 Dobro, da sem odličil. Kaj smo, da sem odličil, da sem odličil, da sem odličil. To je ta nekaj izgledenja izglobalizacija, ... and not least very pleased to welcome this evening our guest, Professor Barbara Harris-White, and let me tell you a few words about Professor Harris-White, and I guess some of you here are already familiar with her research and work. a pa se zelo da se nekaj včasna za dobro, prijezaj na te lektu časno za ZD, prijezaj na te lektu časno za dve zelo, rešt, nekaj da se počavila za diskutivna, nekaj je nekaj dober, 8.30. Što se te lektu časno včasno včasno, So unless you really want to have the recording for you, but otherwise it will be podcast, it will be available as are all the lectures that have been given in this series here. They are all filmed and all available on the SOAS website in in development studies under events in the podcast. Barbra Harris White is emeritus professor of development studies at Oxford University and the coordinator of the South Asia Research Cluster there at Wolfson College. She used to teach nearby here at our neighboring school of hygiene and tropical medicine. She's been teaching social science there to medical doctors because it's a school of medicine. And she joined Oxford, the Queen Elizabeth House in 1987, after seven years here at our neighboring institution. Among the things she did that Oxford is setting up in 2005, Masters in Contemporary India at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. And it happened to be the world's first master in, I mean about contemporary India. And the first year with students for the master was in 2008. And Barbara stresses the fact that this is the first non-environmental Masters degree course that mainstream the environment. And it's important indeed to emphasize this all the more that our topic is very much about that. Then Professor Harris White contributed to the creation of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Program, which provided a launching pad for postdocs, visiting research fellows and whole network of associates, aside from organizing a lot of international events. She also emphasizes, it's important the fact that in 2010, 2011 the program consisted of eight women, which seems to be first at Oxford, and that's indeed something quite important to note. Professor Harris White retired in 2011, after 25 years then at Oxford, when she has been teaching agricultural economics, development economics, development studies, and the political economy of India. And she has been back part time to direct ESRC, DEFID Research Project Networked in India, and working under the title of Resources, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Technology and Work in Production and Distribution Systems, Rise in India, so our whole program. She's the author of, well, very numerous publications, if we count working papers, reports, chapters, etc. but a number of books, including, just to mention, the most recent, she has co-authored or co-edited a book on rural, sorry, rural India in the 21st century, rural India in the 21st century, and in 2007, she co-edited a book on trade liberalization and India's informal economies. This gives an idea of the range of topic, I can read other titles like studies on adult disability in rural India and various issues on labor in India, so a whole range of issues. And, well, one of the prominent axis of this work is the one that Professor Harris White will be presenting to us this evening and you have the title here, and without further delay, please join me in welcoming her. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Gilbert. Two things you forgot to omit. One is that I'm a professorial research associate of SARS and it gives me, I don't mind, I don't mind being the exception, it gives me an almost pleasure to be here as a professorial research associate of SARS and the other thing that you didn't say, which you couldn't know, is that although most of my work is grounded in field work, I have put my head above the trenches on three occasions in my life to do hobby projects, which have generally had enormous themes like food in 1993, involving multidisciplinary perspectives and like globalization and insecurity, which would have made my fortune had 9-11 not happened and redefined what we meant by insecurity. And this talk results also from an abiding hobby interest, which has slowly taken over my own research life in my retirement. But it was also inspired by SARS because last autumn, or late last autumn, the Historical Materialism Conference, which SARS hosts had an environmental stream for the first time ever. And at the end of two or three days, a retired trade unionist who'd left his notes on the train gave a passionate talk, which said, you guys don't understand, it's much more complicated than climate change. And so I began to think and the thoughts are what I'm going to share with you this evening. Ok, I'm going to start with metabolic rift. What is the metabolic rift? My daughters, who are well educated, thought it was something to do with diet. Metabolic rift is very far to do from anything to do with diet. And it was a concept which originated in the ideas of the German soil chemist, Justus von Liebig, who gave his name to a massive chemicals industry in Germany. And in the middle of the 19th century, when all intellectuals read each other's works, the scientists took social science seriously and social scientists took science seriously. And indeed there wasn't really a division between disciplines in that way. Engels, in particular, was very interested in what Liebig was saying in the context of a dire period of agricultural stagnation in Germany, in Europe. And Engels then wrote a lot of letters to Karl Marx and together they evolved this concept of metabolism, which is Stoffbessel in German. It's defined as the process of material exchanges in which nature is appropriated for the satisfaction of human needs, not human wants or human wishes or human market demand, but need. And the intuition, which is backed up by a lot of science, is that these exchanges between people and the natural world are regulated in two ways, which have two different kinds of paces. For nature, metabolism is regulated by natural laws, which govern physical processes, and by and large these operate at a slow pace. But for society, they're governed by what Engels called institutionalized norms, or it's been translated like that, governing the division of labor and the distribution of wealth. And development, what we study in development, takes the form of a dialectical co-evolution between nature and society. So what is the metabolic rift? This was an idea which came from the study of German agriculture in the later part of the 19th century, which was suffering stagnating yields. It was a time when Britain had the monopoly of guano, the guano trade, bird shit that was coming from Latin America to be put on European fields to do something about these stagnant yields, and German soldiers even going to Prussian battlefields to dig up bones and skeletons from the battlefield to crush and put on their fields, because they knew this would liberate yield. But it was Liebig that realized that doing this could have two different effects, and it's the contradiction between those two effects, which gave rise to the ideas which formed the metabolic rift. Because although the application of fertilizer could increase the physical productivity of soil, but also through putting on too much fertilizer and not recycling the waste out of the consumption resulting from the production and wrecking the material balances of the soil, fertilizer could ruin the soil. So on the one hand it could improve the soil, on the other hand the same process if done to excess could ruin the soil. I'm sure you think this is 101. But the conclusion was that because capital doesn't actually restore what it takes from the soil back to the soil, it gives rise to an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism prescribed by the laws of nature, and that undermines both the soil and the worker. So I've begun with agriculture, but you can easily see how this argument can be expanded to the way in which our economy settles upon the planet we live in. This is from my fieldwork, which I've just returned from yesterday. An example of the waste of a town, those with good sight can see milk cows grazing on this plastic waste, this rubbish, as well as this child who's never been inside a school who lives his entire life in this pestilential smoke. But the intuition is we create things out of nature, but we don't return the products of our consumption of those things back to nature in a form which nature can restitute in any sense equal to the time scale in which capitalist production takes place. So Marx and Engels went on from industry and agriculture to look at town and country. And as you can see, that's simply shifting the metaphor and the relations between production, waste, and what nature does with that waste. So Marx wrote that towns and industry concentrate the drivers of social progress in towns where progressive politics takes place. But in physical terms, towns break the cycle of nutrients. And the spatial appropriation and the dislocation of metabolic flows, these are flows of material, also flows of energy, has been a very key fundamental aspect of capitalist accumulation. And in the expanded reproduction of capitalism, inanimate energy and materials inexorably replace human labor so that there's more and more materiality in the economic materiality that Marx is studying. And it becomes evident that nature isn't simply a tap yielding resources through the application of human labor. It's also a sink in which the waste of the productive system is dumped and on which natural processes get going at their own pace to decompose and recompose the physical materials. And the metabolism of sinks, the degradation of resources, the decomposition of biodegradable resources and their reconstitution of potential useful things is totally at variance with the use of nature as a tap in, as in capitalist production cycles. So that the depletion that is due to this effective irreversibility, it's not in fact irreversible, but in the time scales of our economy it is irreversible. It's accepted because until now and until the near future it hasn't been an immediate obstacle to the production of surplus value. I want to make four comments about the metabolic rift because those comments are necessary for the next section of my talk. Firstly, generalized human development. It was Marx who first invented the concept of human development, which has been taken over by all the international agencies now. Marx's concept of generalized human development, human development for all, is totally achieved through the production of commodities. It also requires the preservation of non-commodifiable realms, which are essential for the reproduction of society and for commodity production. Take labor for instance, it has to be reproduced inside families and although all kinds of waves of commodification of things that are used inside and activities inside families has happened during the 20th century, so it remains outside the cycles of commodification and nature performs the same role for raw materials for commodity production. But by means of privatization and commodification these are currently being plundered, encroached on, degraded and destroyed because capitalism has break failure. By itself it doesn't know where to stop. The second point is about restitution. Since capitalist production doesn't restitute back to nature either the stocks or the flows of matter and energy that it uses, a rational human metabolism with nature has to be achieved by other means. And Marx, and I quote, suggested by the systematic application of science to govern metabolic processes with the least expenditure of energy and the reuse of waste under collective social control. And that it isn't clear how we might do this doesn't mean that the theory and the practice of development can ignore it. The third comment is about dematerialization just as there are limits to growth, perhaps limits through sinks as well as through taps. There are also limits to the decoupling of the economy from the physical world. The kinds of materials efficiency that might be required in the commodity base for generalized human development faces constraints due to the actually existing forms of global capital. And lastly, capital. It's not a matter of better or worse kinds of capitalism. A lot of people engaged in critiquing Naomi Klein's book have her saying something, I'm not sure she really does say that really she's talking about unethical, neoliberal forms of capitalism and really capitalism's okay. I don't think the argument is quite like that. It is the logic and the dynamic of all forms of capitalism that are currently pushing the metabolic rift towards what looks like a catastrophic break. Nonetheless, there's a paradox that in the immediate future and even the first steps towards what Richard Smith is called post-capitalist ecological democracy cannot be even taken or achieved without engaging with capital. So capital is the problem and capital cannot be the solution. However, the next steps have to engage with it. In the next session of my talk, I want to explain why the immediate future is so terribly important. And here I run out of words in my PowerPoint, but I put up some visuals so that you can see what I'm talking about. In the top center is the Royal Society. And because of republican hostility to the American Academies of Science, the British Royal Society has actually done an enormous amount of scientific work and outreach work on the topic of the ecological crisis. However, science isn't organized around the concept I've just outlined, the concept of the metabolic rift. Scientists conceive nature as a very complexly interconnected set of biophysical subsystems which provide the conditions of existence for our species. Overwhelming evidence points to their approaching collapse. And unless physically revolutionary measures are taken very shortly, the physical conditions of existence of many human beings are liable to be destroyed within the lifetime of anybody under the age of about 20 now. In the view of one very distinguished team, the team around the Stockholm Institutes, featuring Rockstrom and Stefan, human society has quite likely exceeded its safe operating space in four of the major subsystems. And they're up on the slide. I'm going to go through the subsystems because there are some very important points which come from just the sheer complexity of what is involved. The first is global warming and climate change. The earth's temperature, for those of you who aren't scientists, is a function of several gases, notably carbon dioxide, methane nitrous oxide and CFCs. And the IPCC measures 15 other gases, but there are many more. So there's a family of gases, the composition, the intensity of which have the capacity to shape the temperature of the earth. And the concept of net radiation, that is the radiation that goes back out into space, is a function of these greenhouse gases. And these gases are warming the oceans and also the atmosphere. And the main drivers of this warming process have been deforestation and the use of fossil fuels. The canary in the mine is carbon dioxide for the scientists and for most of the people who understand the literature of public outreach. If we follow business as usual, it's very likely that by 2100, the temperature of the earth, the average temperature will have gone up by between 4 and 6 degrees. Now this is unprecedented in the last 5 million years. At 4 degrees of increase in global average temperatures, the tropical rainforest will be exceedingly threatened by either drought or fire. As you saw all of you who read the Guardian today in the second leader, crop yields are being predicted to decline by really serious amounts. It's predicted by a third in Africa and South Asia, where I've just come from. And American corn and soy and cotton yields might go down by as much as 80%. At 4 or 6 degrees rising global average temperature, two-thirds of the world's major cities will be under water because of rising sea level. Clearly these conditions can't support the current projected human population. And much of these changes are already irreversible. They're impossible to do anything about. The second aspect of the safe operating spaces, the subsystems, which are vital for the planet as we know it, consists of biodiversity loss. We are in the middle of a very rare event in planetary history. And this event hasn't happened since the Cretaceous tertiary boundary event which put paid to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And this is that we're in the middle of a mass extinction event. The canaries are said by Elizabeth Colbert who's written a whole book on this to be Latin American amphibians, frogs in particular, which are becoming extinct at a rate 43,000 times the rate of extinction before the Industrial Revolution. And it's predicted by a lot of biologists that between 40% and 50% of the world's species will be extinct by 2050. The world's ecosystems need a lot of what biologists call apparent redundancy. That means visible redundancy to maintain their health. What is known about the processes which extinguish so many species is that this time round, this mass extinction event is likely to be caused by us. But quite how isn't so obvious. But that, the extinction of species may have severe impacts on us is something that is very likely. One example is the catastrophic decline in the populations of bees on the planet which are needed for the pollination of 70% of the world's agricultural species. Though not, thank God, the bulk species like the cereals. The third subsystem is the nitrogen cycle. Nitrogen fixing in fertilizer and in leguminous plants that fix nitrogen during their process of growth is now being carried on at a level which is four times what the earth can really absorb. It's great for yields and it's necessary for yields. But it's ghastly for greenhouse gases and it's also having a huge effect in rising pollution levels in the soil and in the water. Along with the nitrogen cycle being bust, so also is the phosphorus cycle. We find phosphorus in things ranging from fertilizer to toothpaste. It's being put into the oceans at eight times the pre-industrial levels. And this risks a very rare event from anoxia in the sea of mass marine extinctions. At present, the forecast of these extinctions is far into the future. You'll be relieved to know. So let's stop there. There are four subsystems that already screwed. We now see that talking about climate change and focusing on two degrees is being reductionist in the extreme. That the causes of the non-climate change busted subsystems are likely to be in part the same causes as for climate change, but not necessarily. There may be other processes that lead back to humans and to our economies that cause these failures of subsystems or severe strains to these subsystems. And a lot of these subsystems are causing damage that is not recognized by the general public as being a problem at all. So there's a massive amount of ignorance and a massive potential for public communication of science. Okay, but there are other parts of the planet system which are important, which are heading for severe destabilization. The fifth is acid in the ocean. Before the industrial revolution, the pH, the acidity of the ocean was at the level of seven. It's now at the level of 8.2. In other words, since the industrial revolution, the oceans have become 26% more acid than they were. Now, why is that important? Because it affects the metabolism of all organisms that use calcium or create calcium. And the canary in the ocean, if you like, mixing metaphors, is a crystal of calcium carbonate, which goes under the name of aragonite. Aragonite is threatening... Aragonite levels are threatening shellfish and then reef fish, and then all the fish that feed on reef fish, which are responsible for feeding at least 40 million people on the planet. The other thing which is suffering is coral. You may have heard about that. And coral fixes carbon, so that if coral dies, then the rate at which the ocean acidifies will increase. The sixth threat, the sixth subsystem is the freshwater system. We've looked at the salt water system, let's look at the freshwater system. Rain normally runs a bit over the ground, but basically percolates into the ground, flows around under the surface of the earth, eventually comes out again and is evaporated into the sky, and then the cycle repeats itself constantly. But about half the world's rain is not running off in that way anymore. It's being used in agriculture, in industry and in by households, in towns, including for sanitation. And used water is almost always polluted. The treatment of water is a real luxury in advanced countries. Mostly water is not treated, and it doesn't go back to nature in a pure form at all. It goes back polluted, and it pollutes lakes and rivers, and it pollutes the sea. And not only does it cause pollution, but the diversion of water to these human uses can produce drought. So there are two consequences of that very intensive use of water which are of concern to environmental sciences. Then there is land use change. By and large, when scientists talk about land use change, they're talking about the burning and the destruction of forests for increase in agriculture, and of course in the 20th and 21st century agricultural industrialization and increases in mining and in urbanization. All of this produces greenhouse gases, and it also produces very threatening extreme events, the frequency of which is now going up everywhere, by which I mean fires and floods, storms and droughts. The other major effect of this kind of land use change is the introduction of alien species to particular ecologies. We all know about rats and goats which have spread worldwide, but the spreading of alien species sometimes has a devastatingly destructive effect on local ecology, and the example I know about is a plant called the diffuse napweed which has come from Eastern Europe to Western California, where it's poisoning the local vegetation through its secretions. Where in Eastern Europe it co-evolved with plants which somehow grew resistant to these poisonous secretions, so it was perfectly innocuous in Eastern Europe, but it's a deadly plant in Western California. There are more less well measured threats, so we know that they're going to be threats, but we don't quite know how bad they are. One is chemical pollution, plastics, mimicking chemicals, nuclear waste, heavy metals and so on and so forth. Another is aerosols. In my ignorance, I thought aerosols was something that women sprayed their hair with, but not a bit of it. The air contains aerosols from nature and has done for hundreds of millions of years. The larger particles are made by nature, but the very small particles are made by us and they are manufactured in human systems. Now, those aerosols cool the atmosphere, which is a good thing, perhaps, but they also redistribute pollution, including