Energy and consumption

George Monbiot has a surprising column this week, announcing that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has converted him to the cause of nuclear energy. His point is basically that the Fukushima reactor has been subjected to what in any meaningful sense of the term is a worst-case scenario, and so far the damage has been fairly small. I counter that there's still some ways to go and there are many, many problems with nuclear energy. But he makes a few great points towards the end about the unreality of some proposals for renewable energy. He points to Britain's pre-industrial energy sources:

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.
Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

 There's a similar point to be made about organic and so-called sustainable agriculture: it scales extremely poorly. That's why the "green revolution" in the 1970s that revolutionized world food production came from the development of, er, more effective pesticides and herbicides.

I'm glad to see someone as hardcore Green as George Monbiot dealing with these issues, although I have to say I still disagree with him on nuclear power. But this gets back to the point I made before about the Green movement having a long way to go before it can be a viable alternative to Socialism for the Left.

The Left's big idea?

Another good op-ed in The Guardian today comes from Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the German Green Party, writing about the sudden upswing in support that the Greens have seen since the financial crisis. It is not the best-written piece on the face of the earth, but he makes a number of good points, including noting progressives' disillusionment with the Third Way politics adopted by the Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder - a politician very much of the same mold as Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. But what I find really interesting about the article is his discussion of how the Green Party has moved beyond being a single-issue party focused on energy policy:

Green has become a conscious lifestyle choice – eating organic food, using public transport, buying energy from renewables, consuming from small shops, ethical banking in ethical banks.
Last year, the German Greens celebrated their 30th birthday. It is worth reminding people of the extent to which the party has influenced public opinion in those three decades. Founded above all as an anti-nuclear party, the Greens have helped to generate a new consensus about gender balance, party democracy, renewable energy, genetically modified food, consumer rights and new family models.

He also notes that it helps that the Greens have been able to prove their mettle in coalition governments thanks to Germany's proportional representation system (providing an interesting contrast to my general perspective on PR - see my previous post).

The really interesting point to me here, though,is the range of issues that he highlights as being part of the Green movement in Germany - not just environmental issues, but "ethical banks", "gender balance", "party democracy", "consumer rights" and "new family models". Caroline Lucas has done a great job of this with the Greens in the UK, too - she fought the last election not really on an environmentalist platform, but mainly by opposing cuts as a means of balancing the budget.

I have written before about how I think the new challenge for the Left is coming up with a new Big Idea to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Socialism in the late 80s and early 90s - and how in my view the Third Way was really just Neoliberalism with a gloss of social concern. It has been on my mind lately that the Green movement could fill this gap: Sustainability as an abstract concept helps cover a lot of the ground that the Left talks about, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, has cited the environmental crisis as a prime example of the kind of problem that markets alone cannot solve. This is why Özdemir's mention of "ethical banks" caught my attention - if the Green movement can provide a viable, alternative economic model, it might be just the thing to put the "late" back in Late Capitalism.

That said I have serious concerns about the Green movement. It's clearly a bourgeois movement at this stage, and I have concerns that "localism" and "anti-globalization" could be proxies for what amounts to a reactionary nationalism, especially given the bourgeois nature of the movement. It's important to make sure that the Greens have a properly Socialist attitude towards the poor and excluded - that it's not just all about buying shiny, expensive (but environmentally friendly!) consumer goods. Özdemir's article, in that respect, is slightly heartening.