UK

Gender pension gap falls, but women must work to 100 to rival men

by Marc Shoffman from interactive investor | 11th November 2020 

More women put money aside for retirement, but the average woman needs to work 37 more years to have the same pension as a man.


The gender pension gap is at its narrowest on record, but women still face working beyond age 100 to catch up with men, research claims.

A report by insurer Scottish Widows has found the gap in pension wealth between male and female savers has closed to just 1%.

The company said this was because more women are putting enough money aside for a comfortable retirement, with 59% now saving adequately compared with 60% of men.

Despite this progress, lower pay and a higher proportion of women working part-time means those saving adequately on the median wage are still putting away £1,300 a year less than men.

This means for the average woman to save the same amount into her pension as a man she will need to work an extra 37 years - which would take her over the age of 100 if retiring at the state pension age.

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Scottish Widows said young women are among those struggling most to save for later life.

Its research found just 46% of those in their 20s are saving the recommended minimum 12% of salary.

This compares with 56% of men the same age, and to almost two-thirds of women in their 50s, suggesting that women do tend to save more as they get older.

Scottish Widows warned that the extra childcare commitments that fall on women reduce the number of hours they can work, limits their earnings and therefore reduces their pension contributions.

This is amplified by the pandemic which has shut down and limited sectors where women are more likely to work, such as hospitality.

Jackie Leiper, managing director of workplace savings at Scottish Widows, says: “While we’re heartened at the record levels of saving, there’s still a mountain to climb before we reach true gender pension parity.


“Women face decades of extra working before they’ll have a pension to match that of a man’s, which is unfair and unacceptable. Until we can resolve structural inequalities, from the gender pay gap to the uneven division of labour at home, we will never have pension equality.”

Just £2.50 a week can narrow women’s £70k pension gap

Retired women in line for extra £100 million in state pension

Tens of thousands of retired women also get less state pension than men, but are now in line to get an extra £100 million.

Many married women who reached state pension age before April 2016 were entitled to receive a rate based on their husband's national insurance record, but an investigation found many have missed out.

Before March 2008, a retired wife on the lower state pension rate had to claim for an uplift worth 60% of her husband’s state pension.

This was supposed to have been automatic after March 2008. However, former pensions minister Steve Webb, now a partner at consultancy LCP, has uncovered cases where women were unaware that they had to previously make a claim or have not received the correct amount.

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UK

Gender pensions gap narrows to just 1% but 'still a mountain to climb' - Scottish Widows study

The gender pension gap has closed to the narrowest on record but considerable challenges remain, according to new research by Scottish Widows.

The study found that 59 per cent of women are now putting enough money aside for a comfortable retirement, compared to 60 per cent of men.

By Scott Reid
Wednesday, 11th November 2020

The Scottish Widows study found that 59 per cent of women are now putting enough money aside for a comfortable retirement, compared to 60 per cent of men. Picture: Jon Savage

Despite this progress, the persistent pay gap and part-time working ratio means women saving adequately on the median wage are still saving £1,300 a year less than men, according to the financial firm’s Women and Retirement Report, published today.

It means that for a woman to save the same amount into her pension as a man, she would need to work an extra 37 years – which would take her over the age of 100 if retiring at state pension age – a number that is likely to grow as the full economic impact of the pandemic is realised, researchers noted.

Jackie Leiper, managing director, workplace savings at Scottish Widows, said: “While we’re heartened at the record levels of saving, there’s still a mountain to climb before we reach true gender pension parity.

“Women face decades of extra working before they’ll have a pension to match that of a man’s, which is unfair and unacceptable. Until we can resolve structural inequalities, from the gender pay gap to the uneven division of labour at home, we will never have pension equality.”

Young women are among those struggling most to save for later life, according to the report.

Some 46 per cent of those in their 20s are saving the recommended minimum 12 per cent of salary. This compares to 54 per cent of men the same age, and to almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of women in their 50s, showing that women do tend to save more as they get older.

However, not saving more while young means women miss out on the benefits of compound interest, which can help savings increase substantially over their working lives.

The research was carried out online by YouGov across a total of more than 5,700 adults. A supplementary survey was carried out by the same polling firm involving some 2,250 people aged 18-plus.

The study highlighted a number of “ongoing challenges”.

Automatic pensions enrolment has been a major driver in getting more women saving for the long-term, but there are still a number of structural challenges preventing a truly level playing field, Scottish Widows noted.

Women are still paid less than men, “significantly impacting their ability to save”, it argued. Of those in full-time jobs, men earn on average £6,100 more a year, a figure that increases to £10,800 for all employment types.

As part of its research, the firm spoke to a group of women about how the pandemic was affecting their working life and pension prospects.

Leiper added: “In a matter of months the pandemic is reversing years of progress. We’re calling for urgent pension reforms that will help more women save more for retirement, including improved childcare provisions, enhanced pensions for those on maternity leave, the inclusion of pensions in divorce proceedings, and the scrapping of the auto-enrolment minimum earnings threshold.”

Hurricanes could reach farther inland due to climate change, study suggests

Storms will be 'bigger, stronger, and move longer distances,' ocean expert says

Nicole Mortillaro · CBC News · Posted: Nov 11, 2020

A river flows with debris which destroyed a fishing shed after the departure of Hurricane Dorian in Halifax on Sept. 8, 2019. A new study suggests that hurricanes will maintain their strength longer as they move inland, because of climate change. (John Morris/Reuters)


Hurricanes that make landfall are maintaining their strength longer because of climate change, a new study suggests, meaning such storms could have more of an impact than in the past.

The reason storms are maintaining their strength, according to researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), is the increase in sea surface temperatures.

A hurricane needs several things to form, the main one being warm water. When warm, moist air rises from that water, it's replaced by cooler air which in turn warms and rises. Clouds form and then, under the right conditions, begin to rotate with the spin of Earth. Given enough warm water, the cycle continues and a hurricane forms.


It's well understood that, because of climate change, ocean temperatures have risen. According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, between 1971 and 2010, sea surface temperatures rose by roughly 0.11 C and will continue to rise as the oceans take up roughly 90 per cent of the excess heat produced by a warming climate.

All of that translates into more fuel for hurricanes. And that means it takes hurricanes longer to run out of gas as they move inland.

"Fifty years ago, for a hurricane to decay [once it made landfall], it took 17 hours. Now, if the landfall is at the same intensity and every other thing is the same … it would take 33 hours," said Pinaki Chakraborty, a professor of fluid mechanics at OIST and co-author of the study, published in the journal Nature Research on Wednesday.

"So the time has almost doubled. Meanwhile, the hurricane is of course traveling inland, which means larger and larger areas are affected."

Moisture picked up from the ocean fuels a hurricane over land. The warmer the ocean, the more fuel and the farther hurricane’s reach inland, a new study suggests. ( Julio M. Barros Jr. and Lin Li, Fluid Mechanics Unit, OIST )

Anya Waite, a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax and the CEO and scientific director of the Ocean Frontier Institute, says the findings don't surprise her too much, since it's well-known the role sea surface temperatures play in fuelling hurricanes. But, she said, it is something that Canadians will have to consider to prepare for the effects of climate change.

"We need to worry about risk further and further inland, as the ocean warms up," Waite said. "And that's scary because we're already worried on the coasts

"Now we have to worry that the line that we draw inland goes a lot further. That means that rainfall and wind and other effects and hurricanes are going to go into New Brunswick and much further inland than ever before."

Climatologist Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, says the findings are interesting, and that he looks forward to more followup.

The findings require "rigorous modelling efforts to establish the underlying mechanisms," he wrote in an email. "Since flooding is the major cause of death and destruction from landfalling tropical storms, this study suggests the potential for even greater risk than has been established in past studies."

Chakraborty agrees.

"I would most definitely think that many of the things that we are putting here, may very well be thoroughly revised over time," he said. "This is just a very first step onto something that was somehow missed in all the analysis done before. So I'm hoping more people will get interested."
Climate change and hurricanes

The effects of climate change on hurricanes isn't entirely clear, though the science is beginning to reveal more.

"What we know is that hurricanes are going to be bigger, stronger, and move longer distances as the ocean warms," said Waite. "And we also know that our contribution to that ocean warming is significant: the oceans absorb up to 50 per cent of the heat that we generate, and that is generated through climate change and through the greenhouse effect. So it's really a direct action that we can expect from our activities as greenhouse gas polluters."

While the 2020 hurricane season has been the busiest on record, with 30 named storms as of Tuesday, that is likely due to the influence of La Nina, a cooling of the ocean in the east Pacific that can have global effects.

Not all hurricanes make landfall, and less than half have this year.

"The most intense hurricanes did not make landfall," Chakraborty said. "And therefore, we have been lucky that the terrible effects of climate change are not communicated via hurricanes to us."

Though it's very rare for hurricanes to reach Ontario, the remnants of Hurricane Sandy brought wind and rain in 2012. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)

Rising ocean temperatures mean that more inland cities need to reconsider their planning in the face of climate change, he says.

Stronger hurricanes also mean more challenges for coastal communities.

"We can certainly look to our coasts intelligently. We can move our houses from the shoreline, which is very hard because we're emotionally attached to the shoreline; we don't want to let go of our cottage on the rocking outcrop," said Waite. "But if we don't do that then the insurance companies are going to be under stress. Because, who's going to pay for a flooded home?"

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And that extends inland.

"[In the past] pretty much a day after the hurricane hits land, it's over," said Waite. "It could get as far as Ontario in a very, very unusual case."

But the new study shows that with warming ocean waters, that is set to change.

"Whereas now … you get several days of activity after leaving the ocean. That's really serious for us."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Nicole Mortillaro
Senior Reporter, Science
Nicole has an avid interest in all things science. As an amateur astronomer, Nicole can be found looking up at the night sky appreciating the marvels of our universe. She is the editor of the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and the author of several books.

