Nicholas
@_nic_beuret_
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It’s not doom if it’s a best case scenario. Author of ‘The War of Transition: the fight for our survival in the green economy’, out 2025 @versobooks
Suffolk, UK
Joined January 2009
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Global South: our time is now, burn the plantation, No more tribute to Empire
Degrowthers: ✊ We can all live beautiful lives together
US Left: NOOO, MY BANANAS. MUST HAVE BANANA IN CONVENIENT DRIVE THROUGH. BACK TO THE PLANTATION. HERE HAVE AIR CONDITIONING ON BANANA TREES
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The king of England is going to make a killing from climate change. The crown owns most of the seabed around England, meaning off shore wind farms have to pay rent through leasing programs. The Crown’s renewable assets are worth £4.3bn, with the seabed accounting for much of it.
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“In September 2023, for the second year in a row, Europe almost ran out of olive oil. Drought, fire and storms devastated olive crops, driving Spanish harvests down 50%.... Spain produces 50% of the global olive harvest, and accounts for 70% of the EU’s supply.”
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What I don’t get about the anti-degrowth argument is that there is not a single future where we stay below 2C of global warming and there isn’t an immediate reduction in carbon emissions. And there isn’t a single future where that reduction happens and there isn’t degrowth.
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Where’s the around the clock coverage? Where are the international teams of rescuers?
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On the defection of voters from the Tories to the Greens, the FT quotes O’Hara: “it’s essentially a set of reactions against modernity on both left and right”
Except it’s not. Its pretty clear that we are seeing the emergence of a new conservationism 🧵
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One of the things I didn’t expect to see when researching my book The Climate Squeeze was that the green economy isn’t - for the Global North - a manufacturing economy. It’s a service economy, overwhelmingly just installing things other ppl make. 1/2
U.S. total industrial production has basically flatlined since January 2022…
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Just building low carbon infrastructure uses up half our 1.5C carbon budget. Any actual global justice uses up most of the rest. You want to stay below 2C - you have to reduce material and energy expenditure. You have to stop some things, de-marketise others.
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Full PhD scholarship w/ me.
Come research the human rights dimensions of degrowth and postgrowth!
We are looking for proposals that explore both obstacles and opportunities in existing degrowth practices and pathways
Applications close 31 May
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Beyond this the crown is one of the largest rentiers in the UK, and part of the aristocratic class that owns 30% of England’s land. Less than 1% of the population own more than 2/3rds of the land in England.
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The crown has also made £1.2bn from two duchies - Lancaster and Cornwall. The crown’s claim dates back to C13th, and has been contested since the advent of parliamentary democracy. They are tax exempt, and the source of vast rents for the crown.
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I’ve a new article out!
Mapping the catastrophic imaginary.
“what we see when we examine the images and texts within contemporary environmentalism are three contradictory refrains that work together to produce an environmentalism without nature.”
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Fossil fuel companies made $400bn last year while $1tn was invested in more fossil fuel extraction. We are at 1.3C of climate change
#blockadeeverything
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You have to grow somethings for sure, but a lot of others have to go. In the aggregate - which is what we are talking about - there is only degrowth or catastrophic warming. Just ‘ending capitalism’ doesn’t get the job done.
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For the past 2 yrs, only 2.4mn tonnes of olive oil was produced globally, far short of the annual demand of 3.2mn tonnes.
Spain, Italy and Greece have suffered droughts. Morrocco, Syria and Turkey all imposed export bans or partial bans
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@VersoBooks
Ps - also, one of my favourite olive oil things is just how much rampant fraud is in the industry, from mislabeling Turkish oil as Italian to just passing off other cooking oils as olive oil. I.e.,
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Sabotage has already long been used by environmental movements. But Malm refuses to engage with the tactic at its peak or talk about the lessons learnt. And there is no mention of the far more crucial tactic of the blockade
@novaramedia
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But - why are UK consumers demanding cucumbers and tomatoes IN FEBRUARY? We need to ask what kind of food culture and system we have produced that relies on out of season produce to feed people, in a period of profound supply chain disruption. 8/8. Ends.
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The opiate is the idea - on the Left - that we could undertake a program of growth and sufficiently reduce CO2 emissions. That technology will *save us* from more substantive changes, specifically to the types of lives the minority of us live. This is shear fantasy.
A program that never came close to passing is “the opiate of the masses.”
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“What’s the price of something the whole world needs but we don’t have any of?”
The green transition will be a war zone.
Critical minerals will drive geopolitical conflict, inflation and, a renewal of colonialism.
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“Greece’s crop was down by 2/3s, while Italy & Portugal also suffered poor harvests. Tunisia, Turkey & Syria stopped exporting oil. Globally, production fell short of demand, with only 2.4mtn produced against demand for 3m tn. Prices skyrocketed, climbing in the UK by 38.2%.” 2/4
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When I did my PhD research in climate politics, I found two tendencies. The first is Liberal Utopianism, or the abstract utopian belief in liberal institutions as solutions. The other was Radical Fatalism- the hope catastrophe could provide the revolution we failed to create.
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@VersoBooks
It's also not about middle class salad dressing.
"Cooking oils – from sunflower oil to palm oil – contribute between 10-20% of people’s daily calories globally. Any crisis in the production of cooking oils is significant."
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England is a rentier’s paradise as Brett Christophers has set out in Rentier Capitalism. The monarchy and surviving aristocratic class are no anachronism but the spine of this arrangement. The land should be ours.
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@Matthuber78
you can call it what ever you want, but in the context of France and who Melenchon references, it definitely is a core part of degrowth socialism
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We aren’t in an emerging ‘war regime’ - neoliberalism was built on military spending, the growth of the private security industry (w/ growth rates at around 8% or so per year), the militarisation of the police and the fortification of border regimes.
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Sweden found the largest rare earth mineral deposit in the EU in Lapland, where the Sami cont. to suffer from colonial rule. It is also the site of a huge green industrialisation project - the power needed for it all will take up 1/3 of Sweden’s electricity resources.
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Where did all the salad go in the UK? Is it Brexit? The weather? A thread 1/8
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It's not cohered yet into more than a broad revulsion at pollution, destruction of remnants of woodlands, etc, and a desire to have access to nature. So far the Greens are the only group to mobilise this base. But we could be seeing the beginning of a new conservationism
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King Charles is a landlord king, who directly rents out hundreds of homes making millions/year, on top of farmland and commercial properties that are also rented out or leased. His estate is worth between £250m-£390m / yr
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Our ‘business as usual’ future is one of armed fascist lifeboats
It’s also no mistake that these countries are centres of resurgent far right politics grounded in imperialism and settler colonialism
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The Green’s have been steadily increasing their council seats in East Anglia for almost 20yrs. But what’s happened in the past 4 is a surge. It’s not one “against modernity” [FT quote], but more of a ‘final straw’ moment as enviro damage accelerates.
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Norway's parliament has given the go-ahead for deep sea mining. The rationale is demand for minerals for the green transition, in line with other enclosures across the north in Sami territory. This will be profoundly destructive - the green economy is anything but ecological.
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The brown is where the far right came in first place yesterday in France. The blue is the centre-right. Within five years this will be most of Europe. As the climate squeeze intensifies, the social tensions will only get worse while elites do nothing but plunder whats left.
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There might be a global surge in renewable energy production but until this line hits zero it doesn't mean anything
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“Almost all global thresholds for a “safe and just” planet have already been breached, including for the climate, ecosystems and freshwater, according to new research.”
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Um, say what? Like my man, surely reducing flights and the consumption of stuff that’s clearly just destructive or beyond biospheric limits is the plan here?
@BigMeanInternet
@jonevins1
@nikifab77
@KevinClimate
I don't actually think we necessarily should reduce consumption. I'm w/
@Leigh_Phillips
on this - the goal should be a state-lead decarbonization of the industry in the interests of Sara Nelson & unions in the sector (not to mention working class ppl who might want to travel).
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As we wait to see if rain will arrive, 28% of Europe is in some kind of drought warning.
Reservoirs are at historically low levels, and conflict is already emerging around water supplies - from infrastructure to embodied water in fruit.
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Sleaford Mods are are just a mid band playing to an audience of centrist dads who think they’re radical bc they listened to punk when they were at uni
How to destroy any notion of being some brave political band speaking truth to power in 10 seconds.
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Britain Already Has Its Own Climate Refugees - in
@novaramedia
There are already 21 villages in England under threat from sea lvl rise. 126 in France.
Europe is being smashed by climate change. And the places we take for granted are being lost.
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1/3rd of all food produced globally is wasted. That waste produces half of the carbon from the global food system. Waste is not accidental but a necessary part of the global business model.
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“Prices in most markets for cooking oils are up by 30% just in 2023, with increases globally of 160% between 2020-2022, while sales have fallen between 10-20%. Demand is increasing faster than supply”. 3/4
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US socialists:
air conditioned luxury cruises with unlimited bananas for the working class
UN food program:
“We are entering a humanitarian doom loop – where we save people who are starving, at the cost of millions of others…”
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Sewage, trashed beaches and rivers, tree’s felled in town centres (which is what cost the tories the most in many areas), development *for London* at other’s expense. Bad housing development, etc - nature is taking a renewed beating.
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XR reached deep into rural and exurban areas. Down the road from me in Sudbury there was a group - there were groups everywhere. After XR’s peak, and the pandemic lockdowns, most of these ppl refocused on their local areas.
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All the arguments against
#degrowth
essentially come down to the idea that it’s politically unrealistic. The claims of how it won’t work don’t stand scrutiny, so opposition comes down to the idea that the ‘masses’ (meaning ppl in the US) won’t want it.
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The digital world can never be made sustainable unless like everything else in the economies of the Global North it degrows. Today’s cloud traffic is estimated to be 50 zettabytes a year. 1 zettabyte is a billion trillion bytes.
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There are large numbers of ppl in new campaign groups, inc. Right to Roam, and active through existing nature charities; throughout this milieu there is a shared affect around not only wanting to stop further destruction but have access to something more than concrete.
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Despite a water shortage & rapidly accelerating sea level rise, the new Sizewell nuke reactor is getting the all clear. Should be finished by the time we hit 2C, require immediate action to be saved from coastal erosion, & a desalination plant to run.
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The Green Transition will open up new commodity frontiers across Europe.
By 2030, EU demand for rare earth minerals for wind turbines will increase 5x, but global supplies will only dbl. By 2050, demand for lithium = 60x higher & 15x higher for cobalt.
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Deep sea mining likely to start this summer, contrary to the UN’s High Seas Treaty that protects marine biodiversity, with Glencore leading the way in order to secure critical transition minerals. This will begin a new wave of devestation in ocean.
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These activists, combined with other ppl who had renewed their ecological relationships via the pandemic, mean there is now a huge body of ppl who want to conserve what little nature’s left. Many live in Tory constituencies.
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Why are all the ppl who say degrowth will hurt workers not actual workers but academics, or commentators or ‘entrepreneurs’? It’s almost like they feel their bougie lifestyle was at risk?
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The industrial working class won't be revived - what is happening is a dbling down on sole traders, small businesses and contractors. This is technically the petit bourgeoise, but it would be better to think of it as a commercial class, one of precarious small businesses 2/2
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We've cracked 1.5C. No one believes we're staying below 2C. Any politics that doesn't centre adaption to a 2-3C world is just not serious politics.
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France is refusing to evacuate its troops begging the question how far will France go to secure its uranium supplies from Niger? And seeing how pro-nuke the Wests green policies are, this looks like the kind of green imperialism we will be seeing much more of
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The whole mining sector is looking to go net zero, illustrating the abject poverty of the concept. Coal mines can’t be part of any net zero plan
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As Storm Babet closes in on the UK, its been revealed that more than "4,000 of England’s vital flood defences are so damaged they are almost useless". 800 critical assets where there is a high risk to life were in a “poor” or “very poor” condition"
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This is a stupid take.
The choice is not btwn a high-consumption fossil fuel economy & a high-consumption renewal economy, where peripheral communities outside major metro areas continue to be sacrificed for high-earners like John, but between what we have and something better.
Greens applying their approach to the climate emergency to a house fire:
“Help! Fire! Emergency!”
*Fire truck arrives*
“Woah that’s a very large and noisy vehicle, and that big hose might scare the cats. No we’re not saying don’t put it out, just do it by hand with buckets.”
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The top 10% of earners are driving inflation just as they are responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions. The solution to both problems is the same - ending the rich.
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The Left needs to stay far, far away from carbon removal technology and geoengineering. It's not just a false solution; it's a delusion of mastery that will make things much worse
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"The number of workers suffering from the “silent killer” of extreme heat in Europe and central Asia has increased by almost a fifth since 2000"
2.4 billion workers — 70% of the global workforce — are now at high risk of extreme heat.
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IEA: things are going great! Solar panels are falling from the sky!
World economy:
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This will further compound the devastation and injustice of the green transition, inc. the inevitable green colonialism of the project to save capitalism from climate change. Meanwhile, over in Norway ->
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@novaramedia
Malm's vision is of heroic acts done by a vanguard. But heroic acts of sabotage don’t work on their own - this sort of adventurism leads nowhere, It’s only when its embedded in bigger, mass direct action movements that it works. thats the lessons of the 90s
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We aren't even close to staying below 1.5C, and 2C is looking heroic. *If* policies are implemented, we end up with 3C.
But *emissions are still rising*
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"For every degree Celsius that Earth's atmospheric temperature rises, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can increase by about 7%"
Just another day in paradise.
South east France this afternoon
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Postscript: Organising this class is not impossible - the petit bourgeoise has often been more involved in revolutions and rebellions that the industrial working class. But it does mean taking a different approach, one focused on communities not workplaces.
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The privatisation of climate politics is pushing us past 3C. The choice is between a planned economy and disaster capitalism.
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Why no one seems to give af about the ongoing occupation of Western Sahara (and why instead wealthy countries give military and political support to the occupation)
See:
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I don't care about Stonehenge & paint.
By 2090 1/3rd of the global population will live in temperatures inhospitable to human life. That’s not the worst case. The worst case if no action is taken is closer to 50%.
Global emissions increased last year
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The no. of ppl who fear a loss of freedom that comes from green transitions & the no. of men into far right toxic masculinity is far far larger than most imagine. They are close to completely merging into a resurgent fascism that is likely to win the coming war of transition.
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Ecomodernism is just a way of saying the future is consumerism AND death. Degrowth is no more politically unrealistic than some Jetson’s tech-utopian future. The difference is in the end degrowth is scientifically necessary.
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One of the implications of this is that politics will increasingly return to the forms that characterised the last period of ecological 'undersupply'. Expect the moral economy and the food riot to feature heavily as social reproduction becomes the basis for political action
...If you've been following
@macrodosepod
over the last 18 months or so, you'd be on top of this: inflation is *increasingly* going to be a side-effect of climate change, not "excess demand", not "money printing", not some other 19th/20th century theory.
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@meadwaj
Unlikely. The old socialist left will just spend their time demanding the Greens just adopt their ideas. The challenge posed by environmentalism and ecological economics is too great to be engaged with, so it will just be ignored.
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This is what the left should be about. Absolute 🔥
Beautiful speech by
@JLMelenchon
on free time, explaining what the fight in France is really about
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George here manages to write an entire response to
@csmaje
without actually addressing any of the main criticisms of Chris' book. Namely that
@GeorgeMonbiot
presents a technological fantasy of abundance that does nothing to actually address future food production.
I would love everyone in environmental movements to read this essay. It’s a painful, difficult but really important subject. By avoiding it we give a clear run to those whose proposals would lead, literally, to the deaths of billions. Please RT. Thank you.
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I'm sick of liberals thinking that opposing development can only be anti-green, when the actual green position is to develop appropriately in dialogue with local communities while reducing material and energy usage, esp the excess consumption of high-earners
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If the banana socialists were *that* triggered by the idea that maybe their abundant fruit was the result of ecologically destructive forms of super-exploited labour in the Global South, wait till they hear about peak fish
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That smaller scale labour intensive farming is more productive per acre is now well est. scientifically. But the debate in the Left isn't around yield/acre but abt labour - specifically, who would actually want to farm. The debate is over what the future of work will look like.
