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They play, we pay, says Victor Anderson. And how to make a fair CoP.

The political story unfolding now is completely outrageous if you stop to think about it. In 2008, financial wheeling and dealing brought the world economy to the brink of a precipice which was only pulled back from by major programmes of government spending, funded by borrowing. These were the ‘fiscal stimulus packages’ put forward by the Obama, Brown, and most other governments around the world.

They worked pretty well, but the consequence was debt, a debt built up not through government waste and extravagance, but caused by the need to respond to the financial crisis created by the speculators. Of course a lot of people have relatively small amounts of money in pension funds, but the big money which dominates the world of financial speculation belongs to a combination of large companies and rich individuals.

In 2010, and much more so in 2011 and 2012, the chickens are coming home to roost. The debts, created essentially by the irresponsibility of the rich and economically powerful, are to be repaid, and the question which arises is, who is going to pay?

The answer is going to depend a lot on how squeamish the Liberals get when local public services start to be cut back, and how much support and strength the trade unions can still muster when they really try. However there would surely be something grotesque about David Cameron, who had one of the most privileged educations in the world - not only at Eton, but less famously, also at the prep school (Heatherdown) where the Queen sent two of her princes, Andrew and Edward – cutting back on the opportunities in life of those who are far less fortunate than he was. Hence the master-stroke of appointing as the minister in charge of government spending, a Liberal, Danny Alexander, to take the blame.

Climate change has become such a big issue that it can lead us to forget about the world’s other ecological difficulties. An important event coming up in October may put this right. Two international treaties were signed in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders discussing environment and development problems - accompanied of course by thousands of advisors, negotiators, lobbyists, and protesters. One was on climate change, the other on biological diversity and ecosystems.

Both treaties included provision for follow-up meetings (“Conferences of the Parties”, or “CoPs”). A Climate Change CoP was held last December, in Copenhagen. The next Biodiversity CoP is this October, in Nagoya, Japan. It is potentially a key meeting, although of course Copenhagen, which must be counted a failure, was potentially a key meeting too, but failed because of conflicts between the interests of different governments.

There are a few factors which might make Nagoya turn out better. First, the European Union was annoyed by the way Copenhagen turned out, despite the efforts of the EU to provide leadership for the process. Taking the initiative for Nagoya, as the EU is now trying to do, is a way of reaffirming an important role for Europe in the world. Second, the scientific community is stirring, and wants to set up an equivalent to the hugely influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Currently this is being called Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, but maybe someone will come up with a catchier title in time for the October conference.

Thirdly, sections of business are taking an interest. If you sell tinned fish, you might be getting worried about depletion of fish stocks. If you grow anything at all, you might get worried about soil quality and water supply. A business bandwagon is starting to roll – one sign of which is the ‘Business of Biodiversity’ event coming up at London’s ExCel Centre on July 13th/14th.

A combination of business concern and scientific evidence is feeding into a programme of work highlighting the economic aspects of ecosystem destruction – ‘TEEB’, which stands for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. This is timed to produce its final report ready for October.

There is a problem, however, about money. The 1992 Biodiversity Convention established a mechanism whereby rich countries can pay poor countries to protect the ecosystems the whole world depends on, such as the rainforests. However in practice, not a lot of money has changed hands: the political will and organised public support has been lacking. Ecosystem destruction is principally about changes in land use – farming replacing wild land, mining and road-building in forests, industry and buildings taking up more and more space. This is only likely to change if the incentives not to destroy ecosystems are greater than the current incentives to destroy them – and that could be very expensive.

Previous 'Planet Earth' columns

Prepare to be disappointed by the quality of debate in the upcoming election, says Victor Anderson. And how did we get into this situationist situation anyway?

General elections are always disappointing. There is always the hope beforehand that the election campaign will be a chance to focus the public’s attention on important issues. Many organisations have the bright idea that they will at last be able to get politicians to take notice of their favourite issues, since this is the time when politicians are at their most vulnerable, when there are no MPs, only candidates.

However the media take a different view. They see the election as a debate between political parties. Campaign groups are seen as an irrelevance, and even an interference in the democratic process if they contravene the restrictions imposed by charity law. The BBC is bound by a set of legal obligations which tie them not simply to the parties, but to giving time to parties in proportions depending on the previous election result, always making it difficult for new parties to break through.

The parties themselves are increasingly centralised organisations, centralising their mechanisms for selecting candidates and controlling election messages. Instead of a whole range of opinion being expressed, reflecting the real range of opinion within a party, the tendency is to only give a hearing to a single narrowly defined and market-researched “party line”.

The great debate we could have, given that this is society at the most democratic point in the political cycle, is routinely denied to us as we sink beneath the repetition of sound bites, exhaustively tested beforehand on focus groups to ensure the words are palatable.

The recent death of Michael Foot, Labour Party Leader in the early 80s, is a reminder of how we got here. He was a civilised and principled man, but the 1983 election campaign he led was shambolic and ended in disaster for the Labour Party. That defeat is the origin of New Labour, and New Labour in turn is the model for David Cameron’s attempted updating of the Conservative Party.