into the pores of plants and inside our own lungs. And they're associated with epidemics of asthma and with cancer. And the last one I'll talk about is ozone depletion. Ozone, because it's a good story, it's a feel-good story in a way. Ozone prevents or helps to prevent ultraviolet lights which harms us and harms plants for from reaching us. It hurts the skins of whales. It forms cataracts in animals as well as us. In 1989 the world's states got together and signed a Montreal Treaty which restricts ozone depleting propellents and refrigerants and foam-blowing agents. And now this treaty has actually slowed the rate of depletion of these, of the holes in our atmosphere that are letting in ozone, which are slowly beginning to refill. And what that is saying is that when global society wants to do something about these threats it can take action. Ok, so to sum up what I've said in this part of my talk human society may survive on the planet only as long as the planet allows us to. And now science is saying that the lease is very short. Fossil fuel based industrialization under communism as well as under capitalism but now under capitalism is leading to a biogeochemical breakdown and opening up an unprecedentedly dangerous new era which scientists are calling the Anthropocene. Many of the interactions between the dimensions of the ecological crisis which I've laid out before you and in this slide are known unknowns by which I mean things that we know in which we lack information about the details of but there are also in Donald Romsel's famous phrase unknown unknowns things we don't know, we don't know but which are sure to happen because the ecosphere is so complex. A recent development in neoliberal economics which promises to generate a huge mind field of unknown unknowns is the treating of nature as natural capital as a set of potential commodities as providing ecological services which are then quantified, valued and even traded for how you trade public goods, I don't know. There are services that exist solely for the benefit of humankind completely ignoring the dependence of other non-human species on that same nature and our dependence in term on them. There's much else that the literature says about the science which I'm not going to talk about at all this evening which we might talk about in questions and answers and discussion afterwards but topics like the public communication of science the handling of policy by science and public outreach and so on the handling of science by the media and so on and so forth I'm not going to talk about that because my theme is slightly different my focus is moving towards the urgency the treatment of time and the conceptual frames that are driving the action that we have had so far and the proposals for action that we may have in the future and I want to pause and consider time and then the question what is to be done before going on to the final part of my talk time is clearly of the essence and yet as it runs out it's treated in very strange ways time has been conceived as probably an open window a window of opportunity in which action needs to happen if this window hasn't already closed it's getting to be a very narrow slit if the window was between 7 and 20 years wide in 2008 and that's one quote I have we're now in 2015 so it must be down to between no years at all and 13 years and the window's literature is also associated with targets and goals and targets are imagined for instance the targets for developing renewable energy and then they are set but then as we all see who read the newspapers and the technical literature the targets are multiplying and they become ever more draconian because 1990 is the baseline and we have done nothing but move away from the baseline ever since in the field of rhetoric has developed about targets and summits and deals and technological fixes that is ever less connected to political reality so there's another rift that between scientific understanding and political action and I want to come back to that at the very end now this urgency has also been dismissed as catastrophism for catastrophists it's a matter of dire urgency and radical political mobilizing response one which is driven by fear and by anxiety and for radical catastrophists capitalism will shortly collapse through the combined weight of its own internal contradictions and its contradictions with nature now anti-catastrophist critics respond that that's a council of despair firstly anxiety is said to be a very weak driver of radical social change secondly the crisis is obviously not natural it's not a crisis of nature it's produced by capitals relations of production distribution consumption and waste and therefore it's a potential because we know that nature is not independent of capitalism and that the two co-evolved together and capital constantly internalizes constraints even in a crisis and it dynamically invents reinvents itself and wartime planning and carbon trading and bioengineering and the dematerialization of the economy are the kinds of examples that are often cited now despite the evidence limits to migration that is capitalism expanding somewhere else and the evident limits to resources David Harvey is on film saying the idea of the limit is an ascetic idea the only limit of consequence is that to social alienation that's what he said however the ecological sociologist John Bellamy Foster has observed the very fact that capitalism is not likely to collapse of itself and may prevail for some time to come is precisely why the planet is in such absolute peril the advent of a more barbaric form of capital is no longer the worst of our worries it is the threat to the planet itself that constitutes our most dire challenge so in so far as ideas matter how time is treated is vitally important the second general comment is what is to be done and I'm putting that in a way in scare quotes what do people say is to be done and I want to look at the terms literally the terms and the politics of the response for the relatively few actively concerned and I guess everybody in this audience is in the relatively few and for the most part the problem is not the depth and the complexity and the unknowns of the metabolic rift nor not its reduction to climate change and not the role of time that I've just considered but the absence of national political boundaries to causes and effects and thus the need for global deals and for global collective action behind the collective politics however lies an epistemological question of how the reduced form of the rift climate change is being discussively constructed because this is driving and this reflects political action what you find is that sources of pollution are doubly simplified firstly to greenhouse gases and secondly to carbon equivalence carbon dioxide equivalence then their origins are classified in several different ways they're mostly attributed to economic sectors where in turn various types of classification are at play for the second biggest polluter because China has just overtaken America, the USA but the USA has the best data the sectors are like electricity transport, industry agriculture and residential pollution you know the kind of list I'm talking about or they're attributed to combustion sources liquid, solid gaseous and cement or to people or humans or to consumption and we have these figures of one billion being responsible for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions while the bottom 3 billion who don't have plentiful access to fossil fuels are responsible for a mere 5% it's yet another kind of version of inequality and the 1% on the other hand if pollution is classified in terms of its immediate toxicity to people you get a very different set