Individuals are not to blame for the climate crisis

The fossil fuel industry uses greenwashing and woke-washing to shirk their own responsibility.

By

 Cassandra Roxburgh

 -

February 3, 2022

Generation Z has grown up in the shadow of the climate crisis. Global leaders promised they would act. But despite grave warnings by leading experts on climate change, every year for the past four decades, the world has been largely paralyzed by inaction. Meaningful progress has been obstructed by fossil fuel companies’ intentional obfuscation of responsibility for the climate crisis.

The result? The climate crisis is now reality. Globally, 41 million people are on the edge of famine due to climate change, and that number is set to increase with the higher temperatures, desertification, and more extreme weather events on their way.

But who’s at fault? The 2020 Carbon Majors Report identified 90 companies, mainly fossil fuel companies, that are responsible for two-thirds of carbon emissions. Despite this, global leaders still somehow conclude that individuals are to blame.

At the COP26 conference last October, leaders regurgitated the same tired talking points about individual responsibility, insisting that the public change its consumption patterns, even as companies urge people to consume at unprecedented rates. This is unsurprising given that there were 503 delegates from fossil fuel companies at COP26—two dozen more than the largest country delegation—despite fossil fuel companies being banned from participating directly. Experts argue the integrity of the talks was compromised by the presence of these fossil fuel lobbyists, whose influence led to the Glasgow Climate Pact containing commitments to phasing down the use of coal rather than phasing it out. This deal gives fossil fuel companies the social license to continue business as usual. 

Writing for The Guardian, columnist George Monbiot described individual responsibility as one of the most significant lies ever told by the fossil fuel industry and the PR companies that devise their messaging. And still, these messages continue to be perpetuated by leaders worldwide.

“The myth of individual responsibility has origins in 40 years of the creation of societal order fixated on individualism by the Republican Party,” says Robert Brulle, visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University. The first mainstream manifestation of this individual focus, he says, was BP inventing the concept of the “carbon footprint.” It’s a messaging strategy that has fundamentally reshaped how the public views the climate crisis.

Suggesting turning off the lights or driving less loses sight of the global severity of the climate crisis and shifts the focus off those with the greatest capacity and responsibility to make meaningful change.

Melissa Aronczyk, associate professor of media studies at Rutgers University and author of A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism, describes it as “misdiagnosing and misunderstanding the scale and scope of the [climate crisis]. It keeps [humanity] external to the environment instead of seeing us as part of the environment.”

This externalization of responsibility allows fossil fuel companies to downplay their role in the climate crisis and undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism.

Individualizing the responsibility is an insidious weapon within the fossil fuel industry’s arsenal, which includes greenwashing and woke-washing. By obfuscating the reality of the climate crisis, it has exacerbated climate consequences and caused long-term damage to climate justice efforts.

To counter this, climate action plans must place blame where it belongs and focus on the problem’s immediacy. Two main ways of achieving this are collective action and requiring the companies that caused the problems to be at the forefront of finding solutions.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing is a multibillion-dollar PR campaign run by fossil fuel companies to market themselves as environmentally friendly. It began in the 1970s and ’80s.

“[Fossil fuel] companies figured out that it’s not popular to be against the environment,” Aronczyk says. “There is no way that a company could say they are anti-environment and be legitimate.”

And so the fossil fuel industry uses advertising to greenwash its ongoing contribution to the climate crisis. Companies use various messaging tactics to “position themselves as contributing to the public interest rather than working against it,” Aronczyk says. “They started using tactics like raising awareness and coalition-building to support their interests.” For example, Shell has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 by offering more low-carbon products and transitioning into renewable energy sources.

But according to an analysis from environmental lawyers at ClientEarth, the truth behind Shell’s greenwashing paints a grimmer portrait. According to the company’s 2020 fourth-quarter report, Shell has no intention of reducing its production by 2030 and is still committed to exploring new oil and gas sources. Shell is currently going ahead with seismic exploration for gas off the coast of South Africa and plans to continue to grow its fossil gas business by 20% in the coming years.

There is no indication that Shell has aligned its investments with its reduction targets either: The company’s 2020 annual report indicates that Shell has allocated just $2 billion to $3 billion per year for investment in renewable energy while investing roughly $17 billion into fossil fuel production.

In May, the Hague District Court ruled that Shell’s planned emissions reduction of 20% was insufficient and said the company must raise its decarbonization commitments. Under the ruling, Shell will need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030, compared with 2019 levels. Shell is currently appealing the ruling.

Woke-washing

As ClientEarth has indicated, greenwashing is a thinly veiled attempt at reputation laundering—one that is becoming increasingly easy for the public to see through. So companies are now engaging a new tool to delay efforts to curb emissions—one rooted in social justice arguments.

Colloquially known as woke-washing, these marketing campaigns aim to persuade people that fossil fuel companies are fighting for the poor, the marginalized, and women. Companies are pumping billions of dollars into fossil fuel propaganda that casts the industry as integral to society. This process of co-opting social justice arguments is derived from companies getting good at using the tactics of social movements to justify their actions.

The woke-washing strategy usually takes one of two forms: either warning that a transition away from fossil fuels will adversely impact poor and marginalized communities, or claiming that oil and gas companies are aligned with those communities. As an example, Chevron is one of many companies that posted “Black Lives Matter” on Twitter during the 2020 BLM protests. Ironic, considering that fossil fuel pollution disproportionately kills Black people and that Chevron paid soldiers and police to shoot Nigerian protesters on Chevron’s oil platform in 1998.

Woke-washing represents a transformation point for corporate PR.

