January 18, 2010

The Environment Is Not The Economy

Posted in Conservatives, Consumerism, Economics, Global Climate Catastrophe, Labour, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society at 2:06 am by Paul Sagar

A few months ago I blogged about the left’s prevailing economic illiteracy, to quite a lot of uproar. I observed that there’s a lot of talk about “new models of growth”, but very little by way of solid proposals. I also noted that there’s a frustrating tendency to equate economic recovery with environmentalism, as though the two automatically go hand-in-hand.

Although for the most part Saturday’s Fabian New Year Conference was a great success, the inability of large sections of the popular left to keep economics and environment conceptually separated was firmly on display.

The conference closed with a light-hearted yet seriously-intentioned “Democracy Den”, imitating the BBC’s “Dragon’s Den” but with people pitching ideas for how to beat the Tories at election. The “dragons” were Ken Livingstone, Mehdi Hassan and Deborah Mattison. Their job was to scrutinise 5 pitches, which were successively put to the audience who were invited to make speeches for and against, before a mass vote.

My personal favourite was the “Make the election about George Osborne: have his face in every voters’ mind” pitch. I also tried to help out Sunny Hundal when he ran out of time, and made a passionate plea for Class War (but now as we know it).

But the most interesting pitch – for all the wrong reasons – came from a lady saying the election should be fought on green issues. She only had 1 minute to make the case, but she successfully managed to conflate economics with the environment within that 60 seconds. Indeed, Deborah Mattison picked her up on it straight away remarking that “you were talking about jobs, but what’s that got to do with the environment?”

Quite. We hear a lot of prattle about “green jobs”. But what are they? Working in wind farm factories? Paying people to pick plastic out of landfill sites? We don’t really know.

But I’ll tell you what, with unemployment nudging just below 3 million, here’s a list of definitely real kinds of employment. Jobs in the oil, coal and gas industries. Jobs making airplanes, staffing airlines, in airports and for companies organising cheap holidays abroad. Jobs making, selling and maintaining cars. Jobs with electricity companies. Jobs building new roads and expanding motorways.

Unfortunately, none of them are green. But they all definitely exist.

Ken Livingstone made the very important point that no matter how important green issues are – and after all, what’s more important than saving the planet? – they don’t win elections. One of the reasons he lost the mayoralty to Boris Johnson was that people were turned-off by Livingstone’s green messages and liked Boris’ proposed scrapping of the Congestion Charge. Mehdi Hassan pointed out that environmentalism isn’t a vote-winner, noting that every time the New Statesman puts the environment on its front cover, sales plummet. It was pointed out that some polls put popular belief in the existence of man-made global warming as low as 39%.

Did the audience take notice, and concede that the environment was not something to campaign on to beat the Tories? Did they hell.

When the debate was opened to the floor, time and time again people spoke passionately in favour of campaigning on green issues. Often this consisted in a straightforward ignoring of the fact that environmentalism doesn’t win votes, and simply moving from “green issues are very important” to “therefore we must campaign on green issues”.

The idea that you campaign on something else that is more likely to help you win and then just do the green stuff seemed lost on many. As did the fact that Labour has had 13 years to do something about the environment, and all it’s got to show is the failure of Copenhagen. Why would voters start seeing Labour as the party of the environment now, because of a bit of pre-election bullshit?

But worse were those who kept speaking about a “green new deal” and “green jobs for the future”. There was lots of inspirational rhetoric about saving the earth and the economy – but details were few and far between. There’s always vague fluff about “insulating people’s houses” on this topic, as though that’s going to prevent global climate catastrophe (although I’ll admit promising to do it for free might win votes). But actual policy proposals that stimulate growth and prevent us consuming all the earth’s resources and burning our atmosphere in the process? No, none of those.

Indeed, I’m starting to suspect there probably aren’t any of those because, er, having high employment and high living standards means using lots of resources which means, er, burning the planet. And this is not some fluke or simple policy choice be teh evil neolibruls. It’s a product of centuries of decentralised, spontaneous evolution for how to best allocate resources and make human life dramatically more worth living than it was a 1000 years ago. Or come to think of it, drastically more worth living that it was 60 years ago in the USSR.