of problems mercury poisoning lead and sulphide oxide pollution from mining and from the processing of ores pesticide pollution from agriculture groundwater arsenic from the over extraction of water chromium from dying acid battery recycling now the point about these classifications is not that they're boring but that exactly the opposite each of them is driving a different kind of political project focused on combating the specific harm that's involved through those classifications but for the reduced form of the metabolic rift that's climate change in terms of the units for which evidence is brought together and policy responses are proposed first and foremost we have countries the country, the nation or the state 196 of them if you include Taiwan in this conceptual and practical framework the leading countries in terms of current flows China, the USA, India and Europe including the former USSR in terms of their historical contribution to stocks of polluting gases in the atmosphere it's North America again, Europe Russia or the USSR and China in terms of per capita per head pollution if we discount the oil producing shakedowns including Brunei USA, Canada Australia, Korea and China are dirtiest with Germany and Japan following closely behind for the world's countries and their states the dominant policy tool is a combination of cap and trade in administered carbon markets together with financial transfers for clean development in places where its costs are lowest this works in theory but the theory is terrible because over 25 years it has been singularly unsuccessful many reasons have been invoked for this failure of theory and agency the inventors of the cap and trade policy Thomas Crocker and the late John Dales have cautioned against it as totally inappropriate for the conditions that it's been being implemented for because of four or five factors one is myriad sources of pollution and not just sulfur dioxide where it did work for conditions when the kind of evidence that's needed to administer the price of carbon or to quantify the damage of climate change on global production is imprecise which it is, we don't know thirdly, when the cap is inflexible it's very hard to adjust those caps to make them more and more binding on polluting industries and when the price of carbon is highly volatile and often too low to incentivize low carbon technology it's currently in the last two years it's been around $5 when it should be between $50 and $100 to incentivize low carbon technology and lastly when the carbon market currency the permit system has no state or governance institution with sufficient authority to enforce the rules so in cap and trade and clean development there are incentives only to free ride and very importantly democracy, modern representative government with its short term electoral cycles which privilege the rights of the present over those of the future seem quite unfit for this particular purpose now all these are powerful reasons but more important than any of them is the fact that the whole cap and trade model ignores market driven politics that have sabotaged every stage of implementation of carbon trading and incentivize pollution and disincentivize low carbon investment missing from all this literature are the categories of the metabolic rift and the historical, economic and environmental logics of capital and its waste if alluded to at all it's shrouded in euphemism the ecological crisis is just climate change capitalism becomes growth or markets the private sector becomes the economy et cetera et cetera the belgian environmental sociologist Daniel Tanuro and those who don't want to hear about capitalism shouldn't talk about global warming so the rest of this talk is a first attempt to examine what is to be done and why by capital by labour and civil society and not by countries or nations or states this approach to capitalism must be selective, highly selective and the argument that I'm going to build from it is an indicative one, we can talk about it the principles of selection have to be different from those of others because this exploration is going to focus on the significance of urgency and time and the relationship of the cases to the metabolic rift and their discursive and actual responses to the metabolic rift so within productive capitalism I'm going to take you through the military industrial complex cases of corporate capital within finance capital we're going to look quickly at the insurance industry we're then going to juxtapose the responses of labour through trade unions and lastly of the biggest single civil society organisation in the world the Roman Catholic Church firstly the military the US military and the metabolic rift here the sword is definitely mightier than the pen why choose the US military simply because its military industrial complex is known to be the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and a major polluter of soil and water we all know that the American military budget is somewhere around a trillion dollars and that is the size of India's gross domestic product and it's equal to the combined totals of the dispending of the next 13 largest countries in the world yet I wonder whether how many of you know that military emissions are exempt from reporting requirements and that the Pentagon from 1998 onwards has a blanket exemption in all climate change agreements the pentagons position on the metabolic rift has been explained with exemplary clarity essentially the rift is reduced to climate change and for the military climate change is a threat multiplier to border shortages, disease disputes over refugees and resources and so on and so forth what is being done the defense secretary Chuck Hagel launching a conference of 30 defense ministers which wasn't reported in the press before the Lima climate change meeting in December last year argued for a flexible approach to adaptation already existing climate change affects the deployment of weapons systems and military installations the climate change proofing of 7000 American military bases installations and other facilities is in hand the navy is testing sonar and other systems under changing ocean chemistry and the melting arctic ice is to be securitized in the face of competition for sea lanes and under sea minerals climate change has already been mainstreamed in defense planning activities the Pentagon's treatment of time and of urgency is immediate and fast vestigial scientific uncertainty cannot be an excuse for delaying action listen to it, its treatment of politics is quite up front politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning for America's security this is Chuck Hagel again adaptation is the priority not mitigation a new case for the military industrial complex is being built and vast financial and scientific resources have already been commandeered the Pentagon is also enmeshed in a structure of irresponsibility actively engaged in all the international rounds of climate change talks but enjoying legal protection against engagement with any of the mitigation outcomes companies the climate researcher Richard Heade has discovered after eight years of exhaustive research that climate change is not a global collective action problem for 196 countries but one of controlling the behaviour of between 30 and 90 companies and in interview he said the decision makers, the CEOs or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person could fit in a greyhound bus or two these companies have produced 63% of all polluting gases from 1751 to 2010 half of it was produced in the last 25 years in the era of cap and trade the top 20 companies just 20 companies are responsible for 30% of global emissions throughout history and they also currently