“Up until recently, companies were reluctant to enter into partisan battles, as they didn’t want to alienate potential consumers,” Aronczyk says. But she says that changed as the youth market grew and being political became trendy. “[Companies are] capitalizing on a market trend but also help to create it by reducing social justice movements to a commodity.”

This tactic makes consumers feel like they’re achieving social justice goals by engaging with brands. For instance, buying products from Chevron is marketed as supporting BIPOC communities. This effectively compromises the original messaging of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as climate change benchmarks.

What real solutions look like

The solutions to climate change are complex. Many solutions, like implementing multilateral instruments to hold corporations liable for failures to set out realistic targets for emissions reductions, depend on policymakers enacting the appropriate policies to trigger systemic change. However, the machinations of capitalism and governance mean that meaningful change through policy is slow.

Additionally, part of the solution is to force companies to be honest about climate change. But the long-term effect of these disinformation campaigns is public uncertainty about the role fossil fuel companies play in causing the climate crisis.

The results of the COP26 talks, which United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres described as insufficient, have further set back climate progress by entrenching the legitimacy and value of the fossil fuel industry.

The often-touted solution of changing individual consumption habits is a nonstarter. It feeds into the narrative of individual responsibility that the fossil fuel industry has manufactured. Ethically, yes, one should reduce meat consumption and use public transportation more often. However, those things will not single-handedly make a difference in the grand scheme of things: An individual can save a meager 2.6 tons of carbon dioxide by going carless, which can’t compare with the 1.38 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent Shell emitted last year.

“There is a dire need to overcome the messaging of individualism that has been ingrained within society,” Brulle says. “Your individual actions, while admirable, need to be backed up against collectivism—particularly collectivism that calls fossil fuel companies to account.”

He identifies practical solutions, such as urging one’s congressional representative to look into corporate greenwashing. This is particularly relevant because of ongoing investigations into greenwashing by the House Oversight Committee. Additionally, communities can support lawsuits against greenwashing campaigns, such as the one filed by the state of Massachusetts against ExxonMobil.

Collective action has already had tangible results within the private sector. After environmental activists placed legal pressure on the U.K. government to disallow drilling, Shell recently pulled out of its Cambo oil field project off the Shetland Islands, citing that there was not an economic case for the project. Community organizations in Australia also caused Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, to announce that a controversial proposal to drill for oil and gas off the New South Wales coast would not go ahead.

Private equity investors, too, are ditching fossil fuel investments in favor of green assets. This is mainly due to the rise in public demand for climate accountability. Furthermore, organizations like Clean Creatives are engaging in name-and-shame campaigns and boycotts of PR firms that work with fossil fuel companies.

Still, Aronczyk stresses the need to place companies at the forefront of finding solutions to the climate crisis. “Advocating solutions can contribute to the problem,” she says. “It suggests that we as individuals should find the solutions. By doing that, aren’t we letting decision-makers and policymakers who need to make system-wide changes off the hook?

“We have to be careful not to suggest that individual solutions can be carried out instead of pushing the large decision-makers to develop and implement solutions,” she says. “They’re already diverting resources to distracting people from the larger issues at hand when they could rather use those resources to find actionable solutions.”

Cassandra Roxburgh

Cassandra Roxburgh is a journalist covering LGBTQ issues and climate rights. She left academia after completing her masters thesis on corporate human rights diligence to pursue a career as a freelance writer. She can often be found yelling enthusiastically about her favorite punk band or the latest speculative fiction novel to capture her attention. She is based in Cape Town, South Africa, and speaks English and Afrikaans. She can be reached via Twitter or LinkedIn.

Dionysus in Music: On the ‘God of Sex and Drums and Rock and Roll’

Babette Babich
Philosophical Reflections
Posted by Babette Babich

January 31, 2022


— In memoriam: Michael Lee Aday: 1947-2022 —

If one could think the Dionysian in music, what would that be like? What would that sound like? Better still: who would that be?

Nietzsche tells us in a book, starting with the very first section through to the end of The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.

He tells us that the Dionysian — via Schiller, who wrote the words, but also via Schiller’s theory of ancient tragedy — is Beethoven. The Beethoven of the symphonies, not his string quartets and not the Beethoven of The Creatures of Prometheus. Yet the little vignette Nietzsche pays for out of pocket, commissioning Prometheus unbound, liberated from his manacles with his tormenting vulture shattered and broken on the rocks, can make us wonder.


In fact, Nietzsche quotes Goethe’s creative verses on Prometheus, the titan who steals the human-forming thunder of Genesis, not least because Homer gets there first, with Prometheus forming humanity out of clay.

Nietzsche starts as musically verbatim as possible, quoting The Ninth Symphony, the choral ode, all to go on to play with the spur, the thorn, the edge of dissonance.

Elsewhere, in The Hallelujah Effect, I revisit Adrienne Rich’s reflection on the protracted endurance of dissonance, The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message, like a rapist, so the cultural musicologists said. Her poem makes her point plain, had that been her purpose (it was not, not quite), his would be another name to add to a list of the cancelled. There are already so many names on the list, all of them, arguably, with reason.

And the connection, the same, we find in Nietzsche’s extended praise for Archilochus, the self-avowed rapist of antiquity, difficult to comprehend no matter how much care scholars care to give it, not that they usually do. In the book they wrote, Nietzsche on Tragedy, Silk and Stern can make neither head nor tails of Archilochus: it is Nietzsche who has to be wrong. Classicists continue to make the same claim for their own reasons but still it got under their skins — ‘Nothing to do With Dionysus’ even when they were writing about neither Nietzsche nor Archilochus.

