Not Much COP

Big intergovernmental gatherings like the G20, or, now, COP26 never produce anything substantially new.  They are talking shops, which at best rubber stamp decisions that have already been made elsewhere.  The current COP26 meeting in Glasgow is no different.  The main players have spent the last few weeks themselves reducing hopes of anything coming out of it to near zero, and it looks likely not even to meet those lowered expectations.

The real decisions on things like action to reduce carbon emissions come not from the gatherings of government ministers and bureaucrats, but from the decisions of big multinational corporations.  When governments started to commit to banning the production of new internal combustion engine vehicles by 2030, several years ago, it was only because the big car makers were already well advanced in their production of electric vehicles, with battery efficiency rising by around 30% a year, and prices falling by a similar amount.  Car makers will have switched the majority of their production to electric, if not all of it, well before 2030.  In fact, the main thing stopping the more rapid switch is the failure of governments to ensure the rapid roll-out of sufficient, reliable charging points, but as an indication of why its not governments that are the main player, here, that task has started to be taken on by the car companies, and the oil companies themselves.

The gatherings like COP26 are merely a façade, and an opportunity for politicians to engage in virtue signalling.  Its easy for politicians from any single country to say, "Well we are doing our bit, we would like to see more, done, but unless everyone agrees, we can't move forward."   For nearly 80 years governments have all said that they are each committed to getting rid of nuclear weapons, whilst during that same time the number of countries with them, and the amount held by each country has continued to increase to the extent that they could destroy the world several times over.

One of the biggest drivers of virtue signalling is the sensationalising 24 hour media.  They played the same role in relation to COVID.  The virtue signalling takes the place, and squeezes out, any room for common sense, or rational thinking.  So, for example, the media have made big play about the likely decision to give a licence for a new North Sea oil development, claiming that this indicates a lack of commitment to carbon reduction.  Does it?  Not at all.  As with any production, of anything, energy is required at various points, and carbon may be released.  But, the main issue in relation to oil, is not this production of the raw material itself, but its use as energy, to be burned in cars, boilers and so on.

Its this latter that is the cause of large scale carbon emissions, not the production of the oil itself.  Go back 300 years, and the main source of fuel was wood.  Was the production of wood, i.e. the growing of trees, a source of carbon emissions?  No, other than when forests burn, or when trees and leaves rot, and give off methane as well as carbon.  It was the burning of wood on domestic fires, or to fuel kilns, furnaces and so on that was the cause of carbon emissions at that time.  In fact, wood was a very inefficient fuel, which is why the return to log burners in homes, today, is a rather crazy fad.  When wood was replaced by coal, much less coal than wood was required, and it produced relatively less pollution, precisely because it burned hotter, and so was more efficient.  The reason pollution increased was not the switch from wood to coal, but the fact that the use of coal went along with the Industrial Revolution, so that a vast amount of additional energy was required.

But, the reason that the virtue signalling over the issuing of additional oil drilling licences is ridiculous is that a) oil and gas use for energy is not going to end overnight, b) oil and gas are used for other purposes than just energy production, just as was wood.  When wood was largely replaced by coal, as a source of energy, it did not mean that there was no longer a use for wood or forests.  Wood, in fact, had a far more valuable role to play for use in construction, for the production of furniture, for the production of paper, and so on.  So too with other fossil fuels.

Oil is not just used for burning, any more than was wood.  Oil and gas are used on a massive scale in the petrochemical industry for use in producing not only a massive range of plastics, which are of vital importance in all industries, and in the health service, but also in the production of a huge range of chemicals from fertilisers to pharmaceuticals.  The media insisting that no such licences be granted, seem to have forgotten their news story of only a few weeks ago that even sky high natural gas prices threatened to bring society to a halt, because it meant that fertiliser producers were not producing fertiliser, and so their bi-product of CO2 was not getting produced, bringing production across the food and other industries to a dead-stop!

Another similar example is the media focus on planning permission for a new mine in Cumbria.  As I understand it, the coal from the mine is proposed to be used in steel making.  To make steel, you need carbon, and the carbon comes from coal.  Unless you are going to propose a world without steel, it seems, therefore, that you are going to need to continue producing coal.  But, the media's virtue signalling is again ridiculous in simply focusing on short-term headlines, rather than any longer-term serious thinking.  One of the most significant new materials of recent decades has been carbon fibre.  It is both much lighter, and yet much stronger than steel.  It is used in things from F1 racing cars to cycles.  But, carbon is also used to produce carbon nanotubes.  Nanotubes are going to be one of the most important materials in the next few decades, with use in industry as well as in bioscience and medicine.  Finally, there is graphene, again made from carbon, and which will be used for the production of flexible screens, vital for wearable technology, which itself will form the basis of the personalised healthcare systems of the next decade and beyond.  It is also used for the production of membranes that allow salt water to be turned into drinking water without the use of the vast amounts of energy currently required.

The most obvious source of all of this carbon, the demand for which is going to rise massively, is coal!  And, similarly, as 3-D printing takes off in coming years, the requirement for huge ranges of new polymers, in turn produced by the petrochemical industry means that the demand for oil and gas is also going to rise sharply.  As with wood, burning such precious resources, required for these purposes will be seen to have been hugely wasteful.  The talk of stranded assets is nonsense, because, in the future, the demand for these raw materials is going to make them much, much more valuable than just something used to be burned!

A lot of the virtue signalling is based upon petty-bourgeois moralising.  The big polluters will have to face the representatives of the people of poor countries in danger of being overwhelmed by climate change, we are told.  And, what do they expect will be the consequence of that?  Those big polluters are not going to change their behaviour simply on the basis of such appeals.  Those making the appeals have no leverage.  The big polluters will only change their behaviour if it is advantageous for them to do so, and within a continuing global capitalist system that essentially means that it must be more profitable to engage in non-polluting rather than polluting behaviour.

In the 19th century, Britain faced repeated epidemics of cholera, and other such diseases, caused by poor sanitation and public health.  The country still had a large population that could be employed, even with repeated amounts of large-scale culling.  So, the capitalist class had little need to spend money to deal with the epidemics.  But, when an epidemic again swept Britain, the US, wanting to prevent its spread there, banned British ships from docking, requiring a two-week quarantine.  It severely disrupted British exports to the US, and overnight, Britain began to introduce legislation on sanitation and public health that brought the epidemics to a halt.

Engels notes in his later Preface to The Condition of The Working Class,

"Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst “slums” I had to describe. “Little Ireland” had disappeared, and the “Seven Dials” are next on the list for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working-class. But that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place is amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission “on the Housing of the Poor,” 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects. Police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.”

(Preface to the English Edition of “The Condition ofthe Working Class in England)

This same thing is seen time and again in the development of capitalism.  Marx describes, for example, the fact that capitalism first arises in industry, in the towns.  As industrial capitalism develops in the towns, it places increasing demands on agriculture for raw materials, and subsequently for food.  For example, its the growth of textile industries in the towns that leads to additional demands for wool, which leads to landlords clearing estates, and giving over wide areas to sheep.  Marx describes how, as capitalist industry develops, these increasing demands for agricultural products leads the existing pre-capitalist agriculture, to have to increasingly overwork the land.  Eventually, the old peasant based production could not meet the needs of capitalist industry, and its only at that point, Marx says, that capital is led to have to enter agriculture itself, and to introduce the same kinds of capitalistic measures that it had pioneered in industry, in the towns in the previous centuries.  As I have demonstrated in recent posts, Lenin describes the same process in Russia, in the period following the 1861 Emancipation.

The process of development, the hitting of barriers and fetters, resulting in crisis, causing capital to engage in new technological developments that overcome those barriers and fetters, that extend the realm of capital to new areas, that create larger, more rational single markets within which a level playing field and common regulations and planning can operate, is the history of capitalist development over the last 600 years.  It is a crisis ridden form of development, and one that shows the need for its replacement by a more rational, socialist development, but until such Socialism arrives, it is the best we have.  Those that simply seek to hold it back offer no progressive solution.  As Lenin put it to the Narodniks and other moralists who baulked at such crises,

“This argument is a repetition of the typical error of romanticism, namely: the conclusion that since capitalism is torn by contradictions it is not a higher form of social organisation. Does not capitalism, which destroys the medieval village community, guild, artel and similar ties, substitute others for them? Is not commodity economy already a tie between the producers, a tie established by the market? The antagonistic character of this tie, which is full of fluctuations and contradictions, gives one no right to deny its existence.”

(A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, Chapter 2, p 213)