control most of the reserves faced with this most inconvenient truth Al Gore commented those who are historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere have a clear obligation to be part of the solution let us see whether this is true we have space here and time here to examine just two companies I've chosen BP the world's fourth largest cumulative polluter and coal India the world's 11th largest using evidence which is available on the net British Petroleum BP is the UK's largest corporation with a gross revenue equal to about half of India's entire GDP it produces and sells oil and gas in 80 countries and it's fourth in Richard Heade's list it's workforces worldwide concentrated in Europe and North America however over half the 373 million hours worked by BP in 2013 were carried out by subcontracting companies so a lot of its business model is subcontracting and in 2010 you may remember the deep water horizon oil disaster which was the worst environmental disaster of the United States was being operated by a contractor called Transocean BP has ongoing massive rounds of investment in deep water oil and gas in fracking and in the exploitation of the Canadian oil sands BP produces something called an annual energy outlook and this is a sort of biblical document it's a reference source for everybody concerned with energy and the latest one which came out recently is looking forward to 2035 and it expects China in which BP is busy investing and other non OECD countries to be responsible for most of a predicted 41% increase in energy demand by 2035 most of which is going to be based on coal while the OECD and BP as it presents itself is moving towards gas widely cited in the press for projecting carbon free energy demand to reach about 7% by 2035 in fact BP in the footnotes of its annual report expects just 7% of global energy demand to be from renewable energy including biofuels since it's in house definition of what carbon free is includes large scale hydroelectric power and nuclear BP publicly opposes limits to greenhouse gas emissions and it advocates tax breaks for oil and gas as everybody knows until 1995 as part of the global climate coalition BP ridiculed climate science and undermined the Kyoto treaty but when Lord Brown took over BP he famously rebranded it even partnering it with moderate environmental groups for which it won a major PR award in 2002 in 2005 it created a subsidiary company and by 2013 had invested 8 billion dollars in British feed wheat, Brazilian cane and 16 American wind farms however from 2008 the parent company recarbonized and it's tried energetically to sell off its wind farms and wind down its subsidiary BP co-produces the environment through fires, explosions for some of which criminal charges for fairly constant spills for which it's also faced criminal charges and for venting and flaring oil and gas it calls these process safety events and they occur mainly in wells and in the transport of fuel between 2009 and 2013 however the company has reported a decline in spills and in fines and it has raised environmental expenditure now threading through its own annual report which it now calls a sustainability report are three aspects of the metabolic rift one is water for cooling, for steam, for manufacturing and in Brazil for irrigation it says half of BP's operating sites withdraw fresh water in areas of water stress or scarcity the second relation of BP to the metabolic rift is its acknowledged harm to biodiversity and its attempts to measure it and to minimise it it's even preserved a wetland habitat beside one gigantic oil refinery its third aspect its third relationship is in terms of its waste BP shows its emissions as having dropped from 35, sorry 65 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2009 to 50 million tonnes by 2013 big drop however, again in the footnot it's buried in the annual report these achievements resulted largely from having sold off to American oil refineries Texas City and Carson so it continues to set no company wide target and it treats climate change like any other physical and ecological hazard it accepts that the warming of the climate is now unequivicable and it's obvious to BP temperature rise will not be achieved it even thinks that the greenhouse gas intensity of oil and gas production will increase BP's response to climate change involves doing little about it at best it will commit itself to lower carbon expansion ok, let's look at coal India nurturing nature it says in its logo it's the world's largest coal producing company commanding 80% of India's coal market and 70% of its power generation amongst the world's purely coal producing companies it's the largest and in 2010 it emitted 50% more greenhouse gases than did BP it's 90% owned by the government of India and the last 10% are controlled by foreign blue chip private institutional finance it imports coal it also invests internationally it's a global company it employs 4 times more people than BP but it also employs numberless more it employs about 350,000 people directly but probably double that through subcontracting private companies and casualized labor it has absolutely no plans not to press on with low cost open cost mining of low quality coal for power generation of which it is regarded internationally as relatively efficient it has weathered sustained criticism of both the environmental and some environmental elements of its business model in 2011 2 thirds of its 471 mines lacked environmental permits and were operating illegally it mines open cast not with shafts and galleries with disregard for reserved forests and endangered species and it actively encourages subterranean fires in order to fast track the very open cast extraction that maximizes profit devastates landscapes and perpetuates these underground fires it evicks eligible victims of mining and underground fires instead of compensating them it provides dangerous working conditions and it's sort of accused of anti competitive practices and untransparent contracts and it's subcontracted and casualized its labor force since 1972 it's broken the labor and environmental norms and standards of seven international or United Nations agencies now despite or because of this business model the financial times recommends it as a high quality investment with double digit returns on capital and it expects dividends to rise in sum BP's beyond petroleum slogan and it's green sunflower logo are comfort blankets for the credulous BP is not beyond petroleum both BP and coal India are far from being on track to carbon neutrality within a generation quite the opposite the dash for gas doesn't reflect the urgency needed to prevent the metabolic rift developing further and coal India emits no sense of urgency just an awful lot of CO2 and is basically committed to deepening the rift okay let's go on to the insurance industry and the metabolic rift insurance claims are vast and rocketing whereas the pentagon has a direct interest in adaptation the insurance industry has a direct interest not quite in mitigation per se but in managing mitigation and in managing risk it engages with the metabolic rift through its reactions to extreme events with social impacts and the urgent need to set limits to the insurability of industry it has to convert uncertainty into risk and then reduce responsibility for climate change related liabilities insurance is a protection for unforeseen risks I'm quoting from the chairman of Lloyds we're now at a point with the science where climate change is a foreseeable risk in their reactive reactive activity to climate change the industry is deeply divided the top reinsurers Munich Rey Swiss Rey headquarters in London they have in-house meteorologists and