Financial Times Europe - 26.10.2019 - 27.10.2019

26 October/27 October 2019 ★ FT Weekend 9

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ver since the renowned Nasa scientist James Hansen started issuing direwarnings about the risks of man-made climate change in the late 1980s, the same question has haunted environmental campaigners: how to get political momentum behind an “invisi- ble” and global problem whose impacts would not be felt for many years? Attempts to outsource the answer to some grand international bargain in succeeding decades have done little to abate the volumes of carbon still belch- ing into the atmosphere. Wealthy countries such as the US have bridled at bind- ing global targets, while national regula- tions have simply shifted emissions from wealthy countries to those with less exacting environmental rules. Earlier this year, two American pro- gressive politicians, Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez and Ed Markey, launched the latest attempt to break the political logjam. Granted, their “Green New Deal” is more of a political brand than a practical programme. But it sets out to provide that elusive energising factor by tying climate action to the notion of greater social justice within the US. The deal offers jobs for millions to restore US infrastructure, extends uni- versal healthcare and proposes switch- ing tocommunity-led renewable energy systems with the aim of reaching 100 per cent renewable power in10 years. The goal is to make decarbonisation a defining national mission rather than an internationally mandated chore.

It is not the first time a “Green New Deal” has been touted. But the original, cooked up by the US journalist Thomas Friedman in 2007, gained little traction. Conceived as a mission that would bolster US energy security as well as (happily) saving the planet, it argued for a technological revolution; one where the government showered fiscal incentives to replace fossil fuels with unlimited green power. Friedman’s was a consumer-friendly vision; one where western knowhow bailed us out without us actually having to change our lifestyles very much. A decade on, proponents of the latest Green New Deal, such as the activist Naomi Klein, are much less optimistic about the ability — or will — of western private capital and technology to solve the world’s environmental woes. InOn Fire, the longstanding critic of corporate globalisation argues for a much more comprehensive economic reboot. “Markets play a role in this vision, but markets are not the protagonists of this story — people are,” she writes. “The workers who will build the new infrastructure, the residents who will breathe the clean air, who will live in the affordable green housing and benefit fromlow cost (or free) public transit.” Klein’s book is a collection of essays spanning the past decade, which chart her growing despair at environmental degradation and conclusion that any solution must involve radical and urgent economic change. The story moves from the Deepwater Horizon oil- rig disaster in 2010, through the wild- fires of western Canada, the refugee cri- ses in Africa and the Middle East all the way to the Vatican, where Pope Francis is attempting an extraordinary “ecologi-

cal conversion”. These journeys have left her with a profound mistrust of the way markets allocate resources. Klein argues that we must change more than just our energy sources; we must master our urge to dominate the natural envi- ronment — what she calls our “expan- sionist, extractive mind-set”. This is partly a long-lensed critique about humanity’s relationship to nature. As a Canadian, Klein is acutely aware of her own country’s history, and the way early colonial settlers treated it as “their God-given larder”, killing first the native species, such as auks and bea- vers, for profit, before turning to its woodlands and mineral resources. But she also blames modern globalisation for hindering climate action and leaving it too late for less abrupt changes. The explosion of post-1980s “neoliberalism” tamped down the col- lective spirit necessary for decarbonisation just as action became vital, she argues. Instead it set the world on an extractive bingethat may have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but has seenCO 2 missions risee 60 per cent over 1990 levels. And it did so on what she sees as a wildly misguided prospec- tus: “in the name of liberating ‘free markets’ in every aspect of life”. Essentially Klein’s argument is that our unbridled urge to extract has created what she calls “sacrifice zones” around the world, such as the Louisiana marshlands after Deepwater Horizon, or the toxic wilderness created by tar sands extraction on First Nations lands in her native Canada. These activities clearly hurt the envi- ronment and those who live in these places. But Klein also focuses on the effect they have on the psyche ofperpe- trators, who rationalise the damage by treating the victims as “the other”.

Her concern is what happens when western consumers with such attitudes are confronted with real climate disrup- tion; when, say, rising temperatures in the Middle East (already touching 50C in Iraq this summer) force a mass exo- dus to more temperate places. “This is how the wealthy world is going to ‘adapt’ to more climate disrup- tion: by fully unleashing the toxic ideol- ogies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the mon- strous discarding of huge swathes of humanity,” she writes. “And what starts as brutality at the border will most cer- tainly infect societies as a whole.”