Climate Change and Hurricanes
BY JOHN DAVIS
COUNTERPUNCH


Photograph Source: Roosevelt Skerrit – CC BY-SA 3.0

Do you remember last summer’s gang-of-five? Known individually as Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia and Maria, a strangely mellifluous invocation of the deluge (or a diluvian mantra), the climatological spawn of cyclogenesis (the spin cycle in the South Atlantic) they collectively represented the most powerful group of hurricanes in over a hundred years. They were part of a train of such events in 2017, which totaled, at the time of writing, eight Atlantic hurricanes – the-hateful-eight – an unprecedented cyclogenetic sequence. Their combined death toll is conservatively estimated at over five hundred people with property and infrastructure damage low-balled at 200 billion dollars.

Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and anthropologist writes, in Facing Gaia – Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, 2017, “In the Anthropocene, how can the state maintain that it has a monopoly on legitimate physical violence in the face of the geo-historical violence of the climate?” These weather events now terrorize the state and as we become increasingly subject to anthropogenic phenomena – those characteristics of climate that we believe are acting out of humankind’s historic and present burning of fossil fuels –we anthropomorphize their impact. Wild fires rage, threaten and ravage; hurricanes bear down, hit and devastate. Their actions deriving, we understand from the frantic reporting of them, not from a set of climatological beginnings but devoted to the terrorizing of the human beings in their path – fire, flood and wind marked by a teleological stripe as wide as the swathe they purposefully cut through civilization. Either way, it’s all about us. We have created these vaporous monsters, these flowers of evil – their whirling florescence stunningly captured in satellite imagery – that can only survive in the hot-house of an anthropocentric world. Their evil is the evil that men do, their monstrousness mirrors ours. It is we who have turned the page of geologic epochs to the one named the Anthropocene.

The fight to reduce CO2 levels to diminish global warming remains the central field of operations in the global climate war that was enjoined some decades ago. Capitalism and its enabling political environment of neoliberalism are locked in battle with a growing army of opinion (scarcely yet reified as action) that suggests that planetary health would be better served by a dramatic re-visioning of our hegemonic anthropocentrism towards an enlightened co-existence with other life-forms. As the world warms, this new Cold War is fated to get increasingly hot. It is a war between the Moderns – those living out the scientific rationalities of the seventeenth century and who still formally exist within the Holocene, a geological epoch characterized by the geomorphic changes signaled by the end of the last ice age and the subsequent advent of agriculture – and those whom Latour calls the “Earthbound of the Anthropocene”, populations alive to the geologic epoch which takes account of humankind’s impact on geo-history and which embrace a world suffused with animism.

Timothy Morton, proclaimed by The Guardian as “the philosopher-prophet of the Anthropocene”, and most recently author of Humankind – Solidarity with Nonhuman People, 2017, sees a similar divide between modern humans who cleave to the modes of production established by those early fertile-crescent civilizations with their tendencies towards “the overkill intensity of the logistics of post-Neolithic agriculture” – and those who continue the traditions of the foragers, the people of the Paleolithic for whom the world is fully animate. He writes, “Everywhere in post-agricultural psychic, social and philosophical space, is evidence of a traumatic Severing of human and non-human relations”. ‘Severing’ is capitalized because of his conceit that our current dilemmas can be usefully framed in a Game of Thrones-like world. He continues, “traditional ecological models rely on the ruling class mandala structure…Nature gets to mean something pristine and pure, an endlessly exploitable resource or majestic backdrop to the doings of (human) folk”. Latour posits that “one of the great enigmas of Western history is not that there are still people naive enough to believe in animism, but that many people still hold the rather naive belief in a supposedly de-animated material world”. Like Morton, Latour is driven by the inherent drama of our predicament to make theatrical analogies: he sees the natural world as the scenery jumping up on the stage and demanding a part in the human play – a speaking part, no less!

We casually crossed the CO2 threshold of first, 350-ppm, sometime in the 1980’s and, as of a year ago, have driven over the 400-ppm line. Latour writes, “we went through total war and hardly noticed a thing”. We have arrived at what he calls “a profound mutation in our relation to the world”. We have quietly folded our tents and ceded our accustomed atmosphere to one that is now accelerating the sixth extinction towards its almost inevitable denouement: that of our own contingency in a profoundly changed world. Fire, winds and epic rains signal our loss in a war in which we barely engaged, while the scorekeepers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Earth System Research Laboratory daily records our crushing and ever deepening defeat. The geologic aggregations of plastics, the drilling of oil and gas reserves and their ignition, the resultant changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the chemical residues of industrial production are now frequently stirred, wind driven, and rain pelted into spongey anthropogenic chimeras that, like the trenches of Northern France and Belgium in World War One, are the record of a war, but one in which we have stubbornly refused to fight. The latest United Nations projections point to a global temperature increase of 3.2 C (5.75F) by the end of the century. By then, sea level rise is expected to flood Alexandria, The Hague, Miami and Rio de Janeiro amongst countless other communities. Hurricanes and typhoons and their attendant storm surges now bring seasonal death and destruction but they are but precursors to this permanent submergence of coastal conurbations across the world.

Hurricanes are profoundly non-human. Like us, they are ecological beings but the temptation to render them as evil intruders is almost irresistible since they act in what we think of as our exclusive terrain. Yet we have begun, hesitatingly, to accept the rights of other predatory nonhumans to live in ‘our’ world. Growing numbers of people are beginning to accept the idea of co-existence with large carnivores such as wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions. We are beginning to discuss the acceptance of forest fires (which struck California this summer with apparently deadly intent) as naturally regenerative – the threat to human life and property that they pose seen as a problem of human settlement patterns rather than that of their inherent maliciousness. How long will it be before we bring weather phenomena into this fold of accommodation?

The globe has been impacted by an asteroid-like extinction syndrome driven by the New Climatic Regime – in the Western hemisphere, the Caribbean is at the epicenter of the materially destructive forces this regime has unleashed. Florida and the Gulf Coast reap similar levels of weather chaos. If the-evil-that-men-do has been transmuted into the temper tantrums of our atmospheric swaddling – and which (who?) is now an actor on the no longer exclusively human stage (an erstwhile fantasy of the modern age) – the actions of our anthropocentric states (none more so than Trumpistan) appear to be increasingly marginalized.

The most destructive hurricanes of the season, Maria, Harvey and Irma, manifested in three of this nation’s most extreme political environments – at the frayed edges of our Republic where the potential for its unravelling is perhaps the greatest. One, the poster child of late-modern imperialism, mired in debt and under the thumb of Wall Street; the other a global hypercity – a metastasized oil metropolis surrounded by kudzu-like suburban and industrial malignancies that entrap and stifle it; and the third, a state existentially vulnerable to climate change and global warming but where the reality of those phrases is effectively denied by their Governor – using the tired ‘I am not a scientist’ defense. Each was viscerally impacted by a climatological body blow, the state powerless to control the violence and largely ineffectual in dealing with the resultant societal and infrastructural hemorrhaging. Hurricane Jose threatened outer areas of the Caribbean but in the end brushed by the northern Leeward Islands already battered by Irma. A weakened Katia made landfall at Tecolutla in Eastern Mexico where torrential rains caused deadly mudslides and added to the chaos in the earthquake shaken state of Veracruz.

The human tragedy following Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Turks and Caicos, Puerto Rico, Dominica and Haiti is heart-breaking. The Island of Puerto Rico (or Borinquén) harbors a much diminished patch of Edenic tropical rain forest in the El Yunque National Park but elsewhere functions as a low-wage haven for pharmaceutical, pesticide and bio-tech production and as a provider of minimum wage service sector jobs. It represents half a millennium of colonial rule now fully incarnated as the late-capitalist exploitation of a vulnerable and politically powerless work force. Given its debt status, it faces decades of austerity tactics from its Wall Street overlords who will doubtlessly ensure that its post hurricane reconstruction is repaid with an enhanced immiseration of the local population. Areas of the island may be in the process of becoming the world’s newest wet slums.

The hurricane claimed over fifty lives in Puerto Rico (a very conservative estimate recently amended by the journalist Vijay Prashad to a number almost ten times as large based on his travels in the highland villages) and left thousands more injured, sick, homeless and hungry. This was extreme climate violence enacted on a territory with a notably impoverished governmental structure. What promises to be a decades long Maria hang-over will serve both as reminder of the supreme power of cyclogenesis and as a continuing demonstration of the puny authority of a marginalized government. The territory’s outlook is grim, unless you are willing to count its people as heroic counter-revolutionaries trying to minimize the impacts of what Latour identifies “as a revolution that has taken place without us, against us, and, at the same time, through us”.

By chance, or the vagaries of academic tenure, Timothy Morton lives in Houston. The English-born, Oxford educated, and Bjork’s favorite philosopher teaches at Rice. He experienced Hurricane Harvey but was not rendered homeless, because, as he explains in his blog, he lives ”at high altitude for Houston, aka 1 meter above sea level (joke estimate)!” Many were not as fortunate. Houston has assumed the mantle of Los Angeles as the ultimate late-twentieth-century American City: of sprawl, freeways, smog; and with it, its vulnerability to disaster and its ecological racism. It is a pre-cursor city of Latour’s New Climatic Regime – an old-world oil, gas and petro-chemical metropolis sited on marginal lands; its cancerous growth feeding on the city’s surrounding wetlands and prairies. It is, as Morton suggests, an emblematic spatio-temporal piece of the hyperobject (that consists of humankind and their works) that has initiated a mass extinction of life-forms in the Anthropocene. Now deprived of buffer landscapes, lacking zoning regulation and in an era of weakened environmental standards it will be increasingly vulnerable to weather terrorism; its inhabitants in low lying suburbs more frequently at risk of flooding, toxic spills and chemical fires and ever more likely to become climate refugees.

It is academics who have been at the forefront of both promoting the modernity project and of the attempt to expose it as an anthropocentric conspiracy to side-line the sentience of other beings. In the proto-modern world, Copernicus drove humans out of the center of the cosmos; then Descartes established human consciousness at the center of our Universe surrounded by a de-animated and inert nature – anaesthetized and ready to dissect. Now, the cost to the world of this segmentation is amply apparent: human history seems cold and natural history frenzied: this summer, a frenzy called Irma was Florida’s Nemesis.

