An Update on Climate Change

The BLOGGER people are making such a mess of my posts that I've decided to experiment with a pdf version of this post. Just click!

https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZVng30Z1xsqE4KBGR79cWwhlB4GlY9JRo6y

The first 2 books in the undernoted list came to my attention yesterday and made me realise that 5 years have elapsed since I offered my first ‘’RESOURCE’’ on climate change – so here’s an update

• The Arrogance of Humanism David Ehrenfeld (1978) An early critique of the belief 

in human omnipotence and the accompaning hubris

• Overshoot – the ecological basis of revolutionary change WR Catton (1980) 

an early and powerful attack on the damage we’re doing to the planet

• “The End of Nature – humanity, climate change and the natural world”; Bill McKibben 

(1989). McKibben was one of the early environmental writers – and this is his classic book

• Governing the Commons – the evolution of institutions for collective action 

Elinor Ostrom (1990). Ostrom earned the Nobel prize for her work

• “Slow Reckoning; the ecology of a divided planet”; Tom Athanasiou (1996) by an activist 

and writer. Still worth reading almost 30 years on for the breadth of its references“

• The Carbon War – global warming and the end of the oil era”; Jeremy Leggett (1999) 

from an entrepreneur and writer passionately committed to alternative energy

• “The revenge of Gaia – why the earth is fighting back – and how we can still save humanity”; 

James Lovelock (2006). One of our most famous scientists (just turned 100) who coined 
the Gaia concept

“Six Degrees – our future on a hotter planet”; Mark Lynas (2007) A detailed 

examination by an environmental journalist of what happens when the planet heats up

Blessed Unrest - how the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, 

justice and beauty to the world; Paul Hawken (2007); Beautifully-written history of 

the environmental movement, with particular emphasis on the contemporary aspects. 

Very detailed annex.

• “Storms of my Grandchildren – the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and 

our last chance to save humanity”; James Hansen (2009). A powerful story of how one scientist has tried to warn us

• Why we Disagree on Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity;

Mike Hulme (2009). An environmental scientist Professor takes a rare and deep look into our cultural disagreements – using anthropological insights

• Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change Clive Hamilton 

(2010) . 

• Living in Denial – climate change, emotions and everyday life” Kari Norgaard (2011) A researcher returns to her Norwegian roots to spend a year exploring what one town felt about climate change

• “Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”; Joanne Macey and Chris Johnstone (2012) A philosopher and social psychologist team up to develop an important idea about hope (about which St Augustine did not say - "Hope has 2 beautiful daughters – anger about how things are – and courage to ensure they do not remain so)

• This Changes Everything – capitalism v the climate; Naomi Klein (2014). This book by 

the Canadian journalist is written for those who are already convinced about the need for urgent action.

• The Wizard and the prophet – science and the future of our planet; Charles Mann (2014) A detailed study by a journalist of two figures at opposite ends of the climate debate.

• “The Carbon Crunch; how we’re getting climate change wrong – and how to fix it”; 

Dieter Helm (2012). This by an economist – and the subtitle is the giveaway

• Drawdown – the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warning; 

ed Paul Hawken (2017). The title may be a bit over the top but the scale of research undertaken for a superbly-designed book was impressive

• Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; 

Club of Rome (2018). This is the definitive text for anyone who wants an up-to-date 
overview of the point we’ve reached. These are the people who first alerted us in 1972 
and were pilloried mercilessly by the corporate elites for their audacity. The report 
probably falls into the category of “not give up hope completely” and the technical options 
described in detail in the last part of the book do give the impression that things might still be fixed….But the politics suggests otherwise

• How to have impossible conversations; Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019) a rather formulaistic book

• Change – why we need a radical turnaround; Graham Maxton (2019). Written to try 

to persuade the ordinary citizen of the need to take this issue more seriously – and therefore without the copious referencing of an academic book.

• The Uninhabitable Earth – life after warming; David Wallace-Wells (2019) 

This highly readable book from a journalist who has compressed his extensive reading into a series of short, very punchy chapters can be accessed by clicking the title.

• Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism O Berblund and D Schmidt 2020 

An excellent short book which critically appraises the arguments used by the activists

• “Climate Change and the Nation State – the realist case” (2020) by geopolitical 

strategist Anatol Lieven 

• “Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril” Thomas Homer-Dixon 

(2020) which is one of the very few books I’ve seen which takes the crisis as read - 
and chooses instead to use our own reluctance to change our habits as the key with 
which to explore the values and worldviews lying at the heart of the different sense of identity we all have. In the absence of a link to the book itself, I offer this video

• “Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism”; Maude Barlow (2021) an admirable activist in issues such as water and globalisation offers some lessons from her work

• “Saving Us – a climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world”; Katharine Hayhoe (2021)

• Power – Limits and Prospects for Human Survival Richard Heinberg (2021) Heinberg 

has been writing about our overreliance on fossil fuels for a couple of decades - 
but I find his book a bit too glib - see the video

and this is a quite excellent little article on why we have chosen to ignore the climate crisis

• Earth for All Club of Rome 2022

• Five Insights for avoiding global collapse Gaya Herrington (2022) 

• Limits and Beyond – 50 years on, what did we learn and what’s next? ed U Bahri and 

E Pereira (Club of Rome 2022) A review of the lessons from the 1972 “Limits to Growth”

The Party Machine

I started with the intention of subjecting the labour party machine to a ruthless (academic) analysis, using Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (2013) as a lever which might offer insights into the sorry state of the Labour Party. But, as usual, I got distracted first by Tom Nairn’s expose on The Nature of the Labour Party in 2 editions of New Left Review in 1964, then by Enzo Traverso’s Revolution – an intellectual history (2021) which took me to Leon Trotsky and to GDH Cole’s monumental study of the History of Socialism, running to 7 volumes. 

I had started the early draft of the post by arguing that political parties are 

a more or less successful device to:

• recruit political leadership

• represent community grievances, demands etc.

• implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

• extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intraparty dialogue - into the nature of governmental decision-making (this is the theory – the reality is that most of the MSM titilate citizens with gossip, with social media….)

• protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decisionmaking – being able to offer the excuse of the party whip to head off criticisms.

These days, however, elected officials probably perform only the first two of 

these roles which perhaps accounts for the public cynicism which Peter Mair 

explored in this 2006 article in NLR developed, with Mair’s seminal Ruling the 

Void book appearing posthumously in 2013. The two British parties are torn 

by profound internal divisions with the right-wing elements in both having so 

far won out. I have argued elsewhere that our society is hardly what one would 

call a participatory democracy. The term that is used - "representative" 

democracy – recognises that "the people" do not take political decisions 

but have rather surrender that power to one (or several) small elites - 

subject to infrequent checks  Such checks are, of course, a rather 

weak base on which to rest claims for democracy and more emphasis 

is therefore given to the freedom of expression and organisation 

whereby pressure groups articulate a variety of interests. Those who 

defend the consequent operation of the political process argue that 

we have, in effect a political market place in which valid or strongly 

supported ideas survive and are absorbed into new policies. 

They further argue that every viewpoint or interest has a more or 

less equal chance of finding expression and recognition. This 

is the political theory of pluralism.
A key question is: How does government hear and act upon the signals 

from below? How do "problems" get on the political "agenda"? The 

assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially 

are, is that

• the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and

• the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society.

The inescapable reality is that the UK, European and US media 

are owned by plutocrats who impose their right-wing agendas on 

the public . Peter Oborne is an interesting journalist who, 

from an original right-wing background, now exposes in this 

short video the client-journalism of the MSM
Two years ago almost to the day, Al-Zeera showed The Labour Files – a 2 

part series, each lasting an hour and a half. This exposed the activities of 

the right-wingers in the Labour Party who had used the anti-semitic trope 

on – of all people – Jeremy Corbyn. They may have succeeded in their aim to 

remove him from the Labour Party but have done irreperable damage to the 

party in the process.  
Most people have probably forgotten the Forde Report which was asked by 

the party to investigate the chaos of these claims and counterclaims. 

I don’t consider The Guardian any more a fair reporter of these events 

(given its bias to Zionism) but this is how it covered the report. A more 

objective analysis is probably this one 

There are rumours that the Labour peer Lord Ali funded the plot to overthrow 

Corbyn. If you’re wondering why our politicians are so corrupt it’s because the ones 

who aren’t corrupt are removed from politics. This is how we end up with 

bastards who will do things like genocide if it’s better for them personally.

Has British Labour lost its Moral Sense?

I served as a Labour councillor from 1968 to 1990 – that’s 22 years and all of them in an official position as the secretary to the entire group of Labour councillors, first in a Clydeside town and then on Strathclyde Region which covered half of Scotland. This required surviving, every two years, an election of office-bearers which I managed no fewer than 8 times since I offended neither the right or the left. But, thanks to the example of my parents and to the community activists who taught me so much in my early years of council service, I knew where my accountabilities lay – to ordinary working folk – and certainly not to the big battalions. Hence Social Strategy for the Eighties (SRC 1982) on which I tried to throw some light in the recent article Some Dilemmas of Social Reform

My last decade in Scotland was during Thatcher’s reign which gave me the 

incentive to leave the country to become an adviser to central European and 

central Asian governments as they clawed their ways out of communism to 

various forms of kleptocracy which I called “impervious regimes” for the simple 

reason that they were generally impervious to the voices of their citizens 

(the Baltic countries were perhaps the only exceptions).

