The feeble strength of one

The Union express, the paper of the National Distribution Union, is one of the better union newspapers. They've had some excellent coverage of the raids.

But there was one appalling article about climate change in their latest issue (not available on-line but it's February-April 2008 with a Bunnings protest on the front cover). I've been thinking about it ever since I read Anne Else's excellent piece about Plastic Bags, and realise I had to say something.

The article is called Be The Change and is based on the website of the same name.

My main objection is to the section called Save Money and the Planet, which gave all sorts of advice about what union members could do. Much of the advice assumed that you own your own home, and have capital to make upgrades, with suggestions to install insulation, and consider solar water heating. Then there's the advice to turn off your heated towel rail and your second fridge.*

I am angry to read this nonsense in a union magazine, which is going to some of the lowest paid workers in the country. While some of NDU workplaces, such as mills, are well paid enough that workers might own their own home and a heated towel rail, many are not. The assumption

I regularly turn off my hot water heater, not for energy efficiency reasons, because it's the only way I can pay my electricity bill. The idea that workers need to be lectured at how to save electricity is ridiculous. Low paid people know from saving money. What they don't have is capital, some people can't afford to buy a $6 light bulb now to save $20 over the course of the year.

There was nothing about landlords and government's responsibility to provide better quality housing, and what unions are doing about that (which is probably because the answer is 'nothing'). There wasn't even any information about the schemes that some councils are running which subsidise landlords to install heat-pumps and installation.

I would expect a union magazine to be the one place you could find discussion of environmental issues that goes beyond individualistic moralising. That it didn't, that all the Union Express had to say was the banal 'be the change' is a really bad sign. Recently discussion about climate change and carbon footprints have gone mainstream. Airlines and power companies want us to believe if we do our little bit then everything will be fine. Some environmentalists seem to see this as a victory, but it's not, it's distraction and co-option. Individuals can't save the planet, anymore than they can end war. The way the world's resources are used is not decided by consumers, but at by companies at the point of production. Action around climate change which ignores this isn't so much rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic, but telling the passengers to lose weight so it'll sink slower.

* It makes me want to write a whole series of climate change advice in a similar vein: "Turn off the heating system in your spa pool when you are going to be away for a few days. Consider an energy efficient air conditioning system for your second home." etc.

The Greens really do hate poor people

From Radio NZ:

The Green Party says the Government should help people to use less energy, not give them money to pay their power bills, as part of a new carbon trading scheme.

Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons says if the compensation simply helps people pay their power bills, it will do nothing to reduce energy use.

Ms Fitzsimons says New Zealand homes are appallingly cold, damp and uninsulated - and that is where the compensation should be focused.

She says the amount that electricity prices go up by under the trading scheme will depend on the price that is put on carbon emissions.

Poor people, generally rent rather than own their own homes. While offering subsidies to make houses more energy efficient could work for people who own their own house, it is not a solution for people who rent. Unless the government ensured blanket coverage of a particular area, subsidising insulation and heat pump installation would lead to rent increases, and drive the poorest people who out of the newly warm houses.*

The underlying assumption for the Greens is that the problem with carbon is an individual problem, and if each person just made some changes we could make a difference. My electricity bill was unaffordable so I regularly turn my hot water heater off for days at a time. I can generally make this work by using the hot water left in the tank carefully, and showering when I go for a swim. I have a small radiator heater, and don't use it very often. There isn't much give left in my electricity bill. Poor people have generally cut back the parts of the electricity bill they control, often beyond what is creates a healthy environment. I don't think it's our behaviour that has to change - it's the environment.

I'm all for the government regulating the housing market, stating that a a landlord must lag the hot water tank, for example. But penalising renters with a higher electricity bill, when they have no ability to improve the housing stock, is ridiculous.

What is even more disgusting, is in the nine to noon, Jenette Fitzsimons appeared to be defending delaying applying the scheme to sheep farmers, saying they could ill afford it. They can afford it far more than a family on a benefit, or minimum wage, can afford electricity increases.

* Currently I think the government requires no rent increase for a year after subsidised improvements, I think that is woefully inadequate, and just delays the effect.