But the Dionysian in music: could it be Hallelujah? Hard to argue, no matter how it’s sung and no matter who sings it, k.d lang or Bob Dylan.

Here is the question of sex appeal and preference in music is less for the song sung than for the one who looks the part: this, Nietzsche tells us, is the Apollinian. In the case of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, that’s not Cohen himself but Jeff Buckley — after all these years.

Similarly there’s gotta be a looker for rock and roll.

In search of a modern Prometheus, a modern Beethoven, candidates of choice will be all about public taste, popular, that is: vulgar eros. The Dionysus of choice is not via Nietzsche’s Dionysus book, even if these days, waiting for an update, we are ready for relevance. We still need a text, a record or an album cover, a video frozen in time.


Riders on the Storm. Cue the Doors, they covered Dionysus.

Jim Morrison looks the part. College educated, smart as fuck: and he had the decency, not too, too unlike Mozart, to die young.


Nietzsche scholars along with students of 19th Century Music in Comp Lit, cast their vote before they read anything at all about the Dionysian, sparing them the Archilochus problem. Archilochus, the name is already a syllabic choker: who was he? Didn’t he talk too much about himself, lyric poet, I poet, and was he not, on his own account, a literal rapist, ‘howling from the climacteric,’ as Rich wrote of Beethoven? No metaphors for Archilochus, so he insists, writing his lyric to tell us, with rhythm too, so we believe it? One cannot quote Archilochus without shuddering, awful man, nasty man, vile, technically impotent as he smoothly informs us, praecox, or it would have been worse. Like the current narrative about vaccine injuries: how it could be worse is unclear. Archilochus tells us that because of his song, three at one blow, the daughters along with their father, Lycambes, hung themselves rather than bear the shame of his word.

As for me, I still hold a torch for Morrison. Beauty’s beauty.

Morrison is not the god of sex and drugs, didn’t Steinman write drums? that’s rhythm, and rock and roll? It wasn’t Sid Vicious, nomen est omen, or various Ramones, but it was, odd and dissonant, Meat Loaf, of all things, and he didn’t write the songs.


Jim Steinman (1947-2021), who died last April and never stopped being an Amherst undergrad, wrote the songs. That’s the point when it comes to Dionysus. The lyric is no personal confession, you learn nothing about the man when you hear the song sung: it’s a drama the singer inhabits, just as Nietzsche tells us that in any Greek tragedy there is only one actor on stage, however many actors are on stage, including the chorus, everyone, everybody, even the audience.

Dionysus.

Meat Loaf is as unlikely as Archilochus, basically oafish, offensive and harmless and harmful, lustful and sweaty and messy, way messy. Uncanny vocal register, between male and female.

Like the god of wine.

Meat Loaf, a jock who played football in high school and college, would have brushed that off. Should have been, so he tells us: Roger Daltrey, who, along with the young Brian May, looked the part. Taller too.

And at the same time, Meat Loaf easily, off-hand, as it goes without saying, claimed the crown for himself: sex-god.

One should think about that because the song sung, the way he sang it, made Steinman’s song work — and otherwise not — I would do anything for love,* resurrecting their top selling album in a line: I’d run right into hell and back.


*Official video


Now Steinman wrote opera — Wagner never dies — and said so. And part of what Steinman wrote and Meat Loaf sang is myth, in this case, the myth of Orpheus.

There is a power in doubling metonymy: Orpheus, the original myth of the myth, who did and did not — and this is the way of all love songs — retrieve his beloved from hell. After finding the way to Eurydice, Gluck also tells us this in his opera, and almost bringing her back, before Orpheus yielded to the one ‘no’ he needed to remember, to keep as sacred vow, a pact he would not break, that’s a fact, until he broke it: I won’t do that, as he had assured himself and Hades, part of his pitch.

But you never don’t do the thing, the one thing, you must not do. Afterwards, if you don’t die, you live a broken life as Orpheus was thereafter broken until the Thracian women found him and gave his body in pieces — the original corps morcelé, after the Dionysian original, baby Zagreus — to the river. Milton catches that, as When, by the rout that made the hideous roar, / His gory visage down the stream was sent, / Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore…

I Would Do Anything for Love includes the mysticism of love, caught between the parallel reference to difficulties in life, some days it don’t come easy, and the frustrations of eros, some days it don’t come hard, seemingly a simple variation into clever, moving inside the genius of everyday words, easy turned to hard, and then the erotic point in any case, now a love paean because that’s the song it is: some days it don’t come at all / and these are the days that never end. The song swings in different versions between neutral reference to life and time and personification, so that an unnamed woman might, from night to night, be breathing fire or carved in ice.

But how does one get inside a lyric that sings tantra to the world: no mysticism, just earnest admission, an admission that happens to be the height of love, of eros, mystic union, paradise by any light?

This is not about prowess, this is admitting the impossible to replicate wonder of connection, love, that most love songs, most memories simply pass over: But — and one needs the conjoined connector for this — I’ll never do it better than I do it with you, there is a pause, a breath, so long, so long. In various videos singing this, sometimes, Meat Loaf’s eyes are closed, but the audio alone makes it clear.

When the operatic vision turns, as opera must, to a duet, there is the small town vision of the woman’s voice, like Archilochus’ lyric, opera is misogyny or it is nothing, and she asks, in the touchingly simple faith of women, the Gretchens as Nietzsche teased, if her suitor can or cannot bring this or that to a proposed tryst, Can you get me out of this godforsaken town, turns into pure relief, is that all you want: Oh I can do that. As the song goes, it turns out that women already know the tune, cannier in such exchanges than they seem, asking the world and already guessing, Cassandra like, the apocalypse: we all fall down and we all turn to dust. The lyrics are malleable, does she sing we’ll all fall? ashes, ashes, we all fall down: dust to dust?

