Oxfam Press Release on their Report

I whole-heartedly agree with what they are saying, but when I read the report I am left with some questions in terms of the principles around which such a frame-work should be built.

Their report finally prompted me to get a piece I wrote a few months ago out into the public domain:

Why we need non-tradeable rights to basic goods in order to adapt to climate change.

New Orleans marked the end of the American half-century. Up till then it was possible to imagine the world run via an American-style of national and international governance. But with climate change in the news, it was suddenly clear that the American model was too flexible to deal adequately with a moderate-sized storm. How is such a model suitable for a world that faces the prospect of increasing environmental instability?

Rather, it is clear that in order to guarantee the social stability that is needed to deal with the upcoming environmental instability, then a social contract needs to be worked out globally based on an ethic of social protection, more in line with European Social-
Democratic models. However this social protection approach needs to be geared to the realities of the poor in developing countries.  They are not in the same situation as the labour movements were in the industrialising North, where such rights were fought for, and which were framed largely in terms of the workplace. So we need a new framework for social protection, one that is based in Southern Realities, where direct dependence on the environment is far more the norm.

If we merely continue with market mechanisms for fighting climate change (and all the other environmental crunches) we will find that the spending power of the rich will price the poor to starvation. Instead we need to extend the right to life to include the right to basic goods necessary for life, water and food being the most obvious examples to start with.

There are three main reasons why this measure is absolutely essential:

1)Inequality is still increasing in the world.
This means that the spending power of the rich increasingly outweighs that of the poor. The debates on the recent food crisis reveal this phenomenon for food, where the purchasing power of a citizen of the rich world, even if you only consider that which they will use to fill their petrol tank, outweighs the entire spending power that a poor person can put towards preventing their own or their family’s starvation. Thus land is allocated to the former, via bio-fuel production,  despite widespread starvation amongst the latter.

It is the same principle at work when dairy and meat production displaces the cultivation of basic staple crops.  Indeed this is a generalised problem with all basic resources. As more and more resources become integrated into global commodity markets, and as inequality continues to increase, this issue of economic competition for the basic necessities of life will continue. This is especially so as markets are liberalised, and the “distortions” of various forms of social protection are reduced or removed, as is happening in food and water markets in India.

2)Basic goods are running short.

As the demand for basic goods increases, as the global economy grows and as population grows (although this is far less significant than economic growth) and natural resource consumption follows suit, the supply of basic goods like land and water, which is finite, cannot keep up with demand. With this emerging shortage, prices rise, and these resources increasingly (via normal market mechanisms) become monopolised by those that can afford these increased prices.

These goods are not really substitutable, and intensification of their productive usage implies capital investment, and so an increase in prices in order to pay for that investment.The other route out of such a situation is to intensify productive usage (of both water and land) through increased labour intensity. The main way this can happen is by granting rights to land and water, or some form of land reform, since owners of larger plots of land tend to employ capital intensive rather than labour-intensive methods, whereas small-holders tend to get higher yields per land area, due to the quantity and quality of labour intensity they tend to invest in their land.

3)The poor are dependent on environmental stability for their welfare.
In India, figures put together by Development Economist Utsa Patnaik (1) indicate that more than 80% of people are below the income level required to meet the 2400 calories a day they require to be nourished. This means that many in India are starving, and those that are avoiding starvation are only doing so via direct non-cash livelihoods from nature. Since these non-cash livelihoods tend not to include irrigation, which involves capital investment, these livelihoods are strongly dependent on climatic and environmental conditions, as is indicated by the term “rain-fed agriculture.”

The situation in India is likely to be fairly representative of the rest of the world, since it has the world’s largest irrigation network, thus in other places people are likely to be more rather than less dependent on the environment and climate. The upshot of this is that climate change will directly de-stabilise one of the only remaining welfare safety
nets remaining in many parts of the poor-majority world.

A global safety-net
These three points converge towards the need for a form of global safety-net that is rights-based. The UN FAO has guidelines on the right to food, and there are discussions on the right to water and the right to development (which itself implies the first two.) But ultimately the three points above imply that there will be some sort of crunch on most forms of natural resource. Right now this includes oil, access to carbon sinks (which is what climate change turns on), land, fisheries and increasingly freshwater.

This implies the need for a set of basic rights for all these resources, similar to the basic rights called for under contraction and convergence (C&C): In the case of C&C, the global annual carbon sink is divided up and allocated to each person on earth, as a starting point for a system of rights and trading. But if we are facing a generalised resource crunch, and if climate change is likely to worsen this by destabilising the main welfare system for the poor globally (i.e. a predictable environment and climate) then surely we need to generalize such a system of rights, so that we have the basis for a global safety-net that is commensurate to the problem.

Within political philosophy there is a strand of work, represented by Hillel Steiner (2) that lays out the case for justice as based on each person on earth having a fundamental right to a share of the earth’s resources, as if we lived on “Earth plc”.  Such a line of reasoning is a sensible starting point for a framework of international welfare that can meet the coming challenges. The current model of aid, based on an allocation of much less than 1% of GDP on a “charity” basis leads to huge problems of lack of democratic accountability, and this perpetuate a huge skewing of power relations. This regime is clearly inadequate to deal with the current challenges of global poverty that we face, never mind those much greater ones which already lie within our current horizon.

Consider India
India is soon to become the world’s most populous nation, with the majority of its people with purchasing power below that which would allow them to meet international nutrition norms. It stands number 94 in the Global Hunger Index, just after Ethiopia, and yet this is the land that is “Shining India.” That is a country with a 9% growth rate, where the official poverty rate is 25% with the World Bank claiming that 100,000 people a day are being lifted out of poverty. (3)

But these poverty figures are based on highly suspect statistical methods, where a faulty price index is applied to prices in 1973, rather than looking at how much food a given income would buy today.  The reality, as documented by rural journalists, nutrition experts, and by the Development Economist Utsa Patanaik (4), is that poverty and malnutrition have been getting worse under liberalisation, since 1991. Liberalisation is leading to a collapse in purchasing power in Rural Areas, which is also why there has been an epidemic of farmer suicides in India during the same period.
Part of the reason that India’s situation is getting worse is that pre-liberalisation India had a fairly well-developed system of price support for farmers and food subsidy for the general population. This is being dismantled in the name of making the rural economy more efficient, but it seems that one of the inefficiencies that is being phased-out is providing basic resources to people who cannot pay their market price.  This in many ways resembles that market driven famine in Bengal documented by Amartya Sen. There is food available, indeed India has exported food during this period, but people cannot afford to pay for it, and making markets efficient only makes them better at driving this process.

There is a similar picture emerging with water, as Industrial usage of water and water pollution compete with the subsistence needs of the poor. This is partly facilitated by a privatisation program for India’s urban water facilities, and partly through a drive to clear away legal barriers to business in India, which includes India’s fairly stringent environmental laws.

These problems interlock: Tirapur is an industrial town in Tamil Nadu that is host to India’s first Public Private Partnership for water. Tirapur is one of India’s main textile producing centers, and it lets out phenomenal amounts of industrial waste-water. So much so that it proved too costly to include the processing of this wastewater in the partnership contract.  Hence the local water provider, now a private consortium, is not required to process this waste-water. At the same time, due to the economic value and prestige of the project for local politicians, the local pollution control boards refuses to pursue its legal powers in enforcing the proper implementation of industrial waste-water processing.

This form of corruption of legal process is not isolated to the district and state level, but also operates within the federal Supreme Court. Environmental Lawyers have described how under liberalisation Supreme Court Judges have radically changed their stance towards environmental law, overturning previous decisions, openly accusing environmental lawyers of being anti-development in court, and shouting them down and threatening them with contempt of court proceedings. This is in line with the policy drive by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to “streamline” the approval process for business investment processes.

What is disturbing about this is that India is dependent, more than any other country in the world, upon its irrigation network, in order to feed its ever growing population. Industrialisation uses up huge amounts of water: The EU uses twice as much water for industry as it does for agriculture. Thus there will be increasing competition between the expanding demands from industry and the needs of a growing, increasingly impoverished, rural  population.  If it is all left to market forces it is clear that the poor will be priced out of existence.

Hence it is clear that the only way for India to avoid a form of looming economic genocide, without even taking into account the effects of climate change, is to have a system of rights to basic goods. That such a system existed before and is now being dismantled by the dynamics of the international political economy, points to the need for such a rights regime to be global, so that such international forces can be brought within some sort of more democratic oversight, in order to safeguard the lives of the many.

Kyoto2 - Or who gets the permits?
The debate over Kyoto2 in no way undermines the case for environmental issues, such as climate change adaptation, being dealt with on a rights-based basis. The main questions raised by Kyoto2, as it contrasts with Contraction and Convergence, is how the permits for using natural resources should be distributed, especially in the case of industries with very concentrated usages of fossil fuels. The Kyoto2 proposals actually include Contraction and Convergence as a means of regulating diffused carbon sources.

Clearly many questions remain about how to implement the distribution of entitlements based on an allocation of environmental resource rights, but this in no way undermines the arguments for a fair system for the allocation of such rights. One of the problems of dealing with the upstream regulation of Carbon Sources is that it raises prices for all consumers. Since the poor use a greater share of of their income on basic goods like food and energy than the rich, this can be a regressive measure, so whilst efficient, it needs to be balanced by a system of basic rights and redistribution. This argument also applies to all taxation-based proposals. This approach provides a coherent basis for such a system to be set up internationally.
1 Utsa Patanaik lays out the figures and the arguments in detail here: The Republic of Hunger available at:
http://www.networkideas.org/featart/apr2004/Republic_Hunger.pdf

2 Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
3 9 Handbook of Water Resources in India: Development, Management, Strategies, p. 4 J. Briscoe, R.P.S.
Malik (Eds.) OUP: New Delhi
4 Patanaik, prev. cit.

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.

There is another warning within the IPCC’s prediction. Above 1 degrees, even ignoring extreme weather, food production in the tropics will decline. Up to 3 degrees this is supposed to be offset by increases in temperate regions, hence the misleading headline. But even if you accept this, it means that the poor tropics will become more dependent on the global food trade. In other words the survival of the poor will become even more tied to the production and consumption patterns of the rich.

This is part of a wider trend in market forces that are putting the poor in peril of starvation. Bio-fuels are a prime example. Here there is a there is a stark choice between using land to feed people, or to grow fuel for cars. People who have cars are generally richer than those that might starve. They generally have more purchasing power, so left to the market people starve in order to run vehicles.

Another market force is the rise in oil prices: Oil is a major input into agriculture. For every calorie of food produced via industrial agriculture, 10 calories of oil are burnt. This means that as oil production falls behind demand social choices need to be made, via the market, about how to use that oil. Now again, since the poor and hungry have less purchasing power than the rich and mobile, it would seem that we will most likely drive them to starvation.

Bio-fuel production, oil prices and the tropical food deficit are all set to increase in the long run. All three stack the pleasures of the few against food on the plate for the majority. All that stands between the purchasing power of the poor and global markets are food and agriculture subsidy regimes. Disturbingly, as developing countries become more dependent on the global food trade, they are likely to face ever increasing demands to dismantle these protective regimes in the name of liberalisation. It seems that there is a disaster on the menu.

India’s position

India stands at a staggering number 94 in the world hunger index. I was particularly shocked by this figure when I found out that Ethiopia, the country that means ‘famine” in the global imaginary, squeezes in one place higher at 93. With it’s 1 billion odd people, this makes India host to the largest mass of hunger on earth. Indian’s are also some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Indeed, the day I saw the hunger figure reported in the Hindu, I also read about an Indian overtaking Bill Gates as the world’s richest man. India is quite simply the most unequal and hungry place on this planet.

It is also a country with huge emerging agriculture and water problems, even before you begin to worry about climate change and energy markets. The south of the country is pretty much dependent on water that it is mined from the ground. This is a one-shot supply that will not recharge within the foreseeable future. In the plains of Tamil Nadu bore wells are stretching down to depths of 300 meters or more, many of them finding bedrock, which spells the end for ground-water irrigation.

Another issue is the ever-growing cost of agricultural inputs, and the pressure this puts on farmers. This is partly due to Genetically Modified seeds, which farmers are forced to purchase each year. One result of this increasing financial pressure is a rocketing in farmer suicides, with 150,000 reported between 1997 and 2005. The ongoing oil price increases are likely to make matters worse, as they translate into the cost of inputs. When you consider that the Indian government already has to subsidise these massively, and that using these inputs reduces both soil productivity and rural employment, it becomes clear how crazy this approach is.

The subsidy regime will be hit hard by climate change. The pressure of bio-fuels on food prices through competition for land, as well as the rising cost of inputs due to the more general upward pressures on energy prices, is likely to make the current system unsustainable. The costs of direct subsidy on food, of subsidy on chemical inputs, as well as liabilities for guaranteeing subsistence wages, will all go up. In fact the subsidy on chemical inputs in itself increases the need for subsistence employment guarantees, since chemical agriculture is less labour intensive than the alternatives.

And this points the way to domestic solutions for this coming food and water crunch. Developing countries are relatively people rich and capital poor. They also need to provide more employment to help people adapt to climate change. Why not have a subsidy regime that encourages a shift away from the rising cost of chemical inputs towards the employment provision of low-input techniques? This kind of approach seems set to save developing government money on two fronts, by avoiding chemical inputs as well as boosting employment. Reports from the FAO as well as trials by Tamil Nadu Agricultural University establish that low input techniques give enough yield to feed India, or indeed the world at large, if they are rolled out at scale with full extension support.

There is a similar issue and solution with water. The government is responding to the water shortages by proposing a huge scheme to link the rivers of the North to the Rivers of the South. But climate change completely confounds this. The rivers of North India are heavily dependent on melt from the Himalayan glaciers to maintain their dry-season flow. With warming climate the Himalayas are losing their glaciers. The projections are for a 40-60% reduction in flow for many of North India’s rivers, which makes the linking project a waste of time.

There is also a general problem that undermines current capital intensive approaches to water management. As temperatures rise their are two opposing dynamics in play in terms of water supply. Increased rainfall is pitted against increased evaporation. In most cases the evaporation wins, with an overall decrease in river flow forecast for most of India, even in areas not affected by glacial loss. Large scale dam systems, with their huge open surfaces and long transport distances, are massively prone to evaporation. Indeed, according to the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, they are several times less efficient in terms of conserving inflow than smaller-scale water harvesting approaches. This inefficiency only increases as temperatures rise.

Taking all this into account, it seems that the main thing which capital intensive methods have has in their favour is that they are far more suitable as a basis for corruption. This dubious qualification keeps them popular with politicians and business leaders, despite the technical and economic advantages that lie along the low-input, people intensive paths. Water harvesting, like low-input agriculture, is far more likely to generate ongoing local economic activity than big dam projects, so in terms of adapting to climate change, activities at these smaller scales make far more sense. If this sounds like sending people back into poverty, then consider this: If many die of starvation and this brings on political instability, then we really face a return to the dark ages.

But even with a transition to low input farming and water harvesting at a national scale, there would still be risks of food deficit to face in India, due to the risks at a global scale. This means that this Indian case needs to be considered within the global context of how food markets operate. Clearly, as food and energy markets converge, there needs to be a mechanism for stabilising food supply that does not rely on the poor being priced out.

This mechanism needs to be global, since the developing countries cannot bear the rising costs of protecting their poor from these global dynamics. Nor should they be expected to do so, since it is not they who have created the problem. Rather global markets should be re-engineered to guarantee the supply of crucial staples to the poor, in order to address the danger of energy markets driving the poor to starvation. An approach to this kind of global protection is outlined in my article “Food and Carbon Trading.” I think the India case illustrates that we need a green revolution that reaches all the way from the field to the global financial architecture.

The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.

Anthropologist Alex de Waal has written about the ground-level history leading up to the Darfur Crisis2. Climate change might well have had an impact on rainfall patterns in the area, causing the famine of 1984-85 and a persistent reduction in land productivity. The resource scarcity that followed raised the value of the land, and this in turn led to elite groups stepping in to capture it. According to de Wall, it was this resource grabbing that set off the conflict.

Now this is of wider significance. Currently human consumption is growing exponentially, driven by both population and economic growth. As this expansion approaches the limits of natural resource usage, the scarce natural resources start to rocket in value, as demand outstrips supply. This creates a general situation where political elites are tempted to capture these resources. Their economic incentive is the rising value, but they also have a political justification, namely to protect the dwindling resource, and so the population from the implications of shortage.

Take the case of Chazev in Venezuela. He nationalised oil production and ploughed the revenues into services for the poor5. This has given him massive democratic popularity. This is close to what Putin is doing in Russia, tightening his grip on Gazprom with an explicitly nationalist justification, of restoring Russia’s former glory, presumably for the long-term good of its people. Why is this political risk worth taking? Well partly it must be because of the rising value of the resources captured.
This is something that could catch on world-wide. Tariq Ali recounts how Chavez had been interviewed live on Al-Jazeera for over an hour. The audience response was enormous with thousands of emails pouring in. The majority of them asked “Why don’t we have a Chavez in the Middle East?”6
Oil company executives should be very worried about this. According to the IPCC, the current growth path we are on will lead to between 2-6 degrees of warming7. This is likely to severely damage agriculture in the tropics8. So their business becomes a cause of mass starvation.
Rising oil prices will make matters worse. After the various Green Revolutions, mechanised agriculture has become a global phenomenon. This type of agriculture uses around ten times as much fossil fuel energy as the food energy it produces, or around fifty times as much energy as traditional agriculture9. So global food prices are now linked to rising oil costs.
Oil companies are already seeing record profits10 as barrel prices rise, with food prices following suit11. Combine this with bio-fuels now pushing up food prices, by competing with food for the use of land and you can see a powerful political logic for resource-capture emerging. Sooner or later a politician will connect the perceived profiteering of oil companies with the suffering of starvation.
It might be a series of floods or a hurricanes that sets it off. Public anger with fossil fuel extraction will mount until punishing fuel companies becomes a vote winner. You can nationalise the resource and then distribute the proceeds to try and repair some of the damage. You can plough the nationalised oil revenues into boosting food production for instance. It has a certain simple justice to it that will play well to an angry crowd.
Which brings me to my main point: The oil companies need to exercise a bit of foresight. They are facing a crisis, since the legal and political basis of their fortunes may disappear. The issue of food shortage is a general one, with enough political power to cause a wave of nationalization.
The politics of this is potentially very powerful because there is a huge distributional issue built into the coming food crunch: Under 2-3 degree scenarios, there is a good chance that agricultural production will decline in the tropics even whilst it increases in temperate zones. Less agriculture in the tropics will lead to less income for the rural poor. At the same time as food prices are rising, rural purchasing power falls. Poor people starve because they can’t afford food, even if there is enough to buy14.
In addition, if climate change hits hard it is going to severely stretch government resources. Globally, with food in short supply and thus expensive, famine relief will be beyond the means of many tropical countries. And those tropical countries, and their politicians, are unlikely to overlook that fact that the mass starvation within their borders has its roots in the rich world’s consumption. When the resources to relieve famine run out, they are sure to want to pass the buck.
So there needs to be a solution that not only tackles climate change, but also tackles global inequality16. It is only that kind of solution that will foster a “stable business environment” where the benefits of leaving fossil resource in the open market outweigh the political costs. Under Kyoto, the current Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) does not address inequality well. It is another case of a scarce resource (emission reductions) gaining value and then being captured by elite groups. What the developing countries are now selling, cheap ways to reduce emissions, they will have to buy back at a premium rate in future, when they hit their carbon limits17. This will make it even harder for developing countries to deal with food shortages. What is required is a solution that leads to redistribution, based on a just principle that is simple and easy to explain.
One solution that fits this description is the contraction and convergence (C&C) scheme18. This scheme is not on the fringes any more: the majority of the world’s governments already back it. Sadly, the current gang of rich world governments are showing quite some resistance to the idea19. There is a simple reason for this: it gives out rights to emit on a per-capita basis, favouring countries with large populations that don’t emit much, which means not them.
Thankfully, things are changing. India and China are rising powers, albeit shaky ones20. Under C&C they will get emission rights based on their huge populations, so unsurprisingly, they are both backing it. Any deal on the atmosphere that doesn’t have the backing of these two is unlikely to last. The CDM is nowhere near as generous to India and China as C&C would be21, so it is not the horse the oil companies should be betting on.
If the oil companies want to avoid getting nationalised, it makes sense for them to get behind contraction and convergence in a very public kind of way. It is a widely supported approach, which is perceived to be just, and is pretty much the only framework under which their continued existence would be politically justifiable.
The beautiful part is that if they get behind it straight away, rich world governments might even listen before it’s too late. Otherwise, we might even live to see a UN Secretary General calling for the worldwide nationalisation of fossil fuel production, a thought which is guaranteed to leave any oil man under a black cloud.

References
1. Ban Ki Moon (June 16th 2007) A climate culprit in Darfur. Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061501857.html
2. Alex De Waal (June 25th 2007) Is Climate Change the Culprit for Darfur? Social Science Research Council Blogs
http://www.ssrc.org/blog/2007/06/25/is-climate-change-the-culprit-for-darfur/
3. Cynthia Rosenzweig and Daniel Hillel (1998) Climate Change and the Global Harvest: Potential Impacts of the Greenhouse Effect on Agriculture London: Oxford
4. The Economist (June 16th 2005) The global housing boom
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4079027
5. Nikolas Kozloff (2007) Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the US Palgrave Macmillan: London
6. Personal communication with Tariq Ali at Hornsey Library (December 2nd 2006), at the Launch of his book, covering Chavez, Pirate of the Caribbean: Axis of hope
7. Mark Lynas (2007) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Fourth Estate: London
also:
Working Group III contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Fourth Assessment Report (2007) Summary for policy makers. See table on page 23.
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM040507.pdf
8. Ibid.
9. Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel (October 1993) The Tightening Conflict:
Population, Energy Use, and the Ecology of Agriculture. Negative Population Growth online.
http://www.npg.org/forum_series/tightening_conflict.htm
10. Consumeraffairs.com (October 28 2005) Record Oil company profits prompt call for probe
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/oil_price_probe.html
11. John Vidal (July 5th 2007) Bio-fuel demand to push up food prices. Guardian Online
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2118696,00.html
12. DuPont, Director Government Affairs (June 20th 2006) DuPont and BP announce partnership to develop advanced biofuels Epobio online
http://www.epobio.net/news/news060627.htm
13. George Monbiot (November 23rd 2004) Feeding cars, not people Published in the Guardian 22nd of November 2004
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/
14. Amartya Sen (1983) Poverty and Famines: An essay on Entitlement and Deprivation OUP: Oxford
15. Ibid.
16. There is also the problem of overall global food supply, and possible schemes to try and address that. There is not space to cover this issue here.
17. Anil Agarwal (2000) Climate Change: A Challenge to India’s Economy, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi
http://www.cseindia.org/html/climate/pdf/cse_briefing.pdf
18. Aubrey Meyer (2000) Contraction and Convergence: A Global Solution to Climate Change Green Books: London
19 Ibid.
20. Pranab Bardhan (25th October 2005) China, India Superpower? Not so fast
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6407
21. Anil Agarwal (2000) Climate Change: A Challenge to India’s Economy, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi
http://www.cseindia.org/html/climate/pdf/cse_briefing.pdf

Allen, my new Taiwanese-Canadian web-friend asked me to go look at the film Zeitgeist (Z)

So I did the unthinkable and threw myself into a conspiracy theory film. And I have to say it was really good fun, I was thoroughly gripped and entertained throughout, and learned some very interesting things, although verifying them is entirely another matter.

So I want to do a sort of film review of this web film. It is a film that attempts a global vision, and that is distributed on a global media, and so is probably worth debating as a form of emerging global public debate.

It is interesting how constructing myths these days so often takes the form of debunking other myths. Z takes this form, part I attacking Christianity, Part II attacking the official account of 9-11, part three turning explanatory and discussing the history and power of the federal reserve and of the banking elite that are standing behind it. The synthesis is that these banking groups have been triggering wars for profit for donkey’s years, that they are happily dumbing down the American public, and that they hope to produce a world government, totalitarian in its application of accounting standards.

The movie is such an interesting mix, of thought provoking evidence and what feels like paranoia, that I am going to trawl through it bit-by-bit.

Part I focuses on attacking the Christian story as a myth derived from astrology, and found as historically connected (via this astrological link to Sun Worship) to other mythology in the Judeo-Christian world, and closely related to the Sun-God myths of ancient Egypt.

This part I found plausible: Why should Christian myth have arisen out of the blue? As with most stories it is likely to have arisen in relation to historically pre-dating narratives. I also find it plausible that astrology and sun-worship could form a ground for a whole family of religious practices, which eventually fed into the Judeo-Christian religion.

This might not make me popular amongst my Christian friends (I am surprised by how many I have). But looking at it another way, it makes Christianity a set of values that reflects a broader worship of the sun and its warmth. It also makes Christianity a religion with a set of humanistic principles that have been shared amongst many cultures around the fertile crescent. So this version of events embeds Christianity more closely in human history, and so to my mind makes it more humanistic and sympathetic.

It also kicks fundamentalist and literal interpretations into touch, which I also like. I will have to try this out on my new American Christian Philosopher friend, who is a true believer, but also a lovely bright man.

Part II details the 9-11 controversy. This bit I am very unsure about, no doubt influenced by the arguments of the talented Mr Monbiot.

But the idea that the US elites are happy to use shocking events as an excuse to go to war, and also to use war as an excuse to implement foreign policy is really very plausible. Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine book talks about the latter. The point is that whilst they may try and orchestrate some things, they don’t have to orchestrate everything.

This is where the thesis comes a bit unstuck. It falls into the narrative fallacy, namely that everything has to fit into one big story. This means that effectively the world is driven by the unfolding of ideas. This is the zeitgeist myth in a nutshell, precisely Hegel’s big mistake, much attacked by Marx.

Now there are strong reasons to be suspicious of this, the best on is the idea of randomness. Taleb writes of this in the Black Swan, but in a nutshell, the unexpected makes non-sense of a world-view based exclusively on narrative.

People attempt to bring out order and stories amongst the unruly unpredictability of life. And it is partly a question of power as to how much success people have in this, clearly those with more power and resources have more potential to exert control, both over others as well in relation to unpredictable circumstances, but only to some extent: Total control is impossible.

Now, in practice probably the Bush regime took advantage of the terrorist attacks, and may have even aided them to some extent, but the salient point is that they desperately wanted to go to war in Iraq, and there were definitely financial interests driving this, even the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, admits this. So I remain agnostic on 9-11, because for me it doesn’t make much difference how these people got there, they still wanted to dominate the Middle East.

Part III about the federal reserve is deeply interesting. I had not looked at this history of the American Financial infrastructure before, and of course it is profoundly significant. These people undoubtedly do have some serious power, and it does seem to run against the interests of the American people at large and the rest of the world. This is a story of elite groups systematically attempting to capture all the resources by skewing the rules of the game, something I find entirely plausible, consistent with how the international financial institutions were founded, as well as with Lietaer’s account of the financial system in “The Future of Money.”