climatologists and catastrophe modelers so much for the anti-catastrophist critique and they already incorporate climate change along with property values into the drivers of the balance between their insurers risk holding and their reinsurance payments insurance companies in the body of the insurance industry not the reinsurance but the insurance companies themselves are slower on the science front and they're reactive and not proactive they're unable to invest in the kind of scientific competence that they require and they're caught in their own paradox of asymmetric information John Wybie from Yale has concluded that the credibility of insurance companies is called into question on their purported core competence risk assessment and management like the Pentagon the insurance industry is acting with immediacy like the Pentagon its politics are also immediate within the system day to day shifting risk onto the uninsured reducing the protection of the incompletely insured and the increasingly underinsured consumers and requiring physical data last but not least the industry is very secret and opaque about its reaction to the ecological crisis in all but the six least carbon intensive states of the US the demands for the disclosure of modes of incorporation of climate risk polity into insurance practices demands from the federal state have been successfully resisted let's turn to labor as you all know in the last three decades global labor force has been increased by over 1.1 billion and these new working classes are singularly fractured by nation by sector, by relations of control by work status and citizenship by race, ethnicity, caste, religion and gender and by the degree of precarity outside work as well as at work so as is guy standing has been indefatigable at explaining all this and the global work force are in immediate contention with rising ethnic and religious proto-fascist mobilizations and these are really not propitious conditions for effective class action as Andre Gortz put it as early as 1968 the mobilizing of working classes involves challenging current policies criticizing them, challenging them and then defining and mobilizing around alternative policies which reflect a new balance of forces the inherent opposition of labor to capital is constantly generating class movements and organizations and the predatory relations of capital to nature have immediate and long term consequences for workers so let's look at two of the significant working class organizations that have addressed climate change so far that British TUC and the India New Trade Union initiative the TUC recognizes the relation between the energy economy and climate change and it recognizes the immediacy of the need for action it has a long standing commitment to adjust transition to a low carbon economy at present it points the finger at the under investment of the energy majors in green energy and in energy efficiency while their profits are either untaxed and while consumers, energy bills yours and mine saw at four times the rate of inflation and notes that the British government is not exactly seized by urgency there are many other things which come higher on the list in British politics than climate change the TUC calls for binding green house gas reduction targets but aligns with the very modest ones of the British coalition government over a goal of a 50% reduction by 2025 which it cannot achieve it has a very well worked out excuse me a very well worked out coordinated low carbon industrial strategy with an emphasis on skilling on research and development and a revitalized innovation system and support for science it needs this kind of scheme long term scheme needs a proper green bank and a business investment bank it calls for state support for strategically low carbon sectors in other words for the state to pick winners how long is it since the British state picked winners prioritizing renewable energy and electric transport it's against shale gas fracking but it supports carbon capture and storage it supports the carbon capture and storage association I'm going to draw four conclusions very quickly from the TUC's climate change policies firstly it does sense the urgency of the situation and yet its targets are merely those of the coalition government whose lack of urgency it criticizes secondly it reduces the metabolic rift to climate change thirdly its project is discursive rather than active despite recognizing that the new economy will be created by workers it needs the cooperation of capital and lastly its project needs and assumes a powerful state driven by the public interest in the present and in the future and it would certainly be a mistake to underestimate the value of the TUC's engagement but its limitations are clear turning to a third world trade union the new trade union initiative came into existence after the world social forum in 2004 to bring together unaffiliated workers organizations and new social movements which the NTUI has theorized as reflecting class struggle in India I don't know how many of you know this trade unions are fractured by many political parties by locality by being confined to single plants and last but not least by the enormous size of the informal sector which accounts for 93% of all of India's jobs this little trade union rapidly gained a membership of 1.5 million workers and 300 affiliated organizations many of whom mobilized workers in the informal economy it's the only trade union that has no party political allegiance and it's continually mobilizing and organizing and talking to its members about climate change in its first assembly in 2008 it addressed the implications of climate change for workers it recognized the urgency of the science but like the TUC its action is at the level of discourse it also like the TUC sees state engagement as absolutely essential because addressing climate change cannot be divorced from addressing social inequality the state needs to be there to be responsible for taxing the rich and redressing the massive deprivation of the poor for reallocating the workers who would be displaced if fossil fuels were replaced by renewable energy and as you saw from my description of coal India the workforce and the interests of workers whose lives are involved in mining coal is an enormous group of people the NTUI adds to its support for greenhouse gas reduction targets and national climate budgets very fierce attacks on the military industrial complex and on the orthodox steel tech cap and trade the clean development mechanism and red, do you know what red is? reducing emissions from deforestation degradation in developing countries the CDM for the new trade union initiative prevents the physical verifiable cuts in emissions by the developed countries that are so urgently needed points of finger at us and the red will aggressively push for a forced takeover of forest lands from communities who are already facing massive forced displacement so it's very clear where NTUI's alignment is in short the positions of the TUC in the UK and the NTUI in India are similar recognizing the need for urgency in the role of the state however, both their analyses stay at the level of discourse and are further weakened by divergent interests within the labour movements not least the dependent of so many workers on jobs in the energy industries and by what they see as the need for capital to collaborate in the changes that they spell out as necessary so the global working class I know I've only given two examples but in so far as these examples are indicative it's not yet this countervailing force in mitigating climate change let alone reflecting a new balance of forces in dealing with ecological crisis in all its range and complexity ok, this