Archive for the ‘climate change’ Tag
When the advertised product does the opposite of what is intended
Filed under: Advertsing | Tags: advertising, climate change, environment, Investment advertising, JP Morgan, JP MorganChase
Leave a comment A number of years ago I posted regularly photographs of German billboards where it was still legal to advertise cigarettes. The Germans love all things dangerous and lethal, including driving at suicidal speeds. Those posts were very popular – and still are despite there being no additions to the collection since before Covid. It has been difficult to find a replacement, and hence my posts have focused on book reviews and political comment. I think I have now found a suitable replacement – investment advertising. Equally lethal.
Let me start with JP Morgan. The billboard on the left I snapped at Luton railway station on 11 September 2026. I see two potential messages here. The first is, how sweet, a sleeping child. And I presume that the child may be related to the potential pension investor. The second, of course, is JP Morgan’s expertise in investment that gets a better return than other financial services companies.
Whether that is true or not, I’m not sure. But what I am sure about is that if the investor is the parent of that child then investing with JP Morgan may not be as wise as it may seem. JP Morgan is the biggest investor in fossil fuels globally. Last year JP Morgan invested $58bn in fossil fuel interests. Interests that are totally against the future wellbeing of that child. When the child wakes up the question will be, “why did you finance fossil fuels when you knew that burning them warms the planet to unlivable temperatures in my lifetime?”
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver, book review
Filed under: Book reviews, Environment | Tags: Barbara Kingsolver, book review, climate change
Leave a comment This is my review of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Flight Behaviour. It has plenty of spoilers so read on only if you have already read the book or do not intend to.
I was a little apprehensive about this book, it did not look like anything I would want to read and 600 pages of something that one does not want to read is beyond the call of duty. My conclusion is simple, although I am unlikely to claim this as a favourite to join me in my tomb, for a book published in 2012 it shows remarkable perceptiveness. It also addresses climate change from the perspective of farming families in rural Tennessee. The family of Dellarobia Turnbow, her husband Cub, their two children, Preston and Cordie, and the dog, Roy, who live near to the fictional Feathertown – a place that we can all imagine. Nearby live Cub’s parents Hester and Bear who own much of the forested land as well as property.
New arrivals, new thinking, new opportunities
Times are really hard on the farm, not least because of the relentless rain. Unusual but increasingly common because of climate change. Our protagonists are not wholly aware of the causes, only the effects. Bear decides to cash in on the wood in his forests after a lumber company offers him money to clear it. He agrees to wait until the butterflies have migrated before the felling starts.
Central to the exploration of the changing lives of of the characters is the unexpected arrival and discovery of a huge population of Monarch butterflies (below right) in the forest. On seeing them for the first time by accident, Dellarobia has somewhat of an epiphany as she and her son become obsessed with the lives and survival of the butterflies that are normally expected to over-winter in Mexico. We learn that the habitat in Mexico has been destroyed, hence the unexpected migration.
Dellarobia becomes somewhat of a local celebrity and the spectacle becomes an attraction which Hester and Bear try to monetise unsuccessfully. The television media (News Nine) take a particular interest (pp274-288) and journalist Tina Ultna exploits a naïve Dellarobia through an interview in which she reveals that she went into the forest to kill herself (not true, it was to start an affair in the old hunting hut, but the cause was the same, alienation). On seeing the butterflies she realised that she was too focused on herself and not on the wider world including her children. Some weeks later Tina and different cameraman, Everett, came back for a follow up that is much more revealing but less reportable (see below).
A series of visitors begin to change everything. First a Mexican family call on them (pp132-142). The child, Josefina, is in Preston’s class at school. The parents Lupe and Reynaldo are not so proficient in English. They come and request to see the butterflies. They do, of course, have a parallel experience of being displaced from Michoacán (Angangueo) like the butterflies (it is a bit of a crude rhetorical device, but there are quite a few of these in the book). Indeed, they used to be guides in the forest for visitors coming to see the butterflies, such a spectacle they are/were. But then came the flood. All was gone. Be under no illusions on this point as the novel progresses.
The most significant visitor is a scientist called Dr Ovid Byron (pp143-174) who changes everything for the family. He is a 40 something tall and handsome black man and drives a rented orange VW Beetle. In an exchange with her closest friend, we get the following:
“Wait a sec,” Dovey said. “He flew across the whole damn country and drove to your place to see butterflies?”
“That is correct”
“Did he seem, I don’t know, insane?”
“How would I know? I spend my whole life with people that want to eat thumbtacks off the floor.”
Without hesitation she invites him for supper with the family after coming back from the mountain to look at the butterflies. Dellarobia likened him to Sidney Poitier because of the movie plot. At supper he charmed both Dellarobia and Preston. Dellarobia was amazed to find that scientists exist that specialise not only in butterflies, but to these butterflies. So much so that she progressively learns from Byron not only about Monarch butterflies but natural history more widely and the impact of climate change, a subject that was something they were living through but where the trust, ultimately, was in the hands of God. Preston, equally becomes beguiled by this stranger whose knowledge he can aspire to in a way that his mother, and particularly his father, cannot.
From this moment on, Dellarobia and Preston are different people. Cub is different because of the impact of Byron on his family. For a matter of weeks, Dellarobia is employed by Byron along with a research team of Mako, Bonnie and Pete (who lodged nearby) plus local and not-so-local volunteers, many of whom are hardy souls living rough in the forest throughout the winter – albeit a mild one. Byron himself lives in a mobile home parked on the farm and an outbuilding is converted into a laboratory, for a rent of course. Dellarobia’s employment on her own terms provides her with a small income that enables a degree of autonomy and the ability to provide a few of the presents that she has wanted to buy her children but couldn’t. But more important is Dellarobia’s education – learning by doing. Everything from counting, sexing, measuring, looking out for food sources and signs of flight. She realises that human life is intertwined with that of the natural world and humans’ impacts not only lead to extinctions (Byron believes that they are watching a species extinction) but hardship for human beings as well. Farming becomes uncertain; security, too, and migration becomes necessary for those whose habitats have changed so much that their lives cannot be sustained there.
Ephemera
Perhaps one of the most telling chapters, Chapter 11, is the visit to a very large second hand store in the nearby town of Clearly visited by Dellarobia, Dovey and the children. The shop is a magical place full of useful stuff ranging from bedding to toys, homeware to clothes, bicycles to books, aquariums to wigs, and so on. All at exceedingly affordable prices. The merchandise largely comes from house clearances, but the symbolism of this extended chapter speaks volumes. It tells us that:
- There are a lot of poor people, (even) in modern America
- Used stuff has value
- We are reflected in all of the things we own; we reveal our identities often after death
- It lays bare the possessions that humans acquire through life
- [resale] is a metaphor for genetic mutation (p439)
- There is such a thing as society (even in highly individualised societies, or maybe particularly in such societies)
- People come together to trade, exchange, commune and replenish.
Media culpability
And so to the second encounter with Tina Ultna and cameraman, Everett (pp498-510). Again, arriving without warning, Dellarobia (with Dovey) takes her to meet Byron, a man who is not keen on talking to the media about his work. After some goading he lets Tina have copy, but not of the kind she wants or expects. This is a long exchange, but here is the critique of media coverage of the climate crisis:
“…What is your name again?”
“Tina Ultna,” she said in a different, off-camera voice.
“To see only beauty here is very superficial. Certainly in terms of news coverage. I would say it’s off message.”
“You’re saying there’s a message here? And what is that?”
“…After a long pause, Tina tried again. “Dr Byron, something new is happening here. Most of us are struck by the beauty of this phenomenon. But” she cocked her head theatrically as if burdened by a keen insight – “do you think it might possibly be a sign of some deeper problem with the ecology?”