Chantel Acevedo, the Floridian novelist and academic of Cuban heritage, imagines sharks in the deep water of Miami’s flooded intersections and actually sees octopi stranded in her parking garage. Her five-year-old asks her, “Mom, will my room blow away?” “Irma was biblical”, she writes, in Vogue, November, 2017, “the warm waters of the Atlantic provided fuel, and Irma gulped and gulped. The swirling, giant storm, with its menacing eye, spoke of desolation to come.” Fully personified in the pages of a fashion magazine, one is left only to wonder what Irma will wear. In the event, she arrived in the Keys dressed as the grim-reaper, killing seventy-four before departing the state as a tropical depression. Property damage is in the sixty billion range.

Long ago, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans killing a total of 1,836 people along the Gulf coast and causing over $100 billion in property damage. Just five years ago, it was Hurricane Sandy that left New York with a death toll of 106 and property damage of almost a billion dollars. Unless we learn to co-exist with these heightened weather events, we will continue to be terrorized by them. From hurricanes alone, there have been well over 500 deaths in the U.S. since 2010. Never mind the death toll from other weather events such as floods, tornadoes, droughts and wild fires. The cost of this year’s hurricanes and wild fires in the U.S. is estimated by the General Accounting Office at $300 billion. Since 9-11, there have been 148 deaths in the U.S attributable to foreign terrorist attacks while the bill for the U.S. War on Terrorism has ballooned, from 2010 through 2018, to $1.774 Trillion. The 2017 budget for civil works by the Army Corps of Engineers, much of it ear-marked for storm remediation, is a puny $4.62 billion.

If keeping the American people safe and their property protected are the criteria, the inevitable conclusion is that our Federal spending priorities are grotesquely out of whack. The state has indeed retained its monopoly on violence rendered by guns, missiles, drones, chemical agents, capital punishment, torture and incarceration, and spends trillions exercising that right; it has however, through at least six presidencies since Carter (the first World Climate Conference was held in Geneva in 1979), been entirely remiss in making any sort of reasonable attempt to control weather terrorism. As such, it has likely confirmed its fate as an irrelevancy in the New Climatic Regime, in this, the first century of the Anthropocene.

Timothy Morton notes, “Since the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio, 1992, what has underpinned the fascist right in the USA has been opposition to solidarity with nonhumans”. In other words, our government’s refusal to engage with geo-history has made it complicit in the sixth extinction. Culpability can be spread across the decades, but perhaps it reaches it apogee with the incumbency of Al Gore as vice president, 1993 – 2001, who, he wants us to believe, understood what was going on. Given that he presumably understood the Earth to be imminent danger, his signal failure to act aggressively on his putative presidential victory in 2000 (and thus be in a position to ‘save the Earth’) suggests both a towering cowardice and a profound narcissism. Morton writes that when he hears the word sustainability, he reaches for his sunscreen, echoing the Nazi propagandist Hanns Johst, 1890 – 1978, who wrote, in 1933, “when I hear the word culture, I release the safety catch from my Browning”. When I hear the name Al Gore I think to check the appalling list of nonhuman extinctions catalogued by The Center for Biological Diversity. Morton has doubts about Gore’s avowed mission – the saving of the Earth – if that only means “preserving a reasonably human-friendly environment”. What this preserves, he suggests, “is the cinema in which human desire projection can play on the blank screen of everything else”. Like Latour, he counsels a solidarity with the nonhuman.

Since Latour correctly suggests that we have already lost the war against limiting the ppm of carbon in the atmosphere and the resultant weather extremes, we have been reduced to creating secondary lines of defense consisting of hard and soft infrastructures that attempt the containment of these new, globally warmed geo-storms in the attempt, worthy or not, of preserving a human-friendly environment. The money to create these defenses comes from a combination of State and Federal budgets, institutions and private enterprise: most of that money is devoted to hard infrastructures which are mostly made of concrete – which has a huge energy footprint. Concrete production currently contributes about 1% of the greenhouse gases emitted in the U.S. exacerbating the very reasons for its extravagant use in storm barriers and sea walls.

In Manhattan where the surrounding sea level is projected to rise six feet within the century, an ambitious scheme originally conceived of as a big “U” of concrete and steel fortifications, water parks and dunes around Lower Manhattan promises protection from future storm surges and is currently undergoing community review. In Bridgeport Connecticut, hard and soft infrastructures are planned for this community hard hit by super storm Irene in 2011 and the following year by Sandy. An existing seaside park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, is being re-engineered by Dutch flood control consultants to act as a storm surge buffer.

Manipulation of the landscape to enhance human and nonhuman existence (making a friendlier human environment in ways complementary to other life and land forms) has a long tradition reaching far back into the paleolithic era. The hard edges of our continent that support the logistics of energy, food and raw material import and export as well as the incoming container loads of finished Chinese goods, will inevitably soften: our choice is whether to encourage this process by design or resist it and thus prolong the recalcitrance of weather terrorism.

In Miami, key roads are being elevated to serve as escape routes for flood refugees; an extensive system of pumping stations is being augmented; sea walls proliferate, and flood gates have been installed to protect strategic highway tunnels. New commercial buildings are designed to sit on concrete plinths that rise sixteen feet or more above grade. The high-style Perez Art Museum designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, sits on a plinth while its expansive glazed areas have undergone ballistics testing to verify their ability to repel a weather terrorism weapon-of-choice: a 2 x 4 wood stud, wind driven at a speed of 50 feet per second.

The newly relocated Whitney Art Museum in New York, now sandwiched between the Hudson River and the Highline park, was re-designed, mid-construction, after Sandy, to withstand storm surges through a system of sea gates and barricades. Our finest cultural storehouses are thus being elaborately protected against impending weather terrorism while they serve as symbols of the privileging of human consciousness that characterizes modernity and which, in turn, has now been geo-historically reified as the ‘asteroid’ of the sixth extinction.

In New Orleans, twelve years after Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is up grading the city’s levees and finally removing or replacing the temporary floodgates and pumps it installed after the emergency – which was exacerbated by their earlier engineering miscalculations. New schools, hospitals and housing are being built under a city-wide water plan which requires that individual developments contribute to the storage and ground-infiltration of storm water flows. New waterways and parks are being designed as storm water management elements as well as recreational resources. Marshes and grasslands are being revived as natural retention and infiltration areas, yet the coastal wetlands, the city’s best and softest defense against storm surges, continue to erode.

The wisdom of defiant urban renewal in the face of the overwhelming vulnerabilities of the Mississippi estuary and its coast line is rarely questioned; solutions are more usually framed in terms of the hard re-engineering of miles of the great river below New Orleans; while plans to save the coast to protect the city and its industrial infrastructures will likely destroy the rural communities who have developed ecologically viable settlements in the littoral. Alternatively, a program that restores indigenous plant, animal and bird communities at the water’s edge would provide soft-landings for violent tropical storms and push urban and industrial development into the hinterland away from the continent’s most vulnerable ecotones.

It is useful to heed Morton’s advice: “It’s very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake, at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.” There are practical things one can do to mitigate the impacts of weather terrorism, and developing community solidarity in preparedness for such events (as widely practiced in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean) may be the most valuable; but as important, perhaps, is to understand that the various parts of our lives that support the hyperobject – that historic, socio-economic and political ‘asteroid’ that warms the waters of the Atlantic and causes daily nonhuman extinction – are quite small and can be easily subverted: your credit card cut in half, for instance.

Solutions to our predicament will likely be similarly small in scale. Latour shares Morton’s notion that seeking ‘wholes’ is necessarily dismissive of what they subtend: our connectedness to each other and to the nonhuman depends on diverse symbioses not on holism. We need to attend to these connections not their ideological containers. Latour writes, “Each time we talk about Nature, Earth, the Global, Capitalism or God, we are presupposing the existence of a superior organism. The passage through connections is immediately replaced by a relation between parts and the Whole”.

The gang-of-five has quietly retired, and the hateful-eight has drifted into history; but these heavily anthropomorphized ecological beings have played their part. They did indeed enact our (and perhaps their) fantasy of getting up on the stage and speaking. Did we hear them amidst the howling of their winds, amidst their apparently willful destruction as they demonstrated the awful majesty of their climatic power?

Can we now welcome them, and those that will follow in annual alphabetized procession, into the family of human and nonhuman beings in a newly non-anthropocentric, re-animated world as both intensely scary ecological objects morphed into gigantism by our exploitation of fossil-fuels but also as regenerative beings – like their elemental ally, forest fires – of great beauty and spiritual power? To do so would signal a re-connecting to the nonhuman by humankind mitigating both the contingency of our own existence and that of all nonhuman beings.

The alternative is to continue in our extreme Cartesian anthropocentrism: to continue to resist the impacts of weather terrorism with concrete, steel and bullet-proof glass; to continue to rebuild in place and attempt to deny the terrestrial morphological modifications that climate change makes inevitable.

In 2017, as in past years, there were many heroic examples of human solidarity in the face of the marauding hurricanes. It is tempting to believe that in the Caribbean, where the people deal with these regular emergencies stoically and with sensible preparedness rather than under the influence of media shock and awe and of hasty evacuation plans, there is also an underlying solidarity with the nonhuman. Is it entirely too romantic to believe that the death grip of modernity on the Caribbean is less tenacious than on the U.S. mainland; to believe that the disease that is America (another hyperobject) is less fully entrenched in these islands that bear the initial brunt of so many South Atlantic hurricanes? That in Puerto Rico, this vestigial solidarity is evidenced in what Vijay Prashad calls the ‘Campsites of the Forgotten’ – epitomized by a mountain town called Utuado, 104 kilometers south-west of San Juan – where the 33,000 inhabitants have banded together to sustain themselves in the face of great infrastructural damage; where there is a re-discovery of old ways of ‘making-do’ (like using mountain spring water) he so movingly described in his essay, The Devastation Of Puerto Rico? As a part of this reawakened solidarity, can we doubt that the Island’s people have also re-animated their nonhuman surroundings?

