism…

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

It’s an interesting reflection on his failure to move past his impasse with Claire Fox. The notion of political freedom lost on Monbiot, he now considers himself the saviour of the poor.

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

And this is a point answered well by Dr Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance in a letter to the Guardian.

[Monbiot] claims we “pretend … that only the state intrudes on our liberties. [We] ignore … the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free.” Not quite. We do believe that the state is the foremost violator of our right to life, liberty and property. But we also observe that banks are licensed and regulated creatures of the state, and that big business in general is only big because of state-granted privileges like limited liability, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that cartellise costs and flatten competition from outside the magic circle. There is a difference between believing in free markets and supporting actually existing capitalism.

Monbiot has been banging on about ‘libertarians’ for years. And yet had he seen just one interview with Ron Paul, for instance — not that I am his biggest fan — on the subject of the economy, he would know that conservative libertarians are fiercely critical of the extant relationships between governments and banks, even in the United States of America! To criticise libertarians for ignoring the relationship between the state and banks would be not unlike criticising environmentalists for not ‘caring about nature’.

How can a man who purports to have an expert grasp on the world and its politics, fail so comprehensively to understand the very terms of the arguments he is taking issue with?

To make matters worse, Monbiot now turns to Isiah Berlin’s ‘two concepts of liberty’ essay.

So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

It is something of an irony that Monbiot — who, as we have seen, has barely more than an idiot’s grasp of the terms of the debate — complains about the misconception of ‘The great political conflict of our age’. He flatters himself with the claim that ‘social justice campaigners and environmentalists’ exist on one side of a historical battle, pitched against phantom ‘neocons, millionaires, and corporations’. ‘In reality’, claims Monbiot, ‘the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms’.

This much is plagiarised from Adam Curtis’ trilogy, The Trap: Whatever happened to our dream of freedom.

But while what Curtis’s excellent films show is a complex world without straight lines and full of paradoxes, Monbiot’s fantasy depicts just two sides: goodies (hooray!) and baddies (boo!). In article after article after article, the recurring theme is a shrill attempt to reduce the world’s complexities to simple moral coordinates: cave in to the conception of liberty peddled by the libertarians, and Africa will be scorched by drought and heat, the waves will inundate the reminder of the third world, and Romainian workers will be forced to inhale lead. This cartoonish perspective on the world reveals Monbiot’s absolute failure to see any depth in it.

The claim that ‘the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms’ is true, but prosaic. There is no ‘great political conflict of our age’. What defines this age is not some battle between One Concept of Liberty, but a dearth of political conflict — of ideas, or concepts — of any meaningful kind. The millionaires, corporations and even neocons (whoever they’re supposed to be when they’re not a figment of Monbiot’s imagination) are as likely as not to be doing all that they can to demonstrate their ‘ethical’ credentials, to be showing themselves to be ‘caring about the environment’, and the ‘social justice campaigners and environmentalists’ only too keen to help them. You cannot move in this world without bumping into eco-marketing. There are even ‘ethical banks’. There are billionaire philanthropists, who donate vast sums to environmental organisations. NGOs are given priviliged access to policy-making processes at national and supranational political institutions. There are no straight lines. There are no simple moral categories. Monbiot concludes…

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned “freedom” into an instrument of oppression.

In real reality, however, libertarianism — of either the kind espoused by Claire Fox or more conservative libertarians — is not a political force. Yet. The idea that it is powerful, or has been able to assert itself is a fantasy. It is an illusion that is owed to Monbiot’s failure to grasp the world, and to understand the claims libertarians make, and thus to identify ‘libertarianism’ or its influence in the real world. Libertarians are perhaps environmentalism’s (and Monbiot’s) most coherent and vociferous critics, and hence they appear to him as the harbingers of doom: like a spoilt infant, he can’t tell the difference between the end of the world and a challenge to his will, or criticism of his argument. ‘Libertarianism’ becomes an encompassing explanation of his own sense of inertia, just as ‘the climate’ serves as an encompassing account of all that is wrong with the world.