Will it take a ban on flying to stop climate change?

Stopping global warming means cutting air travel. Jonathan Neale looks at how this could be done without targeting the poor

Jonathan Neale’s book Stop Global Warming: Change the World will be published by Bookmarks in next year.

Tackling climate change means cutting carbon emissions drastically. We have to start now – that’s clear. But there’s confusion over what to do about air travel.

Half of global carbon emissions come from seven sources – heating buildings, air conditioning, cars, trucks, petroleum refineries, cement plants and steel plants.

Air travel may seem less important right now. Planes are responsible for 3 percent of carbon emissions globally.

But air travel puts other, more powerful and rarer greenhouse gases directly into the stratosphere. It’s the fastest growing carbon source.

It’s true that planes now use 70 percent less fuel per mile than they did 40 years ago, and further design changes are possible. But that alone won’t be enough.

One common answer starts by saying cheap flights are the problem – so tax them heavily, and fewer people will fly.

Sounds good. But then only the rich would fly. This is the problem with all green taxes.

There is always another solution that is fairer and cuts more emissions.

For instance, you can tax cars and roads heavily. Then only the rich will drive, and ordinary workers will hate environmentalists.

A better solution is to ban cars in cities and provide excellent public transport. Then you have beautiful cities where parks replace most roads.

Again, if you tax energy and make it expensive to heat houses, the poor and the elderly will freeze. And most people will hate environmentalists every time they open their bill.

But if the government gives grants to insulate every house, we can cut energy use from heating by more than half.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California is building one million solar roofs. We could do the same in Ireland.

The way to stop global warming is almost always not to cut what we have, but to do things differently. So it is with air travel. Here are some social justice solutions that will work:

First, ban all flights in Europe. But don’t make people give up their holidays. Instead have subsidised trains that prebook until they’re full, like cheap flights.

We would need new train lines. Those trains will have to be publicly owned. Privately owned railways invest less, cut the number of trains and raise the ticket prices.

What about longer flights? One answer is to ban expensive flights, not cheap ones. Luxury transatlantic seats create four to five times as much carbon.

But much more important, much long haul travel is done by business people. There are not so many of them, but each makes many flights.

The solution is rationing. Let people have one long flight a year. But don’t let them sell that ration – they use it or lose it. The business people can teleconference.

With new railways, that means more travel, more holidays, and less carbon emissions. And if we cover the world with wind farms and solar power, we can run the railways on almost carbon free electricity.

These kinds of massive public works that create jobs and improve people’s standard of living is what will stop climate change.

Otherwise, activists lay themselves open to the right. Look what Tony Blair said about air travel. He claimed his hands were tied because ordinary people wanted their holidays, and would never stand for airport cuts.

In reality right wing governments build new airports to please business travellers.

Blair posed as the working people’s champion because he could smell the weakness in green taxes – they’re unfair.

We have to build a global mass movement to stop climate change. Time is short, and nothing less will work.

We can’t build that movement by asking ordinary people to sacrifice when the rich don’t.

In almost every area where we have to act on climate change, there is a choice. The conservative answer is to keep the economy the same. Then we have to cut living standards.

The radical answer is to change the way the economy is organised, so we can have both growth and fairness.

None of this means we wait for the new railways before we shut down runways.

We have to fight for both, now.

Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

Written by John Bellamy Foster

Monday, 10 December 2007

Ecology is often seen as a recent invention. But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonized was already expressed in the nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Writing in Capital in 1867 on England’s ecological imperialism toward Ireland, Marx stated: “For a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.” Marx was drawing here on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig. In the introduction to the seventh (1862) edition of his Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology Liebig had argued that “Great Britain robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility” and singled out Britain’s systematic robbing of Ireland’s soil as a prime example. For Liebig a system of production that took more from nature than it put back could be referred to as a “robbery system,” a term that he used to describe industrialized capitalist agriculture.[i] Following Liebig and other analysts of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were sent in the form of food and fiber sometimes hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of being recycled back to the land these nutrients ended up the polluting the urban centers, with disastrous results for human health. Meanwhile, faced with an increasingly impoverished soil, Britain, as Liebig pointed out, imported bones from Napoleonic battlefields and from Roman catacombs together with guano from Peru in a desperate attempt to restore nutrients to the fields. (Later on the invention of synthetic fertilizers was to help close the nutrient gap, but this was to lead to additional environmental problems, such as nitrogen runoff.) In addressing these environmental issues Marx took over the concept of Stoffwechsel or metabolism from Liebig,[ii] describing the ecological contradiction between nature and capitalist society as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.” Indeed, “capitalist production,” Marx explained, “only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.” This rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature could only be overcome, he argued, through the systematic “restoration” of the metabolism between humanity and nature “as a regulative law of social organization.” But this required the rational regulation of the labor process (itself defined as the metabolic relation of human beings to nature) by the associated producers in line with the needs future generations. “Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together,” Marx stated, “are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”[iii] Marx’s ecological discussions, coupled with those of Engels, therefore went well beyond the general understanding of his time. Today the ecological issues that Marx and Engels addressed (albeit sometimes only in passing) read like a litany of many of our most pressing environmental problems: the division of town and country, the degradation of the soil, rural isolation and desolation, overcrowding in cities, urban wastes, industrial pollution, waste recycling in industry, the decline in nutrition and health, the crippling of workers, the squandering of natural resources (including fossil fuel in the form of coal), deforestation, floods, desertification, water shortages, regional climate change, conservation of energy, the dependence of species on changing environments, historically-conditioned overpopulation tendencies, and famine. Marx saw the materialist conception of history as related to the materialist conception of nature, the science of history as related to the science of nature. He filled his natural science notebooks with studies of geology, chemistry, agronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, and mathematics. He attended the lectures at the Royal Institution in London of the Irish-born physicist John Tyndall. Marx was fascinated by Tyndall’s experiments on radiant heat, including the differentiation of the sun’s rays.[iv] It is even possible that he was in the audience in the early 1860s when Tyndall presented results of his experiments demonstrating for the first time that water vapor and carbon dioxide were associated with a greenhouse effect that helped to retain heat within the planet’s atmosphere. (No one at that time of course suspected that the greenhouse effect interacting with carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuels might lead to human-generated global climate change—a hypothesis not introduced until 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.) Today the dialectical understanding with regard to nature-society interactions that Marx and Engels embraced is increasingly forced on us all, as a result of an accelerating global ecological crisis, symbolized above all by global warming. Recent research in environmental sociology has applied Marx’s theory of metabolic rift to contemporary ecological problems such as the fertilizer treadmill, the dying oceans, and climate change. Writing on the social causes of the contemporary “carbon rift,” stemming from the rapid burning up of fossil fuels, Brett Clark and Richard York have demonstrated that there is no magic cure for this problem outside of changes in fundamental social relations. Technology is unlikely substantially to alleviate the problem since gains in efficiency, according to what is known as the “Jevons Paradox” (named after William Stanley Jevons who wrote The Coal Question in 1865) lead invariably under capitalism to the expansion of production, the accompanying increases in the throughput of natural resources and energy, and more strains on the biosphere. “Technological development,” Clark and York therefore conclude, “cannot assist in mending the carbon rift until it is freed from the dictates of capital relations.”[v] The only genuine, i.e. sustainable, solution to the global environmental rift requires, in Marx’s words, a society of “associated producers” who can “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.”[vi] The goals of human freedom and ecological sustainability are thus inseparable and necessitate for their advancement the building of a socialism for the 21st century. [i] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 860; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 164. See also Erland Mårald, “Everything Circulates: Agricultural Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Environment and History, vol. 8 (2002), 65-84. [ii] As indicated in the editor’s notes to the Penguin/Vintage edition of Capital, vol. 3: “Liebig is referred to several times in both this volume and Volume 1, and it seems that Marx took from Liebig the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) that he applied there, suitably transformed, to the analysis of the labour process (Chapter 7).” In Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 878. [iii] Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 155-70. See also Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, “Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy,” Theory & Society, vol. 35 (2006), 109-56. [iv] Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 3-4; Y. M. Uranovsky, “Marxism and Natural Science,” in Nikolai Bukharin, et. al., Marxism and Modern Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), p. 140. In 1865 Engels reported that a chemist that he had just met—probably Carl Schorlemmer, who was to become one Engels and Marx’s closest friends, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first individual in England to occupy a chair in organic chemistry— had explained to him Tyndall’s “sunbeam experiment.” See W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Frank Cass, 1976), vol. 1, p. 262. [v] Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,” Theory & Society, vol. 34 (2005), p. 419. For further work on the metabolic rift and global ecological crisis see Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, “The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology,” Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4 (2005), pp. 422-44; Philip Mancus, “Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradictions,” Rural Sociology, vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2007). [vi] Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 959.