Are we ready to understand the lessons of weather terrorism and follow Morton and Latour, outliers of the environmental movement, purveyors of what Morton and others characterize as ‘Dark Ecology’, into the realm of non-anthropocentric ecognosis (the logic of future co-existence) where humankind subtends from the whole in an interconnectedness with the nonhuman?


John Davis is an architect living in southern California. Read more of his writing at urbanwildland.org

Rolls-Royce led consortium to create 6,000 new jobs in Britain over the next five years as it builds 16 mini nuclear power stations

Over the next 15 years, the Rolls-Royce led group hopes to create 35,000 jobs

80% of the power station components set to be made in Midlands and the North

The group also includes National Nuclear Laboratory and Laing O'Rourke

By JANE DENTON FOR THISISMONEY
PUBLISHED: 11 November 2020

Engine maker Rolls-Royce is leading a group of companies creating 6,000 jobs across 16 new mini nuclear power stations within the next five years.

In the longer term, within the next 15 years, the Rolls-Royce led consortium hope to have created 34,000 further jobs, many of which will be permanent, well-paid manufacturing roles.

Eighty per cent of the components for the new mini power stations will be made in factories across the Midlands and in the north of England.

These components would then be sent on to existing nuclear sites around the country for rapid assembly.



The future: A group led by Rolls-Royce plans to build 16 new mini nuclear power plants

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered a jobs bloodbath across the country, with official data this week revealing that Britain's unemployment rate rose to 4.8 per cent in the three months to September, up from 4.5 per cent.

Rolls-Royce is cutting 9,000 jobs and warned it will take 'several years' for the airline industry to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Derby-based firm, which makes plane engines, said the reduction of nearly a fifth of its workforce would mainly affect its civil aerospace division.

'This is not a crisis of our making. But it is the crisis that we face and must deal with,' boss Warren East said earlier this year. The bulk of the job cuts are expected to be in the UK at its site in Derby.

In a sign of how hard the jobs market has been hit by the pandemic, redundancies rose to a record high of 314,000 in the same period, the Office for National Statistics said.

The Rolls-Royce led group of companies, which also includes National Nuclear Laboratory and Laing O'Rourke, said it is hoping to get a 'clear commitment' from the Government for the flat-packed power station project.

The Government handed the Rolls-Royce-led coalition £18million last year to design the small modular reactors.

The consortium matched the funding and is now looking to secure a further £217million, which would also be matched by industry.

Tom Samson, interim chief executive of the consortium, said: 'This creates a unique opportunity to revitalise the UK's industrial base and paves the way for the future commercialisation of advanced reactor solutions, including fusion technology.

'Our ambition to accelerate the deployment of a fleet these power stations across the UK will contribute massively to the 'levelling up' agenda, creating sustainable high value manufacturing jobs in those areas most in need of economic activity.'


He added: 'The fleet approach will bring huge value to the communities of which these power stations will be a part, with economic activity spanning 60 years of operations.'

The consortium also believes the mini nuclear power plant projects will help Britain meet its net zero commitments, while it has export potential of at least £250billion by 2050 and could lead to the creation of even more jobs.

The group has sealed two new agreements in the past week, with US power giant Exelon Generation and Czech Republic firm CEZ looking at how the reactors could be used in their power stations.

Unite national officer Rhys McCarthy said: 'We have long called upon Rolls-Royce to diversify its production and services, so this opportunity must not be missed.'

He called on Rolls-Royce to use the opportunity to reverse plans to move work at the Barnoldswick site in Lancashire to Singapore.

He said: 'They can both play a huge role in this new chapter for the business.

'They have history, loyalty and above all world-class skills on their side so Rolls-Royce must not turn their back on this workforce and the UK.'

Dumping Fukushima’s Water into the Ocean
What could possibly go wrong?

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER
COUNTERPUNCH


Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY 2.0

For nearly a decade the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has been streaming radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. As it happens, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co.) struggles to control it. Yet, the bulk of the radioactive water is stored in more than 1,000 water tanks.

Assuredly, Japan’s government has made an informal decision to dump Fukushima Daiichi’s radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. A formal announcement could come as early as this year. Currently, 1.2 million tonnes of radioactive water is stored.

The problem: TEPCO is running out of storage space.

Government of Japan’s solution: Dump it into the Pacific Ocean.

Third-party expert solutions: Build more storage tanks.

Environmental groups insist there is no reason why additional storage tanks cannot be constructed outside the perimeter of the plant. They accuse the government of seeking the cheapest and quickest solution to the problem. All along, authorities have promised the site will be safe in 40 years. Really, only 40 years!

According to IAEA’s Director General Grossi, who visited Fukushima in February 2020, dumping radioactive water that is mainly contaminated with tritium meets global standards of practice. (Source: Michael Jacob in Tokyo, What! Is Japan Really Planning to Dump Radioactive Water From Fukushima Into the Ocean? Sweden-Science-Innovation, June 10, 2020)

In that regard, advocates of nuclear power utilize a subtle storyline that convinces, and deceives, the public into accepting nuclear power, however reluctantly. It goes something like this: “There’s nothing to worry about. Nuclear power plants routinely release tritium into the air and water. There is no economically feasible way to remove it. It’s normal, a standard operating procedure.” Nevertheless, as shall be explained in more detail forthwith, there is nothing positive about that posture, absolutely nothing!

According to TEPCO, all radioactive isotopes will be removed, except tritium, which is hard to separate. Still, similar to all radioactive substances, tritium is a carcinogen (causes cancer), a mutagen (causes genetic mutation), and a teratogen (causes malformation of an embryo).

The good news: Tritium is relatively weak beta radiation and does not have enough energy to penetrate human skin. The principal health risks are ingesting or breathing the tritium.

TEPCO has deployed an Advanced Liquid Processing System that purportedly removes 62 isotopes from the water, all except tritium, which is radioactive hydrogen and cannot easily be filtered out of water.

However, the filtration system has been plagued by malfunctions. According to Greenpeace International, within the past two years TEPCO admitted to failures to reduce radioactivity to levels below regulatory limits in more than 80% of the storage tanks. Reported levels of Strontium-90 (a deadly isotope) were more than 100 times regulatory standards with some tanks at 20,000 times.

“They have deliberately held back for years detailed information on the radioactive material in the contaminated water. They have failed to explain to the citizens of Fukushima, wider Japan and to neighboring countries such as S. Korea and China that the contaminated water to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean contains dangerous levels of carbon-14. These, together with other radionuclides in the water will remain hazardous for thousands of years with the potential to cause genetic damage. It’s one more reason why these plans have to be abandoned.” (Source: Fukushima Reactor Water Could Damage Human DNA if Released, Says Greenpeace, The Guardian, October 23, 2020)

Cancer is the main risk to humans ingesting tritium. When tritium decays it emits a low-energy electron (roughly 18,000 electron volts) that escapes and slams into DNA, a ribosome or some other biologically important molecule. And, unlike other radionuclides, tritium is usually part of water, so it ends up in all parts of the body and therefore, in theory, can promote any kind of cancer. But that also helps reduce the risk because tritiated water is typically excreted in less than a month. (Source: Is Radioactive Hydrogen in Drinking Water a Cancer Threat, Scientific American, Feb. 7, 2014)

Some evidence suggests beta particles emitted by tritium are more effective at causing cancer than the high-energy radiation such as gamma rays. Low-energy electrons produce a greater impact because it doesn’t have the energy to spread its impact. At the end of its atomic-scale trip it delivers most of its ionizing energy in one relatively confined track rather than shedding energy all along its path like a higher-energy particle. This is known as “density of ionization.” As such, scientists say any amount of radiation poses a health risk.

According to Ian Fairlie, Ph.D. (Imperial College/London and Princeton University), a radiation biologist and former member of the 3-person secretariat to Britain’s Committee Examining the Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters: “At the present time, over a million tonnes of tritium-contaminated water are being held in about a thousand tanks at the site of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan. This is being added to at the rate of ~300 tonnes a day from the water being pumped to keep cool the melted nuclear fuels from the three destroyed reactors at Fukushima. Therefore new tanks are having to be built each week to cope with the influx.” (Source: Ian Fairlie, The Hazards of Tritium, March 13, 2020)

Furthermore, radioactive contaminants in the tanks, such as nuclides like caesium-137 (an extremely deadly isotope) and strontium-90 (which is equally deadly) in reduced concentrations still exist in unacceptable high levels. According to Fairlie: “These problems constitute a sharp reminder to the world’s media that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima did not end in 2011 and is continuing with no end in sight.”

“There are no easy answers here. Barring a miraculous technical discovery which is unlikely, I think TEPCO/Japanese Gov’t will have to buy more land and keep on building more holding tanks to allow for tritium decay to take place. Ten half-lives for tritium is 123 years: that’s how long these tanks will have to last – at least. This will allow time not only for tritium to decay, but also for politicians to reflect on the wisdom of their support for nuclear power.” (Fairlie)

Meanwhile, over the course of seemingly endless years, Fukushima Daiichi remains “the world’s most dangerous active time bomb” for several reasons, and spent fuel rods are at the top of the list.

In addition to the 800 tons of lava-like molten fuel, aka: corium, (the big meltdown) in the three reactor containment vessels, the crippled reactor buildings contain more than 1,500 units of used nuclear fuel rods in open pools of water and must be kept cool at all times or all hell breaks loose. Loss of water from structural damage or another major earthquake (the structures are already seriously compromised) could expose the fuel rods, resulting in uncontrolled massive release of sizzling radiation that could be worse than the original meltdown, possibly exposing Tokyo to an emergency mass evacuation event with people running and screaming.

Tokyo Electric Power has plans for complete removal of the dangerous fuel rods by 2031. That work is being carried out remotely from a control room about 500 metres distance due to extraordinarily high radiation levels inside the reactor buildings.

