Tag: George Monbiot

George Monbiot’s wake-up call!

We are losing our fundamental rights.

I follow George Monbiot, and have had his permission for some time to republish his articles.

I was born in November, 1944, some six months before the end of WWII. Over all these years, I have read countless essays and articles about the state of countries, and the world.

However, George’s latest article is the most serious reflection on the state of things, effected by the rich and powerful, that I have ever read. I’m sure I speak for millions of other people.

Read this now!

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Our 1933 Moment

Posted on the 4th August 2026

At astonishing speed, around the world, fundamental rights are being cancelled at the behest of oligarchs and corporations.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  31st July 2026

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

At a global summit convened by the US government earlier this month, the Trump administration officials Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent explained that they were redirecting counterterrorism efforts away from Islamic jihadism and towards “the political left”. Most of the examples they cited to justify this shift were more than 30 years old. Several times they had to dig down to the 1970s to find a sufficiently menacing threat. You could hear the barrel being scraped.

Without producing a shred of evidence, Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that the Cuban government is “inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the west”. The following week, his department sought to justify this claim with a report containing a long list of leftwing legislators, journalists and activists that attempted to link them to Cuba in ways that ranged from the tenuous to the hilarious. This is a well-honed tactic, used prolifically by the Nazis among others: they claimed dissenters, by definition, were part of an international communist conspiracy. They insisted, as Rubio did, that “it is time to crush this evil for ever”.

That wasn’t the only crude reminder. Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, maintained that when you see antifascist protests, “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism … their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.” I’m just surprised he didn’t say “untermenschen”. The US government, by contrast, promotes “normal, healthy, ordered living”.

But what hit me even harder was Miller’s attack on “jury nullification”: jurors acquitting people who, he said, were “obviously guilty”. Shutting down this possibility has been an aim of illiberal governments and conservative judges around the world. We saw it in the UK in the prosecution of Trudi Warner and others for holding signs that state an ancient principle in English law: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience.”

We see it in the astonishing prosecution, being pursued at the moment, of Rajiv Menon KC, who reminded jurors of this right at the trial of the Palestine Action campaigners he was defending. He became, as a result, the first lawyer in English history to be charged with contempt of court for a closing speech. If convicted, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment and will be struck off. Prosecuting lawyers for defending their dissident clients is more or less the definition of authoritarianism.

We also saw it in the assault Keir Starmer launched on jury trials as a whole, greatly curtailing, without any coherent justification, our strongest defence against injustice.

Starmer was a weak man, without a clear vision of his own, who was rolled by any powerful state or corporate lobby. He was no match for a well-funded and highly effective international campaign. A network of groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by corporations and billionaires, has been producing “model legislation”. The groups test these laws in sympathetic jurisdictions. If they are found to work, they then press for their adoption elsewhere. The result is a sustained assault on our rights to protest, to political equality and to a habitable planet.

The globalisation of this attack on our fundamental rights is a key conservative aim. As capital operates everywhere, so should its ability to crush our objections. The long series of vicious anti-protest laws in the UK is an outcome of sustained lobbying by junktanks, the media and other governments. The result is a country that now keeps hundreds of political prisoners, a country in which you can get six months in jail for marching slowly down the street.

These oppressive laws have culminated – so far – in an act of parliament passed in April that enables the police to shut down any protest they deem to have a “cumulative” impact on the community. The only protests that have ever succeeded are those with a cumulative impact. Protest is acceptable as long as it’s useless. Let the people have their say, but only if we can’t hear them.

The new laws have been accompanied by that age-old trick, traditionally associated with fascist regimes, of smearing leftwing dissidents as terrorists. As the rights group Liberty has pointed out, the definition of terrorism here has greatly expanded, to incorporate tactics formerly regarded as civil protest. This is what enabled Starmer’s government to ban Palestine Action.

The judge who referred Menon for contempt, Mr Justice Johnson, was also the first – at the same trial – to use the extraordinary powers quietly inserted by the Conservatives into the Sentencing Act 2020. These enable someone tried for one crime to be sentenced for another. The four Palestine Action protesters were convicted of ordinary crimes. But, without informing the jury, Johnson marked the case as having a “terrorist connection”. He then sentenced them for terrorist offences, which means much more prison time.

Already, his example has been followed by another judge: a different group of pro-Palestine protesters, who sprayed red paint and broke some windows of a branch of Barclays Bank, are about to be sentenced as terrorists, though neither they nor the jurors were told of this possibility during their trial for criminal damage. This means, of course, that they were unable to defend themselves against this far more serious charge.

Nothing is safe from the billionaire assault on humanity. None of our rights, however ancient and familiar, are impregnable. Fight for them now or lose them, perhaps for ever.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Congratulations on George Monbiot for writng this. Congratulations to The Guardian newspaper for publishing this article on July 31st, 2026.

Our human rights, everywhere in the free world, have to be fought for.

As George Monbiot says: “Fight for them now or lose them, perhaps for ever.”

Feel absolutely free to republish this post wherever you wish.

Trashing the living world

The latest post from George Monbiot.

In a weird way, this post published by Geo Monbiot on the 24th July, 2026, reveals a similar vein to yesterday’s post about the Save Europe Act. I mean they are both about the unfair and unreasonable power held by those in political command.

Over to Mr Monbiot (and I have his permission to republish):

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Chickened-Out

Posted on 24th July 2026

Trashing the living world on behalf of corporate power: is this really all we can expect from the ministers in charge of protecting it?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd July 2026

There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the Environment Secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one who … no, they went, didn’t they? That other one …” It’s been like this for seven years.

Why? Because throughout this period, we’ve not had environment secretaries. We’ve had portals through which corporate lobbyists may pass. The last incumbent to represent the wider public interest (and I can scarcely bring myself to type these words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he’s widely remembered with loathing and disgust. Out of office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general astonishment, he placed the public good above special interests.

Standard operating procedure, by contrast, is exemplified by the final acts of the outgoing secretary, whose name, to put you out of your misery, is Emma Reynolds. To give just one example – which could be seen as an embodiment of everything that has gone wrong here – she spent her last weeks in the post trying to remove the brakes on industrial chicken farming.

In front of a parliamentary committee this month, she railed against the planning constraints holding back yet more giant chicken factories (let’s not grace them with the name of farms). If only these obstacles were demolished, she mused, “there is great investment out there waiting to be made … I want to bring down these barriers as much as you do”. She said she had spoken to other departments to ensure permission for new chicken factories was easier to obtain.

Neither she nor the MPs questioning her gave any hint of why these buildings have run into trouble with the planning system. In fact, there was no mention of any of the problems the factories cause: the MPs’ only apparent interest was in what the industry wanted. What’s the point of MPs if they simply channel corporate demands? But these factories are killing some of our most beautiful rivers. They generate far more dung than the surrounding fields can absorb. The surplus washes downhill into the nearest stream.

The only decision that counts is the planning decision. As soon as permission for a chicken unit is granted, the local tributary, and possibly the main stem of the river it drains into, is as good as dead. It’s not even as if these factories support jobs and growth: by killing the rivers, they help to destroy local economies.

I thought we’d won this argument. But argument, it seems, is no match for economic power. Reynolds’s loyalties appeared to lie not with the ecosystems she was meant to protect, but with the lobbyists threatening them. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising: before she joined Keir Starmer’s government, she worked as a lobbyist, representing the financial sector.

Disturbingly, it was the new environment secretary, Angela Eagle, while working as Reynolds’s deputy, who sought to drive through the “planning reforms” the poultry industry is demanding, telling chicken lobbyists “planning should enable ambition, not stifle it”. Will she now take Burnham’s “circuit breaker” promise seriously, and junk this appeasement of one of our most destructive industries?

At a recent farming festival, Reynolds claimed that boosting the poultry sector would enhance our food security. I don’t know how many times we need to point this out, but isn’t it bleeding obvious that it has the opposite effect? The feed sustaining chickens in these factories must be either imported or grown on land that could otherwise directly feed people. There could be more soya in chicken than in tofu: one report estimates that it takes 109g of soya to produce 100g of chicken breast. Yet this is just one of several components of their diet.

The chicken business in the UK is also controlled by a handful of giant companies: another security red light. If food security were the objective, the government would encourage us to eat fewer chickens and other animals, and more plants. But in parliament, Reynolds also proudly announced that she was disregarding the targets set by the government’s Climate Change Committee to reduce livestock numbers. I find myself asking, over and again: “Are they trying to harm this country?”

To advance their dismal agenda, Reynolds and Eagle set up something called the Farming and Food Partnership Board. Its aim is to encourage “closer collaboration between farming, industry and government”. How could it possibly be closer? The environment department, Defra, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the farming industry. The only members of this new board are government ministers and corporate representatives and lobbyists. Among its objectives is a “poultry sector growth plan”, to address the issue of “planning barriers”.

This chickening out is just one of many examples of how, by working for special interests, the environment department has harmed the ecosystems and the people it is supposed to protect. Another is the government’s “delivery plan” to restore nature, released by Reynolds just before she left office. It’s not a plan, and it won’t deliver: just a catalogue of vague hopes and blandishments. It could be summarised as “do nothing, for fear of offending landowners”. Far from meeting its promise to protect and restore 30% of the land in England by 2030, Reynolds’s department has presided over continued decline. That’s her legacy: less nature, less resilience, less security.

Much worse is planned: Starmer’s government proposed a “regulating for growth bill”, whose text we haven’t yet seen, but which appears to threaten even greater assaults on nature protection. It may contain one of his government’s most alarming proposals: creating a system that could be described as pop-up freeports, in which companies all over the country would be able to operate in temporary “sandboxes”, where the usual rules don’t apply. We should see this as a key test of Burnham’s promise to end neoliberalism: will he drop this nonsense?

I’ll keep asking the question, regardless of who occupies this office: do you know the name of the environment secretary? The answer is likely to depend on one factor: whether they are ready to break the grip of corporate power, and defend us and the rest of the living world. Whether, in other words, they want to do their job.

http://www.monbiot.com

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It makes for grim reading.

Thanks to George Monbiot for revealing the truth as to what is going on with the United Kingdom Government.

Has this UK Government gone insane!

A post by George Monbiot on the 9th July explains.

I looked up quotations about government, and this one caught my eye: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” — Thomas Paine.

Here is that post by George, republished with his permission.

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In Deep

Posted on 9th July 2026

The numbers are simply mind-blowing: up to £264 billion for a climate “solution” that will increase emissions. Has the government lost its mind?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th July 2026

The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.

Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.

Yes, £264bn. More than a quarter of a trillion. This cost will be divided between the public and private sectors. Given the record of CCS programmes so far, we can expect the public to carry most of it.

An investigation by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that roughly 25% of the public costs of CCS will be borne directly by the government, while the remainder will come from extra levies on our energy bills. The government should explain to the electorate that it intends to slap up to £198bn on our bills. Then see how that lands.

Even this might not be the end of it. Buried in an arcane side document is a government commitment to pay a “premium” for the hydrogen produced by the CCS programme for 15 years. This commitment is uncosted, but could run to tens of billions more.

But surely CCS is essential for cutting carbon emissions? That’s how the government has pitched it. On the contrary, this programme will massively increase them. The Climate Change Committee claims that the role of CCS is “limited to sectors where there are few, or no, alternatives”. But this is simply untrue. Its own data shows that only between 5% and 6% of the CCS deployment in the UK will be used to address the emissions of industrial sectors such as chemicals and cement, whose impact is hard to abate (though even here there are partial alternatives).

The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government’s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.

Its insistence that we need hydrogen made from fossil gas is also baseless. Its own figures show that producing hydrogen from gas with CCS will cost twice as much by 2050 as producing it from the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity.

The new CCS plants will mean massively more gas use than the UK would otherwise have required. Ultimately, that means more imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We now know that, thanks to methane leakage along the production and transport chain, LNG has higher emissions than coal. Two-thirds of its greenhouse impact occurs before the gas arrives in this country. So that’s all right then – it doesn’t count towards our national figures.

If the real aim were to cut emissions, we would push fossil fuel use in the electricity sector down to zero, and scale up renewables and battery storage instead. The net effect? Much lower climate impacts and much lower bills. Instead, the programme will greatly ramp up both. Why?

Well, the whole thing has been built the wrong way round. It appears likely to be the result of massive lobbying by fossil fuel companies. In 2023 alone, as the key decision on deployment loomed, the oil companies Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with Conservative ministers to discuss CCS. Why? Because they know it’s the only way they will be permitted to keep burning gas. Governments have sought to find a way of meeting their demands while adhering to the climate budgets, so lo, a £264bn white elephant is born. As the Climate Change Committee admits, “gas with CCS accounts for around half of the remaining demand for fossil fuels in 2050” in the UK. In other words, this is their lifeline.

And now we know something else: that the scientific credibility of CCS as a climate solution was shaped by the oil company BP. Investigative work by ProPublica and Drilled discovered that BP both financed and helped steer one of the most famous of all climate papers. The “Wedges” paper, published in 2004, became a foundation of government policy around the world. It purported to show how climate stabilisation was compatible with continued fossil use. And one of the major policies its plan relied on was carbon capture and storage.

BP’s chief executive suggested the “wedges” concept. Another BP executive was so heavily involved that the scientists suggested he should be named as co-author. He declined: the industry tries not to leave fingerprints. The paper greatly oversold CCS, presenting it as “already deployed at an industrial scale”. In reality, it had barely been tested. Yet it underpinned three of the 15 climate actions the paper proposed.

Since then, there has been a long record of shiny promises followed by partial or total failures. In the UK alone, three attempts (the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project and a 2012 funding competition) have been abandoned, thanks to cost escalation and infeasibility. As the Public Accounts Committee remarks, the government “is taking a high-risk approach by backing first-of-a-kind, unproven technologies with large amounts of taxpayer and consumer funding”.

But success is not the point. The point is to provide a gigantic, publicly-funded reason for the fossil fuel industry to stay in business. Guess who the lead operator of the government’s first CCS cluster is. Hello, BP.

So we come round full circle. From cradle to grave, this programme appeases the world’s most antisocial and destructive sector. The wasted money, the lost years, the lost lives: for how much longer will this farce continue? And how many more warnings will the government ignore?

http://www.monbiot.com

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I am towards the end of my days, and we live a pretty frugal (as in use of fossil fuels) life.

However, that does not mean that I am not very concerned about George’s essay. I have a son, a daughter, and a grandson. They are a tangible group who will be affected by this proposed legislation. As will millions of other people.

I really hope, and this is truly meant, that the UK Government does not push ahead with this Act.

Geo. Monbiot’s Grim Message

Action regarding the climate crisis.

The following essay from George Monbiot is a difficult read but it is also a necessary read.

With the news that the polar ice caps are retreating, just read yesterday: “Polar ice caps and sheets are shrinking at alarming rates due to global warming, with Arctic sea ice decreasing by over 12% per decade and polar ice sheets losing 7,560 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2020. Greenland and Antarctica are losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice annually, significantly contributing to rising sea levels. [1, 2, 3, 4]”

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Alternating Current

Posted on 29th April, 2026

If this crucial circulation system shuts down, the civilisational impacts will be irreversible. So why isn’t it a top priority?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd April 2026

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.

They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.

Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.

This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happenedbefore. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.

The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur.

Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.

So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.

It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.

As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk.

The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.

Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, “it is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.” Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor – but under the models, their lives are also priced down.

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Until I came to live in the the USA permanently, in 2010, I used to live in South Devon, near Totnes. Thus the AMOC was very familiar to me and the local population. AMOC stands for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Much more information on AMOC may be read on the WikiPedia site.

Although the future of the AMOC is uncertain, many scientists are concerned that the AMOC will weaken.

The above article by George Monbiot is potentially frightening. As Monbiot says at the end; “… a few thousand people can destroy civilisations.“

What we need is a few thousand people to make this the number one priority! Not tomorrow but today!

Picking a fight ….

…. with a mathematical function!

This is another republication of a George Monbiot post. The title of his post is Total Futility Rate.

It is another great article!

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Total Futility Rate

Posted on15th December 2025

Let’s focus our campaigning on things we can actually change.

By George Monbiot, published as a BlueSky thread, 15th December 2025

Because the issue of population change is so widely misunderstood, I’ll seek to lay it out simply. This note explains why there is almost nothing anyone can do to change the global population trajectory, both as numbers rise, then as they fall.

The residual rise is due to:

A. The birth rate 60-100 years ago, which created a larger current base population. This means more children being born even as birth rates are in radical decline. The global total fertility rate, by the way, is now 2.2, just above the replacement rate of 2.1.

B. Infant mortality has declined very fast and longevity has risen very fast. Again, there’s nothing you can do about either of those things and, I hope, nothing you would want to.

All women should have total reproductive freedom and full access to modern birth control. Because it’s a fundamental right. Not because old men on other continents want them to have fewer children. Even if total reproductive freedom became universal now, it would scarcely nudge the curve, due to the factors mentioned above.