“Yes!” Ovid cried. “A problem with the environment is what you are trying to say. Pervasive environmental damage. This is a biological system falling apart along its seems. Yes. Very good, Tina Ultna.”
“And briefly, Dr Byron, tell us the nature of the problem.”
“Briefly? Unseasonable temperature shifts, droughts, a loss of synchronization between foragers and their host plants. Everything hinges on the climate.”
She blinked a couple of times. “Are we talking about global warming?”
“Yes, we are.”
Tina made a downward wave at Everett to stop the camera, and bizarrely her own animation clicked off too, her face slack as she walked across the lab, maybe starting to feel homesick for her average flaming interstate wreck. Tina checked something on the camera, then walked back to her interview spot and spoke in a subdued voice. “The station has gotten about 500 e-mails about these butterflies, almost all favourable. Is this really where you want to go with this segment? Because I think you’re going to lose your audience.
Ovid looked genuinely startled. “I am a scientist. Are you suggesting I change my answer to improve your ratings?”
Byron gets angrier as the dialogue progresses. It ends with Byron telling Tina that humanity has been drifting for decades but now we are at Niagara Falls in a canoe. Tina responds by saying that at least if this was Niagara Falls “I’d have a decent background.” On they go. Byron tells Tina that she is part of the problem, dancing to the tune of her sponsors and not doing real inquiry.
All the while, Dovey was recording with her phone. She had an unedited version of the exchange and very quickly it was on the internet.
Religion
Religion, of course, plays its part in the story. This is a religious community. Though there is a lot of doubt. Hester gave up after a miscarriage (not her own but she had given up a baby for adoption) and labelled Dellarobia a 9/11 Christian, “in the event of an emergency, call the Lord” (p82). The local pastor, Bobby Ogle, was an attraction beyond Feathertown and is more than a cleric. He set up his own “no heller” church. He could look past petty things. “[H]e was not into things of this world. Just love.” He also takes a role of mediating the change for and amongst those in his congregation. So much so that he has a significant influence over the fate of the trees once the butterflies have gone.
After church (chapter 13) the family meet Pastor Ogle in his office to discuss the logging contract. Not before, however, having sung “Oh this earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord, and He walks in His garden in the cool of the day.” amongst other references in a distinctly organic sermon. Surprisingly it was Cub who started the bidding pointing out the potential for mudslides and contamination of the well water. Pastor Ogle offered Bear alternatives, including selling equipment (back to the secondhand theme) and how community can help to send work his way (keeping the machine shop open). Bear stayed firm. Then the insults: “Bear apparently at the end of his argument rope, responded by calling Bobby [the Pastor] a tree hugger.” (p556). The Pastor responded with “…what have you got against the Lord’s trees?”
That is not the end of the story, suffice to say Dellarobia and Cub come to an arrangement over their marriage and the duties to their children, but not before a climate-related natural event occurs that parallels the experience of the Lupe, Reynaldo and Josefina. We observe the events with little real surprise. Kingsolver is not the subtlest of writers. It does leave us with a few questions but they are overridden by the change to all brought about by the butterflies as symbols of our own fragilities, vulnerabilities and detachment from the natural world that supports us.
Pictures: Monarch butterfly (Brooklyn Botanic Garden, CCBY-SA 4.0)
Barbara Kingsolver: Terry Ballard – https://www.flickr.com/photos/terryballard/40684622480/
Drought, heat, the summer of 26
Filed under: Environment, Photography | Tags: climate, climate change, drought, Hastings, heat, Luton
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Top left: It is not only the people that are dead, St Mary’s Luton Parish Church, 5 August 2026; Middle: Another cloudless sky, Hastings, 6 August 2026, top right: Sunsetting, Hastings, 6 August 2026.
Above left: Let’s get this straight (East Sussex College and Hastings railway station, 7 August 2026); Middle: A shape of things to come (derelict Queensbury House, Hastings, 7 August 2026); Above right: I can see you (Station Plaza, Hastings, 7 August 2026)
I have drawn on a newspaper headline for Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail newspaper. Suitably silly comment but it still has currency as people confuse climate and weather.
Climate, social care and strategy
Filed under: Environment, Food | Tags: andy-burnham, climate change, Ian Dunt, social care
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I have just read, as I often do, Ian Dunt’s weekly free Substack, Striking 13. This week’s contribution is called “Jenrick is an idiot sandwich“. Essentially, Dunt unpicks Robert Jenrick’s – as the representative of Reform UK in the absence of Farage – response to Andy Burnham’s approach to social care reform, a policy that is long overdue.
The policy process goes like this:
- Set out the case for reform, particularly drawing on personal experience (Burnham’s father had Alzheimer’s and was looked after in the care system). Make clear that it will involve “hard decisions”, by which is meant, taxation. And also that everyone is impacted; for example, even if we personally do not call on the care system, many will either for themselves or relatives, and this impacts widely on society and hence everyone’s wellbeing.
- Call for a factual debate – appealing directly to the media, particularly the right-wing media, not to poison it.
- Specify the process – bring forward a report on social care by one year, bring together political leaders from across the spectrum to seek out areas of agreement and compromise.
Dunt summarises like this:
You get a pretty decent picture of where we’re going with this. Hold cross-party talks, bring as many parties as you can with you, see what the review publishes, have a big fact-based national debate, then come to a decision and promise to implement after the next election. This would allow any tax rise to be explicitly accepted by voters and outside of the existing manifesto headlock.
Of course, populists such as Reform’s key spokespeople, have no solutions to the big issues of our time. Robert Jenrick was sent out to respond. His approach goes like this:
- Get ahead of oneself and invent a policy, say, a 10 per cent estate tax on the death of property owners.
- Criticise the alleged owner of the policy, in this case Burnham, for even proposing it.
- Instil fear in the hearts and minds of the people by suggesting the tax office will knock on your door before the body is cold to assess the value of the estate and make a claim on it.
At this point, I say, good for Burnham. It has been a heady two weeks since he became Prime Minister and he is showing that he is prepared to tackle difficult policy challenges and a collegiate political way (something that we have not seen in decades). Now I am sat here writing this blog entry on 1 August 2026. I cannot now remember when it last rained in any meaningful way (last week we had about 10 minutes of rain as a cold front crossed the country). There are wildfires across Europe including England and Scotland. Indeed, in England a nature reserve in Suffolk is on fire. Burnham’s response is to hint that he will sanction further drilling in the North Sea. He is quoted as saying on 31 July 2026: “The question isn’t whether Britain will still be using oil and gas, the question is where does it come from.” And again “There is a resource there. When people are struggling, we can’t ignore that. Hence, me indicating that to the president [of the USA].”
These are nonsensical things to say. How many times do these people need to be told that what is left in the North Sea will not impact fuel/energy security and prices in the UK? Oil is traded on international markets. Plus, North Sea oil is becoming higher in sulphur content and is not, therefore, “clean” as Kemi Badenoch would have us believe. Indeed this oil is so valuable that BP has put its oil and gas interests in the North Sea up for sale.
Using Dunt’s framework, what does a mature and factual debate about climate change look like?
- Set out the case for reform, particularly drawing on shared experience (wildfires, stressed infrastructure, heat deaths, flooding/insurance costs, migration, increasing food prices, supply chain disruption). Make clear that it will involve “hard decisions”, by which is meant, lifestyle change. And also that everyone is impacted; for example, there is nowhere to hide from the impacts, and even if one is in the later stages of life, your children and your grandchildren, or those of friends and family, will have to live with the consequences of us not confronting the crisis.