Now this all takes you into very radical territory. For one thing, Klein is far less concerned about preserving the productive motors of the economy. Indeed she advocates the notion of “de- growth”, which responds to the reduc- tion in productivity caused by the locali- sation of trade and scrapping of hydro- carbon fuels by simply scaling back activity. She’s also against industrial forms of agriculture, preferring a return to smaller scale traditional forms. There’s short shrift too for “get-out-of jail-free card” fixes such as geoengineer- ing, on the basis that, as the climate affects everyone, it will never be possi- ble to get informed consent for such risky experiments as squirting sulphate into the atmosphere. Nuclear energy is similarly dismissed because of its requirement for extractive mining. Which brings you up against both the economics and the politics of Klein’s grand vision. One can sympathise with her concern about the sustainability of our globalised economy, and laud the idea of much needed, job creating infrastructure spending. But how sensible is it to sweep away agricultural practices

that feed 7.7bn people? And how do you sell the idea of “less” to the west’s myr- iad consumers, let alone their emulants in the rest of the world? Orthe powerful corporate giants that drive the economy? Klein confidently asserts that the “footloose investors” who back these entities can be made to curb their de- mands for ever rising profits, suggesting the answer is to expand “those sectors that are not governed by the drive for in- creased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, non profits)”. Maybe wealthy nations should pay climate reparations to developing countries as she suggests, as well as granting them exclusive rights to all future per- mitted growth. Yet short of pretty mus- cular coercive measures, it is hard to see how any of this will be achieved.

One way, of course, might be to beef up state control of the economy and muzzle the power of the international financial system — the prescription reached for by the economist Ann Petti- for inThe Case for the Green New Deal. An adviser to Ocasio-Cortez and Markey, she sees the nation state as eminently capable of financing decarbonisation. The enemy is globalised markets, with their propensity to fly from juris- dictions that seek to mobilise trillions of capital to pay for climate transition. We need to “get real” and recognisebankers will never “finance a massive climate stabilisation project on terms that are acceptable and sustainable”, she writes. To achieve the “steady state” economy that would have to repay all that debt out of future tax revenues, Pettifor argues for constraints on moving capital. There are few tears shed for the citi- zen’s liberty to move around their money. “Much of the responsibility for today’s rise in extreme right-wing and

authoritarian governments can be placed at the door of instability caused by volatile, footloose cap flows.”

Both authors assume these curtail- ments of economic freedom won’t stop the public cheering on the Green New Deal. And they may be right. Klein’s own “Leap” programme — a more radical variation of the GND — was condemned by Conservative politicians inCanada for its “economic nihilism”. But as she points out, when polled with the public, it received majority backing from the supporters of most mainstream Cana- dian parties. Even 20 per cent of Con- servatives gave it the thumbs up. Painting in primary colours may actually make some sense politically at a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning that the world has just a decade to start bringing down global emissions if the rise in temperatures is to be constrained to 1.5C. True, it is easy to pick holes in the impracticality of the GND, especially the idea of moving to a zero-emission

power system in just a decade. Simply backing up an electricity network that was wholly powered by renewables would presently be ruinous. Building the necessary battery storage to supply a week’s power in Britain would cost £1tn, according toFrench utility EDF. Then there is the question of the out- comes we would be avoiding. While 2C-3Cincreases would clearly bring suf- fering to many, few scientific authorities believe it would bring about mass species extinction or ecological collapse. But that is to misunderstand the psy- chological attraction of the GND. It appeals not to a practical instinct, but to a latent sense of guilt and powerlessness among western consumers. The same emotions that drove 7m on to the streets around the world inclimate protests, or cheered the Swedish schoolgirl activist Greta Thunberg at the UN when she accused delegates of “[stealing] my dreams... with your empty words”. It reflects the failure of many national governments (especially the US) to come up with a worked through and detailed proposal that would avoid sweeping economic changes, or to determine what resources are needed to fight climate change and how those should be deployed. American climate legislation has pretty much stalled since the failure of President Obama’s cap- and-trade scheme a decade ago. And even limited practical initiatives are struggling: a plan by 24 countries to double green energy R&D between 2015 and 2020 is far off course. The GND may not actually be about doing something specific. Demanding drastic, even impossible change — as Klein and Pettifor do — may just be a way to ensure that something is done.

Jonathan Ford is the FT’s City editor

The Green New Deal appeals

not to a practical instinct, but to a latent sense of guilt

and powerlessness among western consumers

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein Allen Lane £20/Simon & Schuster $27, 320 pages

The Case for the Green New Deal by Ann Pettifor Verso Books £12.99/$19.95 208 pages

Power to the people?