Now the next step is that these people in America want to found a world order based on everyone being tracked and controlled individually. The paranoid bit is our action being regulated by a system of personal identification, that would allow the bankers to switch them off or erase us if we caused trouble, by cutting off our account. This is a bit like the scenario in “Flow my tears the Policeman said” by Phillip K Dick. Except this is paranoid, because in Sweden you have a strong personal identity system, which is not abused, partly because the government is very socialist, and is also very concerned about democratic limits on power. The problem is more the politics than the system itself.
Now I find it plausible that American elite bankers might have such megalomaniac ideas, and that they would try and manipulate the international system to achieve this. But the idea that they will achieve it in practice is another matter, it might not be that easy. Also, whilst bankers travel in groups called wunches (a wunch of…), they do not all think alike. It is not clear that there is just one cabal bent on world domination. But hey, they are out to protect their interests, no doubt about that.

Now the ideas that are put forward at the end of the film are genuinely about zeitgeist, and seen in that light they are interesting. The idea of each person being individually accounted for and controlled is very much an implication of the current hegemony, which is quite strongly centered on ideas of information and information processing. If you see the world as a huge database, or as a huge set of accounts, then having a primary key or an index of numbered citizens makes sense.

And this is a huge vision of mechanical control. Information is a vision of knowledge built, in Shannon and Weaver’s paper, an a metaphor of communication between machines. The objective is to remove as much noise, or unpredictability, as is possible from the signal. Which is fine as far as clear connections between machines go, but is profoundly undemocratic. Edwin Black details how IBM leased machines to the Nazis to administrate their genocidal logistics. This illustrates the dangers of allowing information alone to become the lodestone of our social order, without strong democratic politics to watch for abuses of power.
A requirement for humanism is to involve the people at large in the creation of social order. Now people, with their ability to reflect on their situation and change their minds, are very unpredictable, and thus might count as “noise” or “risk” in a purely information-based system ( I also co-run an IT based project management firm. I also wrote an academic paper on the tensions between democratic ethics and an information-based view of the social.)

In short, the alienation that the film warns of, and the fascistic tendencies in today’s order are, to my mind, quite real risks. As are the attempts by the American financial community to control the world. John Perkins details these well in “Confessions of an Economic Hit-man.” Anybody who has ever played war or strategy games seriously will recognize this behavior (I like a game called Lux) - it is part of the common-sense of domination.

But how these trends play out in the partial, complex and un-predicatable ground of practice is another matter. The unexpected breaks us out of social narrative again and again. The current narrative of debt-based accumulation was not ready to meet with environmental limits: Climate change came out of the blue, and has upset the story.

I have spoken about this a lot, but suffice to say it is human action and democratic politics that will overturn the age of global accountancy, and expose the limitations of information economics, and usher in yet more interesting times.

Oh, and the sting in the tail is that the film is actually part of a right-wing American activism, trying to get rid of the central federal tax system, and thus make America “free”!

So sometimes it is hard to tell the stories of the right from the stories of the left. This is the candidate, Ron Paul, that the film site is backing for President in America, a free-tradist Republican, bless his cotton socks.

One of the key issues impacting on the poor is that their right to food is being compromised by market mechanisms. The enormous purchasing power of the rich, for meat, bio-fuels as well as luxuries like sugar is being pitted against the pitiful purchasing power of the poor, who are being priced out of food markets, and thus out of existence. Thus there is a need to try and provide the poor with affordable food. One way to do this is for countries to subsidize food on a national level. But this does nothing for global justice…

Why climate change implies the need for global redistribution

Climate change contains an enormous injustice. The IPCC reports make it clear that food production will be hit hardest in the tropics, with some temperate zones actually growing more food due to warming (at least at first, and without taking account of extreme weather events.) So why should tropical countries, who are most often poor, who have thus contributed little to climate change, and who can scarcely afford to subsidize food imports, even as prices rise, why should they of all countries be expected to carry the costs?

This suggests that in the name of both social justice, but also in the name of global social stability, that a global system of food stability needs to be set up, and one that is based on progressive principles. This link between the food shortage issue and climate change also helps to suggest a solution. We are currently looking at a set of new systems to deal with climate change.

But the focus in international negotiations has mainly been on mitigation - reducing the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere. There has not been enough thought put to how we might integrate this with a system of adaptation, particularly to help poor countries deal with the impacts of climate change. And a system to regulate food supply fit the bill, since starvation is the most obvious implication of climate change for the poor.

Contraction and Convergence (C&C): The most popular scheme

Contraction and Convergence (C&C) is the most widely accepted of all the mitigation proposals, backed by the majority of the world’s governments. It is popular because it is based on a principle of fairness. Each person on the planet is allocated the same amount of carbon emissions, based on an overall target for emissions year on year, and then this share is allocated to countries based on how many heads of population they have. These allocations are then trade-able, meaning that rich countries will need to but credits from low emitting countries, to pay them off for using more than their fair share of the global pool.

How to modify C&C so that it addresses food supply

Now if we are in the process of setting up one global regime to regulate carbon, why not extend that to give another global regime to regulate food supply? That way you are dealing with both mitigation and adaptation within the same framework. You can also use the redistributive aspects of C&C a basis for preventing starvation.

One mechanism that could be used to do this is to create a relationship between emissions rights and food production. It is critical that this arrangement only affects the distribution of emissions rights, and not their overall amount, or it would break C&C. The way to do this is to set up an exchange rate between food exports and extra heads of population, only for the purposes of sharing out the carbon allocation to each country.
The FAO could administer this. They could define a basket of staple foods that one person needs for a year, based on a portfolio of various sources of nutrition. They could then define exchange rates, food for extra heads of population in the carbon share regime, geared around the staples that the poor are not able to afford. In this way a relationship between food production and the ability to emit and to trade internationally is formed. Since this is defined as a variable exchange rate that the FAO can manipulate based on its food forecasts, then this creates an incentive of variable strength that can be used to regulate food supply, in the same way as central banks attempt to regulate money supply.

These measures would also create a symbolic link between having some claim on the global commons, and looking after human life, thus creating the kind of social contract needed for a stable global polity. Just such stability is needed for the kind of long term planning and co-operation required to tackle climate change.

So yes, maybe it is a good thing if, over the next few hundred years, the vast majority of life on earth goes extinct. Just think, if humanity survives this crisis, and goes on to colonize other planets, what a problem that would be for those other planets,and those that live on them.

We don’t have a great track record, what with colonialism and environmental destruction, so maybe we will have saved the universe at large from a terrible fate. Besides, if you take a giant step back you can see it is all futile anyway: Lives will come and go, planets will live and die, and eventually stars, including our own, will burn out. The rest is just not worth getting too upset about, or is it?

Well that is where an objectivist stance takes you. Because I am thinking about the world as if my and others feelings, responses and relationships were not a part of the ‘real world.’ Thus people become passing trends, life and death becomes the ticking of the clock, and people’s lived experience becomes invisible. As Kahn points out, this is where value-free, exclusively fact-based thinking will take you: It invokes no response, because it has very little to do with the world of responses and human feeling.

Thus it is unemotional and de-polticised, and tends us towards a detachment and disengagement that is not a coherent response to the human tragedies that can be found between the lines. So we are indeed at the limits of enlightenment thinking: We cannot merely study the statistics any more - There are real lives, pains and sorrows on the line.

In the tropics, those lives are in danger right now: Food production in India is already falling due to climate change. More discussion of how we (collectively) should respond, is what we need. The irony of the situation is that if we do not start to respond to climate change morally and emotionally, we are more likely to end up doing too little too late, thus saving the universe from a terrible fate.

Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.

Now there are reasons to be wary of the all encompassing and magnetic qualities of positive sentiments and sympathy. They can indeed warp your view (they do mine) making one both willfully-blind and one-sided. They can also cause you to overlook details and differences in a quest to experience unity. Anthropology - a discipline supposedly founded in an interest in humanity, carries critical cynicism to an art form. Anthropological accounts of the broadly observed human urge for unity and community, and critiques of the startling power this has to shape people’s perceptions, are well-founded. But if you cary that critical philosophy too far it is easy to miss an elementary point: This wish for unity shapes the world, it makes the idea of a common public possible. It shapes politics and practice: it is part of what makes us make the world.

Without this awareness, one tends to default back to already established unities as lodestones: The nation, the state, this or that identity. Because if you see the shaping forces of affection as not being real, you miss where the game is going on. Certainly these are forces that are manipulated by politicians. But however suspicious you are of powerful people (which I am) it is hard to see how politicians could run a democracy without appealing to affections and attachments. But they also must attempt to remake the same, in order to shape the social world to better meet its future.

Now more than ever this needs to happen. If we do not extend the global sympathy that currently so greatly limits wars (despite the near unimaginable physical power available these days) to also limit our physical power over our environment, and thus prevent the massacre of distant others then we are at great risk of all perishing. For whilst we in the rich world are ‘culprits first and victims later’ in climate change, it is the poor’s current victim-hood and lack of culpability that should motivate us to meet our own future well. It is a shame that the media does not seize this opportunity to help us overcome our inertia and complacency. It is in sympathy that our hope lies, for without it we are all lost.

Although a positively geriatric 32, if I want good critical information nowadays, I don’t go to the TV or to newspapers, I go to the net at large. This is a general trend: for the under 25’s the internet is the primary medium for information, well above TV. Claims that the net offers poor quality are fig-leaves for worried journalists. In his speech Paxman tries to make his quality claim by equating the web with the blogosphere. But the web contains all sorts of commentary sources, from universities, to government departments, to think-tanks, to bloggers who cite references, to bloggers who rant (ahem…). The “media” are just a part of this: Amazon is a more significant web-player than the BBC, and Google makes them both look like midgets.

Paxman is the voice of an old-school journalism. On TV it is possible to speak, as Paxman did, of enlightening the “audience” (which is a polite contemporary way of saying the “masses”.) On the internet this is more tricky, is it not sometimes the case that “the masses” do the enlightening? Journalism needs to take this into account, the media cannot be a credible fourth estate until it has risen above the bar set by internet users.
Paxman’s exclusive focus on 24 hour News is thus a distraction, akin to Blair’s slightly surreal attack on the Independent. The pressing issue is that centralized opinion formation is at risk, or at least facing transformation. It is not the emotional excesses of 24 hour TV that is the problem, it is the fact that TV is the wrong medium for the times, at least politically speaking, and journalists need to catch up with this.

Indeed, some press journalists already have. The Guardian’s investigation of BAE, involved the journalists uncovering evidence, which they then posted on the web. People “swarmed” around this evidence, carrying out their own enquiries and turning up new leads. This leveraged much needed brainpower into a complex piece of investigative journalism. It is an example of a new journalism forging powerful relationships within the emerging digital fourth estate.

This example is highly relevant to the TV market. Television is approaching a tipping point, based on these differing media-usage practices of the under 25s. Jack Schofield reported in his Guardian blog on Apple TV dropping NBC content because the network tried to hike prices. This is a bad move by the network. The TV market as it stands right now may just support making such a move.  But this will change fast especially for the under 25 segment. What happens when there is a consumer product that integrates TV schedules with p2p networks in a touch of the button way?

Bittorrent programs promise to bring this about fairly soon. There is a new program for Mac, Xtorrent, which greatly simplifies finding torrents. Azureus is experimenting with a consumer interface called Vuze also making it easy to find TV content. The only missing link is to integrate these easy p2p platforms into a plug and play box, like AppleTV, and suddenly there is a whole new TV market, one that implies a journalism very different to Paxman’s enlightening vision.
This is a TV market that is more likely to support the kinds of journalism seen in the Guardian BAE investigation. Why not run a series, a bit like Watchdog crossed with Panorama. Instead of your crook on the street, it would be aimed at politicians, businessmen and other powerful wrongdoers. You could run it as a weekly series, with a few investigations running at any given time.

The web bit is a support site where all the evidence is posted by the program makers. Members of the public are invited to do research from these leads, and then post their own evidence.  The next week’s program could then review what had come in, and then follow it up. There is also a possible  Wikinomics approach to investigative journalism where people can earn money for providing key evidence. Now that’s what I call feral Mr Blair…

This may well be the future of the fourth estate, and Paxman hasn’t really seen it yet. He can try and enlighten the masses, but they may just vote with their feet.
Footnote:

Tom Loosemoore deserves a thanks for filling me in on a lot of this stuff.
He has been responsible for BBC 2.0 for a while, and is moving on to Ofcom to shape their policy on public service internet provision.

He blogs here:

Tomski.com

Responsibility and neo-liberalism | openDemocracy

My commentary was as follows:

Thompson argues coherently that neo-liberalism has become internalised into a form of governmentality, where a certain kind of personal responsibility works hand in hand with the outer forms of governance.

However it is important to remember that this internalisation of responsibility is neither new, nor unique to neo-liberalism, and that what are significant are the specific forms these internalisations take.

The nub of the problem is this: Individual responsibility is amenable to a kind of privatisation, where it is set as a target to individuals and then measured. In management speak this is broadly called management by objectives. This is the kind of form of responsibility neo-liberalism has taken on: You can see it in development with the rise of Log Frame Analysis (LFA), and in governance in the ways in which treasury departments have internalised. LFA type approaches as a way to measure the performance of public spending.

But the problem is that this kind of target setting is terrible when it comes to collective responsibility. Management by objectives has been critiqued as such int he management literature, since as a procedure, it does not tend to uncover problems that cut across the individualising metrics used. Whilst the parts may be efficient, systemic issues tend to be neglected, meaning that you get massive “Nash equilibriums”, that is situations where individual interest turn out very much less efficient than a collective approach would bring. You need look no further than Private Finance Initiatives, or the toothlessness of Corporate Social Responsibility to see this.

The problem is this: Not all bottom up, emergent solutions are good: This is why humans were interested in designing things in the first place. There is still the problem of top-down design that is irrelevant to circumstances, as totalitarian states often demonstrate, but this is not the end of the discussion, and neither is a more nuanced view of neo-liberalism.

You can take a kind of “market failure” approach, and say you need to intervene where emergent solutions don’t work. But that also misses a crucial point. That intervention need not just be fire-fighting. It can also be planning, looking ahead, and exercising foresight, alongside an awareness of how emergent economic and social forces tend to play out.

The big myth of neo-liberalism is that it is impossible to plan and predict, and so governments don’t need to take responsibility, it is better to leave it to more responsive others. But that is an obfuscation. Look at climate change: Spontaneous collective action is failing solidly in this area, and business leaders are calling for regulation, so that they can do the right thing without losing out to their competitors. This is a classic Nash equilibrium type situation, and clearly a regulating, predicting and planning governance needs to step in to break the stalemate, before we all run out of time.

This is exactly what neo-liberal approaches cannot provide: They can distribute responsibility to those with control of capital, they can make it easier to reconfigure capital, partly by limiting people’s rights, they can make more of the polity into capital, by making more of the system trade-able, but governing, planning and regulating is not a strong part of the neo-liberal approach, which is more attuned to gradual marginal tinkering. Strong, predictive, systemic planning (i.e. leadership) is the work of governments, who really need to rediscover what it means to govern well, and to lead far more based on something longer-sighted than profit.

New Statesman - Our leaders are steering us into the abyss

My response is that this is to do with us aiming our messages at the wrong people. The question that bears most strongly on all of this is who is facing the abyss the most. That is where the strongest political pressure-base can come from:

I believe we are not fighting this issue in the right places.I am sat in India, where people with marginal lives stand to die in collosal numbers if nothing is done. And yet awareness of the issues is miniscule amongst those most likely to be killed by it.The rich world (wrongly) feels insulated from the problem by our huge wealth, thinking it will be possible to enjoy now and buy our way out later.

The poor in the tropics have no such illusions, but have yet to mount any major campaigns on this, largely due to its absence form the sort of media they have contact with: Their is a near total disconnect between vernacular language and English Language media here, with climate change mostly discussed in the latter, which are not the publications of the poor.

We need a political strategy that will mobilise those likely to be affected worst. They need to be aware that the wealth they see in advertisements will not spread to them, because of environmental constraints, and that their lives are currently being traded in as concessions to powerful political funding lobbies.

We need this because justice is never given but always fought for (even if non-violently), and the justice issue of our age is the enclosure of poor people’s future survival by the current consumption patterns of the rich.