- Call for a factual debate – appealing directly to the media, particularly the right-wing media, not to poison it. Build trust in scientists and develop an understanding amongst all about the science of climate change. Explain why the UK’s current level of emissions are not the whole story. The emissions from the start of the industrial revolution that stared in Britain are still in the atmosphere and belong to the nation. Debunk the argument that North Sea oil and gas can reduce domestic fuel bills. Call on the BBC to drop false equivalence and invest in factual programming and drama alerting people to the hazards and their responsibilities as citizens. Regulate properly media with a mission to propagate and diffuse misinformation.
- Challenge the position that net zero will cost the country £4.5 trillion by 2050 (it will if business-as-usual is costless and that gas is free) and discuss the costs of not achieving net zero.
Shall we try it?
Pictures:
Robert Jenrick: ©House of Commons / photography by Roger Harris
Andy Burnham: © House of Commons – https://members.parliament.uk/member/1427/portrait
Book Review – Elemental by Arthur Snell
Filed under: Environment | Tags: Antarctica, Arctic, Arthur Snell, book review, climate change, Elemental, environment, greenland, Politics
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Much of the climate change literature, quite rightly, is based on the planetary sciences – weather, oceans, gases, etc. Arthur Snell, here, provides and important additional perspective, that of geo-politics. Ultimately, if we thought the science was tough enough to comprehend, the geo-politics can only complicate matters. Of course we are talking climate migration, food and fuel security, water (fresh for drinking and agriculture, saline oceans for weather stability and free trade routes).
The book is organised, as the title suggests – around the elements of fire, water, air and earth. This is as good scaffolding as any, I think; it gives Snell the opportunity to share insights from his own diplomatic experiences and new travels and discoveries (revelations, probably).
Readers of this blog may already be well aware of the mechanics of climate change, the IPCC’s periodic reporting and the target of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 achieved only by eliminating the burning of fossil fuels and, unfortunately, some unlikely carbon capture and storage. At one end of the spectrum are poor, low lying countries such as Bangladesh, particularly vulnerable to sea-level rises, erosion, salination of agricultural land, amongst others. At the other end of the spectrum is Trump’s USA in denial about human-caused climate change (I write this section on 4 July on the 250th anniversary of the USA when a good number of events have been cancelled because of extreme heat) and the promotion of fossil fuel exploitation and consumption and the active suppression of renewables, wind, solar and batteries. And then there is the rest of us pulling back from commitments because of a far-right false narrative about cost and impacts on electricity bills and lifestyle.
Worrying highlights
Let’s take Russia. Russia is under stress having opted for an all-out invasion of Ukraine, it has few allies in the West (it is difficult to know whether the USA is an ally, it has to be said). Say what we will about Russia, it does seem to have a more forward thinking approach than many Western countries. For example, The Russian state is watching closely the opportunities for opening up and controlling a strategic arctic sea route. The natural resources currently locked under the Arctic ice become accessible as the permafrost melts. And that secretive and provocative settlement on Svalbard, Barentsburg (Norwegian sovereignty, and a NATO member). Readers wanting to see this, Simon Reeves went there on his Scandinavian adventure. Snell describes it on pages 297-301. The main town on the archipelago is Longyearbyen which serves primarily as a summer tourism base.
For the time being, Svalbard is a demilitarised zone under a treaty dating back to 1925. There may not be weapons on the archipelego, but there seems to be plenty of NATO intelligence equipment linked to the mainland (800km south) by an undersea cable that has already been damaged by, very likely, a Russian “trawler” (page 300). Such cables are also being cut in the Baltic.
China is another actor in this area. Whilst it has no coastline in the Arctic, it is very active in the region. It has observer status in the Arctic Council. It has also built a fleet of icebreakers (the USA has one, apparently). China’s interest in an Arctic passage come out of the insecurity of existing sea/trade routes controlled by hostile powers including Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia (p308). It is potentially a “polar silk road” to add to the Belt and Road Initiative, amongst others. Clearly Trump’s claim on Canada and Greenland is part of this strategic game (though one wonders whether Trump understands it quite like Xi and Putin).
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia looks to the East to sell its oil and gas – China is now the key recipient of these resources. Russia also stays close to China because of arms procurement and the Arctic passage. But there is an even more intriguing reason for the alliance, and that is migration and food security. Snell offers a very interesting insight into how Russian land opened up by the melting of permafrost can become highly productive agricultural land that is particularly attractive to Chinese migrants and for which Russia has too few ethnic citizens to work (p118-9). Crucially, however, there are tensions that go back a long way. In a nutshell, Vladivostok and its hinterland used to be part of China. The port city was Haishenwai before being renamed. Arguably, China wants this territory back.
Just back to international treaties for a moment, Snell signals how jeopardised international treaties are becoming. For example, Antarctica belongs to no one (under a treaty dated 1959), though claims are being staked, as it were, again, as the ice melts and the resources become accessible. It is also a demilitarised region (or unmilitarised). China has four research stations on the island each with military capabilities and functions. The 1991 Madrid Protocol that bans mineral extraction is being challenged. It is up for renegotiation in 2048, let us see if it is not opened up before then. Finally two treaties between China and Russian (Aigun and Beijing) which formalised China’s ceding of territory to Russian may also become life expired.
Obviously I could summarise the whole book at length. It is not the purpose of a review, and I recommend the book to anyone with the slightest interest in geopolitics let alone the geopolitics of climate change. But here are a few more quick highlights:
- Why rice is so difficult to genetically modify (page 40)
- China’s dominance in EVs and the materials that drive them (p67-9)
- Weather control and geoengineering (chapter 10)
- importing PV electricity from Morocco (p169)
- Middle-East oil empires (183-191)
Photo: Arthur Snell from https://tinyurl.com/3y6mrusm
Book Review: Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Filed under: Book reviews, Environment | Tags: climate change, dystopia, Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood
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This is my first Margaret Atwood (left) experience. I was gripped. And I was taken somewhere not unfamiliar: a dystopian view of the future. Now bearing in mind this book predates Covid-19, it is quite chilling. Bearing in mind this predates Trump and tech billionaires, doubly so. One has to give her credit for what follows. Once again, please note, I am a novice literary critic and my review here has spoilers. This book is also the first part of a trilogy (the subsequent books are not reviewed).
The story is told through the experiences of two men, Crake and Jimmy. Only Jimmy exists before and after the thing that happens to humanity. Jimmy grows up in a family where his parents work for a corporation, HealthWyzer, that, essentially, makes organic life forms. For example, Happicuppa is coffee plants where the beans all ripen together so can be harvested by machines. However, foremost amongst the animal lifeforms are pigoons – pigs that grow organs for human transplant that can be harvested whilst the animals are still alive. Essentially reusable pigs. But there are many other hybrid-type creatures made by corporations: rakunks (make good pets), wolvogs (great guard creatures), spoatgiders (goat-spider – good for bullet-proof vests), rockulets (absorb water high humidity/let it out in low humidity), snats (snake-rats) and crakers (named after their creator) – humanoids that drop dead at 30, bear no malice, enjoy enhanced immune systems…monetisable.
Jimmy and Crake are friends. In their youth, they experience together some of the worst facets of the digital world they inhabit, including violent and gruesome pornography and executions (hedsoff.com). They also play games such as Blood and Roses (pp89-92), a trading game in which players trade atrocities (blood) for human achievements (roses). This game is part of a wider gaming eco-system of Extinctathon monitored by Maddaddam. And it was from this game that Crake got his name which stuck (his real name was Glenn) from an extinct Australian bird. Jimmy’s codename was Thickney from an Australian double-jointed bird that inhabited cemeteries.
