On Being Sold Down the River.

 

Normal is a word that's lost most of its meaning. We imagine that it's just a matter of time until Covid-19 is just a bad memory allowing a "return to normal." Or the global supply chains will miraculously mend themselves and the economy will bounce back to normal. Or we're on the cusp of some great breakthrough that will tame our runaway climate and avert mass extinction.

All of that stuff - it's utter nonsense. It's a delusion. 

The environmental crisis isn’t going away. The best available projections from climate forecasters point to greater instability – more heatwaves, more floods, worse shortages of food, even an increased risk of future pandemics. Yet this unavoidable and hugely costly instability, now becoming a part of our daily lives, scarcely seems to register with the institutions charged with managing the economy.

...The assumption of a certain kind of stability over time is hardwired into many of the kinds of economic models used today. That even if the economy is temporarily knocked off-balance, it will swing, eventually, back to its steady growth path, plodding on into the future. “Shocks” such as sudden hikes in the price of oil, or wars in eastern Europe, may happen, but, like a roly-poly toy, the economy springs back to where it was before.

...plans for public spending and future investment, drawn up in the Treasury, will seriously understate the amount of either needed in a world of frequent environmental shocks – risking, in this case, higher than expected government borrowing, as additional emergency spending is pushed through.

It’s past time for a new approach, from the fundamental design of our economic models to the kind of economic management pursued by government. A starting point would be to focus on the requirements of protection, rather than the assumption of future growth. Focusing on things such as support for incomes, including real-terms pay, pensions and benefits increases, as a monetary insurance for households against future environmental shocks. And to invest hugely, not only in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in building in the kind of protections against extreme weather, from flood defences to home insulation, that are now tragically necessary.

We're up against it. By "it" I refer to a global oil sector that rakes in profits of $3 billion every day and has done that for the last half century.

The vast total captured by petrostates and fossil fuel companies since 1970 is $52tn, providing the power to “buy every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate crisis, says Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis. The huge profits were inflated by cartels of countries artificially restricting supply.

The analysis, based on World Bank data, assesses the “rent” secured by global oil and gas sales, which is the economic term for the unearned profit produced after the total cost of production has been deducted.

The study has yet to be published in an academic journal but three experts at University College London, the London School of Economics and the thinktank Carbon Tracker confirmed the analysis as accurate, with one calling the total a “staggering number”. It appears to be the first long-term assessment of the sector’s total profits, with oil rents providing 86% of the total.

“I was really surprised by such high numbers – they are enormous,” said Verbruggen, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and a former lead author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

“It’s a huge amount of money,” he said. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money, and I think this happened. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”

For the fossil energy giants this scam with its all too willing political accomplices is the best money they've ever spent.

George Monbiot recently observed that small, tepid change favoured by our political caste "will not save us."

The same formula applies to every harm humans do to each other: what cannot be discussed cannot be addressed. Our failure to prevent catastrophic global heating arises above all from the conspiracy of silence that dominates public life, the same conspiracy of silence that has, at one time or another, surrounded every variety of abuse and exploitation.

...They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. Those who hold power today do so by stamping out challenges, regardless of the form they take. The demand to decarbonise our economies is not just a threat to carbon-intensive industry; it is a threat to the world order that permits powerful men to dominate us.

Wake up. The people we elect to high office lie to us as easily as they lie to themselves. They've chosen sides and the side they've chosen is not ours.

The last thing we need now, the thing we must fear, are the Chamber of Commerce governments in our Parliament and legislatures. They're working against our interests and indifferent to what awaits young Canadians from their handiwork.

Comment Response - 

Thanks for the heads up, Lungta. Fixed.

I suppose you're right. 

"Catastrophic change won't be pretty." Indeed, but that merely ensures change will not be equitable or effective.  But it will be change nonetheless. Nature will see to that. The dream has turned ghoulish.