Perhaps this nasty necessity of the situation is why we can all play (and lose) the game “spot the concrete proposal” on the “core principles” section of nothing-organisation the Green New Deal Group’s website.* They haven’t got any substantive concrete proposals because the problem of the environment being destroyed is a problem that goes to the heart not of some abstract monolith called “global capitalism” but to basic facts about how our societies are fundamentally organised and have been for centuries, arrived at via a process of useful innovation and evolution. No blabbing about a “new economics” and a “green new deal” is going to change that. It’s just going to waste time and lose elections.

Of course, a few people spoke dramatically in terms of how we need to make voters see that being green doesn’t mean giving up high standards of living. One young guy rather sweetly pronounced that this was true, because he was both a cyclist and a vegetarian and hence living proof that environmentalism doesn’t mean lower living standards.

I’d hate to break it to him personally, but when the petrol rationing, the limits on car use, the abolition of cheap flights, the electricity curbing and the food restrictions kick-in, no amount of lettuce-eating and peddling around will disguise the fact that if we’re to avoid catastrophe, we’re going to need to make sacrifices. And I reckon many voters get their heads around this. They will be very suspicious of anyone who promises them caviar, whilst proposing to kill all the sturgeons.

Before moving to the public vote, the lady making the initial pitch was asked to defend herself from charges that environmentalism doesn’t win elections. And what did she do? She leapt straight into economics. Building the jobs of the future, green investment, securing a new economy. The usual.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Saving the environment is not necessarily the same as saving the economy. Imagine: I take over the world, make you all my slaves and in the process we go carbon-zero. Planet: saved. Economy: totally ruined. (But who cares; you’re all my slaves).

The point is, not all things we care about come together in one neat unified package. Hard choices and sacrifices need to be made. It’s not good enough to wave hands in the air and spout off about a “green new deal” as though by simply incanting the words we’ll make it reality.

Macroeconomics is not just some abstract “models” chosen by evil people from Chicago, but possibly being reclaimed by that nice man Mr Keynes. It’s a complex interface of thousands of interacting influences, the vast majority spontaneously arising and not directed by any consciously-centralised administration. And for this we ought to be grateful; centrally planned economies were an almost unqualified disaster, as 70million dead Soviets would attest.**

I certainly believe that governments can make positive and beneficial changes to the workings of (international) market capitalism. Just as they can really mess things up when they get it wrong. But “economics” is not something that can just be replaced overnight like a faulty light bulb. It’s a damn sight more complicated than that.

Yes, climate change is important. Yes, we need to do something about it. Yes, economics is at the heart of that necessity. But working out what is required is very complex, and making it happen is likely to be even more difficult. Part of the complications and difficulties lie precisely in the fact that the environment is not the economy, even if the two are related in myriad ways. We have many values invested in both. But it isn’t true that all our values come together all the time.

The left needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Firstly, on the immediate issue, if Labour goes to the country with the environment as its main campaigning pledge, the Tories will ease to victory.

Secondly, and with a more long-term perspective, serious changes do need to be made to the systems of mass-production, transport, communication and energy-supply that contribute so much to man-made global warming. That requires economic reform, for sure. But we need concrete proposals for how to bring that about, and to face the reality that it may necessitate great sacrifice. Bleating vaguely about a “green new deal” isn’t what we need. That’s just fiddling whilst Rome burns, no matter how well-intentioned the fiddling.

And believe me, the left has a problem here. I was in the tiny minority who voted against this pitch, which was later chosen as the over-all winner of the day. One of the purest examples of the victory of idealism over both strategy and reality I’ve ever seen. You can be sure this is a mistake the Conservatives will not be making.

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* Seriously, take this complete crock of nothingness from The Green New Deal Group:

“Jobs, more jobs and secure jobs. And, it’s about the skills and training to create and sustain them: in a time of recession, with unemployment already rocketing in the US, and growing here, shifting to green energy will produce countless new jobs, and create many more pound-for-pound of investment, than propping up the current system.”

Not even an attempt to argue the case or provide reasons. Just a bare assertion. Unbelievable.

** The only case I can think of for saying that state planned economies didn’t prove to be a total disaster is that the USSR won the Second World War and thus prevented Hitler taking over the world. Without state planning Russia would have still been at the level of a 12^th Century peasant economy. It was state-directed factories building tanks and planes on five-year-plan production schedules, and the mass-oppression of human rights, that stopped Hitler. Not plucky Brits in spitfires, or late-to-the-party Yanks, but Commies.

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