* To stabilise CO2 requires 175 billion tons of CO2 reduction from the current growth trajectory over the next 50 years.
* To provide everyone on earth with a decent electrical power supply will cost 0.5 billion tons of CO2 over 50 years.
If he's supposedly for technical progress, why does James freak out at this prospect? (Is he inadvertently taking the Malthusian position here?)
To back the stats, I have a Sept' 2006 article coauthored by a guy I heard present at the Cornell labor/climate conference on Monday, Robert Socolow of Princeton. I'll send anyone who wants the .pdf so you can see the nice pics, if you ask offlist: pbond at mail.ngo.za
To beat the heat we've got to get a really big alliance together, especially including the poors who have no access to electricity. Hopefully more and more will be off-grid electricity from reliable micro renewable sources. Within a year we'll have a book ready on the optimal way to argue this latter point.
Russell Grinker wrote:
> "... Patrick Bond thinks of himself as an environmentalist - though in his
> commitment to social redress he imagines that we can reduce world greenhouse
> gas emissions and get electricity supply to two billion people who currently
> do not get it..."
>
> ***
>
> Wednesday 9 May 2007
>
> James Heartfield
>
> Seeing people as a plague on the planet
>
> The Optimum Population Trust's claim that having a large family is an
> eco-crime exposes the anti-human streak in green politics.
>
> Having large families is an eco-crime according to the Optimum Population
> Trust (OPT). 'The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the
> future of the planet is have one less child', the Trust says (1). It is
> actually modest compared to the more extreme versions of environmentalist
> hostility to humankind. 'Wildlife has more right to live on the earth than
> humans do', according to one group, which goes on to say: 'Humans are too
> great a threat to life on earth: they should be phased out.' At least that
> is the view of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which hopes our will
> be the last generation of humans (2). Then there is the Church of
> Euthanasia, with its snappy slogan: Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.
> Moderate environmentalists might object that the deep ecologists are on the
> fringes, and not typical of the movement. But if the Church of Euthanasia is
> off in the sidelines, egging on lonely teenagers to top themselves while it
> trolls suicide websites, the OPT's message that we are the problem is
> mainstream. The OPT's trustees include the Green Party veterans Jonathan
> Porritt and Sara Parkin, the climate change diplomacy veteran Sir Crispin
> Tickell as well as the actress Susan Hampshire.
> As the chattering classes' preoccupation with climate change reaches fever
> pitch, the extremists feel more confident to draw conclusions that others
> baulk from. That is because the extremists are only drawing out the
> underlying philosophy of environmentalism to make it more explicit. Indeed,
> the deep ecologists pre-date the more contemporary environmentalists. The
> current philosophy of 'sustainable development' was framed precisely because
> it was thought that the original aim of zero growth was too much for people
> to get their heads around.
> The underlying philosophy is that mankind is the pathological species, the
> scourge of the planet. Since James Lovelock coined the deeply mystical
> concept of Gaia - of a natural balance - mankind has been cast in the role
> of the disturber of the balance. At its most extreme, the misanthropism of a
> John Gray or a Jared Diamond looks forward to 'nature's revenge', the point
> where the laws of nature reassert themselves in the mass extinction of the
> human race.
>
> Lots of lazily left-wing people think that they can reconcile their ambition
> to improve the lot of the poor with the goal of carbon reduction. South
> African academic and activist Patrick Bond thinks of himself as an
> environmentalist - though in his commitment to social redress he imagines
> that we can reduce world greenhouse gas emissions and get electricity supply
> to two billion people who currently do not get it (apparently there are some
> savings to be made in aluminium smelting which will help). Even American
> leftists imagine that they can rally to the cause of the working class and
> still cut greenhouse gas emissions. Most environmentalists do not agree,
> thinking that any answer must involve 'horrendous costs to American industry
> and lifestyle' (3).
> There is a default to extremism that is written into environmentalism. And
> that is not surprising. If you hold that human life is worth less than the
> natural order, then you will have less respect for its sanctity. The
> ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses,
> which from time to time becomes explicit.
> One example is Jon Ablewhite, currently serving time at Her Majesty's Prison
> Lowdham Grange for disinterring the corpse of Gladys Hammond, whose
> son-in-law owned Darley Oaks Farm where guinea pigs were bred. Ablewhite and
> his friends' six-year long hate campaign knew few restraints because the
> animal rights activists started with the assumption that people's interests
> were inferior. 'Jon is driven by the desire to right a wrong', said his
> mother, widow to a vicar and missionary (4). Unabomber Ted Kaczynski
> campaigned for years against the technocratic society, posting bombs to
> electronics companies, while hiding out in a shack in the woods until he was
> arrested in the late 1990s.
> Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their
> starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that
> begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure
> on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who
> must make sacrifices.
>
> James Heartfield is a writer based in London.
>