Essay Could a Green New Deal provide the necessary impetus to break the political logjam around|

climate change? Two books make the case for a radical economic reboot, writesJonathan Ford

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey (right) at a news conference about the Green New Deal in Washington in February New York Times/Redux

W

hat have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself,” Franz Kafkaonce wrote in his diary. It’s a quintessentially Jewish kvetch, laden with contradictory mean- ings: self-deprecating and self-effacing on the one hand, defiantly if ambigu- ously self-assertive on the other. In truth, Kafka was deeply interested in the question of what it meant to be Jewish — even fantasising at one point about emigrating to Palestine with his girlfriend and opening a café. Virtually unpublished during his lifetime, he was elevated posthumously to the ranks of literary genius thanks tohis loyally dis-

loyal friend Max Brod. Kafka’s papers were preserved for posterity only because Brod defied Kafka’s deathbed instructions to burn them. Effacement or assertion? Brod chose the latter. Kafka is just one of a huge and colour- ful cast of characters wheeled out in Norman Lebrecht’s new bookGenius and Anxiety, a quest to explain the profound and disproportionate contribution of European Jews to society between 1847 and 1947. The book’s incautious title gave me, I confess, quite a few twinges of anxiety, but then that’s exactly the kind of keep-your-head-down Anglo-Jewish reaction that Lebrecht would deplore as “the Jewish cringe”. His central thesis seems to be that Jewishness, whether embraced or rejected, whether consciously or uncon- sciously, was a deep and powerful driver of achievement and originality for these men and women, whose lives were set against a cultural backdrop of unremit- ting anti-Semitism. Whether the con- tents justify the book’s title, however, is

never satisfactorily answered. Lebrecht in the main leaves his subjects’ lives to speak for themselves. The result is a riveting, gossipy, action-packed, seam-bursting blast through 100 years of (mainly) Euro- pean history, which draws us into the complex, frequently messy lives of musicians and politicians, philosophers and scientists, bankers and scholars. Alongside the household names (Felix Mendelssohn, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud) are lesser-known indi- viduals: Eliza Davis, a Victorian house-

Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947 by Norman Lebrecht Oneworld £20 448 pages

thusiast for its usein the first world war. Each chapter revolves around a specific year, telling the stories of a cluster of game-changerswhose lives inter- sectedaround that date. The year 1875 gives us Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust and Einstein; 1881 is the turn of Ben- jamin Disraeli, Emma Lazarus, author of the poem that adorns the Statue of Liberty, Eliezer Perlman, inventor of modern Hebrew, and Albert Ballin, father of transatlantic shipping and pos- sible inventor of the hamburger. This approach allows Lebrecht to trace the concentric circles of influence back and forth in time, and to reveal the intricate webs of friendships, love affairs, rivalries and animosities that connected his subjects and their wider networks of family and colleagues. Driven out of Germany by fascism and anti-Semitism, the composer Arnold Schoenberg moved to California. Fellow Jewish exilesErich Wolfgang Korngold and Otto Klemperer were regular visi- tors to hishome; his tennis partners

were Charlie Chaplin and George Gersh- win. When Gershwin died in 1937, it was Schoenberg who in a radio eulogy pro- claimed his musical achievements “not only to the benefit of a national Ameri- can music but... to the music of the whole world”. Everyone who’s anyone knows someone in this densely popu- lated mesh of movers and shakers. Gen- ius may be rare, but it’s seldom solitary. Lebrecht’s warts-and-all portraits of these extraordinary peoplefails to land the provenance of genius, or its putative connection to Jewishness, but he makes a compelling case for the phenomenal energy and independence of thought that underpinned their achievements and far-reaching influence. Impres- sively wide-ranging in scope and unflag- gingly fascinating in detail, his account is perhaps most remarkable of all for its striking absence of authorial anxiety.

Rebecca Abrams is the author of ‘The Jewish Journey: 4,000 years in 22 Objects’ (Ashmolean Museum)

The innovators who defied a hostile age

Rebecca Abrams enjoys a riveting ide through 100r

years of achievement in the face of anti-Semitism

wife who held Charles Dickens to account for his anti-Semitic prejudices, leading him to revise his fictional por- trayal of Jews; Magnus Hirschfeld, early champion of gay rights and gender equality in Germany; Leo Szilard, inventor of the nuclear reactor and an ardent campaigner for nuclear non- proliferation; Gregory Pincus, creator of the contraceptive pill. Best known as amusic critic, Lebrecht is an exuberant storyteller who ably brings these personalities to life. Feet of clay abound. Theworld-renowned nov- elist Stefan Zweig was a compulsive flasher. Freud was an overbearing husband who banned his Jewish wife from keeping kosher or lighting the Sabbath candles, a ruling she obediently com- plied with throughout their long mar- riage but flouted the very first Friday after his death. The pacifist Albert Ein- stein, another lousy husband, persisted in turning a blind eye to the ethical fail- ings of his friend Fritz Haber, inventor of poison gas and an unapologetic en-

OCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 24/10/2019- 18:23 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD9, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 9, 1

Financial Times Europe - 26.10.2019 - 27.10.2019

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