Oryx from the title is rescued from child sex slavery and becomes an intimate companion of both characters. Crake, we discover, is the evil genius heading up RejoovenEsense, the ultimate in unregulated mega corporation designing the future. For example, in this world, there is:
“No more prostitution, no more sexual abuse of children, no haggling over the price, no pimps, no sex slaves. No more rape. The five of them will roister for hours, three of the men standing guard and doing the singing and shouting while the fourth one copulates, turn and turn about. Crake has equipped these women with ultra-strong vulvas – extra skin layers, extra muscles – so they sustain these marathons. It no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child will be, since there is no more property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war.” (pp194-5)
Jimmy and Crake have very different university experiences. Crake goes to the elite Watson-Crick Institute: “Once a student there and your future was assured. It was like going to Harvard had been, before it got drowned.” (emphasis added, p203). By contrast, Jimmy went to the down-at-heel Martha Graham Academy: “The Academy had been set up by a clutch of now-dead rich liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York as an Arts-and-Humanities college at some time in the last third of the 20th Century, with special emphasis on Performing Arts – acting, singing, dancing and so forth. To that had been added film-making in the 1980s and Video Arts after that.” (p219).
Where Crake after graduation gets access to mega corporations, Jimmy settles for working in advertising for a company called AnooYoo before being invited by Crake to join him to promote their big product, BlyssPluss: The aim was to produce a single pill that, at one and the same time would:
- protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases, fatal, inconvenient, or merely unsightly;
- provide unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with generalized sense of energy and well-being thus reducing the frustration and blocked testosterone that led to jealously and violence, and eliminating feelings of low self-worth;
- prolong youth.
What is not on the label is that prolonged use renders one infertile.
In parallel to this we learn of life after the event in which Jimmy, known now as Snowman, lives in the forest and oversees the security of the Crakers that Crake had entrusted to him with in the post-corporate world. This we discover is only possible because of Crake’s scientific intervention that protects him where others perish. Snowman’s life revolves around trying to find food for himself left behind in old settlements – the corporation compounds – amongst the bodies. But venturing further into the forest and towards these places is dangerous. the Pigoons are now feral and themselves hungry. Finishing off what is left of humanity for the sake of a meal would not bother them.
This book is only marginally about climate change. We know it is hot. And we know that perhaps the East Coast USA flooded due to rising sea levels. We know that corporations and their technologies determine the future. And these corporations are in the hands of people for whom profit and power are central to their thinking. They and the corporations they lead are not founded on an overtly ethical platform. Business is simply business. That said, in true Bond villain style, there is more to it. The power to create life forms is balanced by the power to destroy lifeforms, too. Human, in particular.
Critique
On the face of it this is a straightforward dystopia novel. The world is controlled by corporations seeking to refine humanity to secure profit – through idealized/designer babies, disease control/vaccines/organs, human reproduction, etc. There is no real government or regulation. Something catastrophic happens by accident or design. There is no way back. In this case there is a relative peace because there are few other survivors. In many other dystopian novels, civilization breaks down leading to savagery in pursuit of resources.
The parallel stories work well. Atwood does not expect us to understand fully what is going on until quite late – probably at the point at which the two stories converge. The dystopia is plausible now, in 2026, though perhaps not so much in 2003 when it was first published. Though it is not the first dystopia novel. On that basis, it is not very revealing. Maybe it has not aged very well, or maybe it lacks something to say in a way in which 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale perhaps does.
The friendship between Crake and Jimmy is explored at length. I have to say whilst Crake and Jimmy explore pornography in their bedrooms I, with my childhood friend, marvelled at coloured vinyl records and Matchbox die cast models (two things that we both collected). I will give Atwood credit here; she understands boys and men as well as any male author understands women and girls. I felt the bond between them. It leads neatly to the conclusion. Crake needed someone whom he could trust to protect his legacy in the event of catastrophe (which seems about 90 per cent certain it was planned rather than accidental).
More interestingly is the subtle surveillance state. There is resistance to the corporations with sporadic violence and internment. If I read it correctly, the Maddaddam movement is the focus of the resistance. Both of the main characters are being monitored and controlled arising from their family involvement in the corporations. Jimmy, for example, is often questioned by the pervasive CorpSeCorps armed security forces. They remind him to stay compliant, not least when they show him a video of the execution of his mother, convicted of treason, having rebelled against the corporation and paid the ultimate price (p302). Though in the video her words were clear: “Goodbye. Remember Killer [Jimmy’s pet rakunk]. I love you. Don’t let me down.” (p303).
Once again, then, Atwood is on top of the surveillance state. Something that is now normalized in China and now increasingly in the USA as the corporations take control of our data. The question for me is a simple one, did I need to read 430 pages of Margaret Atwood prose to reveal what is for me self-evident? The answer is, I think, “it depends”. For too long I have avoided fiction and I had forgotten how important it is for creating alternative worlds (the Sci-Fi genre) or at least taking us into the worlds of others who may have had very different life chances and experiences. More critical though is building narrative around relationships – this novel is particularly good in this respect. A number of years ago I was in a book group and we read quite a bit of women’s literature. Actually, that is the wrong term. It is literature that prioritizes the issues relating to women, primarily family and friends. As a younger man, I was quite dismissive of that literature and rebelled, when it was my turn to select a book by foisting on to others work by Will Self, for example. It is good to see here that Atwood can do men. There is only one female character in the book for a reason; namely, the cause of the event that sees off much of humanity is men. And my goodness, we can see that in the contemporary world where three old men in particular seem to engineering dystopia.
Picture: Margaret Atwood Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Collision via Sportsfile
Book Review: Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
Filed under: Book reviews, Environment | Tags: book review, Book reviews, books, climate change, fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future, Review, science-fiction, wet bulb
Leave a comment People have different ways of coping with the climate crisis. Quite a few people just ignore it. Others deny it and actively seek to make it worse. Others expect someone or something else to fix it; surely there is a technological fix? I wake up each morning with the challenge in my head. What can I do more to change things?
A response has been to seek solace in art, theatre and music. Indeed, I have a playlist. Every visit to a gallery or exhibition is filtered through the climate lens. And now it is novels – not a medium that I have indulged much. I was never a great reader of novels as a child. When I grew up I immersed myself in non-fiction and newspapers. There is a point to my sudden interest. I have an objective. But first I have to read what are seen as the significant books of fiction that deal with the climate crisis. I also have to learn how to critique literature. This is not a skill that I currently possess. Please bear that in mind when reading. Also note, there are countless spoilers in this text.
My first book to review is Kim Stanley Robinson’s, The Ministry for the Future. It is an epic. The paperback has a small font and has 563 pages. There are two main characters. There is a lot of implicit violence. It is also a book unusual in explaining economic and innovation concepts; for example, discounted cash flow (p 131); the Jevons Paradox (p 165); Gini Coefficient/equality measures (p73); MMT (Ch73); Bretton Woods (Ch50) and the International criminal court (Ch56), etc. There are also free lessons in glaciology and geoengineering amongst other scientific concepts.
The first of the book’s two main characters, Frank May, is an aid worker in Uttar Pradesh. It is 6am and the temperature is already 38 degrees and the humidity 35 per cent. We know that heat and humidity are a lethal combination. And so it proved. When the power failed all life-saving air conditioning shut off. During the course of the next few hours 2 million people died. What we learn from this is that 2 million people is the trigger for action. No state can sit back when 2 million of its citizens die from what is not a natural disaster.
The Indian Government’s near first response was to execute a programme of geoengineering – depositing particulates into the upper atmosphere to deflect the sun and cool the surface. This contravened the Paris Agreement of 2015. No state should unilaterally undertake a programme of geoengineering where the impacts are unknown and cross-border. But they did it.