Dismally, a perverse endlessness overhangs Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima Daiichi (2011), earmarking these nuclear power meltdowns as the worst industrial accidents in human history.

Yet, with 440 operating nuclear plants worldwide, and 50 new plants under construction, there are plans to build a few hundred more.


Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

USA
Coalition Launches Challenge to Federal Wolf Delisting

BY COUNTERPUNCH NEWS SERVICE
NOVEMBER 9, 2020

Gray wolf. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Environmental groups point to lack of scientific evidence showing wolf recovery

On November 6th a coalition of Western wolf advocates filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, launching a challenge of the Trump administration’s decision to prematurely strip gray wolves of federal protections in the contiguous 48 states, in violation of the Endangered Species Act. This notice starts a 60-day clock, after which the groups will file a lawsuit in federal court.

The most recent data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and its state partners show an estimated 4,400 wolves inhabit the western Great Lakes states, but only 108 wolves in Washington state, 158 in Oregon, and a scant 15 in California. Nevada, Utah, and Colorado have had a few wolf sightings over the past three years, but wolves remain functionally extinct in these states. These numbers lay the groundwork for a legal challenge planned by a coalition of Western conservation groups.

“As we’ve seen over the past week, counting and numbers are not a strength of the Trump administration,” said Lindsay Larris, wildlife program director at WildEarth Guardians. “No matter how you try to spin the data, wolves do not even inhabit 20 percent of historic range. This is not true recovery under the Endangered Species Act and a clear violation of the law.”

In delisting wolves, USFWS ignores the science showing they are not recovered in the West. The USFWS concluded that because in its belief there are sufficient wolves in the Great Lakes states, it does not matter that wolves in the West are not yet recovered. The ESA demands more, including restoring the species in the ample suitable habitats afforded by the wild public lands throughout the West. Wolves only occupy a small portion of available, suitable habitat in Oregon and Washington, and remain absent across vast swaths of their historical habitat in the West, including in Colorado and the southern Rockies.

“The Trump administration has been nothing but cynical, self-serving, and science-denying since the beginning,” said Taylor Jones, endangered species advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “Delisting wolves was a last-ditch, unsuccessful stunt to garner votes, and there’s no way we’re going to let it stand unchallenged.”

“Given that gray wolves in the lower 48 states occupy a fraction of their historical and currently available habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service determining they are successfully recovered does not pass the straight-face test,” said John Mellgren, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. “While the Trump administration may believe it can disregard science to promote political decisions, the law does not support such a stance. We look forward to having a court hear our science-based arguments for why wolves are not recovered throughout the contiguous U.S. and need Endangered Species Act protections to fully recover.”

The conservation groups have long been active on wolf recovery issues in the American West, including working with western states to develop science-based wolf management plans, mounting cases to rein in rogue federal government wolf-killing programs, promoting recovery efforts in the Southwest for critically imperiled Mexican gray wolves, and furthering non-lethal methods to prevent wolf-livestock conflicts before they occur.

“Wolves are a keystone species whose presence on landscapes regulates animal populations and improves ecosystem health – something the Service has acknowledged for at least 44 years,” said Kelly Nokes, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “Allowing people to kill wolves in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana has already stunted recovery in those states. Applying this same death sentence to wolves throughout the contiguous U.S., would nationalize these negative effects, with potentially catastrophic ripple effects on ecosystems wherever wolves are found today.”

The coalition launching the legal challenge includes WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, Cascadia Wildlands, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), The Lands Council, Wildlands Network, and Klamath Forest Alliance, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center.

Contacts:

Lindsay Larris, WildEarth Guardians, 310-923-1465, LLarris@wildearthguardians.org

Taylor Jones, WildEarth Guardians, 720-443-2615, tjones@wildearthguardians.org

John Mellgren, Western Environmental Law Center, 541-359-0990, mellgren@westernlaw.org

Kelly Nokes, Western Environmental Law Center, 575-613-8051, nokes@westernlaw.org

Extreme weather events increasing in intensity in Africa: Greenpeace report

Temperatures and extreme heat events are expected to increase across the continent



By DTE Staff
Published: Wednesday 11 November 2020
Dry scrubland in the Sahel. Photo: Pixabay


A new scientific report by international non-profit Greenpeace has found that extreme weather events like heatwaves, floods and intense rain are increasing in intensity, frequency and severity across many parts of Africa.

The report titled Weathering the Storm: Extreme Weather and Climate Change in Africa, released November 10, 2020, predicted that:

Future average temperatures in Africa are projected to increase at a rate faster than the global average in all warming scenarios

The mean annual temperature increase for much of Africa is projected to exceed by two degrees Celsius or fall within the range of 3-6 ℃ by the end of the 21st century if high emissions continue — two to four times beyond the rise permitted in the Paris Agreement

The rising temperature is likely to lead to deaths, displacement, climate-related conflict, irregular rainfall, drinking water shortages, obstruction of agricultural production and accelerated extinction of endemic African species

The frequency, intensity and duration of extreme heat events are expected to increase, following trends already observed in southern, eastern and northern Africa

From the second half of the 20th century, heatwave duration and intensity increased over parts of Africa, most notably parts of southern Africa, East Africa and the north of the continent. At the same time, South Africa was projected to become drier in the west and southwest, and wetter in the east.

The report said climate change was one of the biggest challenges that African societies were facing and will continue to face this century and beyond.

Many African communities are vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather events because of their limited ability to cope and adapt to those events. Limited resources in terms of access to technology, skill development and economic capacity contribute to low levels of possible adaptation, the report said

“There needs to be better incorporation of indigenous knowledge in scientific evidence on extreme weather events in Africa,” Ndoni Mcunu, climate scientist, founder of Black Women in Science and co-author of the report, said.

African countries needed to be more involved in leading the development of new databases and models rather than being dependent on countries outside Africa, she added.

This would ensure better communication, planning and future projects of events. Access to information needed to be provided at a community level, Mcunu said.

“Over the last 50 years, we have already experienced a warming of 1.5℃, well over the world average. In the Sahel, climate change destroyed our crops, our homes and tore families apart through forced migration,” Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, director of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad, said.

“But Africa is not only at the stage where the worst climate impacts will play out. It is a continent of millions of citizens determined to stop climate change, to move away from fossil fuels, who will stand up to protect our forests and our biodiversity from industrial agriculture,” Ibrahim added.

Prevention, not mitigation needed to solve South Africa’s plastic problem: WWF

Interventions needed across plastic value chain rather than just waste management

By Madhumita Paul
Published: Monday 09 November 2020
Plastic waste. Photo: Meeta Ahlawat / CSE


Multiple stakeholders across the ‘plastics value chain’, with a strong focus on prevention rather than mitigation, were what South Africa needed to solve its plastic problem, a new report by the World Wide Fund for Nature has said.

More than half — 52 per cent — of the plastic raw material produced in and imported into South Africa is used for packaging applications.

It is responsible for the largest volumes of leakage into nature, according to the report titled South African Plastics Facts & Futures Report, released November 4, 2020.

Packaged products such as sanitary towels, disposable nappies, cigarette butts and certain types of fishing gear are responsible for plastic leakage into nature, the report added.

Packaging is also used to pack food items. However, almost half the plastic goods consumed in South Africa are designed for a short lifespan for intended use of less than 1-3 year. They are often disposed of after a single use, the document noted.

There has been a more than 50 per cent increase in processed and packaged food available and consumed in South Africa since 1994. In 2017 alone, the South African crisps market increased by 10.4 per cent.

Some 1,600 tonnes of plastic packaging waste is generated annually in South Africa due to a billion units of crisps, biscuits and chocolates being sold through formal retail markets in the country.

There was limited monitoring and reporting of comprehensive data for plastic material flows in South Africa, the report said. Gaps included data on indirect plastic imports and exports, waste generation and leakage.

The report said recycling was not a solution although South Africa had a vibrant recycling industry.

Instead, interventions were needed across the plastic value chain rather than just the waste management sector, it said.



Used vehicles on Africa’s roads: UN report flags environment concerns

At least 60% vehicles on Africa’s roads are used and imported; regulations weak in as many as 44 countries

By Kiran Pandey
Published: Friday 30 October 2020

West African nations may get a deluge of used, imported cars from the European countries, which will introduce stricter emissions compliance testing from 2021. Germany and the Netherlands will measure particulate emissions of diesel vehicles at their annual inspections next year.

But, a significant number of diesel vehicles in these countries may not pass the test and could be exported to African nations, a first-of-its-kind United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report has warned. This may impact West African nations such as Nigeria, which is the major importer of ‘used cars’ from the EU and do not have any strict norms around them, the report said.

These used vehicles pump out fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, which are major sources of air pollution, and threaten the environmental health of African nations, the report flagged.


Since January 1, 2021, all used light-duty vehicles would need to meet Euro 4 vehicles emission standards in the West Africa. As of July 2020, however, only Nigeria and Libya had adhered to the emission standards, which, too, were low at Euro 3 level.

Under the Euro 4 emissions standard introduced in 2006 across Europe, diesel cars were found to emit 27 times more particulate matter (PM) than petrol cars and 10 times more NOx.

But Nigeria, the largest importer of used cars in the world, has been importing cars that are over nine years old.

Of the total vehicles registered every year in Africa, 60 per cent are used vehicles. But regulations are weak in nearly 82 per cent of the region (44 countries), including Burundi, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Nigeria and Uganda, where government has allowed import of vehicles that are older than nine years.

Of the 100 (out of 146) countries with no standards for emissions from light duty vehicles (LDVs), 46 are in Africa, revealed the UNEP report.

The report, therefore, indicated the possibility of increase in export of ‘used cars’ to Africa and urged strict regulations for exporting and the importing nations.

It said the stricter an importing country is on regulating the import of used vehicles and associated technology, the cleaner and more efficient the vehicle technology brought into a national market.

When combined with appropriate fuel quality in the importing country, used vehicles that meet emission standards can lower the impact from both carbon dioxide (CO2) and non-CO2 emissions.

Exports to Africa

Africa is the destination for fourth out of every 10th used car exported by three leading exporters — European Union, Japan and the United States.