We will.

Meat Loaf died in Nashville on the 20th of January 2022. The year matters because of the state of the world given over to the terror of the very idea of a possible death from just one thing, one virus, as if that were or could ever be the only way to die. Thus, as he died he was mocked for having the misfortune to die at all, heaven forbid, bless his soul, after speaking out on the wrong side of mandates and restrictions. Of the many things he happened to have died from, he was rebuked for testing positive for — because that’s all it takes — before ‘immediately,’ dying from Covid.

In truth at 74, the aging rock star, old man as he was, was some fraction of two years older than the average age to which an average man might live, these days. Certainly, to think as actuaries do: he was twenty years older than his parents had been when they died.

Like an elderly lady who cannot stop dying her hair jet, jet black — or wearing high heels — ‘underlying conditions’ are a life-time coming. Meat Loaf who eagerly told every interviewer who, just as visibly, did not care to listen, had cancer after cancer, crippling back troubles (someone should encourage people to steer clear of the surgery that does nothing for them, crippling the victims and the doctors who recommend it should quit, but there’s money in it and sick people can’t complain). His was a chronicled decline. In 2000, Meat Loaf’s life story was a made-for-TV documentary, with someone else playing the part, singing his songs for copyright reasons but not less because he was too old to play himself, already, twenty-two years ago.

Rock stars, sex-gods, do not have a long half-life.

For many years, this man could not walk unassisted, suffered illnesses of various kinds, stress of various kinds, two or three strokes, and the other things that come with getting older. Age is a thief and, when it is not sudden, death is cut by cut: loss after loss after loss, until at the very end, sick with desire, as Yeats teaches, a tattered coat upon a stick, as Shakespeare taught him to say, sans everything.

To settle these many depredations as injuries bring one to one’s final downward journey, to reduce all that to just one thing is prevarication. And this new disease, Covid? As was made perfectly clear from the beginning of the pandemic and the new world order: any illness, any possible way that one might die, to remember another of Cohen’s songs, who by fire, who by water, or, indeed as this would hold for sex-god rock stars, who in these realms of love, any and all of these ways can be ascribed to Covid, as for two years now, they do do that.

This old man, who had been old to himself — and everyone else: it is never a secret — since his fifties, dying on camera as stars do, on social media, for the past few years, who pulled himself together to give interviews to interviewers looking for a headline and not for the details he gave them as old people will, just to say this again, tell you details until you turn away, a man who kept trying, and who would in death, on the day itself, be mocked by the cruelty of the crowd he lived for, denounced now not for his looks, as part of what age steals is that: he lost the fat, only to be condemned on the same social platforms that drove the pandemic in the same way from the start.

As for the passing of Marvin Lee Aday, as he was born, Michael as he preferred, and Meat Loaf? That was Archilochus, lyric poet, soldier for hire, as Nietzsche tells us his fate could only be tragic: warlike votary of the muses, who was hunted savagely throughout life.

As Meat Loaf lived, he died: transparent while insisting on his own depth, taking insult bitterly and abandoned to angers, mildly savage, curiously gentle, bemused by theatre and seeking his public to the end.

Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. She has wide-ranging interests, with a special focus on the philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, including digital media, as well as art and aesthetics, conceived from the perspective of (classical) continental philosophy. She is interested in themes associated with classics, museum studies, political philosophy, and such. 

Tax-dodging billionaire dynasties could cost US $8.4 trillion

The wealth-hoarding by ultrarich families would be equivalent to over four Build Back Better plans.

By

 Jessica Corbett

 -

February 3, 2022

SOURCECommon Dreams

Over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation—urges Congress to fix the federal tax code to address dynastic wealth.

The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy” and thereby accelerate the “accumulation of dynastic wealth.”

“Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes,” the report explains.

Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.

The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren’t planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:

The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.

The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn’t reached President Joe Biden’s desk—said Tuesday that it is “dead.”

However, Americans for Tax Fairness still uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.

“The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place,” the report states. “That’s the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years.”

The report adds that “about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year.”

“This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable,” declared the report’s principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.

“The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America’s wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax,” he asserted. “Effective reforms have already been developed—all that’s needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now.”

The group’s new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wednesday’s report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.

“As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years,” the report says, “the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small.”

Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would “curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts.” Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket “on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals.”

Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to “impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust’s holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion.”

“The choice is clear,” according to the report. “We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America’s wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”

“Fortunately, we know what needs to be done,” the report concludes. “The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers.”

Spain passes landmark labor reform thanks to 'computer error'

Spain's parliament approved the government's labor reform by a margin of just one vote — a vote the opposition said came from one of its members by mistake.



Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Labor Minister Yolanda Diaz react to parliament's surprise passing of a labor reform bill

A single vote, allegedly cast in error, secured parliamentary approval for labor reforms in Spain on Thursday, unlocking billions of Euros in European Union aid.

The conservative People's Party (PP) is crying foul saying a "computer error" meant one of its members "voted no, but on the screen, the vote appeared as yes."

It was an "anomaly" and should be "rectified," PP party spokesperson Cuca Gamarra insisted.

The legislation narrowly passed in a 175-174 vote.

The vote was so close that House Speaker Meritxell Batet initially said the bill had been rejected, but she quickly corrected herself.

PP President, Pablo Casado, said the party will challenge the legislation in the Constitutional Court.