is my last final session civil society in the power of numbers NGOs like Oxfam Friends of the Earth Greenpeace movements like the campaign against climate change and its active trade union branch and communicating organizations like George Marshall's coin lead international as well as British public opinion they have aims that none of them can achieve single handedly yet they do protect their brands and their funding sources and despite herkilean efforts by organizations like Climate Justice Now and 350.org they do not usually seek to form alliances let alone political parties what about the largest civil society organization with 1.2 billion members globally the Roman Catholic Church is it different the growing threat to the ecosphere has been the subject of increasingly urgent papal pronouncements in 2000 John Paul II declared and I quote that within the movement of nature tranquil and silent but rich in life there continues to palpitate the original delight of the creator but in the following year he thought publicly that I quote humanity has disappointed God's expectation statements like that accelerate during the early part of the 21st century by 2010 Pope Benedict in conversation could say one sees too few models of what self-denial could look like concretely in this respect the religious communities are important as examples an apex is going to be reached this year in 2015 when after issuing an encyclical on climate change in February now delayed to the end of March Pope Francis will address the UN General Assembly in September and also conven an ecological summit of the world's main religions like the Pentagon Pope Francis will participate in the 2015 UN climate meeting in Paris like the Pentagon the Catholic Church is an attempt from binding treaties it's an observer and like the Pentagon its emissions are unknown although they will surely be less it may be interesting to know that in May of last year in 2014 the Pontifical Academies of Science and of Social Science met at the Vatican under the Chancellor of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences to discuss the question of climate change it was framed around the need for urgency and the explanation is a complex which I don't have time to rehearse with you but has a lot to do with the problems of paradigms and disciplines which are preventing common communication and the common addressing of the problem of climate change in the right time frame given the secular nature of the issues and the requisite solutions religious beliefs were not a criteria for selection to attend this conference and it was expertise so there were distinguished experts who were Hindus, Muslims, Protestants Jews, atheists and diagnostics called to the Vatican the conference accepted the concept of the Anthropocene it skewered inequality and it criticised markets socio-environmental processes self-correcting market forces alone, bereft of ethics cannot solve the intertwined crises of poverty, exclusion and the environment and so on but they're followed after this kind of an analysis and critique of markets they're followed a wish list of sustainable development goals using technologies which are available now we have the innovative and technological capacity to be good stewards of creation we must counteract the forces that resist change and there is also an extremely well worked out and very detailed political programme to rectify social inequality it makes very interesting reading for this most advanced expression of the church's concern the driver of climate change is not capitalism but inequality, global injustice and corruption which are undermining our ethical values personal dignity and human rights and creating a moral and a spiritual crisis action in the form of a transformational step may well be a massive mobilisation of public opinion the Vatican and other religions have vast networks of voluntary organisations but an alliance with other relevant civil society organisations and NGOs is not proposed the church has become concerned, it has a sense of urgency the analysis and action is less clear than the sense of urgency since this secular advance in mobilisation reflects a number of analytical and practical tensions between the writings of the church on climate change between reducing the whole problem that I've tried to outline in this lecture to climate change and expanding it to nature between secular materialism and spiritual and moral between the critique of markets and the advocacy of markets between global action and individual action joyful austerity between the causes lapsed and greedy humans and the ever absent capitalism ok, the Catholic Church has absorbed the science but it bulks at identifying capitalism as the driver and it proposes no form of organisation other than preaching to influence opinion and spiritual eco conversion in particular it doesn't seek to pool other than scientific resources which are not its own which come to the Catholic Church let alone counsel its enormous flock to join green parties or to demand pledges from politicians ok, this is my conclusion so in this very long lecture we've outlined the complexity and the irreversibility of elements of the metabolic rift the speed of its deepening and the urgency with which the science says action is needed it's extremely clear that politicians have failed to defend our collective interest throughout the world they have failed to take serious action to mitigate the process let alone reverse it when we look as we have done in this lecture at sectors and at units of capital looking at countries and states we find a glaring contrast between the focused adaptive action being taken by key players to defend their immediate private interests or in the case of the military for example their responsibilities on the one hand the abnegation of action on the other by many other global companies along with many others who are responsible for populations as a whole and when we look at organised labour and the well populated world of civil society we do find coherent analysis and discourse but little hope for practical action and seemingly little appetite for the sort of alliances that might form what Gortz referred to as this countervending force some things look in principle more tractable for example the fact that the number of companies that must rain back their pollution than the number of the planet's countries but other problems look a great deal more intractable the problem for the orthodox mainstream deal making approach to climate change of collective action amongst nations assumes that at the worst they will free ride that the big problem is free riding and global deal making doesn't allow for the realities of competition and the compulsions of profit for example for preferential state support which force companies to ignore collective action altogether as a means to transform the relation between production, distribution, consumption waste and nature you'll note that I haven't mentioned Davos and I haven't had time to look at Davos and I'd be very interested if anybody who does have the time to look at Davos finds that it's more than simply a talking shop the metabolic rift is a political problem at all levels the world's political representatives need holding to account to have a chance of keeping space for generalized human development new political alliances will be necessary and to this end the pope's coming in cyclical could prove very important however it's very interesting that over the last two days we heard that the pope was going to make a retreat to consider the opposition to his encyclical and that the publication of the encyclical was put back to the end of March and I now hear that it's put back to the end of June thank you