Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 18:53 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Wednesday 7 August 2019
4 Opinion
T
he tragedy of our times is that the
gathering collapse of our life support
systems has coincided with the age
of public disservice. Just as we need
to rise above self-interest and short -
termism, governments around the
world now represent the meanest
and dirtiest of special interests. In the
United Kingdom, the US, Brazil, Australia and many
other nations, pollutocrats rule.
The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing
speed. Wild fi res roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting,
in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes
of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global
heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfi res are reckoned to
have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as
Austria does in a year : already the vicious twister of
climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice
cap , sweltering under a 15 C temperature anomaly. Daily
ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule :
they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. T he
thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now
exceeds the melting projected by scientists for 2090.
While record temperatures in Europe last month
caused discomfort and disruption, in south-west Asia
they are starting to reach the point at which the human
body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the
world will come to rely on air conditioning, not only
Diane Abbott
is Labour MP
for Hackney
North and Stoke
Newingtonfor basic comfort but also for human survival: another
feedback spiral, as air conditioning requires massive
energy use. Already, climate breakdown is driving more
people from their homes than either poverty or confl ict,
while contributing to both these other factors.
A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope
of preventing more than 1.5 C of global heating unless we
retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new
gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the
carbon emissions from current installations are likely
to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some
of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life
could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the
temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from
decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost
everywhere governments and industry stoke its fi res.
The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9 tn
over the next 10 years , exploring and developing new
reserves, none of which we can aff ord to burn. According
to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil
fuels to the tune of $5 tn – many times more than they
spend on addressing our existential predicament. The
US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than
on its federal education budget. Last year, the world
burned more fossil fuels than ever before.
An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National
Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by
humans have been burn ed since 1990. While renewable
and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period,
the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-
carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily
widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway
global heating, is not the good things we start to do,
but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil
infrastructure requires government intervention.B
ut in many nations, governments
intervene not to protect humanity
from the threat of fossil fuels, but to
protect the fossil fuel industry from
the threat of public protest. In the US,
legislators in 18 states have put forward
bills criminalising protests against
pipelines, seeking to crush democratic
dissent. In June, Donald Trump’s administration
proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up
to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.
Global Witness reports that, in several nations, led by
the Philippines , governments have incited the murder
of environmental protesters. The process begins with
rhetoric , demonising civil protest as extremism and
terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising
attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then
helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. A similar
demonisation has begun in Britain, with the publication
by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange,
of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. I t was given
a series of platforms by the BBC, which preserved its
customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.
Secretly funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’
Alliance and the Institute of Economic Aff airs – have
supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s
government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an
enthusiastic fracking advocate , to run the department
responsible for climate policy , and Grant S happs – who
until last month chaired the British Infrastructure Group ,
which promot es the expansion of roads and airports – as
transport secretary. Last week the Guardian revealed
documents suggesting that the fi rm run by Johnson’s
ally and adviser Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded
Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.
What we see here looks like the denouement of the
Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract
the least public support, they have the greatest incentive
to spend money on politics, to get the results they want
and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups
and think tanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark
ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be
dominated by the dirtiest industries.
We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest
against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the
dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should
fear are those who hold offi ce.T
oni Morrison was part of an
extraordinary generation of African
American women writers. But she was
the most special. She was the queen.
To understand the impact she had on
me you have to appreciate that I came
of age in an era when there were very
few black female role models.
Prominent black women tended to be entertainers:
British pianist Winifred Atwell , British jazz singer
Cleo Laine , or the host of American jazz singers such
as Ella Fitzgerald. So Toni Morrison was a complete
revelation. Black male writers were rare enough. But
a black female writer was for me a genuine sensation.
She and her peer group – Alice Walker , Gloria Naylor
and Ntozake Shange – burned into my consciousness.
Toni Morrison did so much to shape my understanding
of life and politics, and my world as a black woman.
When she became a revered Nobel prize winner
people forgot what was remarkable about her and the
initial resistance she encountered. Reviewing one of
her early novels, Sula , for the New York Times in 1973,
one writer chided Morrison for her continued focus
on black life: “ in spite of its richness and its thorough
originality, one continually feels its narrowness ... Toni
Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvellous
recorder of the black side of provincial American life.”
In 1988, 48 black writers published an open letter
in the Times protesting the fact that Morrison had not
won a National Book Award or the Pulitzer prize.
Five months later she did win a Pulitzer. But some
people, including some black male writers, were still
not persuaded of her merit. Black writer Stanley Crouch
said: “I hope this prize inspires her to write better.
She has a certain skill, but she has no serious artistic
vision or real artistic integrity. Beloved was a fraud. It
gave a fake vision of the slave trade, it didn’t deal with
the complicity of Africans, and it moved the males
into the wings. The Bluest Eye was her best. I thought
something was going to happen after that. Nothing
did.” But Morrison was undeterred and remained
faithful to her art. And as an editor at Random House,
she encouraged other black writers. What was initially
distinct about her, and completely riveting to me, was
that she focus ed on the black female experience. In
2003 she told the New Yorker: “What was driving me
to write was the silence, so many stories untold and
unexamined.” Very recently she said: “I have spent my
entire life trying to make sure that the white gaze was
not the dominant one in any of my books.”
Toni Morrison was not just a great writer. She
was an inspiration to black women in any walk of
life. She could have been daunted by the opposition
that she encountered early in her career. She
could have adapted her work to what the white
establishment wanted and expected. Instead, she
stuck to her values and her vision. A great woman and a
personal heroine of mine.George
Monbiot
Diane
Abbott
How our dirty
industries
learned to
pollute politics
Ton i Mor r i son :
a role model
who changed
my world
A fracking rig in the US PHOTOGRAPH: GRANDRIVER/GETTY IMAGESРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS