Marxist Moments

STEPHEN GLOVER STRIKES AGAIN

 

          With reference to Stephen Glover’s Daily Mail column for 13^th June 2019: ‘I fear Mrs May’s plan for a green legacy is as doomed as her lost Brexit deal’: I have reasons for agreeing with Mr Glover’s scepticism but from a wholly opposite viewpoint.

          ‘Yesterday,’ he writes, ‘she announced that Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced to zero, or almost zero, by 2050 – an undertaking that has not so far been matched by any other developed country.’

          Of course Mrs May was also going to rehouse the victims of the Grenfell disaster within three months – and they are still waiting after two years. So one takes her ‘green legacy’ with a pinch of salt.

          No: Glover’s argument is that Britain’s emissions are a tiny ‘1.2 per cent – and falling’ of total world emissions. That is, compared to China’s 27 per cent (22 times as much as the British) and those emissions from a rapidly growing India of ‘about 6.5 per cent’. Glover really ought to mention a third country here, the United States of America, which is third largest in population after India and China, if by a long way. But the USA uses up some 25% of the world’s energy with a consumption per capita far outweighing that of the average Indian or Chinese. Moreover its government under President Trump has eschewed the whole idea of world climate change as he rips up environmental protection laws thereby forcing individual states to take their own action - for self-protection, as it were. If things deteriorate this could lead to the worst separation of powers clash in the history of the Republic. But perhaps best not to mention Uncle Sam here, who is Britain’s closest ally.

          ‘My point,’ says Glover, ‘is that nothing we do in this country by way of reducing our emissions – which have already gone down by 44 per cent since 1990, a barely equalled performance, is going to have a discernible influence on the overall situation.’ Never mind that this barely equalled performance was brought about by the barely equalled performance of the decimation of British industry in the Tory years under Thatcher and co. which saw manufacturing reduced to a present 13% of the British economy, giving way to our present predominating services, finance and investment, insurance, entertainment – with irreparable loss in, for example, the north of England, and in Wales. Fifth or sixth-largest economy in the world Britain may be but it is not now an especially important manufacturing economy. The reduction in emissions may be a good thing but it was not brought about by all-wise British social planning.

          The really important point here is that  Britain’s reduced level of emissions is paralleled and dwarfed by British overseas investment in, amongst other activities, mining, fracking and oil drilling, drivers of emissions on a gigantic scale, most of these in the developing world. Britain’s power is capital, not loads of machine goods and services, except financial services. That is why climate activists are demonstrating against BP, not because of its emissions inside Britain but because of its massive polluting all around the world, in the company of others such as Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon and so on – as well as Glencore and other mining conglomerates. Mrs May’s pronouncement and Stephen Glover’s response to it are entirely beside the point. What Britain doesn’t do at home it activates abroad – and both at home and abroad once the gigantic expansion of Heathrow Airport gets underway, around its now waved-through third runway and all the masses of new aircraft discharging emissions wherever they fly, take off and land.

          Speaking of which, I am against Glover inasmuch as it is obvious that Britain is domestically polluted in the cities and in the countryside, which is doing our people, our children (inexcusable asthma disease and deaths amongst the latter due to exhaust fumes) and our wildlife no good at all. We have far too many cars, vans and heavy lorries while rail freight potential lies neglected; we have a potential for tidal power also ignored, at the same time as we are faced with enormous, deadly and increasing methane emissions from more herds of bovines than ever before, within the worldwide growth of what is now referred to as McDonaldisation: vast herds around the globe whose sole purpose is to supply cheeseburgers, and not only to President Trump, would you believe. Even if petrol and diesel are replaced by electric in our transport, who has decided what is to be done about the heavy atmospheric poison emitted by enhanced battery manufacture?

          Apparently we should be complacent about our pollution on the grounds that Britain produces so little of it: but (a) it produces quite enough to poison a not-very-big country, and (b) its overseas investments ensure that the rest of humanity is to be poisoned as well, perhaps at the very least on the same scale as India’s and maybe in time China’s.

          Meanwhile, too, our climate protesters are labelled and treated as ‘terrorists’ and Greta Thunberg – who has the temerity to argue in favour of the interests of our children – being vilified by journalists and others as only, perhaps, a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s should be. Mr Glover ought to be working, if he can, to persuade his Daily Mail to reverse its position towards being in favour of humanity, not to speak of a beautiful blue planet, the only one we know.