Labor reform a key promise by PM Sanchez

The narrowly-passed reform grants more power to labor unions in bargaining contracts and also lowers the number of Spanish workers on temporary contracts.

The landmark reform is a long-standing campaign promise of Spain's Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

"This is the most important law of the legislature," Labor Minister Yolanda Diaz told parliament before the vote.

She added the legislation would counter the country's chronic unemployment problem.

In November, the jobless rate was 14.1%, compared with the 19-country eurozone average of 7.2%.

Nine smaller parties joined the Socialist party and its junior coalition partner Unidas Podemos (United We Can) to vote in favor of the measure.

Its approval meets a condition for aid from the EU's €800 billion ($917 billion) coronavirus recovery fund.

Sanchez's government agreed with business and union organizations in December to push through the bill, but was unable to build a stable parliamentary majority until Thursday's vote.

lo/rs (AP, AFP, EFE, Reuters)

UK

Energy price cap rises: Households will be in 'deep peril' and older people will be 'badly shaken' by increase in bills, charities warn

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a £9bn package following word from Ofgem, the energy regulator, that prices are set to soar by 54% for 22 million households from the beginning of April, adding £693 to the annual costs of a typical household.

Friday 4 February 2022 UK

'I leave my coat on' to keep warm at home

Households will be left in "deep peril" and older people will be "badly shaken" by the rise in energy bills, charities have warned.

On Thursday, energy regulator Ofgem announced prices are set to soar by 54% for 22 million households from the beginning of April, adding £693 to the annual costs of a typical household.

Later in the day, Chancellor Rishi Sunnak announced a £9bn package, including a one-off repayable £200 discount and a £150 rebate on council tax bills, and £144m to councils to support vulnerable households amid the surging energy prices.

Sunak: 'This is a difficult time'

However, the government's plan has been met with criticism with one fuel poverty charity describing it as "woefully inadequate".

'We need deep, targeted support"

National Energy Action (NEA) said the increases will mean the cost of heating an average home will have doubled in 18 months while numbers in fuel poverty will soar from four million to 6.5 million households across the UK in just six.

"These energy crisis measures are woefully inadequate and will leave those on the lowest incomes and in the least efficient homes in deep peril, NEA chief executive Adam Scorer said.

"We needed deep, targeted support for the most vulnerable. We have shallow, broad measures for all. That simply does not work."

"The rebates on bills and council tax are not sufficiently targeted, too small, and too complex," he added.

"We expect the government will have no choice but to return to the issue of spiralling fuel poverty and another price rise later this year. By then they'll be playing catch-up and great harm will already have been done."

Why the price cap needs to rise

='Help is targeted at those who need it most," said the chancellor
Sky News's Paul Kelso looks at what the energy price cap is, and why it needs to rise in line with wholesale price increases.

According to an analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, even after the deferral scheme for energy bills and the council tax discount are taken into account, families on low incomes will spend on average 16% of their incomes after housing costs on energy bills.

This compares to 5% for middle-income families.

"Already people are not spending money because they do not have money to spend," Newham resident, Naveem Choudry told Sky News.

"It has already affected businesses and plus energy bills going up, which has very badly affected business. People are already scared because they don't have no money, they have no future.

Rise in energy prices caused by China and 'colder than usual winter' - Sunak

After announcing the government's £9bn support package, Chancellor Rishi Sunak attributed the record rise of energy prices to China pushing up global prices and the UK's "colder than usual winter".

Writing in The Sun, he said: "One (factor) is the steep rise in demand for gas in places such as China, which has pushed up global prices.

"Another is the fact that we have had a colder than usual winter so we have used up more of our own stores of gas here at home.

"There are no two ways about it: (the £693 annual increase per household on average) ... is a big hit for people to take and I don't underestimate it one bit."

He continued: "We made a difficult decision last year that in order to tackle the unacceptable backlogs caused by the pandemic, as well as to pay for vaccines and integrate our health and social care system, we would have to raise the money to do so.

"We can't borrow for wholesale reform and we were upfront about that from the beginning."

Mr Sunak continued to say the "help is targeted at those who need it most, while also providing some support for those in the squeezed middle".

'We are gonna have to start considering using food banks'

For low-income families with children, the measures announced by the government will mitigate just 36% of the increase in their bills on average in comparison to 59% for low-income single-adult households, analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found.

A 47-year-old mother said the rise in fuel prices may mean she and her family have to start using food banks.

Melanie, who lives with her partner and six-year-old daughter in Flintshire, told the PA news agency she is "absolutely horrified" by the 54% increase in the price cap.

"If things keep rising the way they are, we're going to be in a terrible predicament where yeah, we are gonna have to start considering using food banks," she said.

"We pride ourselves on every time we do a food shop, we buy at least one thing for the food bank - the tables are going to turn where we're having to possibly ask them for help after April."

'It is disgusting' - Age UK calls for more help

Meanwhile, Age UK has urged the government to urgently rethink their plan, warning older people on low and modest incomes are "bitterly disappointed".

"With average energy bills now set to rise by a whopping £693 per year - and almost certain to increase further in a few months' time - the support the chancellor has announced simply does not go far enough," Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said.

"It will still leave many of these pensioners facing energy costs surging by an extra several hundred pounds that they cannot afford to pay."
4:00

Read more: What is the energy price cap and why will bills rise so sharply?

She added: "Tough and stoical though they typically are, many older people will be badly shaken by the news they are hearing today.

"There's no doubt it will lead to many more turning their heating down or off altogether because they will know these price surges and the chancellor's inadequate response signals a crisis in their personal finances, with no end apparently in sight."

One woman, 85-year-old Pauline Thorley, told Sky News: "I think it's disgusting... what can we do about it? Nothing."

