COP29 another Cop out

The bullshit COP29 is another Cop Out focused on protecting the polluters more than the planet, the ever brilliant George Monbiot on how bad things are now…

Trump’s science-denying fanatics are bad enough. Yet even our climate ‘solutions’ are now the stuff of total delusion

We now face, on all fronts, a war not just against the living planet and the common good, but against material reality. Power in the United States will soon be shared between people who believe they will ascend to sit at the right hand of God, perhaps after a cleansing apocalypse; and people who believe their consciousness will be uploaded on to machines in a great Singularity.

The Christian rapture and the tech rapture are essentially the same belief. Both are examples of “substance dualism”: the idea that the mind or soul can exist in a realm separate from the body. This idea often drives a desire to escape from the grubby immanence of life on Earth. Once the rapture is achieved, there will be no need for a living planet.

But while it is easy to point to the counter-qualified, science-denying fanatics Donald Trump is appointing to high office, the war against reality is everywhere. You can see it in the British government’s carbon capture and storage scheme, a new fossil fuel project that will greatly raise emissions but is dressed up as a climate solution. And it informs every aspect of this week’s Cop29 climate talks in Azerbaijan.

…the ‘climate talks’ have just been another exercise in denial of the problem and the ‘solutions’…

Here, as everywhere, the living planet is forgotten while capital extends its frontiers. The one thing Cop29 has achieved so far – and it may well be the only thing – is an attempt to rush through new rules for carbon markets, enabling countries and businesses to trade carbon credits – which amount, in effect, to permission to carry on polluting.

In theory, you could justify a role for such markets, if they were used only to counteract emissions that are otherwise impossible to reduce (each credit purchased is meant to represent a tonne of carbon dioxide that has been reduced or removed from the atmosphere). But they’re routinely used as a first resort: a substitute for decarbonisation at home. The living world has become a dump for policy failure.

Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years.

Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders selling both kinds of carbon market products: official “credits” and voluntary carbon offsets. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.

We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. Here are the reasons why.

First, tradable increments of soil carbon are impossible to measure. Because soil depths can vary greatly even within one field, there is currently no accurate, affordable means of estimating soil volume. Nor do we have a good-enough test, across a field or a farm, for bulk density – the amount of soil packed into a given volume. So, even if you could produce a reliable measure of carbon per cubic metre of soil, if you don’t know how much soil you have, you can’t calculate the impact of any changes you make.

A reliable measure of soil carbon per cubic metre is also elusive, as carbon levels can fluctuate massively from one spot to the next. Repeated measurements from thousands of sites across a farm, necessary to show how carbon levels are changing, would be prohibitively expensive. Nor are simulation models, on which the whole market relies, an effective substitute for measurement. So much for the “verification” supposed to underpin this trade.

Second, soil is a complex, biological system that seeks equilibrium. With the exception of peat, it reaches equilibrium at a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 12:1. This means that if you want to raise soil carbon, in most cases you will also need to raise soil nitrogen. But whether nitrogen is applied in synthetic fertilisers or in animal manure, it’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which could counteract any gains in soil carbon. It is also one of the most potent causes of water pollution.

Third, carbon levels in agricultural soils soon saturate. Some promoters of soil carbon credits create the impression that accumulation can continue indefinitely. It can’t. There’s a limit to how much a given soil can absorb.

Fourth, any accumulation is reversible. Soil is a highly dynamic system: you cannot permanently lock carbon into it. Microbes constantly process carbon, sometimes stitching it into the soil, sometimes releasing it: this is an essential property of soil health. With rises in temperature, the carbon sequestration you’ve paid for can simply evaporate: there’s likely to be a massive outgassing of carbon from soils as a direct result of continued heating. Droughts can also hammer soil carbon.

Even under current market standards, in which science takes second place to money, you need to show that carbon storage will last for a minimum of 40 years. There is no way of guaranteeing that carbon accumulation in soil will last that long. But as a new paper in Nature argues: “A CO2 storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralising remaining fossil CO2 emissions.”

The only form of organic carbon that might last this long – though only under certain conditions – is added biochar (fine-grained charcoal). But biochar is phenomenally expensive: the cheapest source I was able to find costs roughly 26 times as much as agricultural lime, which itself costs too much for many farmers. There’s a limited amount of material that can be turned into biochar. While making it, if you get the burn just slightly wrong, the methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon you produce will cancel any carbon savings.

There is a kind of substance dualism at work here, too: a concept of soil and soil carbon entirely detached from their earthly realities. This bubble of delusion will burst. If I were a devious financier, I would short the stocks of companies selling these credits.

All such approaches are substitutes for action, whose primary purpose is to enable governments to avoid conflict with powerful interests, especially the fossil fuel industry. At a moment of existential crisis, governments everywhere are retreating into a dreamworld, in which impossible contradictions are reconciled. You can send your legions to war with reality, but eventually we all lose.

…there are no solutions at COP29, just more delusional optimism. The inability to respond leads me to be believe we will not manage to stop the worst of the climate catastrophe and need a radical rethink.

Methane will be our undoing…

Countries, companies lag in response to tackle methane emissions, UN says

…as we reel from the scale of a Trump win, Richard Seymour is an ecoMarxist who is pointing out that despite climate deniers being hit by storms caused by climate denial, they refuse to connect the experience to a wider understanding of the consequences and causes…

‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis

In his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, the Marxist thinker explores how extremist movements around the world seek to blame fictional enemies for real disasters

he is, arguably, one of the UK’s foremost thinkers on the politics of climate breakdownand nature loss. In his regular Patreon and podcast appearances, Seymour – who is clearly something of a polymath – effortlessly joins the dots between environmental collapse, the rise of the far right and the role our desires play in a crumbling world, all while retaining his Marxist roots. As the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm asks on the front cover of Seymour’s new book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, “What thinker would you bring to an Earth on fire? You would not want to leave Richard Seymour at home.”

Our emotional responses to the world around us is one of the things that interests Seymour most. When we meet in the British Library to talk about his latest work, it’s this theme we keep circling back to.

Comparing the success of the far right in India, Brazil and the US (among other places), Seymour argues that most explanations for their rise are insufficient. What we’re seeing is “too consistent over time and too global, to be explained by local factors such as the backlash of a fading white supremacy, or Russian troll farms, or ‘bad actors’ spreading disinformation,” he writes. These movements also don’t have the hallmarks of historical fascism. “Their immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy,” Seymour observes, but “a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and ‘woke’ constraints on the exercise of power.” While the old establishment decomposes, the far right conjures up apocalyptic images – “the great replacement”, “Islamisation”, “Chinese-style communism” – to animate potential supporters. This is not yet a distinct form of fascism; instead, it is what Seymour calls “disaster nationalism”.

An examination of the far right globally, Disaster Nationalism isn’t strictly about the climate crisis. But they are clearly connected. While disaster-laden fantasies capture imaginations, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to interrogate this: why is fictional collapse so appealing, so exhilarating, when we live in a world of already existing, real disasters?

If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a specific remedy in disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. “It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.”

Applying a psychoanalytic lens, as the American writer Tad DeLay does too, Seymour avoids commonplace and often sympathy-tinged characterisations of the far right as a cry of the working class (the “left behind”). The economy matters somewhat – he says a trajectory of decline fuels many middle-class people’s radicalisation to the right – but the roots of these movements often aren’t proletarian.

“All of these formations start off with a fairly middle-class voter base,” he tells me. “That’s certainly true of Bolsonaro, Duterte and Modi, and after a term in office, they have begun to build a real cross-class coalition, which is incredible.”

Anyone familiar with Seymour’s writing will know that he takes racism, sexism and transphobia seriously. When we talk, he speaks about these forms of bigotry with the same sophistication he brings to his writing and manages to do so while forgoing one of the other mainstream explanations of the far right’s rise, where voters are dismissed as gullible idiots who need to be shown the error of their ways – and of their information sources.

“If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition,” he writes in Disaster Nationalism.

And that shared social condition is crucially affected and shaped by climate breakdown. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative, sweeping through the western US state after a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, skyrocketing rural poverty, alcoholism, suicide above the norm and a breakdown of local news, leaving Facebook and Nextdoor to fill the void. But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame.

Spontaneously – not orchestrated by any one person or politician – it is the conspiracies they’ve heard that make the most sense of something so large and so destructive: Antifa, doing the bidding of the Democrats whose aim is to usher in communism, are to blame, wanting to kill people like them to remake America. Ideas like these spread like a contagion and the threshold for their uptake isn’t necessarily that high. As the fires rage, people refuse to leave, Seymour notes, so they can physically protect where they live from the arsonists they believe are behind all of this.

Ecological disaster transforms into disaster created by human evil; the climate crisis turns into a crisis of interpersonal rivalry, aggression and victimhood. The destruction of the planet creates the structural conditions for these ideas but it wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t already circulating, Seymour argues.

And he’s clear on why they’re so effective. “You can’t shoot climate change, you can’t take it to court, the same thing with capitalism. These are big, abstract forces, and you feel kind of hopeless against them,” he says. It’s far more attractive, exciting even, to “attack a personalised enemy”. All of us are susceptible to this, Seymour maintains – “There’s jackboots for all of us”, he reminds me at the end of our interview – albeit not equally.

…we might have believed that the climate catastrophe would force people to reflect, but of course they won’t.

As the climate gets progressively worse and more extreme, those denying it will become more unhinged and more sucked into conspiracy theories spread by social media hate algorithms.

Politics is now identity based on myths and lies all to hide from the naked truth that…

…and this…

…we need to be kinder to individuals and far crueller to corporations.

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