Miners can organise - emissions can't

A couple of posts that I've written have got some attention recently, so I'll try and write follow-ups. In The Consequences of support for Working Class Miners* George takes issue with my post Coal Not Dole:

Those who support the miners at the expense of aggressively confronting emmissions are advocating unmitigated climate change, and they must look the consequences in the eye, and say that they are prepared to accept them as a neccessary consequence of their support for the coal miners.

What I'm unclear about in George's post is who he thinks will be agressively confronting emissions. Is it the government? Is it small groups of activists? I don't think either of those is going to be particularly effective.

It's not that I believe that we should support miners, so I don't care about emissions.** I think the 'we' who aggressively confront emissions will not succeed without miners. Miners know better than most the damage of coal - the first thing it emits onto is miners lungs. Creating a better world is not something we can do to people.

If 'Coal not Dole' are the options, then I'm choosing coal. But if we're building a better world, with better options, then we should be able to do without either.

* Suddenly I'm curious, why the 'Working-class' modifier to miners? Are them some ruling class miners I'm not aware of?

** At this point I should say that I'm not a climate change activist. In fact if I think of climate change for more than 47 seconds I generally get to: "There is no hope, we're all doomed, I might as well just eat chocolate and watch Buffy while I still can."

Coal Not Dole

Happy Valley - you may have heard of it. Solid Energy want to build a mine there, various people don't want it built so they chain themselves to chain tracks and the like. I've had friends involved with it at various times; I've made fun of the snails and kibitzed in the way activists do when they have absolutely no interest in organising for a cause, but know they could do better.

Sometimes my kibitzing turns to anger, as it did when I saw the Save Happy Valley forum that was organised last week in Christchurch "A Future without Coal"

I don't object to the idea of the forum - there's going to be a future without coal, since one day the coal is going to run out. What I object to is whose opinion is considered relevant to that future. The speakers were:

Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, renowned Antarctic and climate change scientist Professor Peter Barrett and a speaker on the local impacts of coal mining

The speaker on the local impacts of coal mining doesn't even get a name, unlike professors and political leaders. More importantly, how can you organise a forum about the future without coal without including coal miners front and centre? The first, the most important questions, when discussing a future without coal should be about miners and mining communities. Miners have struggled for generations to build what they have today.

Makes me want to make a badge like this to wear:

Really not going to save the Whales

I've written very briefly about climate change once before. It's not an issue I follow much, because it often invokes an "ARGH we're all doomed lets spend these last few days we have watching Buffy" response in me. But what has really frustrated me is how easily efforts to fight climate change have been co-opted by industry.

On Tuesday Checkpoint had an interview with someone from the trucking industry. Now lets take a moment to point out that if we're going to move cargo in the most efficient way possible, then trucking is pretty much out.* The only things worse than trucking is flying; rail and sea are much more efficient.

So if the trucking industry shrank considerably then that would help lower carbon emissions straight away. What did the trucking industry suggest?

1. The government should change the depreciation rates on trucks so that trucking companies can buy newer, more efficient, truck soon.

2. The government should invest in the road system, because if trucks are in traffic they're wasting carbon.

3. Change the safety rules so that trucks can carry more cargo and be more efficient.

What do we notice about these rules. Well the first thing is that 1 & 2 would only save carbon emission if you were able to make truck and road building carbon neutral. I don't know what sort of carbon emissions road building creates, but I do know that metal production creates a shit-load of carbon emission.

But as well as not being at all useful, all of these changes are things the industry were wanting anyway, and have just dressed up as helping reduce emissions (which they probably wouldn't).

* To what extent can we afford to move cargo at all? Is it another part of our lifestyle which will result in the sea rising and the penguins dying? I'm not even going to begin to answer those questions. But would recommend watching Innocence while you still can.

By-Pass

The Wellington inner-city bypass open yesterday. To non-Wellingtonians that won't mean a lot. Those of us who live here it means a bit more than that. I learnt about the by-pass at age 8 when I went to a school outing to see the buildings that were going to be pulled down (it was a hippy school). My main objection has always been on historical grounds, and I'll explore that in a litle more detail in another post, but I just want to talk briefly about the anti-bypass campaign and some of the issues around it.

The by-pass is part of a late 1970s motorway project where state highway 1 was brought into Wellington city (they dug up a cemetary to do it). There was some opposition to this road, and more opposition to the supposed by-pass that was going to be built next.

That road was delayed for thirty years. In this time there was on-going anti-bypass action, but it focused on two avenues - legal challenges and city council elections. Both strategies were ultimately useless.

Every three years we were told to vote for an anti bypass city council, and every three years this failed (the way the city council wards broke down it was always going to be difficult). T

The problem with these strategies is that there was no organising. There was an occasional public meeting and large march in September 2000, but the basic work of getting people who opposed the bypass together to take action, was not being done.

So come the end of 2004 the bypass started to be built and there was very little organised anti-bypass opposition, but quite a lot of anti-bypass feeling. A small group of people got together to try and do a direct action campaign to stop the bypass.

I want to make it clear that I was not someone who was prepared to step-up to oppose the by-pass (I just had a supporting role). So my reaction to those protests are not criticisms of the people involved (who were at least prepared to do work that I wasn't), but just ideas that I have learned from watching this protest movement, and others (I plan to write a similar post on the problems of letting the media do our organising for us, about a couple of protest actions I was part of). I think by late 2004 it was probably too late to do the organising work necessary, and doubt things could have gone much differently at the time most of the anti-bypass protesters I know, got involved.

The strategy the 2004 anti-bypass group took, the strategy that I agree was most likely to succeed was to delay and disrupt the bypass and make it financially untenable for the sub-contractor. Most of the energy was put into people involved taking action, rather than getting new people involved (although there was some good organising going on throughout this time).

But I think it's always problematic to only look about how you can win, without also looking at how you can make yourself stronger in the process. As it happened the group involved weren't big enough to pull this strategy off. Most of the time we're not strong enough to win right away. People who focus on the importance of winning each campaign ((A word I hate when referring to activism, it usually implies that a small group of people have got together in a room and decided how they can win a particular issue. Rather than focusing on organising, and allowing that no matter how smart a small group of people are they can't predict what'll happen when people get organised.)) also appear to be most likely to burn-out, as they don't win, and feel they've got nothing. We must see the fight for a better world as a marathon and not a sprint. Each protest movement must try and make active organised opposition to the society we live in just that little bit stronger.

The protests against the M11 in Britain show that organising against roading can be done, and even though those protests weren't immediately successful they have had an impact on road-building in Britain (I have dial-up so I can't guarantee the quality of this video - but if it's the one I'm thinking of it's well worth watching to see the level organising that is both possible, and necessary to make a difference).

I don't even have a category

In a lot of those rather annoying end of year round-ups* people have mentioned this as the year that New Zealand politicians finally started taking notice of climate change. I wouldn't disagree, I'm just not convinced it's a good thing for stopping climate change.

I'm the opposite of knowledgeable about the subject. While I find ecosystems and evolution fascinating, I don't have much energy for environmental politics. This is partly because I disagree with the individualist bent of much environmental politics, but it's mostly because I cannot be a political activist if I don't have hope, and when I think of climate change (for example) hope is not the phrase that immediately springs to mind (I make it a general rule not to think about climate change for more than thirty seconds at a time).

But the only solution to climate change in mainstream politics appears to be to turn pollution and the environment into a commodity. The debate becomes how much of a cost is too high to pay for businesses - how low the price can be to get to destroy our world.

I just don't see how it can be a solution. The many things that are produced for profit, whether its food, housing, they don't meet people's needs. Creating things for a profit is what got us into this mess in the first place.

I was talking about it with Dr Frances, a scientist friend who knows much more about these things than I do, and she agreed with my points, but said that it was hard to see what other sort of solution there could be under capitalism.

* It pisses me off how there's always 'best of business' included in these rounds ups, but never 'best for unions', and the politics is always party-political and never politics of resistance. Unfortunately I'm too close to write one myself, but someone else should.