Asked if the energy rise makes her worried about her own bills, she said: "It does, I'm on my own but I've still got the same heating as everybody else."

EXCLUSIVE:
BP & Shell make £900-a-second profits as Brits shiver at prospect of energy bills rise

According to analysis, Shell could reveal profits of almost £4.3billion and BP of almost £3billion in the final three months of last year. Meanwhile, ordinary families are struggling to pay their bills

By Graham Hiscott

Head of Business
28 Jan 2022

Oil goliaths Shell and BP are set to spark fury by raking in more than £7billion profit between them in just three months, while households are reeling from a cost of living crisis.

The bumper haul will reignite calls for a windfall tax on firms making a packet out of the surge in wholesale energy prices.

Meanwhile, ordinary households around the country are struggling to pay their bills.

Someone who won’t be facing the same anguish is Shell’s 63-year-old boss Ben van Beurden, who netted £5.2million in pay and perks in 2020, and nearly £70million since he took charge in 2014.

Shell is the first of the pair to announce quarterly results next Thursday.

BP CEO Bernard Looney described the company as a 'cash machine' 

Analysts expect it to reveal profits of almost £4.3billion - equivalent to just over £32,000 an hour, or the same as an average NHS nurse earns in a year.

Shell has benefited through not only producing gas but also being the world’s biggest trader in liquefied natural gas.

BP follows on February 8, with analysts forecasting it made almost £3billion in the final three months of last year.

The boss of BP, Bernard Looney, described the company as a “cash machine” last November because of soaring commodity prices.

The 52-year-old grew up on a dairy farm in Ireland and became chief executive in February 2020, and in that year earned £1.7million.

Families are struggling to pay their bills (Stock photo) 

The two multinationals have also benefited from higher oil prices, which hit an eight-year high of more than $90 a barrel last week.

Yet millions of motorists have felt the pain at the pumps, with the AA today reporting that average petrol prices had reached within 1.5p of their all-time high.

The rise in the cost of oil is also a reason wholesale gas prices have jumped.

Shell is forecast to have made £13.5billion profit for the whole of 2021.

Labour is set to step-up pressure by using an opposition day debate next week to challenge Tory MPs to vote against a windfall tax.

Rachel Reeves said the cost of living crisis is going to get worse in the coming months

Shadow cabinet members and frontbenchers will also be out doorknocking this weekend highlighting Labour’s proposals to offset a surge in energy prices, including the Mirror-backed axe to the 5% VAT on bills.

Under its plans, producers would be forced to contribute £1.2billion of the £6.6billion cost of the proposals.

Around 22 million households face their energy bills soaring more than £600, about 50%, to over £1,900 a year when regulator Ofgem confirms a price hike a week on Monday, which will kick in on April 1.

Bills could rocket again to more than £2,200 in October.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are under pressure to act 

With everything from food and insurance also rising, and the Government seemingly pressing ahead with tax hikes in April, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak are under enormous pressure to act.

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said: “The cost of living crisis is only going to get worse in coming months.

“Yet the Chancellor wants to whack up business and working people’s taxes at the worst possible time.

“He and the Prime Minister should think again before the National Insurance rise hits hard in April.

“Unlike the Conservatives, Labour would keep energy bills low.

“Our plan, paid for with a one-off windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas profits, would save most households £200 off their bills, with targeted support of up to £400 on top of that to the squeezed middle, pensioners and the lowest earners.

“It is entirely right that the North Sea oil and gas producers who have made a fortune recently are asked to pay more.”

Kate Blagojevic, head of climate, at Greenpeace, said: “While cash-strapped households are counting pennies and dreading the next energy bill, fossil fuel giants like Shell and BP are expected to rake in billions from their gas trades.

“Is the UK government really going to leave families to foot the bill for the energy crunch while fossil fuel firms, some of whom have paid little or no UK taxes in recent years, laugh all the way to the bank?”

A Shell spokesperson said: “People are understandably worried. So while we’ve been supporting customers, we’ve also been working with government to help find a long-term fix. E

“Everyone, homeowners and suppliers, need a market that is stable and resilient.”

EXCLUSIVE:
Shell boss faces fury amid calls for windfall tax as cost of living soars

Shell boss Ben van Beurden, who has earned £70million in seven years as its CEO, promised shareholders a bumper dividend, insisting it was 'appropriate'. The company announced profits of £14billion

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden 

(Image: AFP/Getty Images)



By Graham Hiscott

Head of Business
Nick Sommerlad

Investigations Editor
3 Feb 2022

Pressure is mounting on Boris Johnson to impose a windfall tax on energy firms after Shell announced profits of £14billion on the day millions of people learned their electricity and gas bills are set to rocket.

Campaigners said a windfall tax on the energy firms could raise almost £4bn to help families struggling in the cost-of-living crisis.

Shell boss Ben van Beurden, who has earned £70million in seven years as its CEO, promised shareholders a bumper dividend, insisting it was “appropriate”, and whining that Shell’s household energy supply arm was loss-making and so: “Even for us it is tough.”

But the sky-high wholesale gas prices which are hammering households also helped Shell rake in £4.7bn profit in just three months, taking the total profit for 2021 to £14.2bn.

Van Beurden’s daughters pour ice on him from Veuve Clicquot buckets in 2014

 (Image: YOUTUBE)

Kate Blagojevic, of Greenpeace UK, said: “Our continued dependence on fossil fuels is a ­goldmine for companies like Shell and a scourge for bill payers and the planet.

