THE GENOCIDAL GREENS – race, population control and the “eco-right”

This article was taken from Climate and Capitalism.
This article traces the origins of the population control movement as rooted in Malthus’s original theory. It then goes on to discuss it’s development and reemergence in contemporary politics and it’s manifestations within the “eco-right”. The article then demonstrates how the movement’s ideological underpinnings are based on racism and classism.

Population Control and Climate Change, Part One: Too Many People?
March 2, 2008

Population control is once again being touted by some in the green movement as an answer to climate change and other environmental problems.

By Phil Ward

Why is population control an issue?

There is a long history of intersection between the ecological movement and the advocates of population control. Sometimes, views on this issue are not explicitly reactionary, but still use terms and categories familiar to more trenchant population controllers, for example, the UK Green Party: “The UK casts its ecological footprint over the world, reflecting the real costs of a high, and still growing, population with high consumption.”[1] They link desired (lower) birth rates with sustainability and consumption levels with the “earth’s carrying capacity.”

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth appear not to take an official position on population control, but this means that they do not combat the reactionary positions put forward by the population control movement.[2]

The second reason that population control is a live issue is that simplistic responses to famine or ecological crisis reflect current public consciousness, including large sections of the working class in the imperialist countries. As I will argue, even if there were no campaign for population control measures, there is such a long history of linkage equating “hunger” or “demand for resources” with “too many people” that it has become deeply ingrained in Western culture. In this respect, the issue intersects with racism.

Origins of Population Control

The first attempt to codify the link between population and hunger came from Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). His ideas are still being used in the population control movement.[3] Malthus proposed an extreme form of the idea of the earth having “natural limits” or a finite “carrying capacity” in terms of the human population it could support. He argued two propositions which had already been disproved by the time he was writing, namely that population increases geometrically (for example, doubling every 40 years), while food production increases arithmetically (by a set absolute amount each year — for example by adding 1m hectares of farmland).

From this “inevitability,” he argued that excessive population growth and famine was only kept in check by “vice”, that is extramarital sex – which he presumed to be a contraceptive — and sexually transmitted diseases. Further, it was courting famine to aim to raise the living standards of the working class, “If [nature’s guests] … make room for [a destitute person], other intruders get up and demand the same favour …The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed and the plenty that reigned before is changed into scarcity.”

This is exactly the argument used by prominent population controllers of the 1960s. However, Malthus differed from these people in one respect (and here he was being consistent): his “mathematical” reasoning implies that whatever the population, agriculture will never be able to feed it and there will always be hunger. It was for this reason that he thought there was no point in “helping the poor.” His interest was less in population control than in controlling “vice.”

Malthus also argued that, as a result of excessive population growth, “the middle classes of society would be blended with the poor.” It is no accident that Malthus was writing immediately after the French Revolution, where “the poor” overthrew the aristocracy. Malthus’ book An essay on the principle of population was written in response to William Godwin, a prominent English supporter of the French Revolution and the Marquis de Condorcet, who was involved in the Revolution. Malthus saw the “inevitability of hunger” as an argument against Condorcet’s view that society could be “perfected.”

John Bellamy Foster shows that Malthus’ views, in a distorted form, influenced liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill, and early trade union and suffrage campaigners like Francis Place, on the moderate wing of Chartism. Malthus’ influence led to contraceptives being called Malthusian devices.

Marx and Engels on Malthus

Marx and Engels’ critique of Malthus centred on the following issues:

1) “[Malthus] applies his principle of the geometric growth of population as an eternal law of nature to all places and all times, suggesting therefore that the earth was already overpopulated when one man existed.”

2) He attributes the condition of the poor to a natural deficiency, not to the actions of human beings (from Robert Owen).

3) Only a small proportion of the earth is cultivated and not very productively at that. Malthusianism rejects scientific and social advance.

4) Only socialism, can make possible the “moral restraint of the propagative instinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and easiest remedy for overpopulation.”

5) Malthus’ “overpopulation” was in fact unemployment, a necessary adjunct to capitalism. Unemployment explains the existence of poverty, not lack of food.