But in the absence of any regional or global agreements for the exporter and the importer to govern the flow of used vehicles, the continent is flooded with old, unsafe, inefficient and polluting vehicles flagged the UNEP report.

The UNEP report focused on low-duty vehicles (LDVs), since most used vehicles traded around the world fall in this category.

From 2015-2018, Africa received the largest share of exported LDVs from the three countries. Of the 14 million LDVs exported by them, 5.6 million were sold to African nations.

Only 10 out of 54 countries in the continent have ‘good’ or ‘very good’ used vehicles policies, the report added.

Of the 146 countries studied in the UNEP report, about two-thirds had ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ policies regulating the import of used vehicles. Many imported vehicles would not be allowed to circulate on the roads of exporting countries, noted the report.

Regulating the trade of used vehicles is essential to ensure the quality of the vehicles and reduce vehicular air pollution and global climate emissions, the UNEP said.


This becomes even more important when the global fleet of light-duty vehicles is likely to double by 2050 and nearly 90 per cent of this growth will take place in low- and middle-income countries, including African nations.

Other concerns

At least 79 of the 146 countries do not have any age restriction on the import of used vehicles. Of these 30 are in Africa, the report said.

For example, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe do not have any age restrictions in place for importing light duty vehicles (LDVs).

While 20 countries in the continent have placed a maximum age limit on used vehicle imports, the norms are not very strict, the report flagged. Only 11 countries in the continent have banned used vehicles over five years.

Only four countries in the continent — Egypt, South Africa, Seychelles and Sudan — have imposed a total ban on used vehicles. But, this does not mean they do not import used vehicles. Some countries like South Africa import used vehicles, but then re-export them to other countries in the region, noted the report.

Citing case studies from Bhutan and Egypt, the UNEP suggested promotion of used low and no emissions vehicles like hybrid electric or electric vehicles as an affordable way for middle- and low-income countries.

Liberal Capitalism is Dead
BY BEN DEBNEY- WILDCAT OCULAR
NOVEMBER 8, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH


From its beginnings out of the European Enlightenment, liberal capitalism was based on a promise of progress through justice predicated on equality before the law. In light of the fact that the Enlightenment ran alongside the European Witch Hunts, the ideological foundations of liberal capitalism have always been something of a thought experiment, since the political democracy of liberal capitalism has tended to turn a blind eye to the class war characteristic of the Witch Hunts. This is doubly true of the class war of societies dominated by class hierarchies, such as every society that a liberal democracy has ever operated within. The fact that the Enlightenment did take place alongside the Witch Hunts might perhaps be considered indicative of a pronounced cognitive dissonance; the failure amongst liberal capitalists to perceive any could likewise be considered telling.

As the radical historian Rudolf Rocker noted in the years prior to WWII, the promise of equality before the law under liberal democracy was shipwrecked on the rocks of class society, a fact that has only become truer in the post-war period, as the United States acted as midwife for the rise to power of a transnational corporate empire in the midst of its own rise to global dominance as geopolitical hegemon. With the rise of transnational corporate capitalism, the limitations of liberal capitalism are becoming too conspicuous to safely sweep under the rug. Politicians are bought and paid for before they even reach office thanks to corporate campaign donations, as are the national committees of two-party duopolies, and this is only the beginning.

On shipwrecks

In digging deeper, we find that the revolving door between transnational corporations and the state builds and sustains old boy networks and creates institutional linkages with private, unaccountable power; private security outnumbers state armed forces in most countries these days, private prisons create demand for draconian sentencing laws, and Amazon aids both the CIA and NSA by storing their copious surveillance data on its cloud servers. Public choice theorists sponsored by the Koch brothers propagandise jurists and policymakers behind the scenes to protect corporate power from democracy by conflating individual freedom and extreme class privilege. This and various other forms of totalitarian mischief are enabled by the legal fiction of corporate personhood—one that stands, not because of any clear judicial ruling that can be pointed to as a cogent argument as to why corporations should have the same rights as human beings, but as a series of fait accomplis perpetrated in the closing decades of the 19th century, beginning with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886.

The result of this long process of corporate capture is the hollowing out of liberal capitalist democracy; the corporate power arising out of the inherently monopolistic tendencies of the class-based system appropriates the forms of its victim, articulating corporatist and fascist value systems and priorities using the language of democratic freedom. Where Huey Long once said that, ‘when fascism comes to America, it will come draped in the flag and carrying a bible’, we might now add to that, ‘and stealing the language of the democratic freedoms upon which it preys.’ Billionaire Warren Buffet tells no lies to the New York Times when he says, ‘’There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ Liberal democracy becomes a colony of transnational corporate power in much the same style as the allegedly ‘postcolonial’ second and third worlds. As ideologically-induced amnesia sets in, so too does much of the populace, hypnotised by consumerism. In the face of the corporate Leviathan, we settle for throwing an endless torrent of consumer durables into the bottomless pit of our alienation. We live out our lives as capture-bonded debt mules for rent-seeking finance capital, in lieu of exercising meaningful control over the conditions of our daily lives and our work, as free individuals under conditions of economic as well as political democracy.

It is obvious enough to most of those who aren’t part of the big party for the rich (Rest in Power George Carlin) that the way the world operates in fact is not quite the same as the version sold in the glossy brochures. The democracy Big Mac looks like the real deal in the studio shots for you to look at when ordering, but not much like the one you’re served by a teenager earning minimum wage (and you’re hungry again 20 minutes later anyway). In contradistinction to the paranoid fairy tales of the public choice theorists, governments are less a two-party duopoly of rent-seekers for the poor than a two-party duopoly of rent-seekers for the rich—their capture by the corporate interests represented by public choice theory and its various libertarian cousins and offshoots being the decisive fact on this count. Liberal democrats having thus been routed, the working classes and otherwise poor and dispossessed huddled masses of the world suffer and die under the class despotism of transnational finance capital rent-seekers.

What do with a drunken sailor

With this more or less as the prevailing state of affairs, those who still hold to liberal capitalist democracy are faced with a dilemma. One option for liberals who aim for a more progressive capitalism is to recognise they have been routed by resurgent corporate neoaristocrats seeking to reverse the democratic gains of the 18th and 19th centuries. In making this recognition, they need to accept, with the rebellious students of May ’68, that ‘those who make half a revolution dig their own graves’—that, in other words, political democracy is doomed to fail if constructed atop divisions of economic class. One might as well build a skyscraper on sand, a fact recognised by the mainstays of the French Revolution who understood very well that political freedom was impossible without economic equality, as monied elites would use their economic power to secure political power and turn the laws to their own advantage (economist Michael Hudson exposes this phenomenon as a long historical tendency with devastating precision in his masterful work Killing the Host).

Another option for liberals, which seems to be the one that many of them take, is to try to unring the bell of corporate capture, seeking amendments and reforms within frameworks of national governments now so subject to the whims of transnational capital that they resemble little more than wholly owned subsidiaries. Without any hope of achieving meaningful reforms within a system lurching conspicuously into police state surveillance and corporate-driven totalitarianism predicated on the neoliberal ideology of capitalist supremacism, movements for reform, at best, take on a performative aspect, one of keeping up appearances. If transnational corporate capitalism attempts to maintain the fiction of a pulse within liberal democracy for its own cynical purposes, then it is aided and abetted by performative liberals, captive to their own false pride. Both keep the corpse walking and waving, Weekend at Bernies-style, and both for reasons that much prefer not to be stated openly.

We find various attempts within liberal academia then to close the barn doors after the horse has bolted. Such reflect in one form or another commentary from political theorist Karl Polanyi around the idea of ‘re-embedding capitalism,’ of re-associating capitalist markets with the social and community environments they operate within and to re-anchor them in the needs and rights of the individual. Just as we might do what’s right rather than what we’re told instead of doing what we’re told rather than what’s right, so too might economies serve individuals, rather than individuals be made to serve economies, while being told to do what they’re told rather than what’s right. For his part, Polanyi died in 1966 and did not live to see the growth of transnational corporations and globalisation carried out under neoliberal conditions. No less significantly, Polanyi died only four years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, the work largely credited with launching the ecological movement.

Future attempts from liberal capitalists to greenwash Polanyi notwithstanding, ‘re-embedding capitalism’ neglects then to account for the development of ecological insights into the ‘metabolic rift’ at the core of the present ecological crisis—the tendency of capitalist social relations to undermine the natural metabolism of Earth’s ecology in the process of reducing our planetary home (along with everything and everyone on it) into an object of resource extraction and profiteering. As against proposals from ecological thought for such strategies as degrowth economics, municipalism and recommoning in the increasingly pervasive areas where neoliberal capitalism fails to deliver, re-embedding capitalism as a strategy at best represents a tragic failure of imagination. At worst, and as a by now wildly obsolete idea, it functions to extend the life of transnational capitalism and all of its inherent abuses in the name of combatting them, by dignifying capitalist social relations as such.

Making a home in the wreckage

Under these circumstances, liberal attempts to reform transnational corporate capitalism take on the aspect of a political version of trickle-down economics. ‘Re-embedding markets’ is promised to deliver results later—though efforts to actually follow up and find out whether any real difference is being made appear spartan, as though no one really wants to know what the answer is for sure. Where putting band-aids on the cancers of corporate capture, transnational globalisation and metabolic rift and hoping for the best is concerned, intuition gets us close enough.

Thus echo chambers die hard, especially apparently in academia, even despite the frontal assaults of neoliberalism on higher education. Bodies of work and careers are built up around argument and perspectives rendered obsolete by the quickening spiral of neoliberal capitalism into the ecological, economic and societal inferno; the defence of liberal reforms takes on a conservatising and authoritarian aspect as ranks close against the intrusion of inconvenient realities and unwelcome moral challenges. Liberals embrace voluntary grievance mechanisms where policy is already set as a sop to the otherwise voiceless and powerless victims. The corpse appears to smile and wave while the protagonists, with one arm up the back of its shirt and their shoelaces tied to its, mutter at each other through clenched teeth so as to not give the game away.

In taking on an authoritarian and conservative aspect, liberal capitalism then comes to reflect basic realities of capitalist social relations as it becomes itself a colony. It might be said that the money power built on those relations has the psychology of a vampire, insofar as it views all life around it merely as extensions of its own will and objects to be exploited—indeed, ofttimes destroyed—to keep it alive. Vampires are nothing if not narcissistic junkies, and if their grabby-hands accumulation of capital is anything to go by, as a class the global capitalist class are collectively narcissistic junkies.

The consequences are well known in the statistics on world poverty and income inequality—emblematic in the fact that 25,000 people a day die from hunger while a third of all food produced globally every year goes to waste because starving people are too poor to buy it. Meanwhile, the rapaciousness that creates this horrorshow is feeds a systemic overaccumulation crisis at the other end of global capitalism, where the transnational corporate aristocracy can’t put their money to work anymore because they’re the only ones who still have any. In their tyrannical insistence on ideological conformity to the idea that freedom and class privilege are the same thing as the root enabler of these conditions, the transnational corporate elite do a good impression of the Borg from Star Trek, except also vampiric, narcissistic takers of life and its material conditions just to sweeten the deal even further.

With this being the case, the power built with and through the psychology of vampiric global capitalist world hegemony appears then to permeate down through the entire system, defining the social relations that characterise it at each step, as capital dominates and tyrannises over all life. It figures then that a world social order so vampiric and exploitative as to reduce the world and everyone in it as objects fit only for exploitation for profit also demands total obedience to class hierarchy. The history of class warfare within capitalist modernity and the struggle of the capitalist class for supremacist dominance—a war it will be winning until it overaccumulates to breaking point, or cooks the planet, or both—appears to support this point. So too does the vampiric money power demands wilful blindness from all concerned; the king might have no clothes, but even liberal capitalists must insist that he does, in lieu of having to acknowledge their routing by transnational corporatism.

In looking to rehabilitate capitalist social relations through strategies such as ‘re-embedding capitalism,’ and otherwise by dignifying voluntary redress mechanisms within neoliberal jurisprudence, liberal capitalists become as complicit as those they claim to oppose in normalising the vampirism characteristic of the predatory gaze of transnational corporate capitalism. They become as complicit, ultimately, in normalising cultlike submission to the ideological priorities and value systems associated with capitalist social relations as such; this would appear to go some way towards accounting for the fact that a liberal capitalist who will even name capitalist social relations as a fact of everyday life is so rare as to be non-existent. To even name capitalist social relations, even as they affect every aspect of our lives, is to do offense to the fog of cultish normalisation of economic autocracy, and so too also to the routed logic of political democracy constructed atop societies divided into have-yachts and have-nots.

We must, however, name capitalist social relations if we are concerned with social justice, and the kind of baseline sane and orderly, classless society that can guarantee it. As the socialist feminist Combahee River Collective (CRC) pointed out, ‘work must be organised for the collective benefit of those who do the work, not for the profit of the bosses.’ The fact is that social relations in the economic sphere under capitalism are as autocratic as those in the political under a monarchy (and abolished as intolerable for a society concerned with civilised norms of individual freedom and dignity by democratic revolutions in Europe and North America hundreds of years ago). Nevertheless, and again as the CRC pointed out, a comparable democratic revolution in the economic sphere that was not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution, would hardly secure the freedom of anyone not male or white. Thus a ‘radical subjectivity’ inclusive of identities based on various forms of structural oppression, argued the CRC, was necessary to combat the class reductionism that was as blind to the structural role played by misogyny and racism in propping up autocratic economic social relations as it was the suffering of those subject to it.

Recuperating the siren’s call

For the reactionary neoaristocrats perpetrating corporate capture and capital-supremacist totalitarianism, the level of offense to cultish norms in even discussing capitalist social relations was as good as trying to subvert society—as if subverting society isn’t inherent to feeding off of it as rent-seeking finance capitalist do the point of overaccumulation crisis. By contrast, liberal capitalists seek to deal with the messy business of capitalist social relations by replacing the stick from the right with the carrot.

Production of the carrot as means of enticing loyalty to class hierarchy starts by stripping the identity-politics-as-radical-subjectivity articulated by the Combahee River Collective of its class analysis—inclusive of its revolutionary goals in overturning racism and misogyny as systemically necessary mechanisms of victim-blaming, along with the system that produces them. Freed of having to acknowledge the consequences of class within liberal capitalist democracy, their own routing being not the least of which, liberal capitalists enlist anti-sexism and anti-racism struggles in the recruitment of more diverse talent to feed into the machinery of capitalism, and all it entails in the extraction of surplus value and appropriation of unpaid care labour (again taboo).

In addition to glossing over the institutional function of misogyny and racism by giving capitalism the appearance of racial diversity, this also of course ensures that misogyny and racism continues; for all the tireless efforts of liberal capitalists to make capitalism more diverse, somehow misogyny and racism strangely never seem to go really away. This does not however prompt a general questioning of the reduction of identity politics to single issue struggles. It does, on the other hand, prompt the reduction of nominally progressive politics to a sexy shopping list of worthy causes to be strung together minus any intersectional analysis to understand how various forms of oppression function often in concert at the systemic level.

This bastardisation of anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles in the service of capital accumulation also offers liberal capitalists a mechanism for silencing criticism of capitalism from the left. While the fascists of the capitalist right bolster their capitalist supremacism with the identity politics of white supremacism, the liberals of the capitalist left bolster their capitalist supremacism with what we might call ‘identity reductionism’—the reduction of social actors, whose status as members of (typically) underprivileged groups, sectors and classes within class hierarchies affects their living conditions, to atomised individuals, whose rights are conceptualised in terms of a legal plaintiff (Judith Butler).

Where the white supremacists of the capitalist far-right use identity politics to rationalise their class privilege by conflating challenges to it with attacks on their freedom and victim-blaming, the identity reductionists of the capitalist left use identity politics to rationalise their class privilege by conflating challenges to it with attempts to assert and reimpose social privilege. Both attitudes exist to defend capitalist privilege from challenge; both reflect the same underlying ‘projecting’ dynamic based on identity, even if the pretexts vary between reactionary/hateful, and progressive/benign. As Asad Haider argues,

When rights are granted to ‘empty,’ abstract individuals, they ignore the real, social forms of inequality and oppression that appear to be outside the political sphere. … In other words, when the liberal language of rights is used to defend a concrete identity group from injury … that group ends up defined by its victimhood.

Instead of addressing the material causes of physical or verbal injury, liberal identity politics ends up ‘reduced to a reaction,’ as Haider puts it, and “emancipatory content disappears.’ As Stalin’s persecution of dissent in the Soviet Union as threats to the revolutionary freedom of the working class demonstrated, it is just as possible to perpetrate reaction and otherwise exercise authoritarian rule on progressive pretexts as it is reactionary ones.

Back in the capitalist west, academia as the traditional bastion of liberal capitalism (propaganda mythologies from the Murdoch press notwithstanding) presents a notable forum for the use of identity reductionism by liberal capitalists as a useful tool of reaction—as a means, in other words, of shutting down challenges to capitalist social relations (much less to say the co-option of anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles to the service of capital accumulation). The logic of ‘if you challenge liberal capitalism, the racists and misogynists win’ functions just as well as ‘if you think for yourself, the communists and terrorists win’ in shutting down debate and enforcing ideological conformity. As academia is captured and colonised by neoliberalism, so too are many within it—all the more so as funding cuts and austerity create fear of rocking the boat and increased willingness to submit to the value systems and ideological priorities of the all-coveting eye of predatory transnational capital.

This is hardly a contentious point. Upton Sinclair once wrote, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ The pressure to conform ideologically to the cult of private accumulation that bristles even at the naming of capitalist social relations is made easier at the outset by internalising the logic of the transnational overlord. For those whose salaries depend on upholding the routed and shipwrecked liberal capitalism, the conflict between the moral challenges reality presents to their conscience and the demands of collecting a salary can be resolved easily enough if we abandon or simply neglect the parts of our individuality that notice or care about the misery and suffering of others. We don’t feel the suffering of members of our own class if we allow ourselves to forget that classes exist or that they matter (or even that we share common interests, classist pretences to the contrary notwithstanding).

Abandoning individuality and internalising the value system of the corporate overlord for easier ascension into the rapidly diminishing middle classes also makes the performativity of routed liberal democracy easier—along with abandoning the politics of class, and the working class along with it. One can collect a paycheck and feel perfectly at ease, especially if one works at surrounding oneself only with other liberal capitalists and shutting out anyone who insists on harping on taboo topics like capitalist social relations. The long-term political effects were not hard to predict. As Richard Rorty wrote in 1998:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else . . . At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

In the conditions of 2020, the salience of this observation is impossible to miss. Liberal capitalists, living in blissful bubbles free of taboos like class, are now confronted with a working class who know they’ve been abandoned, and who know being poor and working class is the one identity that identity-reductionist capitalists have zero interest in knowing anything about. The disinterestedness of identity reductionists in poor and working class life is again reflected in the preoccupation with ‘re-embedding capital’ while respecting cultish taboos against mere acknowledgement of capitalist social relations. Capitalism as a fait accompli of colonial and imperial violence historically is to be made more serviceable (as a lost cause and keeping-face performance in the face of transnational corporate capture of governments worldwide), rather than addressing the needs and desires of human beings and finding ways to service those (again, though such strategies as promotion of degrowth economics, municipalism, recommoning, community defence organisations, and/or radical union organising).

The uneducated working class certainly are not the most articulate in confronting the classist elitism of liberal capitalists; objecting to being labelled a misogynist or racist for rejecting classism can easily be read as taking the crumbs of token privilege thrown out to the white working class and white make workers in particular, to ensure their loyalty within class hierarchies. Just because someone does not reject classism in an articulate manner does not, however, actually make them a reactionary—any more than it means middle class liberals who are woke about every identity except being working class and poor are not well out of touch, which it would seem they are. Not only are they out of touch but militantly so, a fact made starkly apparent by Hilary Clinton’s infamous denunciation of working class Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016, comments the latter inevitably took up as a badge of honour and proof that their man was fighting the cause of the common people.