“While Shell is quadrupling its profits off the back of record-high gas prices, millions of households are left with cold homes and astronomic bills.” Spain introduced a windfall tax in September which is expected to raise about £1.7billion to soften the blow on households.

Labour has also proposed a one-off windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas profits.

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said: “Labour would raise money to keep bills low through a one-off windfall tax on oil and gas profits, to support all households, with households typically getting £200 off their bills.”

Ben van Beurden's home

Shell boss Ben van Beurden’s earnings since he took over as CEO in 2014 would be enough to cover the cost of next year’s £693 energy hike for more than 100,000 households.

His personal wealth continues to soar. His shareholding of more than 1.7 million Shell shares were worth £29m at the start of the year. By the close of trading today they were worth more than £33m.

The company’s announcement of dividend payouts to shareholders naturally includes 63-year-old Mr van Beurden himself.

In another boost to shareholders, Shell confirmed it would buy back £6.3bn worth of shares in the first half of this year.

Mr van Beurden has described 2021 as a “momentous” year for Shell, providing ­“significant shareholder distributions”.

Today he insisted he “completely” understood concerns about rocketing energy bills.

Mr van Beurden has described 2021 as a 'momentous' year for Shell

But he said there was an “extraordinary ­situation globally”, with booming demand for energy as economies emerge from Covid lockdowns. He said Shell’s household energy supply arm was loss-making “so we are not exempt”. Payouts to shareholders had been cut in previous years so were “appropriate” now.

Bernardus Cornelis Adriana Margriet van Beurden worked his way up after joining Shell from university in 1983.

The Dutch national is listed at Companies House as being resident in Holland, but is understood to be property hunting in the UK after the firm’s ­decision to move Shell’s HQ from the Netherlands to London. His exclusive estate in the Hague, with a nine-bedroom mansion, guest quarters, sauna and gym, is for sale at £5.5m.

In 2014, the year van Beurden became CEO, he moved his Australian wife Stacey and four children to the Hague from their home in West London, which sold for £3m.

The new pad in Wassenaar set him back £3.3m at the time and is 100 years old. The property is described as having a lawn like a “billiard table”, sauna, marble floors and a pond. But despite extensive renovations, the house has the lowest G energy rating and so needs a new owner with deep pockets to pay the heating bill.

In a video shared in 2014, van Beurden was seen taking part in the “ice bucket challenge”. The water was poured by his two young daughters from Veuve ­Clicquot champagne coolers.

Since 2014, van Beurden has earned £70,176,000, according to Shell’s accounts.

2020, the last year for which his earnings are known, was one of his least profitable. He made £5.2m. Two years earlier, he received £17.8m.

He has amassed a 1.7m shareholding. Based on last year’s payouts, he would have received around £830,000, but pre-pandemic dividends could have netted him around £2.5m a year.

Amazon chews through the average worker in eight months. They need a union

Amazon has earned the dubious distinction of replacing Walmart as the nation’s fiercest anti-union employer

‘Amazon seems averse to letting its employees utter a pro-union peep.’

 Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images
Fri 4 Feb 2022 11.28 GMT

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that Amazon warehouse workers would benefit from having a union. The average Amazon warehouse worker leaves within just eight months – that’s an unmistakable sign that Amazon’s jobs are unpleasant, to put it kindly, and that many Amazon workers quickly realize they hate working there because of the stress, breakneck pace, constant monitoring and minimal rest breaks. Indeed, experts on the future of work often voice concern that Amazon’s vaunted algorithms and technologies treat Amazon’s warehouse workers like mindless, unfeeling robots – having them do the same thing hour after hour after hour.

And then there are the endless tales from Amazon warehouse workers that the company is so stingy about break time that they often don’t have enough time to go back and forth to the bathroom without getting demerits for exceeding their allotted daily break time. It’s hard to believe that here in the 21st century, one of the nation’s biggest, most respected companies makes it so hard for many of its workers to pee.

Share the profits! Why US businesses must return to rewarding workers properly

Robert Reich

In this way, working at Amazon resembles working at a poultry processing plant, where workers often wear adult diapers to work because their bosses frequently tell them they can’t take a break right now from cutting all those drumsticks and wings to go to the bathroom.

Amazon workers continue to endure all this pain and strain even though Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the world’s richest human being, has said he is committed to making Amazon “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work”. Evidently Bezos fails to realize that any company whose workers leave after eight months on average is light years from being Earth’s Best Employer. As for being Earth’s Safest Place to Work, Bezos shouldn’t insult workers’ or the public’s intelligence by making such a claim, considering the rate of serious injuries at Amazon’s warehouses in 2020 was nearly twice that at other warehouses across the US.

If Amazon were to be the Earth’s Best Employer, then its employees would probably be eager to work there until age 65 or 70, rather than say good riddance after a few months. By the way, the eight-month average that Amazon workers stay is a piddling one-sixth the average job tenure for America’s 155 million workers.

However much Bezos detests unions, there’s one thing Bezos can’t honestly deny –unions would be a surefire way for Amazon to become a better employer. Indeed, if Bezos is serious about making Amazon Earth’s Best and Safest Employer, not only should Amazon stop fighting so hard to block unionization, as it has in Alabama, Staten Island and elsewhere, but it should roll out the red carpet for union organizers. If Amazon workers had a real voice at work, a real voice in shaping and improving Amazon’s working conditions – perhaps in de-stressing and slowing down Amazon’s the-algorithm-uber-alles work routines – Amazon might become a far better place to work, and perhaps take a few steps closer to Bezos’s much-ballyhooed goal of becoming Earth’s Best Employer. (I would settle for Amazon becoming Earth’s Best Warehouse Employer – Best Employer is a laudable goal, but a bridge way too far for Amazon.)