Other socialists at that time made similar arguments. Thus H.M. Hyndman, leader of the Social Democratic Federation, pointed out in 1881 that, between the years 1848 and 1878, the British economy had grown by 110% and the population by 20%. He pointed out that what was obnoxious about capitalism was not people demanding to eat, but the rich appropriating the labour (means of subsistence) of the masses.

Eugenics

But many left-wing intellectuals in the 19th century took up Malthus’ views, often in combination with practical activity to promote birth control. They frequently held eugenicist views: that is, they believed that selective breeding out of “deformity” and “imperfection” would result in a healthier “race.” Holders of these racist, classist and disablist views included Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. In the 20th century, the radical birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger moved from a position of support for women’s rights to advocating the sterilisation of “unfit” women — “more children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control.”

The zenith of eugenicist ideology was of course the Nazi period, where the existence of a dictatorship allowed the implementation of a policy that was advocated in the other imperialist countries but applied in a more piecemeal manner. The Nazi policy was praised by the British Eugenics Review in 1939, “the most advanced eugenics legislation is carried through without difficulty.”[4]

So it is not surprising there were sterilization programs in the “democracies.” in the prisons and mental hospitals. Sixty-five thousand people were compulsorily sterilized in the USA up to 1981; 21,000 in Sweden in 1934-76; as late as 1999-2000, nearly a million indigenous people in Peru under Fujimori. Bonnie Mass cites examples of sterilization after birth in US hospitals in areas where there are large immigrant communities as late as the 1970s.[5]

The postwar period

The defeat of the Nazis led to the discrediting of strongly eugenicist ideas. But with the beginning of the involvement of the UN in population issues, the prospect of famine again became the main excuse for advocates of population control. The focus shifted to the neocolonial countries, in an attempt to exercise political control, as a result of the successful anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. A whole range of government and non-government organisations were established to promote and implement population control policies, led by the UN Fund for Population Activities, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the US Agency for International Development. These were backed up by an ideological onslaught, supported by foundations like Ford and Rockefeller.[6] The result was a press and publicity campaign which took up the themes of the time, “Hundreds of millions of people in the world are hungry. In their desperation, they are increasingly susceptible to communist propaganda… our way of life, if not the existence of ourselves and our children, is at stake.”[7]

The most famous ideological onslaught came from Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1968, significantly a year that represented a high point in revolutionary challenges to imperialist power. Their book The Population Bomb predicted apocalypse if the third world population was not curbed. Paul Ehrlich showed his colours in his account of a taxi ride through Delhi, on a “stinking hot night.” “People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people… All three of us were, frankly, frightened. Since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.”[8]

Mahmud Mamdani, a Ugandan Marxist, challenged the Ehrlichs, pointing out that London and New York were just as crowded. What they really objected to – just like the eugenicists of the 1930s – was not people’s numbers, but their “quality,” in other words, their poverty (Mamdani did not suggest their colour as well).

“To talk, as Ehrlich does, of ‘overpopulation’ is to say to people: you are poor because you are too many. People are not poor because they have large families. Quite the contrary: they have large families because they are poor.”[9]

Mamdani and Bonnie Mass demolished the view that the key to improving the environment was population control. Mamdani’s research showed that villagers in rural India often politely took the Harvard-sponsored programmes’ contraceptives, but did not use them. In the prevailing economic and social conditions, it was not in their material interests to have fewer children. Western researchers were perplexed as to why they continued to have babies. Mass showed that US population control programs in Latin America from the 1930s on, were motivated by the desire to reduce the disruption and political turmoil caused by imperialist exploitation. In Puerto Rico, a third of women of childbearing age were sterilized by 1968.

The ultimate argument of population controllers was well articulated by Garrett Hardin.[10] He argued that the “freedom to breed” should be replaced by “mutual coercion, mutually agreed.” This means child taxes in the West (applied in China, in the form of fines) and denying food aid, food technology and immigration rights to developing countries, so that, “the rate of their population growth would be periodically checked by famines.” These measures would ultimately breed out “fecundity.” There is a clear concordance between Hardin’s views and those of Thomas Malthus.

At the same time two think tanks were producing similar ideas. The Ecologist published the “Blueprint for Survival” in 1972. In this, the world’s population was already considered too high (it was 3.9 billion: today it is 6.5 billion). Most of their policies to reduce population were rather mild, consisting of, “publicizing the relationship between population, food supply, resource depletion, quality of life etc. and the great need for couples to have no more than two children,” free contraception, abortion and sterilisation, and commissioning research on ways to reduce population, including, “the subtle controls necessary for the harmonious maintenance of stability.” But one thing they were sure of was complete opposition to immigration — a theme that is consistent on the right wing of the ecological movement.