A basket of shipwrecks

Ironically enough, the insistence of identity reductionists on tinkering around the edges of the capitalist social relations they demonstrate scant awareness of at best leaves the door open for every far right demagogue to then come piling in—which they do in droves. It does not appear to have been for nothing that the final campaign video from Donald Trump prior to the 2016 presidential elections addressed the decline of the manufacturing industry in the United States—something on which the allegedly more progressive Democratic Party was conspicuously silent. Indeed, as Chomsky points out,

The Democrats long ago gave up on the working class, that’s not part of their constituency[, which these days is] an elite, professional constituency. They focus on—to the extent that they’re issues—mostly identity politics, which is okay, but it’s not class-based. It’s not going to appeal to the needs of most of the population. Other Republicans have just taken over the vacuum.

As have opportunists even further to the right, exploiting the vacuum of interest in the immiseration of the working class under neoliberalism from nominal progressives to feed them scapegoats and paranoid, totalitarian conspiratorial poison. In the face of these developments, identity reductionist liberal capitalists continue to turn a blind eye to the oppressiveness and injustice of class hierarchies per se, with all that follows in willing blindness to the consequences. Leaving the door open for every far right demagogue to come piling in (which they do), liberal capitalists still have the gall to act surprised when the working class doesn’t support them at the ballot box. They should perhaps not. As the experience of the Republicans under Trump and the far right his administration has emboldened suggests, the abandonment by liberal capitalists of class politics, and the working class along with it, is the seed of the rot of fascism.

Amidst the fear of rising fascism, it is all too easy to take any attempt to critique identity politics in the hands of neoliberal capitalists as a RWNJ talking point. The fact remains, however, that criticising liberal capitalists from the left and attacking them are not the same thing. Stripping the class-based politics of revolutionary subjectivity as articulated by groups like the Combahee River Collective of their substance, and co-opting them as a service to enhanced capital accumulation is a valid criticism, as is tinkering around the edges of neoliberal capitalism while leaving root causes intact. As noted, such not only leaves racism and misogyny safe from identification as a systemic feature of capitalism, liberal or otherwise, but does nothing to address the effects of class society as such—not least of which being the ever-deepening immiseration of just about everyone but the transnational corporate aristocracy (including, ironically enough, classist liberals).

Averting the rocks

It has long been apparent that liberal capitalists, in neglecting or abandoning the working class, sow the seeds of fascism, digging their own graves as noted by making half a revolution and then turning a blind eye to the consequences while trying to have their cake and eat it too. In noting this tendency, Gilles Dauvé also pointed out long ago in his excellent pamphlet When Insurrections Die that it leads liberals to oppose (or at least try to manage or thwart) resistance to fascism that encompasses anti-capitalist and antihegemonic critiques. Even with fascism knocking on their door, liberals historically have still tried to salvage capitalism—and their own class privileges along with them—somewhat predictably tending to end up losing both. As the degeneration of the Republican Party into oligarchical fascism tends to suggest, supporting the analysis from Dauvé, the far right will hardly hesitate to sacrifice liberals along with the working class to their class privileges during periods of crisis.

Dealing with critiques of identity reductionism and working class opposition to liberal capitalism by handwaving them away and accusing critics of being right wing has, by now, been more than done enough to become a cliché—as much of one as associating political dissent with enabling terrorism. The fact is that the working class swung hard left after WWII; the combination of Red Scare, ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win’-type class war, Cold War liberalism and neoliberalism killed off most working class militancy. With the rise of neoliberalism and capitalist supremacism, liberal capitalists capitulated once again, just as they did throughout the Cold War, and abandoned the working class and left them to rot while withdrawing into enclaves of ideological purity. Within these enclaves, the most advanced ways of attempting to deal with systemic issues appear to involve the work of a theorist who died before much anyone knew of such things as global warming or neoliberalism. Otherwise, we find a milieu where the power of victimhood takes priority over building positive bridges and unity based on mutual understanding and class solidarity, nd becomes the basis for carving out performative, toxic fiefdoms of authority and influence, bereft of emancipatory content.

Under these conditions, resistance is reduced to alienated roles of permanent protest—the goal of the nominal left is to rise to the top of the toxic shitheap, such that they might be the ones to lead. The toxic influence of identity reductionism further infects radical left ghettos, becoming the basis for a competition to be winners of the Oppression Olympics—a certain parallel to the top dog competition on the right to be winners of the Tough Cunt Olympics. The self-appointed apostles and gurus of leftism fashion themselves saviours of the working class, and work to undermine anyone who questions their judgement too much by making them out to be wreckers and saboteurs, to associate them with reactionism. The informal hierarchies that arise are defended, paradoxically enough, in the name of protecting the emancipatory project from petit-bourgeois and reactionary elements—for which deference to liberal identity reductionism as a last resort against acknowledging failures of strategy on the left provides ample ammunition.

All told this would appear to help to account for the inability of the left to build on historical levels of working class dissatisfaction with the status quo of global capitalism. Without meaningful and constructive ways to address alienation and immiseration, fascist conspiracism recognises the opportunity and fills the void with ideologically-driven negativity and paranoia. The forces of progress are losing because we seem to imagine we can fend off the rising far right without a sizeable chunk of the proletariat—because we choose perfect enemies over imperfect allies. This of course begs the question as to where these attitudes come from—the idea perhaps that ignorance is an inherent quality of the working class, poor and lumpenproletariat, rather than the result of the neglect of their education by neoliberal governments of all shades, an effect of mass education in ‘imposing ignorance’ as per Chomsky, or even part of the colonialist project of disenfranchisement. Either the ‘redneck,’ ‘chav’ or ‘bogan’ is inherently reactionary, or they just somehow didn’t make it to finishing school. Suffice it to say that one of these views reflects an appalling classism.

To reiterate, the other side of the coin is that the growth of corporate power has, over the course of the last century or so, subverted political democracy via regulatory capture enabled by neoliberal ideology, subverted evangelicals with prosperity gospel, and fed the feedback loop with tax cuts to and deregulation of the ultra-wealthy, itself enabled by the coup by stealth on the part of public choice theory and corporatist libertarianism. Amidst this sordid state of affairs middle class liberals and laborites, and those aspiring to join them, did not even have to be offered anything—they just sold out, and then invented identity reductionism as a blunt instrument to stifle dissent, making assumptions and moving goalposts along the way as necessity dictates. As the chickens of world capitalism come home to roost in ever-deepening ecological and overaccumulation crises, the fascism that arises to save class privilege from political democracy is what results. The Brenton Tarrants and Rowan Baxters of the world are emboldened because the working class is too weak to challenge their cultural figureheads; needless to say, once they are legion all the hard fought for social reforms those of us who can only imagine democracy in political terms cherish will all vanish.

As Barabara Smith argues, ‘If the left ultimately wants to make a real difference, as opposed to settling for handouts, it must consider creating a multi-issue revolutionary agenda. This is not about political correctness, it’s about winning.’ Class consciousness and class solidarity is as equally important as revolutionary subjectivity; class reductionism does just justify identity reductionism. Solidarity with all oppressed people and classes is more important than single issue narrow range activism. Praxis is more important than smugness. Illusions to the contrary at this point are killing us; those who continue to entertain them can barely even hide your contempt for the poor—it fairly drips from them. Meanwhile the deplorables amongst the popular classes are being sucked into conspiracy land Qanon fascism, and the apostles of identity politics stripped of their class foundation have nothing to offer them, having fallen into the same collectively narcissistic, in-group exclusionary toxic cesspit as the right. As the inventors of identity reductionism, the far right have taken the ball and thrown it back in the faces of the arrogant wealthy liberals mocking the silly fascists in the cabarets. We don’t need a PhD in history to know what comes next.

The issue of linking various forms of hierarchical oppression to class hierarchy and acting on the basis of class solidarity against all forms of oppression shouldn’t be that hard to understand; ditto critical analysis of forms of nominal leftism that fail to make such linkages. If unreconstructed leftists want to fly off the handle over attempts at constructive self-criticism that is of course their choice, but it does beg the question as to whether their priorities are greater understanding, or reinforcing liberal orthodoxy against any intrusion of intersectional class politics. It is no one else fault but their own if they refuse to make a distinction between being criticised and being attacked, and invoke precisely the kind of single-issue politics being criticised on the basis of an ‘if you question my judgement the enemies of social equality win’-type logic to silence further discussion of the topic. The irony there is not hard to discern. The left in general has a strong tendency to confuse rejection of its principles and ideals, and rejection of its often hideous praxis—which often seems to involve behaviour approximating everything it alleges to oppose in the right on the basis of an ‘ends justifies the means’ kind of mentality. Of course means have to be consistent with ends, since the one determines the other—not the other way around.

If we want a left that is united enough to actually present effective resistance to the onslaught of far right reaction, which is becoming an ever more dire danger by the day, we have to deal with the reasons why the working class abandon progressive politics. If we want to lead instead of just reacting ourselves, maybe acknowledging the abandonment of the working class by nominal leftists who care about every form of hierarchical oppression except those rooted in class hierarchy might not be a bad place to start. Those who do give a rats about class oppression might do well to ask themselves how it comes to pass that we have a nominally left politics that fails to consider the synergy between forms of othering such as misogyny and racism and capitalism, and the systemic role of various forms of bigotry in blaming the victims of autocratic social relations rooted in class. If we fail to make these causal connections and act on that systemic critique through a politics of class solidarity, on what grounds can we then complain that the working class have been seduced by far right demagogues who take advantage of the void thus created? We can’t.

We need to be better than this.


Ben Debney is a PhD candidate in history at Western Sydney University, Bankstown. He is the author of The Oldest Trick in the Book: Panic-Driven Scapegoating in History and Recurring Patterns of Persecution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Wildcat Ocular lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.