What’s certainly true is industrial commodity-crop farming produces more $ output per unit labour input, often by growing crops unnecessary for human nutrition, expanding the agricultural land-take or using agrochemicals bad for human/ecosystem health. But this isn’t sustainable
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@Matthuber78
This is terrible - beyond failing to understand the diff between value and wealth (so much for Marx I guess), it goes on to say despite a ton of peer reviewed analysis debunking absolute decoupling, it exists bc some guy in the FT says so. The rest is just same old non-arguments
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New article for
@the_ecologist
There is growing evidence of a series of marine die-offs connected to new ‘low carbon industrial hubs’ in the UK. Despite attempted cover-ups, we can add marine die off to the impacts of the transition to net zero in the UK.
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"It is estimated that under a global warming greater than 2 degrees, temperatures above 50 °C will be recorded in all continents except Antarctica, with maxima over the Arabic Peninsula"
Unthinkable before, but we show that 50°C
#heatwaves
will be yearly occurrences in the Mediterranean by the end of the century. Brace yourselves for a new climate reality.
#ClimateChange
#GlobalWarming
#ClimateCrisis
@StottPeter
@MetOffice_Sci
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Banana socialist is my new favourite phrase and no revolution can take it from me.
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This is fucked
“The International Seabed Authority's member nations on Friday agreed on a two-year roadmap for the adoption of deep sea mining regulations”
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This FT piece on how climate change will change tourism is wild. jfc - Idk where to begin:
"For many well-off people, the first tangible effect of climate change will be that it shifts where we go on vacation... a new global holiday map will emerge fast."
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This is a fantastic piece reconcieving the long C20th
“left-populism is best conceived as an attempt to construct a project state without a muscular civil society or labor movement”
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This is a great example of the theory of differential accumulation set out in Capital as Power, where inflation is treated as a primary means of accumulation, pitting not only capital against workers, but large business against SMEs
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“When I came in, it really was so hot. I decided I need to go on strike. I told my co-workers because it is way too hot here and I knew they were all extremely hot as well”
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Working from Graeber's insight that bureaucracies seem stupid bc they enact forms of structural violence, I'm exploring the politics of bureaucratic neglect not as an accidental policy but as the form adaption will take in an age of post-austerity
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3.3m ppl in the US were displaced last year by disaster. In the UK, sea lvl rise puts 200,000 homes are at risk by 2050, with a further 600,000 at river flooding risk. There is no govt plan for this – Norfolk in 2012 was already planning on abandoning whole towns.
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This thread was great up until the point where Matt got to the heart of the problem - material and ecological limits. I think it’s clear that you can only really be pro-growth if you reject limits (aka deny the science). It’s good that’s clear!
But a soon as the science around 'planetary boundaries' was proposed, it was debated/questioned by other scientists. Even if they are fixed/settled science, as I've already shown, solving one (GHG/atmosphere) requires *expanding* production. 10/x
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Reason
#237
why the ‘green economy’ is just not that green.
Chemical companies tell Europe - ban forever chemicals and there can’t be green economy bc all your green tech uses them
“You can’t have electric vehicles without fluoropolymers, you can’t have semiconductors,”
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Houthi resistance in support of a free Palestine is having a profound impact. Not only has the Israeli port of Eilat declared bankruptcy, shipping costs are at lvls not seen since COVID, w the cost of a container going from $1,660 a yr ago to almost $6,000 to move.
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This is fantastic
“Read in this light, we might view the present attachment to bananas among the Western left as a kind of fetishistic disavowal of the knowledge that they cannot continue to appropriate the lion’s share of the global surplus of enjoyment and value”
"If countries in the Global South committed to a socialism founded on agroecological principles, they would, in turn, put their productive capacities toward meeting their own needs, rather than growing surpluses."
Fantastic stuff from
@akbesigye
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@Matthuber78
yh, except this article is dumb. The AfD are 'winning' over voters over the cost of the transition, focusing on heatpumps, when Germans get the highest subsidies per household of any nation. And the backlash is led by the 3.2m landlords in Germany.
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