If Amazon workers had an effective union that improves pay and conditions, they might stay for eight years on average instead of eight months. In that way, a union might go far to cure Amazon’s biggest headache: it chews through so many employees so fast that it is always desperate to hire new workers – more than 500,000 new hires some years (before quickly chewing through those new ones and spitting them out). Deep down, Amazon executives must be terrified that at some point, so many millions of Americans will have gone through and been chewed up by the Amazon push-it-to-the-max, stress machine, that Amazon simply won’t be able to find enough workers to keep all its warehouses operating – unless, perhaps, it raises its starting pay to $25 or $30 an hour.

Some labor experts see an anti-union method to Amazon’s stress-o-matic madness: that it intentionally wants its workers to stay only a short time because its workers will then conclude that they won’t be there long enough to make it worthwhile to fight for a union. Besides, with such enormous employee turnover and with so many workers staying for such a short time, that makes it immensely hard for union organizers and union-supporting workers to explain to all of a warehouse’s workers how they would benefit from having a union.

Making it even harder to unionize Amazon is the company’s apparent willingness to violate labor laws

To say that unionizing Amazon is an uphill battle is an understatement. It’s one thing to unionize a Starbucks cafe with 30 baristas – and that’s quite hard, considering how aggressively anti-union Starbucks is. But it’s a whole different level of difficulty to unionize a warehouse with 5,000, especially when Amazon pumps out anti-union propaganda to its workers 24/7, while it prohibits union organizers from setting foot on company property.

Making it even harder to unionize Amazon is the company’s apparent willingness to violate labor laws. Fed up with Amazon’s numerous alleged labor law violations at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the National Labor Relations Board pressured Amazon into reaching a settlement in December in which the company promised to comply with federal laws that protect workers’ right to unionize.

But just a month after that settlement, the NLRB again accused Amazon of serious labor law violations, this time at its Staten Island warehouse. In a complaint issued on 27 January, the NLRB said that one of Amazon top anti-union consultants, Bradley Moss, had called union organizers “thugs”, a word that some see as racially insensitive considering that most of the organizers in Staten Island are Black. The NLRB also said Moss had told workers it would be “futile” to vote for a union because a union would “never happen here”. The NLRB said Amazon committed other illegalities; confiscating pro-union literature, preventing workers from distributing flyers in break rooms and telling workers they couldn’t distribute union literature without Amazon’s permission. Amazon denies the NLRB’s allegations. While Amazon pushes its anti-union message to the max – remember the anti-union posters it put in its toilet stalls – Amazon seems averse to letting its employees utter a pro-union peep.

Amazon has earned the dubious distinction of replacing Walmart as the nation’s fiercest anti-union employer. This week, more than 6,000 workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer are getting a second chance to vote on whether to have a union; the NLRB ordered a new election after asserting that Amazon’s illegalities prevented a fair, first union vote there.

The bottom line here: not only would unionizing Amazon make it a better place to work – something Bezos says he badly wants – but a successful unionization vote at Amazon would be a huge, hopeful signal to embattled workers across the US that even at a fiercely anti-union corporation like Amazon, workers can indeed choose to have a union as a surefire way to improve their jobs and their lives.


Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace. He is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

Ottawa Police Chief: ‘Significant’ Funding of Canadian Truckers’ Protest Comes from US


TEHRAN (FNA)- Ottawa’s police chief announced a “significant” amount of funding for the Canadian truckers’ protest has poured in from sympathisers in the United States.

Thousands of demonstrators from across the country have occupied the city’s downtown area since last week to try and force a change to the country’s vaccine mandates, The Independent reported.

A GoFundMe account set up to back the Freedom Convoy has raised more than $10mln, but a notice on it now says that it has been paused as the website reviews it to “ensure it complies with out terms of service and applicable laws and regulations".

“We are now aware of a significant element from the US that have been involved in the funding, the organizing, and the demonstrating,” said Chief Peter Sloly.

“They have converged on our city, and there are plans for more to come. This is putting our city and our residents … at great risk. We are doing our very best to manage this risk,” he added.

During last weekend’s protests a number of former President Donald Trump and Confederate flags were flown, as trucks from across Canada brought Ottawa to a standstill.

Chief Sloly told city councillors on Wednesday that policing alone might not be enough to resolve the situation, and he may have to call on the military for help.

“This is a national issue, not an Ottawa issue. I am increasingly concerned there is no policing solution to this,” he stated.

“I don’t have a singular mandate in this city, this province or this country, to negotiate the end to any demonstration. There always needs to be an element outside of the police for any truly successful end to any demonstration, particularly one of this size,” he continued.

He told officials that it was not practical to block off the city from additional protesters who might want to enter it.

“There is no lawful authority to seal a city, there’s no practical capability to seal a city of this size,” he said, adding that he would need 50,000 officers to even attempt it.

The protests have taken place after the Canadian federal government ended a truckers’ exemption to the vaccine mandate on January 15, which now means that Canadian truck drivers need to be fully vaccinated to avoid a two-week quarantine when they cross back into Canada from the US.

The convoy made its way from British Columbia for this weekend’s rally, which police say is expected to draw around 10,000 demonstrators.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has noted that it is the Canadians who have got vaccinated who have been protecting “the freedoms and the rights of Canadians to get back to the things we love to do".

Supporters of the convoy have said they will be calling on Trudeau to end all mandates, even though most are the responsibilities of the country’s provinces.

Despite the convoy, the federal government has announced that it has no plans to end the federal vaccine mandates that apply to truckers and other Canadian travellers.