Frank May improbably survives, but his whole life is haunted by the experience. His post traumatic stress disorder impacts on those around him. His focus is on bringing about change by whatever means. He makes contact with an organisation called The Children of Kali, a direct action grouping that targets the world’s climate villains; namely, those who caused climate change and those who perpetuate it. The bosses of oil companies require 24 hour protection. The owners of private jets do not sleep easy. Diesel ships and aeroplanes will sink or crash on the so-called “accident day”. That, at least, sees an end to mass aviation.
Rejected by the Children of Kali, Frank kidnaps the book’s second main character, Mary Murphy, the head of the recently established UN entity, The Ministry for the Future based in Zurich. He is not very good at kidnapping since he allows the kidnapping to take place in her own apartment, one which is monitored by the local police, she being a target – by the right for threatening their profits or the left for not doing enough to threaten their profits. Before the arrival of the police, Frank confronts her with the “left” position. The Ministry is not doing enough to change things. It is incremental, transparent and easily captured. He tells her about the Children of Kali and the kind of action needed to bring about real change.
On the arrival of the police, Frank disappears through a back window and goes underground until he is eventually apprehended by the police after defending migrants from an attack by local fascists – naturally, immigration is a real flashpoint, and immigrants very much a target. Frank is sent to prison for the kidnapping and his involvement in the death of a man on the beach whom he hit with a large piece of wood.
Scary though the the kidnap experience was, Mary knew that Frank was right. She discussed with her Chief of Staff, Badim Bahadur, whether the Ministry had any black ops, not dissimilar to the Children of Kali. He was not about to disclose any activities of the sort, but the very reticence suggested that the Ministry had such an arm. This, of course, leads to questions about who is responsible for what? Is the Ministry sinking ships or the Children of Kali, or some other radical outfit with little faith in mainstream politics?
A core vehicle for change is the carbon coin. It is discussed extensively in the book. It has key features; for example it has to be supported by central banks, is securitised by the creation of long-term bonds, it is rendered by blockchain technology. It works whereby: “Every ton [sic] of carbon not burned, or sequestered in a way that would be certified to be real for an agreed-upon time, one century being typical…you are given a carbon coin…the central banks would guarantee it at a certain minimum price, they would support a floor so it couldn’t crash. But also it could rise above the floor as people get a sense of its value, in the usual way of currencies in the currency exchange markets.” (p174). It is a form of carbon quantitative easing. And it is a market-driven mechanism.
The carbon coin is based on a paper (actually a series of papers/essays) by Delton Chen (p172 – https://tinyurl.com/4c27dj9a) author of the key paper: Chen, D. B., van der Beek, J., & Cloud, J. (2017). Climate mitigation policy as a system solution: addressing the risk cost of carbon. Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 7(3), 233–274. https://tinyurl.com/5ervkk74
The cover brands the “Ministry…” as “one of Barak Obama’s favourite books of the year”. We all know how important that endorsement has been in recent years. Whilst this may be good for sales, I am not sure if the scenario presented has the legs the author and Obama think and hope for. The first part of the book is apocalyptic, for sure. Lots of bad things happen to people; obviously the heatwave that starts the book results in mass death, but the terrorism/state-sponsored terrorism takes its toll, too. We do not ever get to know who did what. Curiously, the terrorism seems to go without investigation. We do find out who may be behind much of the terror, however; namely, brown people.
The second half of the book simply reassures. Yes, the climate crisis remains present, but the trajectory starts to go in the right direction. Global emissions are cut seriously, not least by the incentive provided by the carbon coin. The scientist innovate in ways that give hope. Though this part is difficult for lay readers like myself to judge relative to the carbon coin initiative (which has at least been subject to peer review). Some of the glacier adaptations do seem fanciful not just scientifically, but also geopolitically. Admittedly, the book was written before the second Trump administration and the current phase of the Ukraine conflict, but even before then, it would have seemed optimistic.
I suppose my biggest misgiving is Robinson’s belief/hope that already-occurring warming can be reversed. Tipping points are recognised, but they do seem to be glossed over. Migration is recognised, of course, but it is still a “problem” to be handled by efficient bureaucracy. There is, equally, not much thought given to food security, biodiversity and shifting global alliances. Without the security of world order, much of what is described in the second half of the book is unlikely to be feasible. And I have no confidence that that world order will be maintained. For example, I worry particularly about food security, centred as it is now around global value chains, limited genetic diversity of core foodstuffs such as grain, rice, bananas, etc. Interested readers should read Tim Lang. Hungry people do not play be the rules. And because of the trajectory, the second half of the book loses its momentum, suspense and mission. For the final few chapters I was waiting for something to happen. But it did not because the author had already determined that the world had been saved and that one of the main characters can actually retire and travel the world in an airship! The book, therefore, has a very long and unrewarding tail.
Anyone needing more – and there is more – should read clever review using an ideal-type approach to criticism, see the work of Solarpunk – Hacker. Worth a good few minutes of your time.
Book Review: Dani Rodrik, Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World
Filed under: Book reviews, Environment | Tags: china, climate change, Dani Rodrik, environment, Shared prosperity in a Fractured World, sustainability, Trade
Leave a comment It was a good number of years ago a friend and former colleague of mine recommended the work of Dani Rodrik (left) to me. What I liked about his work was its humanity. He is a rare economist who recognises real-world challenges whist making the case for globalization and its impact on world poverty. That humanity stretches not only to responding to communications but granting me the rights to use some of his intellectual property in my own book at no cost.
So what was it that I thought was appropriate for my own book on Sustainable Business Strategy? Rodrick uses a simple but effective form of challenge: the Trilemma. On one corner is hyperglobalization, on another is national sovereignty and on the third is democratic politics. Democratic politics and national sovereignty are linked together by the Bretton Woods Compromise, an economic system designed to maximise domestic performance, essentially a Keynesian approach. Hyperglobalization and democratic politics are linked together by so-called global governance. Hyperglobalization is a concept that assumes that states are no longer the pre-eminent arbiter of world order. Economics is. States are subjugated to a system of global governance. Finally hyperglobalization and national sovereignty are linked together by the golden straitjacket; namely trade liberalization, free capital markets, free enterprise, etc. Readers will have noted that it is impossible for all three to co-exist. We can have two but not all three. Perhaps the world we live in today is the golden straitjacket with free reign for big tech and nationalism? We can talk about this later.
Rodrik’s Trilemma dates back to 2012 in his book, The Globalization Paradox, though it featured in his blog in 2007. Of course all of this was before the Paris Agreement (2015). It was business as usual. In 2025 it is anything but business as usual. Suffice to say, Rodrik has a new “tri” – this time a trifecta which is equally intriguing. This time at the apex is rebuilding the middle class. This is linked to global poverty reduction with the explanation that at its heart are growth-promoting policies in the North and South, without regard to carbon emissions (equating with Keynesian social democracy + export oriented industrialization). Rebuilding the middle class also links with addressing climate change; i.e. industrial policies and climate clubs among rich nations with discriminatory provisions or, in other words, Bidenomics. And addressing climate change is linked to global poverty reduction through the transfer of technology, jobs and financial resources from rich to poor nations; migration from South to North or, in short, Global Rawlsianism (after John Rawls’ principle that justice requires maximum attention to the needs of the least fortunate – p4).
The trifecta is not a trilemma as we can – and must – at least reconcile the three. And that is what this book is about. However, the paradigm is important here. Rodrik is not a revolutionary. He is very much grounded in a Keynesian/Rawlsian ontology. There is also a splash of technological determinism. By definition he is not a “no-growther”. But neither is he a hyper-globalizer or an economic neoliberal. Growth of sorts provides political stability, resources – financial, human and, indeed, natural. Rich states are mandated to share clean technologies with developing countries and exchange personnel. This is important because straightforward rapid industrialization in developing countries will just release ever more carbon; it is also the case that there are significant challenges and tensions in the trifecta. So Rodrik is a pragmatist, and all the better for that approach. Modern states and economies are so polarised at the moment, anything less than pragmatism leads us to extremes.
