Book review which originally appeared on the LeftWrites blog on 24 August, 2008
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BY TOM O’LINCOLN
David
Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency
Action, Scribe,
IF YOU’RE NOT scared yet about global warming, you soon will be.
In their book Climate Code Red,
David Spratt and Philip Sutton respond to indications that sea-ice in the polar
north is disintegrating at a frightening speed. From here they show that other
terrifying consequences, such as the wholesale burning of the Amazon, and
drastic rises in sea levels, are not far away.
This is bolder stuff than we get from most experts, and certainly goes
further than statements from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But
that, say the authors, is precisely the point. For fear of being called
alarmist, too many scientists are toning down what they really think.
That in turn allows politicians to put a bland face on things, which in turn
is a signal to industry it can continue with business as usual.
There is a lot of important scientific information in the book, in a clear
and easy to read form, so if youre new to the subject
its not a bad place to start. Equally important, it
looks at social obstacles to seriously tackling the climate crisis, and
suggests some solutions.
One obstacle is the New Business As Usual syndrome, in which companies persuade
us to consume even more of their junk, while convincing us this is somehow
earth-friendly. Some of this is just greenwash
dreamed up by advertising agencies, but Sutton and Spratt also show how a new
version of conventional economics allows major scams.
Clean coal technologies such as carbon capture and storage
(aka geo-sequestration) are largely unproved and unlikely to be cheaper than
renewable energy, yet Australian governments are in love with them. Why is
that? I think the reasons are clear enough. Coal is a major export industry, and
the industry is desperate to turn its product green before customers shift to
other power sources.
Then there are biofuels,
production of which has driven up food prices to the point where a UN special rapporteur calls it a crime against humanity.
Carbon offsets are fashionable, and some
government-certified offsets seem to be OK as far as they go. Others are
pointless publicity stunts, or blatant frauds in which the trees substituting
for emissions never get planted. In still other cases there are great
uncertainties: what if the trees burn? How do you measure the emissions related
to an individuals flight on a plane?
Some of the biggest offset disasters are associated with so-called Clean
Development Mechanisms, which allow western companies to pollute, then offset their sins by funding projects in the third
world. Making sure these arent rip-offs is very
difficult. By March 2007, Newsweek reported that the real winners in emissions
trading have been polluting factory owners who can sell menial cuts for massive
profits.
Then there is carbon trading itself. After my exchange in Overland with Clive Hamilton, who
seems impervious to the dangers of marketising
environmental solutions, I was relieved to find Sutton and Spratt pointing out
how many of the passionate advocates of carbon trading see it was a way to make
a great deal of money rather than as a means to cutting emissions.
We might think this doesn’t matter, since a well designed scheme might use
the profit-motive to drive environmental solutions whether the players like it
or not. But in practice the schemes are always skewed to suit vested interests.
And these interests are now responding to a multi-faceted crisis that goes way
beyond climate change.
One excellent short chapter in Climate Code Red
summarises its dimensions: global oil shortages, catastrophic food prices; and
soaring demand for water while rising seas destroy supplies of it everywhere
from Australias Murray-Darling to cities like
This is where I started to feel dissatisfied with the book. It takes key
aspects of the capitalist system as givens. The authors do say that the
neo-liberal market economy, without democratic control and with a fetish for
monetary growth and shareholder value rather than community, has failed the
test of sustainability.
Very true, but some of us are old enough to remember economics before
neo-liberalism. Was the economy under democratic control in the early 1970s,
when a recession smashed the Whitlam government? The authors want to
bring runaway capitalism into alignment with the sustainability of the planet,
but have we ever observed a capitalism that wasn’t runaway in some form?
In fact on the authors’ own account, the highly regulated European carbon
trading system ran away fairly quickly.
Of course it’s easier to throw up these questions than to answer them. But
given the persistence with which serious green activists argue the need for a
qualitatively different way of living, at least some of this book’s readers should
be open to discussing social change that goes beyond a return to what preceded
neo-liberalism. And won’t it take a challenge to capitalism itself to actually
democratise the economy?
The social aspects poke their heads up in other ways. As a model for mobilising
to stop climate change, the authors cite the Second World War. That war
drive was certainly dramatic, but this book ignores the huge social costs. It
went together with intense racist agitation; one of its key objectives was
maintaining imperialist power in Asia; and it ended with human and
environmental disaster at
Spratt and Sutton demand an ethic of cross-species compassion: protect the
welfare of all people, all species, and all generations. At first this seems
OK. Taken literally, the all-species thing is a bit silly, but I don’t suppose
the authors really want compassion for the AIDS virus.
They want to defend bio-diversity, a crucial requirement for human
survival; and at the same time to make us think like internationalists and care
for future generations.
Where it becomes problematic is when it seems to indicate a moral
equivalence between all people, because actually the rich and powerful minority
who dominate the world economy have a lot to answer for. Call me callous, but I
oppose compassion for Dick Cheney and the Haliburton
board. Spratt and Sutton’s formulations obscure the need for a mobilisation against
certain people.
The authors come closest to confronting the issue of capitalism in a chapter
called The Safe Climate Economy. They again hold up World War II as a model,
but this time coupled with Keynesian economics’ impact in the 1930s. That
really is unconvincing. The methods of Keynes (who supported the anti-working
class Premiers Plan as having saved the economic structure of
Despite their earlier critiques, Spratt and Sutton return to a kind of
market solution with a call for individual carbon rationing and trading. This
idea got a run in
But I have horror visions of pensioners shivering at home to save carbon to
sell, like third world people selling their organs, so that the rich can enjoy
life. It seems to me this scheme would turn every individual into a
micro-business, the ultimate in neo-liberal market mania. It would also further
individualise responsibility for the environmental crisis, making each of us
feel personally guilty, when in reality the fault lies with governments, oil
companies, the Liberal Party and so on. Why not just take the Packer family’s
wealth off them as the first step in the plan?
Which brings me back to the fact that we have enemies.
Sutton and Spratt write perceptively: It does not require much imagination to
understand that the corporate big end of town may see the idea of [carbon]
rationing as a direct challenge to their world and to their idea of a free
market. They express the fear that strong action to make a safe climate
possible will destroy the economic-growth machine. I’d say this applies to any
major environmental solution.
Climate Code Red’s answer
to this is that ultimately saving the planet is good for the whole economy,
which is true; but that won’t stop our capitalist rulers seeing it as a
challenge to their world, for two reasons. The authors identify the first
themselves: firms that are not adaptable may fail. But who can tell which will
live and which will die? Each business fears this is a death sentence, and some
will choose reactionary solutions.
The second reason is more fundamental. I think the capitalists sense, as
many environmentalists do, and as socialists like me do, that to resolve this
crisis demands deep social changes that will threaten the power of capital more
generally. The nature of those changes is, of course a major topic in its own
right. What I will say now us that I agree we need an economy under democratic
control. Sutton and Spratt seem to see this in terms of government policy and
the workings of the market. But while both are important issues, I think the
logical place to start is in the workplaces where we spend so much of our
lives, and where so many of our environmental problems are generated.
If I’m right, we have a fight on our hands. If so, we need weapons. Climate Code Red, for
all my disagreements, contains some valuable intellectual weapons. It also
seems to be associated with a certain ripple of grass-roots mobilisation. And
this is a very good sign.