Those two options make the coming general election particularly depressing. Labour and Conservative have bought each other’s policies to an unprecedented extent, despite some disagreement about public expenditure cuts, mainly about their timing. The Liberals, who at some elections where Labour and Conservative were close together, presented some sort of radical alternative, are back in the centre-ground. This is therefore likely to be an election in which many people will turn to the Greens, independents, BNP, and UKIP, mainly just to send a message to the others.

Once again, it will be the Greens who will be the only UK party with any serious sense of where we are in history and any realistic idea of the state the world is in. Let’s hope they can get a hearing at this election.

One political trend from the 1960s and 70s which seems to be making a small comeback is the set of ideas known as “Situationism”. Some of its writings are now out in new translations from the French. Their books, such as Vaneigem’s ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’ and Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, were an influence on the attempted revolution of May ’68 in France, and in Britain in the 70s were an influence on punk.

How does their analysis read now? Very differently, I think, and not only because of the failure of the revolts of 1968. Far from having become extremely unpopular and relegated to the forgotten outer fringes of political theory, many of their ideas have simply become absorbed into common sense.

Their criticisms of consumer society stressed the totally misleading nature of the claims made by conventional politics and commercial advertising. Since they wrote, people’s resistance to the messages presented to them has steadily increased. There is now a general cynicism about the claims we are bombarded with, which it takes someone like Obama to break through.

That sense of being systematically tricked seems to be at the root of the dangerous and growing phenomenon of climate change denial. Cynicism about messages has become so indiscriminate that even the clearest scientific evidence is held in suspicion. We are at a point where there are some messages we urgently need people to believe, and yet it feels like we’ve thrown away the means which can communicate them. Is there anyone who people will believe? If the thoroughly documented and virtually unanimous consensus of the worldwide scientific community isn’t enough to persuade people of something, what will?

Maybe there is some strange contradictory historical thread here, whereby some of the most radical and challenging ideas of the 1960s have led on to a cynicism so generalised that people have been left unable to believe some of the most important messages they will ever hear.

The failure of the Copenhagen climate negotiations indicates some important facts about how we organise ourselves as a species. Though we can try pinning the blame on one country or another, the underlying reality at the talks was the sheer lack of a sense of common interests and common good. What ought to have been a deal in everyone’s interests turned out, whatever version of a deal was considered, to be at someone’s expense and to someone else’s benefit.

The big division was – predictably – between rich and poor. Poorer countries wanted to have room for economic development, and therefore generally didn’t want their carbon emissions limited. Richer countries wanted an agreement but weren’t prepared to sign up in any credible way to paying for it.

This is a very straightforward illustration of the fact that old questions like inequalities of wealth and income continue to be relevant, however much we might want green politics to be ‘new’, different, and moving beyond those boring old divides.

Countries with less inequality, such as Denmark and Sweden, have tended to be the countries which have found it easier to address environmental issues, because of the sense of common interest, and what is true within countries was repeated on a global scale at Copenhagen.

The other issue which made the talks fail was the problem of running negotiations in which 192 separate states have a veto. Nation-states are generally too big for some purposes, such as building economic resilience, but too small for others - including sorting out global issues like climate change. 2009 brought the downfall of the G8 – the eight rich country governments which used to run the world economy – and its replacement by the G20, bringing in rising powers like China and India. Maybe 2010 will end the current “G192”, moving us towards some more streamlined system for tackling the problems of the planet.

Too much virtue makes me anxious. The history of Puritanism still weighs heavily on the culture of Britain and the United States, not as the dominant strand but always there as an alternative to be turned to whenever times get tough. It is what many people are turning to now in the face of environmental threats.

“If only we changed our lifestyles, became better people, it would all be different…” There is of course some truth in that, but it is a view with a negative side too. It can divert our attention from the arrangements we make as a whole society: what sorts of technologies and buildings we have, how we organise and reward work, what the tax system looks like, what the political structures are.

Go into many bookshops with “Green Issues” sections and you can find plenty of books on how to count or cut your carbon, but often nothing at all on the economics or politics of what has got us into the current mess and what might get us out.

It is the standard practice of the capitalist system to make every problem a problem for the individual, shifting the effort to deal with what affects us all as a society out from politics and over into lifestyle. Then add to that the various ways of making money out of lifestyle choices. The result is that instead of the members of a society deciding together how to tackle, for example, the problems of the environmental impacts of retailing, we have the establishment of “the green consumer” as just another market segment, together with an extra price mark-up to reflect the cost of virtue, even where the product is in fact no more expensive to the retailer.

Movements for social change have often started in this sort of way, through small groups of people taking a set of things seriously, living in a different way, and alerting others. Virtue undoubtedly has a value – but it is only a start, and it is unlikely to be the form in which a movement will spread and gain very wide support, because the numbers of people who respond to that sort of call are simply not enough to make the decisive changes required.

In particular, like successful social movements in the past, the green movement needs to speak to self-interest as well as altruism, for example about sustaining food and energy supply, and about a better quality of life, not just the reduction of our ecological footprints.

A larger movement is not simply a larger version of a small movement. Environmentalism seems to have got stuck at a particular stage, just about the maximum size for a movement primarily built on virtue, but currently not moving beyond that to persuade the larger numbers of people whose support is going to be essential.

Victor Anderson works as an economist for an environmental campaigning organisation.

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