From a distance I was no fan of New Labour, so obviously the inheritor of 

Thatcher’s neoliberalism. But I did respect Jeremy Corbyn and was appalled 

by the way he was treated by the right-wing of the party which revealed itself 

in all its hideous colours. And Keir Starmer was part of that.
I am totally ashamed of this latest Labour governmen – I understand it inherits 

an economic mess but cannot accept its flaunting of privilege, freebies and 

support for welfare cuts, privatisation and Israel.  

Useful Background Reading – with the exception of the third book, these are texts 

I have just come across which I need to skim
Imagining the Neoliberal state – Assar Lindbeck and the genealogy of Swedish neo-liberalism 

Victor Pressfeldt (2024) Lindbeck chaired the Swedish Nobel prize committee for more 

than a decade when it offered the prize to several neoliberals
Progressive Proposals for Turbulent Times (Foundation for European Progressive Studies 

2022). Strange how the left now pretends it’s otherwise by the use of the “progressive” 

label. That was actually the descriptor used by my conservative father when he stood for 

election in our home town in the 1960s
The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed B Jackson et al (2021) A powerful critique
Beyond Digital Capitalism – new ways of living ed Albo 2021 (Socialist Register)
Corbynism and Democracy Yerrell thesis (2020)
State Transformations – class, strategy, socialism G Albo et al (2020)
Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie Mudge 

(2018)
The Moral Economists – RHTawney, Karl Polanyi, EP Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism 

Tim Rogan (2017)

The struggle for Labour’s Soul – understanding Labour’s political thought since 1945 
ed R Plant et al (2004)
“Progressives, Pluralists and the problems of the State” Marc Stears (2002) - 

a book about progressive political optimism written at a time of progressive 

political disillusion. It traces the relationship between two movements of 

political thinkers – one British and one American – who were joined together 

by their collective sense that the political, social and economic mould of their 

countries was about to be recast. 

As the book demonstrates, these were thinkers who produced detailed plans 

of new democratic institutions and far-reaching social and economic reforms 

and who lived in the continual expectation that these programmes would soon 

be enacted. They were activist intellectuals who believed in the power of 

their own ideas and who had faith in the agents of political change. 

They were political theorists, then, who wrote not only for each other, 

but for political leaders, party members,campaigners, trade unionists, 

and for society at large. They were convinced that they lived in nations that 

were about to be remade, and they wanted to do all that they could to ensure 

that those nations became fairer, freer, more communal societies than they 

had been hitherto.

The contrast with our own new century is, of course, remarkably stark. Few British and American progressive political theorists today share such expectations, or such faith. The political theory of our own times is characterized more by a sense of limitation than of possibility. We inhabit societies which have become dramatically less equal in the last few decades, where civil liberties are continually under siege, and where democratic political institutions are increasingly either dominated by money and special interests or superseded entirely by executive agencies staffed by unelected officials. Political theorists themselves understandably appear to have responded to these tendencies by abandoning the world of politics altogether. The specialized discourses of our leading journals are, then, more often captivated by philosophical speculation and theoretical models than by programmes of political action; their readership is restricted to those who share a concern with abstract ideals of justice rather than with immediate proposals for change.

There are, of course, notable exceptions to this tendency. Both Britain and the United States have traditions of dissent that have not been dimmed by the general pessimism of our times, but those loyal to those traditions are now less frequently to be found at the apex of authority either in academia or in politics at large. My aim in writing this book, however, was to remind us of the spirit that lay behind those earlier aspirations. I wanted to try to recall a time when it was possible to believe that the mechanisms of mainstream politics in Britain and the United States could be used to attain greater freedom, equality, and communality. And I wanted to recapture a sense of political theory as a profession that requires its practitioners to talk to audiences far beyond the confines of the university. I do not believe that either the American nationalist progressives or the British socialist pluralists of the early twentieth century could solve the problems that we now face. I do believe, however, that we might still learn something from their sense of vocation. That is why this book tells their story.

UPDATE

One Labour MP has had the decency to resign the whip in protest against the hypocrisy of Starmer’s leadership – and you can see Rosie Duffield’s resignation letter here – with an explanation from Owen Jones. Although I’m now hearing she was a Starmerite who went along with his opportunistic use of the totally unfounded slandering of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn