by Mel Carrington.
Hats off to the Hay Festival for a range of sessions tackling the multiple and interlinked crises we face – everything from toxic masculinity to misinformation, inequality, extremist ideologies and the big daddy of them all, the climate emergency. No shortage of crises for the authors to diagnose. However, when it comes to a prescription, the choices seemed curiously limited.
I listened with growing disquiet as speaker after speaker name checked the climate crisis and then offered the same old inadequate half-baked solutions that we’ve been hearing for 30 years. All of them carefully constructed to remain neatly within the prevailing neoliberal economic paradigm and current political arrangements and to avoid advocating for systemic change.
According to Alistair Campbell, Lord John Browne, Tony Juniper and others the solution to our current predicament is to vote, start a charity or buy better stuff. With few opportunities for the audience to question speakers, the Hay Festival feels less like Bill Clinton’s “Woodstock of the mind” and more like a walled garden. Here, the true causes of our headlong descent to extinction are carefully weeded out while hopium and comforting lies are left to bloom, along with the algae on the dying River Wye.
The hopium of voting
I suppose it was unrealistic to expect Alistair Campbell to suggest anything radical, but given the title of his new book – “But What Can I Do?: Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It”, I thought he might have some interesting things to say about fixing our broken political system.
I could not have been more wrong. The problem with politics is the people – so it’s up to all of us to get engaged, vote, start a campaign or a charity. Not a word on the corruption of the system itself: first past the post, the lobby system, political donations. Nor any recognition that politics already serves his largely middle class audience very well. I don’t see the millions of families living in poverty having much time for this. Citizen’s assemblies Alistair? Yes, Ireland was very promising, next question….
Deadly realism
John Browne, former CEO of BP spoke frankly on the climate crisis: we’re heading for 3C of warming by the end of the century, perhaps even 5C, he added casually. We’re 25 years too late in cutting emissions and we will need to adapt, not least to mass migration as vast areas of the world become uninhabitable. But, said the oil man, we can’t stop using oil and gas and anyway, think of the business opportunities in geoengineering and carbon capture and storage.
No, he hadn’t read the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Planetary Solvency Report that predicts that we are risking up to 4 billion deaths at 3C of warming. He didn’t appear to dispute the role that fossil fuel companies have played in delaying climate action, but he didn’t think we shouldn’t shut oil and gas companies out of the solution. After all, we need to be realistic.
Be careful what you think
Leor Zmigrod, a political neuroscientist, had some interesting observations about how extremist beliefs affect the brain. Her experiments have shown that people who are less able to adapt to changing rules in a card game experiment are more likely to subscribe to extreme ideologies than others.
What Zmigrod considers an extreme ideology was not stated, but a quick peek at her book reveals that all ideologies are suspect. “From fascism and communism to eco-activism and spiritual evangelism, ideological groups offer absolute and utopian answers to societal troubles, strict rules for behavior, and an ingroup mentality through dedicated practices and symbols.”
In other words, don’t join Friends of the Earth or blame capitalism for planetary overshoot, lest your brains set like concrete. The most cognitively flexible people tend to be more independent, moderate and center-left in their views, she said. The audience at Hay purred.
Fixing capitalism with more capitalism
Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England laid the blame for the climate crisis and extreme inequality firmly at the door of the economic system, but then spoke of reforming capitalism using the very solutions that have created the problems in the first place.
Let’s replace GDP with another composite indicator of success based on social and environmental goals, he said. It wasn’t clear why he was advocating for a deeply undemocratic solution that would reduce to mere arithmetic all the trade offs we face between near term economic survival and the urgent need to both mitigate and adapt to climate collapse.
As for ecosystem services valuation (putting a monetary value on the services that nature provides for us), surely our basic life support systems can escape the grip of competitive markets? There are some things that money cannot and should not be able to buy, not least because they are mine and yours and do not belong to governments and corporations. What next, Tony, oxygen credits? Tell that to the dead fish in the River Wye.
A recipe for disaster
At the bookshop, a massive queue forms, as excited punters wait in line. Yottam Ottolenghi is signing his latest cookbook, dispensing signatures, selfies and winning smiles. To the left, a couple of authors wait patiently, no queue for them. Tim Lang, Professor Emeritus of Food Policy at the University of London and David Omond, former head of GCHQ are promoting their latest crisis themed works. Food resilience, or rather the lack of it, due to our concentrated and brittle food supply chains are no match for Ottolenghi’s spiced delights and promise of plenty. It seems there is no market for being well informed and prepared for the crisis that is bearing down on us.
I spoke to Tim. What did he think of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries report? Yes, he agreed, billions of people will die. Is anyone in the government making preparations for a food crisis given his findings on the state of UK civil food resilience? No.
Never mind. At least the Hay Festival is offering reusable coffee cups.
But what can I do?
It’s clear that nothing short of a political and economic revolution is going to fix this. We need to take back power from the rich and put ordinary people in charge with citizen’s assemblies. Find out how you can help and sign up to take part in the House of the People at www.HouseOfThePeople.UK.
Just Stop Oil has shown that resistance works – ordinary people can bring about change by putting their bodies on the line week after week, risking arrest and even imprisonment. We are building a new street movement rooted in local communities and dedicated to nonviolent civil resistance on a scale that Just Stop Oil never even dreamt of. Help put people on the streets by funding the next phase of civil resistance at juststopoil.org/donate.
Mel Carrington is a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil and a former economist and environmental consultant who spent 20 years working with governments, international financial institutions and corporations on their climate and sustainability strategies.
