Lessons from Climate Camp
Here’s another article Lucy and I did for the English edition of Ha’aretz this weekend.
NORFOLK – Camping in a field, in the rain, in the shadow of a coal-fired power station in southern England, is probably not most people’s idea of a fun holiday excursion. This description, however, belies the excitement of becoming part of the United Kingdom’s newest and most rapidly growing social movement.
At first sight, the Camp for Climate Action, which took place earlier this month in Kent, seemed like a festival of activism, with over 3,000 participants and dozens of workshops, political demonstrations, music, films and a level of discussion that one British MP on hand described as “more sophisticated and informed than the Houses of Parliament.” Yet what the Climate Camp really represented was a glimpse at the kind of egalitarian social relations, small-scale technologies and fundamental change of attitudes toward energy use that may well be our only way to avert dangerous climate change and to cope with the recent peak in oil production.
The grass-roots climate movement in the U.K. is in part an expression of frustration with the British government’s lack of meaningful action. While Britain may be talking the talk on the international stage, the latest battle revolves around plans to build two new coal-fired power stations at Kingsnorth. These would guarantee that the country does not meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, as established in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol.
As oil prices soar, coal, which emits the most CO2 on combustion, seems far more cost-effective. New coal mines are opening worldwide, from the United States to China. The Kingsnorth plants would be Britain’s first new coal plants in 20 years, and are likely to be the first of a new generation. While the power station is expected to emit 8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, energy supplier E.ON spins it as “clean coal” – promising that in the future, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will be installed to absorb the emissions. The problem is that this much trumpeted “clean coal” technology, according to EU calculations, will not be commercially viable until 2020, with a further decade required to install CCS in all existing power stations, at the staggering cost of 600,000 euros per megawatt of capacity. As a result, any proposed coal-fired station would still emit huge amounts of CO2 until CCS technologies arrive, if they ever do.
Meanwhile, Israel is also applying the same short-term and irresponsible thinking in giving the go-ahead for a new coal-fired power station in Ashkelon, without even the false promise of CCS.
This wide gap between the rhetoric and reality of climate change highlights the difficulty that most governments struggle with in addressing the trade-off between economic growth, climate change and peak oil. The general attitude in most of the developed world – Israel included – is that increases in energy demand are a given. All we need to do is throw enough money at new technologies, and human ingenuity will somehow enable us to carry on with our over-consumption of energy without destroying the conditions for our existence on this planet. However, the reality of climate change and peak oil is that we cannot simply continue with business as usual.
Technological change alone is not the solution to climate change. New technologies are definitely part of a solution, but it’s a dangerous illusion to believe that climate change is simply a technical problem that must be solved. It is essentially a social problem, caused by our civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels to do literally everything. The solutions will thus require widespread social, political and economic change. Nevertheless, most governments and corporations have thrown all their energy into the present “clean-tech” boom, with a market size estimated at over $55 billion, illustrating that the motivations for developing new technologies are mainly spurred by profit potential.
If we want to avert dangerous climate change we simply don’t have time to wait for new technology. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that if carbon emissions in developed countries are not dramatically reduced by 2015, the “tipping point” for climate instability is likely to be approached, genuinely threatening the very conditions for life on the planet. We must act now to reduce our energy consumption, focusing on technologies that are already available, rather than dwelling on the future promise of CCS or hydrogen. More importantly, we must begin to radically restructure our societies toward sustainable models, based on diversified and self-sufficient local economies, and production for needs rather than profits. In the U.K., the Transition Town movement is another grass-roots-led movement that has seen concerned citizens across the country coming together to make “energy descent” plans for the transition of their locality to a low-carbon economy. Use of more localized systems of production and exchange should not only reduce these towns’ carbon footprint, but ensure that they survive and actually thrive in an age of oil scarcity.
Israelis, alongside their enthusiasm for techno-fixes, should take note of such responses to the twin threats of climate change and peak oil, if they are genuinely interested in addressing these vital issues of our time.
Uri Gordon, the author of “Anarchy Alive!” (Pluto Press), teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Lucy Michaels is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Desert Research in Sde Boker.