Key concepts
Productivism (p155) is another term for industrial policy. It is an industrial policy that can reconcile the trifecta. For example, a policy of carbon reduction through technology. Clearly carbon reduction helps in mitigating climate change by eliminating the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. But it is also good for those other pillars, rebuilding the middle class (larger markets for other nations’ exports and investment as well as reducing outmigration) and poverty reduction (poor countries are disproportionately impacted by climate change – heat, sea-level rise, extreme weather and loss of biodiversity, amongst others). Productivism is, in the end, a shared policy mindset.
Experimental governance (p172) is borrowed from Chuck Sabel and coauthors (right). It is a form of governance that challenges key assumptions about policy implementation: (1) policy makers have clear objectives; (2) uncertainty is low; (3) there is little added value in policy makers communicating with private actors. Bearing in mind my own work on policy implementation, these assumptions do seem misguided. However, working with these assumptions, experimental governance has four elements: (1) goals are set between policy maker and stakeholders; (2) the executing agents are given broad discretion in how goals are achieved; (3) agents’ performances are subject to periodic review and results compared across different experiments; (4) objectives, metrics and procedures pertaining to the experiments are reviewed, revised and disseminated to a broader set of agents. It is iterative.
In academic research, this appears to conform broadly to an action research methodology. Over time, trust and capacity grow as the ideas and initiatives develop and mature.
Some examples
Notwithstanding much Chinese industrial policy featuring experimental governance, Rodrik illustrates the concept with two explicit examples. For the first, he takes us back to the execution of the 1987 Montreal Protocol – an international treaty – that effectively stopped further erosion of the ozone layer directly attributable to the release of CFCs from refrigeration equipment and enabled it to replenish. The scientists behind it – Crutzen, Molina and Rowland (right) were honoured 20 years after their ground breaking work that made the link between CFCs and ozone depletion. Regarding implementation, firms, supported by government agencies including the EPA in the USA, innovated, even if only to avoid regulation more generally.
For his second example, Rodrik draws on a the case of Fundacion Chile (p158) acquiring a small local aquaculture company which imported Norwegian and Japanese salmon farming technology and, in a process of “learning by doing”, developed an entire supply chain from feed to export logistics. The knowledge from this experiment was widely disseminated which literally spawned a salmon farming “rush” enabling exports to go from 300 to 24,000 tons per year in the 1990s.
Whilst both of these examples are illustrative of experimental governance, they both have had significant environmental impacts. Unfortunately we replaced ozone-depleting gases with greenhouse gases. Potent ones. And as for salmon farming, it is not only a huge polluter, but it threatens wild populations through disease and mutation.
OK, I found some weaknesses in two examples. That by no means negates the notion of experimental governance. Far from it. It only shows that experimental governance can be used for good or not-so-good purposes. And to be fair in the case of the Montreal Protocol the urgency meant that we did have to move quickly to find alternatives. Another measure taken was to ensure that refrigeration gases did not get released into the environment, CFCs or not. Salmon farming, however, was always going to be problematic. It is, simply, factory farming. Ultimately when humans put lots of animals together, especially if they are bred for size, disease will follow and, in the case of fish farming, escapes will occur. Factory farms also undermine the effectiveness of antibiotics, one of humanity’s greatest discoveries, now threatened by greed and excessive protein diets.
Three buckets
As a pragmatist and economist of trade, Rodrik offers us four “buckets” in which to put policy options as they relate to globalization (having accepted that hyperglobalization is neither possible nor desirable). Sovereignty will – and perhaps should – always trump international homogenisation.
1
Here we place policies that are “prohibited”; namely those that cannot be part of a viable trading order. Note here that prohibition does not mean that they will not happen. An example would be violating sovereign territory. Sovereign territory is all-too-often violated. More contestable example are policies that are what Rodrik calls, Beggar-thy-neighbor [sic] (BTN), by which he means policies that generate economic benefits made possible by the harm they generate to other nations. Much of the second Trump Administration’s thinking on trade fits here. But more generally here we can place currency devaluations and export subsidies explicitly designed to improve the terms of trade domestically at the expense of other nations.
2
This bucket contains policies that may be amenable to mutual negotiations and adjustments. They may benefit the country enacting them, but the benefits are more widely spread such as potential spill-overs. The mutual benefit part was the basis of WTO most favoured nation status for countries not directly engaged in the negotiations between two nations but achieve a benefit from adjacent bilateral agreements. Here we may also find protective tariffs (protecting nascent sectors or employees in those sectors). It may still generate monopoly rents, but they are incidental, not the purpose. Moreover, affected parties might be expected to respond, but only in proportionate terms and should be directly linked to the damage caused by the state imposing the affecting policy. Equally, export controls on technology destined for countries representing a security threat are not BTN, but they probably will impose economic costs on the importing country (at least until that country develops the technology itself such as may be the case with China and the USA). On this latter point, Rodrik seems agnostic. In summary, states can pursue policies in their own interests subject to them not being explicitly BTN and may be subject to wider negotiation between affected parties.
3
Here we find policies that essentially invite an open discussion about the policies being touted. These are discussions that might not ordinarily take place but can be – what I would call – de-escalatory. We work this out together. Fairly. It might fall out of this bucket if the originating state is unable to explain the purpose, even if it is not BTN.
4
This bucket is for policies that require the agreement of at least two or more states. These are multi-lateral policies where we will find many of the climate change-driven policies. These are negotiations over the health of the global commons, debt resolution and, of course, pandemics. The Montreal Protocol was a bucket 4 agreement.
Making sense of climate change-driven policies
If we start with green subsidies, which bucket? What about China that now has serious advantage in terms of manufacturing and market access. Surely, these subsidies constitute BTN? This requires some logical gymnastics. First, let us step back. Carbon pricing is way too lax. Current prices do not reflect the impact of carbon emissions on the environment and their warming effect. If that is correct – which it really is – then how might we balance the account? We might try to install with haste photovoltaic cells. With a very low price facilitated by subsidies from the Chinese Government, the panels are available in volume to do just that. That is a collective benefit caused by a green subsidy from a country that may have been designed to outprice other countries. However, those countries could have responded with their own subsidies; On the whole they did but rather late and not proportionately (p201). Arguably there was insufficient subsidy overall, not enough rather than too much (as the neoliberals would argue). In the end, subsidies from the Chinese State provided an affordable resource that could compensate for inefficient carbon pricing (and hence emissions reductions, bucket 3). We’ll take that. Bucket 2. I sense it could be bucket 3 if there was an amicability about it, but I am not sure. Suffice to say, Europe has also tried to protect its EV manufacturers against Chinese imports with tariffs. But there is something about the superior technologies being offered by Chinese manufacturers and cost which add to the complexity and the attractiveness of the Chinese product(s).
What about the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) introduced by the EU (January 2026)? The EU imposes upon its manufacturers auditing of carbon emissions attributable to the product. Any imports that exceed the maximum allowed have to be paid for with a tariff reflecting the additional carbon emitted in manufacture outside of the EU (defined by the probably inadequate carbon price set under the ETS). It is, of course, a policy designed to change the behaviour of actors external to the EU.
The EU has engaged in this type of trade policy for a long time. It is not just about carbon. Food standards may be captured here. Medicines, toxic materials, exhaust emissions, etc. Is it acceptable? Surely the first job of a (supranational)state is to protect its citizens and if there is evidence that a product is dangerous or deleterious to wellbeing collectively defined, then blocking or controlling it is surely the right thing to do. With CBAM, the EU is trying to protect its citizens against the impacts of a warming planet. In doing so, there is a positive spillover as the atmosphere is a global common. Surely that is defendable? Bucket 2, surely. Or bucket 4 – multi-lateral, if only within the borders of the EU. Moreover, the British responded with its own CBAM (futile really, but proportionate).
What about not trading at all with countries that violate environmental treaties – or indeed those that block treaty ratification? Well, seemingly that is bucket 1. I trust that doing so is against WTO rules – but what are they worth in 2025? Rodrik takes an interesting position with regard to trying to impose barriers against states that have poor worker and human rights records; for example, China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Seemingly not in bucket 1 – so, it is allowable. Individual trade agreements could incorporate human/worker rights into the text. Presumably, also, the rights of indigenous people and, by association, the natural environment? And not to forget that the human/worker rights are part of the membership qualification for the EU. But they are hardly definitive and some member states are very much in violation as they progressively dismantle their liberal democratic structures and associated rights. There is no qualification needed for environmental protections, it seems. There could be, if agreed. But it seems very unlikely in the current incarnation of the EU and its parliament. The bigger question though is whether it is something that we must contemplate if we are to mitigate warming and adapt? Maybe the EU as a block could and should?
And one final one. I am just reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, The Ministry for the Future. I will review the book elsewhere, but after serious heatwave in India resulting in the deaths of 2 million people (graphically described in the first chapter), the Indian Government goes ahead with a unilateral policy of geoengineering against a UN agreement that no country would go it alone because the impacts would be global, uncertain and temporary. In this case, geoengineering (depositing aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect heat) is in bucket 1. It’s a no-no. It is the violation of sovereign territory. There are many other examples. Damning of rivers has long been contentious and impacting downstream communities. Not to mention water pollution from human waste, fertiliser run-off and industrial processing. More recently, plastic beads (nurdles) and plastic waste more generally cross boarders. Apparel, equally, is exported and often dumped; for example in the Atacama Desert in Chile (right).
Summary
So, where does this take us? Arguably it leaves economists in charge for the time being. However, growing extreme right-wing/fascist blocs supported by the centre-right (as in the case of the EU Parliament and reporting rules under the CSRD) are rolling back efforts to mitigate climate change. To address the challenge something is going to have to give.
Pictures: Dani Rodrik from Harvard Magazine: https://tinyurl.com/5e4d22s9
Capitalism is the problem
Filed under: Environment, Politics, Privatisation | Tags: Capitalism, Circularity, climate, climate change, Decoupling, Dutch East India Company, energy, environment, Erald Kolasi, GDP, renewable-energy, sustainability
Leave a comment I have been reading some excellent books recently. You know the ones that you wish you had written? I have written a book, and I have just read The Physics of Capitalism by Erald Kolasi. It is brilliant and takes no prisoners. It also a book that I will need to incorporate into the next edition of my textbook if the publisher ever gets round to inviting an update. I know my book needs revision, not least because we’ve all been on generative AI catch-up. My bio needs an update, too.
Back to Kolasi. He’s a physicist. A physicist taking on economists in a way that economists should have been taking on economics in the 21st Century. Back to me. My book starts with a statement about the finite planet and argues that business strategy has to be devised and executed so as not to breach the planetary boundaries, of which there are nine. Kolasi’s genius (at least for me) is to use his knowledge of physics to critique arguments by economists (and others to be fair) about technological “solutions” in the context of climate change. It is hugely effective and it tells it bluntly and with humour (though totally unfunny if you are an economist).
At its bluntest, Kolasi likens economists to people who simply cannot accept that we cannot make light go faster than the speed of light (3×108 m/s) or go below absolute zero (currently -273.15oC). More realistically, in terms of the efficiency of the stuff we use and rely on, internal combustion engines struggle to be more efficient than 35 per cent (conversion of liquid fuel into kinetic energy/Carnot cycle). 70 per cent is a theoretical maximum, but such an engine is unlikely to be put into a car; photovoltaics, 15 per cent (though theoretically possible, but never achieved, 90 per cent). And so it goes. As Kolasi notes, too, even if we could get 90 per cent conversion of solar energy to electrical energy we would still struggle to meet demand for panels and electrical energy as they need an energy source to extract raw materials and manufacture. There are limits (that neo-classical economists will not accept).
GDP and decoupling
The likes of Hannah Ritchie have been making a strong case for decoupling as a sign that capitalism can survive a climate crisis. We can grow economies (as defined by GDP) and reduce carbon emissions simultaneously and absolutely. It’s a dangerous myth.
Some definitions first: relative decoupling is simple reduction in carbon emissions whilst experiencing an increase in GDP. Absolute decoupling is a kind of safe zone where decline in carbon emissions outstrip growth and head towards zero. From what I can see, and have read, there is no absolute decoupling even using current measures of GDP. For Kolasi, the current measure is the problem as it does accurately measure change in the biophysical scale; namely, the use of natural resources in production and reproduction.
Then there is the question of permanence, assuming GDP is a fair measure of output. Kolasi tells us that with this perspective, economic growth and life expectancy have decoupled as Americans die earlier than previously. Where we thought there was a positive relationship between growth and life expectancy, that seems not to be the case. But no one is saying there has been a decoupling.
Then we can consider the data on emissions. They are to some extent estimates. We might have a handle on carbon dioxide, but we certainly do not have measures of methane, nitrous oxide, synthetic and fluorinated gases, all of which are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. Even before the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA relied on self reporting by corporations! Now it is unlikely that any degree of self-reporting will be needed.
Finance
Talking of changes in direction, up to 2021, banks had been reducing (not eliminating) lending for fossil-fuel projects. That has now changed. The Guardian newspaper has reported that “Two-thirds of the world’s largest 65 banks increased their fossil fuel financing by $162bn from 2023 to 2024.” The US Treasury has withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System, essentially giving a green light to private banks to start lending again. Indeed, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs all withdrew from the net zero banking alliance. Here is a table of the worst offenders (apologies for the poor resolution, but if you download it, it is fine):
Be rest assured, banks have not changed.
The steam engine
A book that opened my eyes to the non-inevitability of industrial fossil economies was Andreas Malm’s, Fossil Capital. The argument was threefold: first, capitalists were not prepared to share resources such as flowing water. Second, flowing water was located in areas that required investment by capitalists in infrastructure such as housing, schools, medical. Thirdly, where this infrastructure existed, labour militancy was difficult to manage – wages were going down and work rates increasing. Capital is best optimised if it is mobile. The steam engine enabled capital mobility despite being less efficient than water, at least until major improvements were made to the design of steam engines (to stop them from exploding if nothing else). All this being true, it is not the whole story. Kolasi has helped me to refine this argument.
Let us compare changes over time (Kolasi 2025: 290):
| Year | Steam HP | Water HP | Wind HP |
| 1800 | 35,000 | 120000 | 15000 |
| 1830 | 160,000 | 160,000 | 20,000 |
| 1870 | 2,060,000 | 230,000 | 10,000 |
That brings us to two additional concepts that I did not get from Malm: exergy and spectralization. Exergy is a thermodynamic system’s maximum capacity for useful work (p290); spectralization is the “diversification and variation in the conversional methods of existing technologies in response to changing social and ecological conditions” (p222). And so…
“…Boosting the spectralization of conversional technologies was the main causal vector for the corresponding improvement in the efficiency of industrial devices. The Industrial Revolution in England and virtually everywhere else as well, followed a path of exergy-driven efficiency gains that spurred additional gains and butterfly effects in economic productivity. The English achieved this incredible growth through a huge increase in the aggregate output of mechanical work a process spearheaded by the spectralization of high-pressure steam engines, and eventually the spectralization of other types of engines as well.”
Kolasi, 2025: 290-1
Let me unpick that, probably imperfectly. Efficiency per se is not the point. It is exergy efficiency. And curiously, Kolasi demonstrates that steam engines had a negative impact on aggregate efficiency across the English economy as a whole. Indeed in their early days they were highly inefficient relative to water and wind. The more steam engines that were installed – at least until 1770 – the lower the efficiency of the economy in aggregate. My head hurts trying to get it around this idea.
In the 19th Century it is a different story. But steam’s impact is not that it could be used to power textile factories. Rather it is this spectralization whereby if became a significant component of the economy as a whole, not least in transportation (shifting coal to factories and shifting product to markets). And if we think that steam power is a thing of the past, we must remember that it is steam power that generates most of the world’s electricity.
Steam power does something else, too, which I had not considered. Steam enables capital to be used harder. By which we mean, it enables us to hit things harder – in a foundry, for example, that is useful.
That leaves a question as to why coal? Well here’s a thing, the answer lies is that great British phenomenon of the enclosures. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aristocracy displaced many people from their traditional lands by enclosing it – fencing it off and turning it into private property. This displacement led to a rapid urbanisation. People were concentrated in towns and cities and used wood to heat their homes. More rapacious, though, was the state’s need for timber for warships. The nation’s forests disappeared. Coal was a suitable substitute and, as Kolasi writes, “…the northern parts of England were full of it”. Full of it for sure, but it was under ground. The mines were established but they needed pumping. That was first significant industrial use of steam power – to pump mines.
The steam engines then went through spectralization – the addition of condensers to improve thermodynamic efficiency; new gear configurations that allowed the engines to generate rotary motion and to power machines in factories; and the transition from low- to high-pressure machines as the driving motive force. Kolasi (p281) argues this was the “breakthrough moment of the entire industrial revolution”.
Colonialism
The English enclosures displaced many and created a work-hungry proletariat. International colonialism resulted in mass slaughter, disease and slavery. Kolasi (pp300303) goes into great detail about the activities of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Most brutally, the company slaughtered the majority of the people of the Banda Islands (modern day Indonesia) because they had a monopoly in nutmeg growing. On discovering exactly where the fabled trees grew in 1621, 15,000 people lost their lives through brutal acts of beheading and being pushed over cliffs. These people were substituted for by slaves. The VOC set the stage for the Amsterdam Stock Exchange becoming the first publicly-traded company; but as is ever, the company declined as the secret of nutmeg was demystified and grown in other regions with suitable climates. The Dutch Government nationalised the assets in 1799.
The Circular Economy
We hear a lot about the circular economy…it is essentially another attempt at saving capitalism from itself. In its purist form, the waste from one cycle of production becomes the raw materials for the next. A weakness here is the issue of recycling. Many of us are asked to recycle our waste – my weekly doorstep collection is a case in point. I separate out my plastic, card, glass and metals to be collected. Notwithstanding the fact that turning glass and metals into reworked materials requires energy. Plastic…to much cannot be recycled, and even if it can, the capacity is rarely there to enable it. So, recycling is not realistically part of the circular economy – energy is lost in the circularity.
For circularity to be meaningful, materials have to be reusable or re-purposable. A glass bottle needs to be reused as a glass bottle (energy is required for transportation and cleaning. Textiles need to be re-tradable, up-cyclable and volumes need to come down, drastically. A recent story in the Guardian newspaper illustrates once again just how much textile materials find their way dumped in habitat and wilderness because we cannot absorb the volumes being disposed of.
Sources: Decoupling Chart – Hannah Ritchie (2021) – “Many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions, even if we take offshored production into account” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling’ [Online Resource]
Bank investment table – Banking on Climate Chaos: Fossil Fuel Finance Report, 2025: https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org/?bank=JPMorgan%20Chase#fulldata-panel (accessed 21 June 2025)
Steam Engine: Chris Allen / Steam engine, Nortonthorpe Mills, Scissett
VOC Plaque: By Stephencdickson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72939415
Ghana Wetlands – source unknown. Taken from Guardian story.
Ocean – David Attenborough
Filed under: Business, Environment | Tags: biodiversity, climate change, conservation, David Attenborough, environment, nature, Oceans, Oceans movie
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Thee weeks ago, along with my beloved and my sister I visited Bempton Cliffs in East Yorkshire. It is a colony of seabirds clinging to steep chalk cliffs. I took the photograph (left) of gannets, one of my favourite birds for their sheer seabird-iness! Many of the other people there were trying to see, quite rightly, some early-arrived puffins who normally breed at the top of the cliff in burrows.
In recent years, the colony has been deeply affected by bird flu. I was concerned that so devastated they may have been that the colony would not recover; but alas, they were there and as amazing as ever. Gliding, diving, hollering.
About the same time, we were trying to find a cinema that was showing Ocean featuring David Attenborough. You can count on one hand the number of people in the UK that have known a world without David Attenborough. It is also true that there is no-one alive who has not been witness – whether consciously or not – to the wholesale destruction of the world’s oceans. It is not about over-fishing. It is about the wanton destruction of marine eco-systems. Largely invisible marine eco-systems.
David Attenborough has come a long way. He started with a show that traced the capture of animals for incarceration in zoos, Zoo Quest, between 1954 and 1963. Of course he later fronted some of the most memorable natural history documentaries of the 20th Century. He worked with teams that constantly innovated film technique, sometimes encountering real risk in order to do so. However, in most of those films he did not – or was not allowed to – juxtapose the wonder with the destruction that was happening in parallel. In some cases they filmed simply metres away from organised and illegal logging in rain forests, and the destruction of many other habitats through pollution and resource exploitation.
This one-sided storytelling became increasingly intolerable for Attenborough. Habitat and species loss seeped into the films; but they were never central. It has taken a collaboration with National Geographic for him to tell the story that was not told in Blue Planet. And it is devastating.
My family has its origins in the fishing industry in my home town of Hull. They were trawlers – dragging a net along the ocean floor to pick up cod and haddock, fish that fed on the ocean floor. But that trawling literally destroyed everything in its wake. And 3/4 of the “catch” was discarded. Over and over again, these trawl nets destroyed eco-systems and emptied the seas. I – along with everyone else, probably – have never actually seen a trawl in action. Now you can in graphic detail. You can see the devastation. And you can understand why the oceans are dead or dying. Oh, and the process of trawling releases huge volumes of carbon dioxide locked into the seabed.
There is not an ocean anywhere not now being exploited by factory ships. In Antarctica, the ships have come for krill, a small crustacean that feeds penguins and whales amongst other to be processed into fish food (for all of that harmful salmon fish farming) and, wait for it, pet food. These are international waters being exploited by a select few corporations.
The film is in three parts. We start with the wonder of the oceans – in particular the bits we know the best (though seemingly only recently have we bothered to look), kelp forests and coral reefs in particular. Then the grim bit – probably 30 minutes of hell on Earth. And finally, the hope. There is hope. Kelp forests regenerate super quickly if left; so too, the fish species, even those thought to be lost. Coral can recover as some fish species remove the algae that effectively suffocate the coral and prevent regrowth. It is particularly salient at the minute because the film was released to coincide with the UN Ocean Conference (Nice, 9-13 June 2025). At that conference, the future of the oceans were being decided. You can read the communique here. on 15 June 2025, the Guardian newspaper published a summary. We need to protect 1/3 of the oceans the regenerate the rest. That is an amazing thought – just one-third can result in the rest of the Earth’s oceans recovering to once again provide a living for shore fisher communities globally. These communities have been subject to an ocean colonialism (Attenborough’s words).
Or we can turn the oceans into chronic deserts.
Be informed 