The Limits to Growth report (also 1972) presented a left social democratic approach to what was perceived in the 1960s and 1970s as the population and resources crisis. It predicted that (then) current trends were unsustainable, leading to collapse of human civilization as a result of resource depletion “well before 2100.”

The report recognized that an equilibrium of constant population and industrial output is not compatible with current economic relations, which have increased the gap between rich and poor. But, immediately after this it says, “the greatest impediment to more equal distribution of the world’s resources is population growth.” It used arguments similar to Hardin and Malthus, but also echoed those who cite carrying capacity and ecological footprints, “Equal sharing becomes social suicide if the average amount per person is not enough to maintain life.” Statements like this were seized upon by some environmentalists to argue for population control, while their dire predictions for the future were scoffed at by anti-environmentalists.

In the period following these two reports, the idea of population control as a means to prevent resource depletion and protect the environment gradually lost credibility. The period saw militant campaigns against sterilization programs, especially in India, and against the use of contraceptive injections like Depo-Provera. The Greens in Britain modified their position on population and UN reports and conferences backed off from outright advocacy of population controls.

The new ecological right

Following a weakening in the 1980s and 90s, in the face of a growing awareness of climate change, a new movement for population control has developed, especially in the USA. The connection with immigration controls is much more explicit. The argument now is that as “we” consume so much energy and emit so much carbon dioxide, we should limit our population growth and refuse to let in migrants from countries where energy use is lower. This is combined with calls for (more) population control in those countries where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are rising very rapidly, such as India and China.

Thus, since at least 1998, there has been a campaign in the Sierra Club, one of the biggest environmental groups in the world, to link an anti-immigration policy with its policy of population reduction over the whole world. Many US anti-immigration groups use the environmental crisis and climate change to bolster their arguments.[11] Thus Numbers USA argues that, “US population growth explains the preponderance of growth in our national energy consumption,” neglecting to mention that immigrants are some of the poorest and least energy-consuming members of the community.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) argues that, “When immigrants come to the United States, they do not maintain the old lifestyle of their home country. They begin to adapt to the American lifestyle. As they do, they become greater consumers and damagers of natural resources; their individual rate of environment degradation increases.”[12] Clearly, the task of environmental degradation is too important to be left to immigrants.

In Britain, the main organization making the links between population, immigration and climate change is the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). The driving force behind this is Jonathan Porritt, head of the government’s sustainable development commission.[13] Other leading lights are Paul Ehrlich (again), former Green leader Sara Parkin, Crispin Tickell, who wrote Thatcher’s first speech on climate change and David Nicholson of the New Economics Foundation.

Nicholson’s recent report for the OPT, called A population-based climate strategy, starts with a list of the organizations and people agreeing that population growth is a main driver for GHG emissions, including the Hadley Centre (which models climate change), Sir Nicholas Stern of the Stern Report and Tony Blair. The report argues that planned cuts in emissions will be cancelled out by population growth.

Thus OPT pushes for draconian state controls on birth rates and on immigration: Their press release of 30 May 2006 argues that mass migration is stopping people from repairing the damage caused by climate change and by other factors that led to the migration in the first place.

China

Jonathan Porritt claims that China’s one-child policy since 1979 has averted 400 million births. Multiply that by 3.5 tonnes of CO2 per year and you get 1.4 billion tonnes, “the biggest CO2 abatement since Kyoto came into force.” He fails to mention that up to 2002 Chinese women were given no choice about contraceptive method, with the result that 37% of married women have been sterilized.[14] There is also illegal sex-selective abortion and less aggressive treatment of ill girls.

Under the policy, the average number of children born per woman fell from 2.9 in 1979 to 1.7 in 2004. But the biggest fall, from 5.9 to 2.9, was in the nine years up to 1979, under a voluntary policy of later childbearing, greater spacing between children and fewer children. It is well known that urbanization and economic development reduce population growth rates, and the number of children born per woman worldwide fell from 4.9 to 2.7 between the late 1960s and 1999. [15]

Malthus again

Porritt repeats Malthus’ “Fundamental Attribution Error” when he states in The Ecologist that, “completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep that continent permanently stuck in deepest, darkest poverty.” On the contrary, this population growth is precisely attributable to deep and real poverty. As for the “darkness,” that is a product of Porritt’s bigoted brain.

Moreover, Hyndman’s century-old point about the unjust distribution of economic wealth still holds true: between 1820 and 2003 world population grew by a factor of six, while the world economy grew by 60 times.[16] Inadequate distribution of resources is the main factor involved in the poverty that leads to population increase.

A socialist critique of Porritt and others should therefore take earlier Marxist objections to Malthus as its starting point, but should not be content to remain there. The argument against the population controllers will be further developed in a future article.

From Socialist Outlook, Autumn 2007
NOTES[1] UK Green Party, Manifesto for a Sustainable Society. Note also the position of Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP, “We are the only major political party to have a detailed policy position on population, which includes non-coercive measures to ensure global population reflects the Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity in the long term: boosting sex education, increasing the availability of contraceptives, promoting poverty reduction and female empowerment.” Letter to the Guardian, July 16th 2007.

[2] See http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200705/INT20070517b.html

[3] Here I am following John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, 2000

[4] Bonnie Mass, “Population Target.” Latin American Women’s Group, Toronto, 1976

[5] Mass, 1976.

[6] Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, South End Press, Boston, 1995

[7] T O Greissimer “The Population Bomb” The Hugh Moor Fund, 1954, quoted in Joseph Hansen, Too Many Babies, Pathfinder Press 1960

[8] Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb 1968, p15. For the full quote and Mamdani’s riposte go to: http://web.mit.edu/.

[9] Mahmud Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control 1972, p14.

[10] Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, 1968, also Lifeboat Ethics, 1974.

[11] For notes on these groups see: http://www.splcenter.org/.

[12] See http://www.inthesetimes.com/ and Daley, Ehrlich and Ehrlich, “Population and immigration Policy in the United States’

[13] See http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/.

[14] T Hesketh, Li Lu, Zhu Wei Xing, “The effect of China’s One-Child Family Policy After 25 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine 353, pp1171-1176, 2005

[15] UN ‘The World at Six Billion’

[16] Angus Maddison: http://www.ggdc.net/

Part 2: Population, climate control, and the “eco-right”

Posted by n3wday on July 22, 2008

This article was taken from Climate and Capitalism and discusses Socialist alternatives to rigid population controls and immigration policy.

Population Control and Climate Change, Part Two: The Socialist Alternative
March 9, 2008

The world needs radical policies that challenge the economic power of capitalism, not repressive population control measures against the oppressed

Part One of this article outlined how, after a 10-year lull, establishment figures are again raising the issue of (enforced) population control as a means of tackling the environmental crisis. Now the focus is on climate change, with a pinch of anti-immigrant racism just to spice up the mix. The rationale is that immigration from countries where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per capita are low, into imperialist countries where emissions are greatest, enhances climate change. Part Two looks at how socialists should respond to this debate.

by Phil Ward

The lull followed the UN Conference on Population and Development in 1994, which in the face of feminist pressure dropped explicit advocacy of population control programs, while presenting mealy-mouthed positions on women’s rights. In her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, Betsy Hartmann argues that the commitment of this Cairo Conference to “sustained economic growth within the context of sustainable development” actually opens the door to population control: “…there is no way advanced capitalism and rampant consumerism can deliver all the goods to all the people and “sustain” both the natural environment and the grossly inequitable distribution of wealth.”

For an increasing number of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politicians and organisations, the answer is to reduce the size of the category “all the people.” Indeed, on 26th October 2007, on Radio 4, Sir Crispin Tickell, one of the trustees of the Optimum Population Trust, argued that the UK should reduce its population from the current 60 million to 25m by 2100! He did not explain how this would be done, but you can bet that it would include a large dose of authoritarian, racist, anti-women and anti-working class measures.

Socialists take a different tack. There is plenty of evidence that increased living standards, reduction of inequalities, improved health (especially, but not only, birth control) and education systems and greater equality for women, separately, or in combination, will result in falling birth rates. This has been recorded in the imperialist countries, but also in workers’ states like Cuba and China (before the one-child policy and the capitalist restoration). It has also been noted in capitalist states where extensive agrarian reform has taken place (South Korea, Kerala).

The reason is that these policies increase the social status of women, enabling them to have greater choice over whether or not to have children. When women make such choices, they generally choose smaller families. More extensive reforms, historically advocated by socialists, designed to ensure women’s full participation in public life, would have an even stronger effect on population growth rates.

The following reforms could be added to those above: equal property and inheritance rights for women, an erosion of the cultural practices of dowries and arranged marriages, agrarian reforms such as collectives and co-operatives, that do not strengthen the family as a productive unit, extensive systems of child care, public restaurants and housing arrangements not based on the nuclear family.

However, it is not the effects these reforms would have on human numbers that is decisive from the point of view of GHG emissions. Rather, they serve as a platform for dealing with “rampant consumerism” in all its manifestations, while at the same time improving the quality of life of the working class and its allies. They herald a social system based on collective structures and provision of goods (sharing of use values), keeping resource use to a minimum.

Let us now tackle the proponents of population control directly on their own ground. Would it be possible to sustain a healthy, happy world population of 9-10 billion, which is the UN-projected peak? Although other issues are involved, the two central (and interlinked) factors concern supplying sufficient food and energy to sustain these numbers, while prevent GHG levels from rising. I will deal with these in turn.

Food Production

The first thing to note, and this applies to the issue of energy as well, is that we should be wary of concepts like the “ecological footprint” devised by the Ecological Footprint Network (EFN). This is the area of land and sea required to sustain humanity’s activities. When compared to the fisheries and land available, we get statements like “we” use “1.4 earths.” If this is broken down, we find that more fish are caught than can be replaced annually, but over half our “footprint” is allocated to forest that would be needed to soak up current carbon dioxide emissions.

Reforestation will be a small, but significant contributor to tackling GHG emissions. But other measures are necessary, so the EFN’s allocation is misleading. In fact, their data show that there is excess land area for food production. That does not mean, however, that it should be used for food, still less for biofuels, because of the ecological consequences.

In 1986, the Paul and Anne Ehrlich and their associates looked at the amount of the earth’s “products of photosynthesis” that humans were appropriating. They estimated 40% of all land-based plant growth is taken by humans, through food, wood use and deforestation and urbanization. They concluded that with current patterns of exploitation, distribution and consumption, supporting a higher population was unsustainable — unsurprising for consistent advocates of population control. They did not discuss changes in agriculture that could disprove this claim.

Zoologist Colin Tudge and agronomist Jules Pretty, have looked behind these figures. Currently, 50% of the world’s wheat and barley, 80% of the maize and well over 90% of soya is fed to animals. In addition, much pasture could be used for crops and more for forestry. The problem is Western diets spreading through the world. Average annual beef consumption in Argentina is 70kg, that’s a Big Mac a day for every adult and child. Denmark and Hong Kong eat the same amounts of pork and chicken respectively. High levels of milk consumption are also unsustainable.

A different food system is called for. Current consumption patterns represent outmoded nutritional thinking of the 1960s, when it was thought that high protein (meat) diets were beneficial. In fact, an agricultural system — diversified and mainly organic – that produces a balanced mix of grain, pulses and vegetables, with small quantities of meat, could, according to Tudge, sustain 10 billion people, without increasing cropland areas.

Numerous studies have added to this basic finding. One, from the University of Michigan, comparing 293 examples in imperialist countries and the third world showed that yields from organic and conventional farms are comparable, and organic could provide for the current diets of today’s population. New reports of greater nutrition in organic produce have also appeared (e.g. tomatoes, fruits, milk, meat), as listed on the Soil Association web site.

The best known example of sustainable agriculture is in Cuba where 80% is organic. Economic necessity, due to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, forced upon the Cubans a system with no fertilizer and few tractors. The result was a better diet for the masses, restoration of the soil in many areas, lower carbon emissions and the return of people to the land. Despite the bureaucratic nature of Cuba’s political system and land tenure largely based on the nuclear family, the planned economy made this transformation possible. Considering where Cuba started from in 1959, the Cuban people have achieved big improvements in living conditions without recourse to population control.

Energy Use and Carbon Emissions

Secondly, on energy, George Monbiot, in his book Heat, outlined how he saw the UK making cuts in carbon emissions of 90% by 2030. He rightly shows how much energy is wasted, in poorly-insulated houses, the way we shop, the use of private cars, etc. His central proposals are for electricity supply using solar power from the Sahara Desert, some coal-fired power stations, with carbon capture and storage (CCS, or sequestration) and off-shore wind farms. He envisages electric cars, with batteries changed at garages and a system of coaches to replace cars on long-distance travel.

As Roy Wilkes pointed out in his review of Heat in Socialist Outlook 11, Monbiot tries to come up with a solution that is compatible with the capitalist system. He resorts to large-scale technofixes, failing to realize that they can have damaging environmental impacts, as we are already seeing — and Monbiot acknowledges — with biofuels. Three examples illustrate the problem.

* In the case of electric cars, it is not certain what the most suitable battery is, but let us say for the sake of argument that it is the lithium-ion cell, as used in laptop computers, despite their tendency to catch fire. A US company has produced an electric sports car that used 6,831 such cells. A normal car may use half this, but then the same number have to be charged at the garage. The UK car fleet would require 175 billion batteries: world production in 2002 was 800 million. Using a (generous) battery life of five years, the UK alone would need 40 times that production (and recycling) capacity.
* Let’s look at the suggestion of obtaining electricity from the Sahara desert. The proposal is to supply Europe using 1000 solar power plants, each rated at 100MW, using mirrors to heat a liquid (sodium and potassium nitrate, SPN) to 600oC and boil water, generating electricity using turbines. The network of plants would stretch from Mali to Iran. It would barely be able to cover current UK electricity use, even without electric cars. A solar generator plant operates in California: rated at 10MW, it covers an area of 3.6 square km and uses 1,400 tonnes of SPN. Scaling up, the Sahara plants will use 14 million tonnes (about 10 times current annual production of these two salts) and will cover an area of 36,000 sq.km., nearly a third the size of England. This raises issues about environmental damage in the Sahara, which many people think is ‘empty’.
* Finally, there is carbon sequestration. This requires taking the gases from burning fossil fuels, separating out the carbon dioxide and pumping it into oil wells, with the added benefit that more oil is recovered than can be done normally. This process uses 20% and 40% extra energy for gas and coal respectively, requiring more power stations for a given amount of electricity output. Also, it uses chemicals — amines — which are flammable, toxic and smell of rotten fish. This is not a technology that should be used indiscriminately.

What do we need — conservation and equality

The keys to sustainable energy use that could support current and future populations are conservation and equality. The former means dealing with the huge wastage associated with capitalism, not just direct use of energy, but whole sectors of the economy that are of no use to humanity, replicate resources or are much too large. Many examples can be given, but working people will decide what survives and what doesn’t.

Eliminating such waste and providing a shorter working week, not just in the west, but in the urban areas in developing countries, will reduce the need for commuting. Energy savings could be made by sharing of goods, design for a long life, repair and upgrade. Resource and goods sharing would be made easier by living arrangements not based on the nuclear family.

Shorter working hours will allow longer times for holidays, removing the need for air travel. Where unavoidable, air travel should be severely rationed. All these measures could reduce world energy use — probably by over 50%. The economy could be that much smaller, without harming quality of life. This is quite different from George Monbiot’s welcoming of recession as a means to reduce emissions.

At this level, renewables and reforestation become more practical. In rural areas, especially in hotter climates, the new agricultural system will allow local communities to use biofuels from waste or crops for heating, cooking and electricity generation. Solid waste could be used, sequestered, to improve the soil.

These measures would only be acceptable to the working class and oppressed if applied equally. It is not useful to talk about allocating GHG ‘emission rights’ to individual countries without dealing with what happens within those countries. The elite, in all countries should be stripped of their ‘right’ to emit GHGs with no regard for humanity’s future.

The GHG emissions reductions necessary to forestall the worst effects of climate change are possible. It requires radical policies that challenge the economic power of capitalism and not repressive population control measures against the oppressed. Alongside making that challenge, we need to campaign for immediate measures that reduce GHG emissions and for economic and gender equality.

[From Socialist Outlook #14, Spring 2008]