Before long, people will be fretting instead about the downwave, a very rapid decline in populations as the impact of 60+ years of falling birth rates overtakes the effects mentioned above. There’s almost nothing we can do about that either. It’s about as locked in as any human behaviour can be. As the opportunity costs of childcare rise (i.e. as prosperity increases), the birth rate declines.

Of course, if economic and social life collapsed, the process might go into reverse, and birth rates could be expected to rise again. But is that really what you want? For my part, I’m heartily sick of people who think collapse is the answer to anything.

In the short run, we can survive the decline in wealthy countries by reopening the door to immigrants, which would also offer sanctuary to people fleeing from the climate breakdown and conflict we’ve caused overseas. Two wins, in other words. In the long run, we’ll steadily shuffle away.

Whether you think that’s good or bad will not affect the outcome. I see demographic change as an underlying factor, like gravity, we simply have to adapt to as well as we can. If you want to pick a fight with a mathematical function, be my guest. But it seems to me as if you’re wasting your time.

But surely there’s no harm in it? Surely we can seek, however hopelessly, to change the population trajectory while also campaigning against environmental breakdown, inequality, injustice? Some people who worry about population do. But in my experience, most fixate on population to the exclusion of other issues.

Something must be done about them breeding too fast, rather than us consuming too fast. All too often, residual population growth is used as a scapegoat to shift blame from rich-world impacts, which means that the people in places where growth is still occurring are themselves scapegoated. The result, broadly speaking, is wealthy white people pointing the finger at much poorer Black and Brown people and saying, “You’re the problem.” It’s more than a distraction, it’s a grim and sometimes racist alternative to effective action. It’s an excuse for inaction.

So yes, do both if you want to, while being aware that one activity is useful and the other is futile. But be aware that for most population obsessives, it’s either/or, and is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.

http://www.monbiot.com

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If you read this you will understand why Mr Monbiot explains clearly the changes in the global demographics: That the global population is falling. My own guess is that in the lifespans of those who today are in their teens, the global population will be remarkably lower. I can’t forecast the changes that will bring about but I’m certain they will be significant.

George’s last point is key “(It) is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.“

‘Tolly’ finds something really special

I’m indebted to George Monbiot for this article, and ‘Tolly’ as a nickname for Iain Tolhurst.

Many articles from people that I follow online pass through my ‘inbox’.

But there was something special about a recent article by George Monbiot that was published in the Guardian on December 5th and I have great pleasure in republishing it here, with George’s permission.

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Shaking It Up

Posted on 7th December 2025

A eureka moment in the pub could help transform our understanding of the ground beneath our feet.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5th December 2025

It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and remarkable thing: a eureka moment.
For the past three years, I’d been struggling with a big and frustrating problem. In researching my book Regenesis, I’d been working closely with Iain Tolhurst (Tolly), a pioneering farmer who had pulled off something extraordinary. Almost everywhere, high-yield farming means major environmental harm, due to the amount of fertiliser, pesticides and (sometimes) irrigation water and deep ploughing required. Most farms with apparently small environmental impacts produce low yields. This, in reality, means high impacts, as more land is needed to produce a given amount of food. But Tolly has found the holy grail of agriculture: high and rising yields with minimal environmental harm.

He uses no fertiliser, no animal manure and no pesticides. His techniques, the result of decades of experiment and observation, appear to enrich the crucial relationships between crops and microbes in the soil, through which soil nutrients must pass. It seems that Tolly has, in effect, “trained” his soil bacteria to release nutrients when his crops require them (a process called mineralisation), and lock them up when his crops aren’t growing (immobilisation), ensuring they don’t leach from the soil.

So why the frustration? Well, Tolly has inspired many other growers to attempt the same techniques. Some have succeeded, with excellent results. Others have not. And no one can work out why. It’s likely to have something to do with soil properties. But what?

Not for the first time, I had stumbled into a knowledge gap so wide that humanity could fall through it. Soil is a fantastically complex biological structure, like a coral reef, built and sustained by the creatures that inhabit it. It supplies 99% of our calories. Yet we know less about it than any other identified ecosystem. It’s almost a black box.

Many brilliant scientists have devoted their lives to its study. But there are major barriers. Most soil properties cannot be seen without digging, and if you dig a hole, you damage the structures you’re trying to investigate. As a result, studying even basic properties is cumbersome, time-consuming and either very expensive or simply impossible at scale. To measure the volume of soil in a field, for example, you need to take hundreds of core samples. But as soil depths can vary greatly from one metre to the next, your figure relies on extrapolation. This makes it very hard to tell whether you’re losing soil or gaining it. Measuring bulk density (the amount of soil in a given volume, which shows how compacted it might be), or connected porosity (the tiny catacombs created by lifeforms, a crucial measure of soil health), or soil carbon – at scale – is even harder.

So farmers must guess. Partly because they cannot see exactly what the soil needs, many of their inputs – fertilisers, irrigation, deep ploughing – are wasted. Roughly two-thirds of the nitrogen fertiliser they apply, and between 50% and 80% of their phosphorus, is lost. These lost minerals cause algal blooms in rivers, dead zones at sea, costs for water users and global heating. Huge amounts of irrigation water are also wasted. Farmers sometimes “subsoil” their fields – ploughing that is deep and damaging – because they suspect compaction. The suspicion is often wrong.

Our lack of knowledge also inhibits the development of a new agriculture, which may, as Tolly has done, allow farmers to replace chemical augmentation with biological enhancement.

So when I came to write the book, I made a statement so vague that it reads like an admission of defeat: we needed to spend heavily on “an advanced science of the soil”, and use it to deliver a “greener revolution”. While we know almost nothing about the surface of our own planet, billions are spent on the Mars Rover programme, exploring the barren regolith there. What we needed, I argued, is an Earth Rover programme, mapping the world’s agricultural soils at much finer resolution.

I might as well have written “something must be done!” The necessary technologies simply did not exist. I sank into a stygian gloom.

At the same time, Tarje Nissen-Meyer, then a professor of geophysics at the University of Oxford, was grappling with a different challenge. Seismology is the study of waves passing through a solid medium. Thanks to billions from the oil and gas industry, it has become highly sophisticated. Tarje wanted to use this powerful tool for the opposite purpose – ecological improvement. Already, with colleagues, he had deployed seismology to study elephant behaviour in Kenya. Not only was it highly effective, but his team also discovered it could identify animal species walking through the savannah by their signature footfall.

By luck we were both attached, in different ways, to Wolfson College, Oxford, where we met in February 2022. I saw immediately that he was a thoughtful man – a visionary. I suggested a pint in The Magdalen Arms.

I explained my problem, and we talked about the limits of existing technologies. Was seismology being used to study soil, I asked. He’d never heard of it. “I guess it’s not a suitable technology then?” No, he told me, “soil should be a good medium for seismology. In fact, we need to filter out the soil noise when we look at the rocks.” “So if it’s noise, it could be signal?” “Definitely.”

We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?

Over the next three days, Tarje conducted a literature search. Nothing came up. I wrote to Prof Simon Jeffery, an eminent soil scientist at Harper Adams University, whose advice I’d found invaluable when researching the book. I set up a Zoom call. He would surely explain that we were barking up the wrong tree.

Simon is usually a reserved man. But when he had finished questioning Tarje, he became quite animated. “All my life I’ve wanted to ‘see’ into the soil,” he said. “Maybe now we can.” I was introduced to a brilliant operations specialist, Katie Bradford, who helped us build an organisation. We set up a non-profit called the Earth Rover Program, to develop what we call “soilsmology”; to build open-source hardware and software cheap enough to be of use to farmers everywhere; and to create, with farmers, a global, self-improving database. This, we hope, might one day incorporate every soil ecosystem: a kind of Human Genome Project for the soil.

We later found that some scientists had in fact sought to apply seismology to soil, but it had not been developed into a programme, partly because the approaches used were not easily scalable.

My role was mostly fixer, finding money and other help. We received $4m (£3m) in start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund. This may cause some discomfort, but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want. We also got a lot of pro-bono help from the law firm Hogan Lovells.

Tarje, now at the University of Exeter, and Simon began assembling their teams. They would need to develop an ultra-high-frequency variant of seismology. A big obstacle was cost. In 2022, suitable sensors cost $10,000 (£7,500) apiece. They managed to repurpose other kit: Tarje found that a geophone developed by a Slovakian experimental music outfitworked just as well, and cost only $100. Now one of our scientists, Jiayao Meng, is developing a sensor for about $10. In time, we should be able to use the accelerometers in mobile phones, reducing the cost to zero. As for generating seismic waves, we get all the signal we need by hitting a small metal plate with a welder’s hammer.

On its first deployment, our team measured the volume of a peat bog that had been studied by scientists for 50 years. After 45 minutes in the field, they produced a preliminary estimate suggesting that previous measurements were out by 20%. Instead of extrapolating the peat depth from point samples, they could see the wavy line where the peat met the subsoil. The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous.

We’ve also been able to measure bulk density at a very fine scale; to track soil moisture (as part of a wider team); to start building the AI and machine learning tools we need; and to see the varying impacts of different agricultural crops and treatments. Next we’ll work on measuring connected porosity, soil texture and soil carbon; scaling up to the hectare level and beyond; and on testing the use of phones as seismometers. We now have further funding, from the UBS Optimus Foundation, hubs on three continents and a big international team.

Eventually, we hope, any farmer anywhere, rich or poor, will be able to get an almost instant readout from their soil. As more people use the tools, building the global database, we hope these readouts will translate into immediate useful advice. The tools should also revolutionise soil protection: the EU has issued a soil-monitoring law, but how can it be implemented? Farmers are paid for their contributions “to improve soil health and soil resilience”, but what this means in practice is ticking a box on a subsidy form: there’s no sensible way of checking.

We’re not replacing the great work of other soil scientists but, developing our methods alongside theirs, we believe we can fill part of the massive knowledge gap. As one of the farmers we’re working with, Roddy Hall, remarks, the Earth Rover Program could “take the guesswork out of farming”. One day it might help everyone arrive at that happy point: high yields with low impacts. Seismology promises to shake things up.

http://www.monbiot.com

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George Monbiot puts his finger precisely on the point of his article: “While we know almost nothing about the surface of our own planet, billions are spent on the Mars Rover programme.“

Breaches of trust.

A riveting article from George Monbiot.

George Monbiot published an article in The Guardian recently that was as hard-hitting as I have ever read from him.

I found it very powerful even though I have not been living in England since 2008. Mr Monbiot has previously given me permission to republish his articles and here it is.

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Four-Year Plan

Posted on 3rd June 2025

Keir Starmer has accidentally given us four years in which to build a new political system. We should seize the chance.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27th May 2025

This feels terminal. The breaches of trust have been so frequent, so vast and so decisive that the voters Labour has already lost are unlikely to return. In one forum after another, I hear the same sentiments: “I voted for change, not the same or worse.” “I’ve voted Labour all my life, but that’s it for me.” “I feel I’ve been had.”

It’s not dissatisfaction. It’s not disillusionment. It’s revulsion: visceral fury, anger on a level I’ve seldom seen before, even towards Tory cruelties. Why? Because these are Tory cruelties, delivered by a party that claimed to be the only alternative, in our first-past-the-post electoral system.

Everyone can name at least some of the betrayals:

 cutting disability benefits; supplying weapons and, allegedly, intelligence to the Israeli government as it pursues genocide in Gaza; channelling Reform UK and Enoch Powell in maligning immigrants; slashing international aid; trashing wildlife and habitats while insulting and abusing people who want to protect them; announcing yet another draconian anti-protest law; leaving trans people in legal limbo; rigidly adhering to outdated and socially destructive fiscal rules; imposing further austerity on government departments and public services. Once the great hope of the oppressed, Labour has become the oppressor.

Like many people, I was wary of Keir Starmer. I had limited expectations, but I willed Labour to succeed. So I’ve watched aghast as he and his inner circle have squandered one of the greatest opportunities the party has ever been granted. They seem to despise people who voted for them, while courting and flattering those who didn’t and won’t.

The results? Last week, the polling company Thinks Insight & Strategy found that 52% of those who voted Labour in the 2024 general election are considering switching to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. That’s more than twice as many as might migrate to Reform UK. The research group Persuasion UK estimates that Labour could lose 250 seatsas a result of this flight to more progressive parties (again, more than twice as many as it could lose through voters shifting to Reform). Figures compiled by the progressive thinktank Compass show that Labour would lose its majority on just a 6% swing. Already, while it won a massive majority on a measly 34% vote at the election, it now polls at just 22%.

Labour’s strategy is incomprehensible. Experience from the rest of Europe shows that when centrist parties adopt far-right rhetoric and policies, they empower the far right while shedding their own supporters.

What explains this idiocy? Labour has succumbed, quickly and hard, to the defining sickness of our undemocratic political system: the sofa cabinet system of close advisers. Opaque and unaccountable government favours opaque and unaccountable power. Ever receptive to the demands of rentiers, oligarchs, non-doms and corporations, Labour’s oh-so-clever strategists are moronically giftwrapping the country for Nigel Farage.

Governments don’t start conservative and turn radical. The cruelty will set like concrete. The likely result is annihilation in 2029. On this trajectory, it might not be surprising if Labour were left with seats in only double figures.

Perhaps it’s a blessing that Starmer has shown his hand so soon, as we now have four years in which to prepare. I’m not a party person: for me, it’s a question of what works. And now we can clearly see the shape of it.

The Compass analysis, published in December, reveals extreme electoral volatility. This is caused by a combination of public fury towards austerity, exclusion, rip-off rents and startlingly low rates of wellbeing, and the “democratic mayhem” resulting from a first-past-the-post system in which five parties are now polling at 10% or more. Small vote shifts in this situation can cause wild fluctuations in the allocation of seats.

The report points out that the UK is an overwhelmingly progressive nation: in all but one election since 1979 most voters have supported left or centre-left parties. Of 15 nations surveyed, the UK has the extraordinary distinction of being both the furthest to the left and the most consistent elector of rightwing governments. Why? Because of our first-past-the-post system, which is grossly unfair not by accident but by design. Labour refuses to change it, as it wants to rule alone. The result is that most of the time it doesn’t rule at all.

The thinktank was hoping to mobilise the progressive majority around a revitalised Labour party, but that moment has passed. What the figures show, however, is massive potential for more radical change. A YouGov survey reveals that almost twice as many people want proportional representation in this country as those who wish to preserve the current system. So let’s build a government of parties that will introduce it.

Here’s the strategy. Join the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP or Plaid Cymru. As their numbers rise, other voters will see the tide turning. Encourage troubled Labour MPs to defect. Most importantly, begin the process in each constituency of bringing alienated voters together around a single candidate. This is what we did before the last election in South Devon, where polls had shown the anti-Tory vote evenly split between Labour and the Lib Dems. Through the People’s Primary designed by locals, the constituency decided to back the Lib Dems. The proof of the method can be seen less in the spectacular routing of the Conservatives (as similar upsets occurred elsewhere) than in the collapse in Labour’s numbers, which fell from 17% in 2019, and 26% in a poll before the primary began, to 6% in the 2024 election. The voters took back control, with startling results.

Whether you fully support any of these parties is beside the point. This coalition would break for ever the lesser-of-two-evils choice that Starmer has so cruelly abused, and which has for so long poisoned politics in this country. Game the system once and we’ll never have to game it again.

No longer will we be held hostage, no longer represented by people who hate us. It will be a tragedy if, as seems likely, Keir Starmer has destroyed the Labour party as a major political force. But it will be a blessing if he has also destroyed the two-party system.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Proportional representation is explained in detail here. There is also an explanation on WikiPedia here. From which I quote a small section:

Proportional representation (PR) refers to any electoral system under which subgroups of an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. The concept applies mainly to political divisions (political parties) among voters. The aim of such systems is that all votes cast contribute to the result so that each representative in an assembly is mandated by a roughly equal number of voters, and therefore all votes have equal weight. Under other election systems, a bare plurality or a scant majority in a district are all that are used to elect a member or group of members. PR systems provide balanced representation to different factions, usually defined by parties, reflecting how votes were cast. Where only a choice of parties is allowed, the seats are allocated to parties in proportion to the vote tally or vote share each party receives.

That is a timely and powerful article from George Monbiot.

Improving equality

An extremely powerful new essay from George Monbiot.

While this post from G. Monbiot is about politics, I think it goes far beyond that. Hence my reason for republishing this essay, with George Monbiot’s permission. When I will die is not known but surely I will in the next ten years or so. I really want to leave this world seeing everything improving, from the lessening of the change in our climate, to a reduction in world fighting, to a greater equality for all.

Please, please be wrong, Mr. Monbiot.

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The Urge to Destroy

Posted on14th April 2025

It’s a cast-iron relationship: the more unequal a society becomes, the better the far right does. Here’s why. 

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  13th April 2025

“He’s really gone and done it this time. Now everyone can see what a disaster he is.” How many times have we heard this about Donald Trump? And how many times has it been proved wrong? Well, maybe this time he really has overstepped. After all, his clowning around with tariffs, sparking trade wars, then suddenly reversing his position, could provoke a global recession, perhaps even a depression. Surely his supporters will disown him? But I’m not banking on it, and this is why.

Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded.

This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well.

In many parts of the world, and the US in particular, inequality has risen sharply since the late 1970s. (The UK tracks this trend.) The world’s billionaires became $2tn richer last year, while the number of people living below the global poverty line is more or less unchanged since 1990.

There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.

Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean.

In the US, a high proportion of the population is excluded from many of the benefits I’ve listed. Science might lead to medical breakthroughs, but not, perhaps, for people who can’t afford health insurance. A university education might open doors, but only if you’re prepared to carry tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Art and theatre and music improve our lives: good for those who can buy the tickets. So do national parks, but only if you can afford to visit them.

Democracy, we are told, allows people a voice in politics. But only, it seems, if they have a few million to give to a political party. As the political scientist Prof Martin Gilens notes in his book Affluence and Influence: “Under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.” GDP growth was strong under Joe Biden, but as the economics professor Jason Furman points out: “From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.” GDP and social improvement are no longer connected.

All those good things? Sorry, they’re not for you. If you feel an urge to tear it all down, to burn the whole stinking, hypocritical, exclusive system to the ground, Trump is your man. Or so he claims. In reality his entire performance is both a distraction from and an accelerant of spiralling inequality. He can hardly lose: the more he exacerbates inequality, the more he triggers an urge for revenge against his scapegoats: immigrants, trans people, scientists, teachers, China.

But such killer clowns can’t pull this off by themselves. Their most effective recruiters are centrist parties paralysed in the face of economic power. In hock to rich funders, terrified of the billionaire media, for decades they have been unable even to name the problem, let alone address it. Hence the spectacular uselessness of the Democrats’ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: “One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.”

In the UK, Labour, like the Democrats, has long assured itself that it doesn’t matter how wide economic disparities are, as long as the poorest are raised up. Now it has abandoned even that caveat: we can cut benefits, so long as GDP grows. But it does matter. It matters very much. A vast array of evidence, brought together in 2009 in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and updated in 2024, shows that inequality exerts a massive influence on social, economic, environmental and political outcomes, regardless of people’s absolute positions.

If there is a such a thing as Starmerism, it collapses in the face of a paper published by the political scientists Leonardo Baccini and Thomas Sattler last year, which finds that austerity increases support for the radical right in economically vulnerable regions. (My emboldening. PH) Austerity, they found, is the key variable: without it, less-educated people are no more likely to vote for rightwing demagogues than highly educated people are. In other words, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are busily handing their core constituencies to Nigel Farage.

Of course, they deny they’re imposing austerity, using a technical definition that means nothing to those on the sharp end. Austerity is what the poor experience, while they must watch the rich and upper middle classes, under a Labour government, enjoy ever greater abundance.

Starmer and his minions suggest there’s nothing they can do: wealthy people are already taxed to the max. As private jets and helicopters cross the skies, anyone can see this is nonsense. Of all the remarkable things I stumbled across while researching this column, the following is perhaps the most jaw-dropping. On the most recent (2022) figures, once benefits have been paid, the Gini coefficient for gross income in the UK scarcely differs from the Gini coefficient for post-tax income. In other words, the gap between the rich and the poor is rougly the same after taxes are levied, suggesting that taxation has no further significant effect on income distribution. How could this possibly be true, when the rich pay higher rates of income tax? It’s because the poor surrender a much higher proportion of their income in sales taxes, such as VAT. So much for no further options. So much for Labour “realism”.

The one thing that can stop the rise of the far right is the one thing mainstream parties are currently not prepared to deliver: greater equality. The rich should be taxed more, and the revenue used to improve the lives of the poor. However frantically centrist parties avoid the issue, there is no other way.

www.monbiot.com

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George writes about Britain but my judgement is that this issue is not limited to that country; I suspect it is a far wider problem. Did you know that Finland is the world’s happiest country?

An extract of that article: “Finland has been ranked as the world’s happiest country for the eighth successive year, with experts citing access to nature and a strong welfare system as factors.

It came ahead of three other Nordic countries in this year’s UN-sponsored World Happiness Report, while Latin America’s Costa Rica and Mexico entered the top 10 for the first time.

Both the UK and the US slipped down the list to 23rd and 24th respectively – the lowest-ever position for the latter.”

Introspection.

A recent article by George Monbiot gets me thinking.

George Monbiot is 61; his birthday is on January 27th. Thus he is 14 years younger than me. He is an experienced writer for The Guardian newspaper. Plus he has authored quite a few books and founded a charity, and given TED Talks, and I am sure more than this.

I read all of the articles that are published by him. His website is widely read. Please read his biography. Some of his many articles really get me thinking.

Some time ago I asked Mr. Monbiot for permission to republish his articles and that was granted. A small number of them have been republished on Learning from Dogs.

Today I want to republish an article that was presented on July 3rd.

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The Fight Against Oligarchy

Oligarchy is the default state of politics, and it is surging back. How do we stop it?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  27th June 2024

We are about to return to normal politics. After 14 years of Tory corruption and misrule, a Labour government will put this country back on track. Justice and decency will resume, public services will be rebuilt, our global standing will be restored, we will revert to a familiar state. Or so the story goes.

What is the “normal” envisaged by pundits and politicians of the left and centre? It is the most anomalous politics in the history of the world. Consciously or otherwise, they hark back to a remarkable period, roughly 1945 to 1975, in which, in certain rich nations, wealth and power were distributed, almost everyone could aspire to decent housing, wages and conditions, public services were ambitious and well-funded and a robust economic safety net prevented destitution. There had never been a period like it in the prior history of the world, and there has not been one since. Even during that period, general prosperity in the rich nations was supported by extreme exploitation, coups and violence imposed on the poor nations. We lived in a bubble, limited in time and space, in which extraordinary things happened. Yet somehow we think of it as normal.

Those “normal” politics were the result of something known to economic historians as the “great compression”: a drastic reduction in inequality caused by two world wars. In many powerful countries, a combination of the physical destruction of assets, the loss of colonial and overseas possessions, inflation, very high taxes, wage and price controls, requisitioning and nationalisation required by the wartime economy, as well as the effects of rising democracy and labour organisation, greatly reduced the income and assets of the rich. It also greatly improved, once the wars had ended, the position of the poor. For several decades, we benefited from the aftermath of these great shocks. Now the effect has faded. We are returning to true “normality”.

The history of many centuries, including our own, shows that the default state of politics is not redistribution and general welfare, but a spiral of accumulation by the very rich, the extreme exploitation of labour, the seizure of common resources and exaction of rent for their use, extortion, coercion and violence. Normal is a society in which might is right. Normal is oligarchy.

In his magisterial book The Great Leveler, published in 2017, the historian Walter Scheidel explains that only four forces have ever significantly reversed inequality: mass-mobilisation warfare (such as the two world wars), total and violent revolution, state collapse and devastating plagues. Decisions, decisions.

He shows how warfare economies were turned into welfare economies, sometimes by force. For example, following the defeat of Japan, the US occupation government, led by General Douglas MacArthur, sought what it called “the democratization of Japanese economic institutions” to ensure “a wide distribution of income and ownership of the means of production and trade”. To this end, it imposed high property taxes, with a top marginal rate of 90%; broke up business conglomerates; demanded a labour union law enabling the right to organise and strike, and higher wages for workers; organised comprehensive land reform, which dissolved large holdings and distributed them to peasants; and introduced fiscal reform that led eventually to taxes on the highest incomes of 75% and an inheritance tax on the largest estates of 70%. These programmes resulted in the near-total destruction of income from capital and the creation in Japan of a political and economic democracy, almost from scratch.

All the major combatants were similarly transformed. In the US, the top rate of estate (inheritance) tax rose to 71% in 1941, and income tax to 94% in 1944. The National War Labor Board raised workers’ pay while holding down executive pay. Union membership soared. In the UK, the top rate of income tax was held at 98% from 1941 to 1952. It took decades to decline to current levels. A purchase tax on luxury goods was introduced in 1940, with rates that later rose to 100%. The share of incomes captured by the richest 0.1% fell from 7% in 1937 to just over 1% in 1975.

In the absence of one of the four great catastrophes, income and capital inexorably accumulate in the hands of the few, and oligarchy returns. Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power. They build a politics that suits them. Scheidel shows that as inequality rises, so does polarisation and political dysfunction, both of which favour the very rich, as a competent, proactive state is a threat to their interests. Dysfunction is what the Tories delivered and Donald Trump promises.

Oligarchs seek the destruction of oversight, which is why UK bodies such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive have been comprehensively gutted. The same desire was the driving force behind Brexit. They want the cessation of protest. They want a failing NHS, to justify privatisation. They want malleable politiciansand a tame BBC. They get what they want, distorting every aspect of national life. They pour money into neoliberal and far-right political movements, which help capital to solve its perennial problem: democracy. The arc of history bends towards injustice. But every so often it is broken over the knee of catastrophe.

If you want a return to the rich nations’ “normality” of 1945 to 1975 – in other words, to redistribution, a shared sense of national purpose, robust public services and a strong economic safety net, high employment and good wages – and I think most people would, you need a politics that is not just abnormal, but unprecedented. Snapping the arc of injustice would mean going way beyond Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto, let alone Keir Starmer’s limp offering, which treads so carefully around the interests of the rich. We would need to do what the world wars did, without the violence and physical destruction: a peacetime MacArthur programme for overthrowing the oligarchs.

Political parties would need to overcome their fear of economic power: of the newspaper barons, the property developers, the fossil fuel companies, hedge funds, private equity bosses and assorted oligarchs who now fund and influence our politics. The longer we leave this confrontation, the more extreme and entrenched oligarchic power becomes. If we want even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.

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Let me repeat a sentence from the article: “Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power.”

I am towards the end of my life. Whether or not things will change politically, as Monbiot suggests above, I do not know. But if asked to guess I would say probably not.

I would love to see a different, as in a better way, of us humans running things. I can’t put it better than how George Monbiot expressed it in that last sentence: “If we want even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.”

Finally, George Monbiot has a saying on his website: “I love not man the less, but Nature more.” I wish that were not the case, I wish oligarchy was a dead word, but Nature is so beautiful.

Photo by Daniel Beilinson on Unsplash

Water, water, everywhere, but …

A dramatic article from George Monbiot about water!

I read the latest from George Monbiot yesterday morning and was startled. Startled because I hadn’t thought of it before. Startled because here in Merlin, Southern Oregon we have had so much rain since the beginning of November, 2023 that our acres are swimming in the wet. Startled since that time also our Bummer Creek, which flows across our land, has been at record depths.

But this report is incredibly important and I wanted to share it with you, as I have Geo. Monbiot’s permission for so doing.

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Dry Run

Posted on11th March 2024

The mega-droughts in Spain and the US are a portent of a gathering global water crisis.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th March 2024

There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.

Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.

A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out.

In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.

Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.

That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.

Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline.

Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.

There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it.

You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work.

Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.

Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.

This is not to give all plant products a free pass: horticulture can make massive demands on water supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, we should be switching from some grains, vegetables and fruit to others. Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of stronger rules and informative labelling.

Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the EU’s agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger than in the food and farming sector.

I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have to try to counter the endless bias against relevance in politics and most of the media. This is yet another of those massive neglected issues, any one of which could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, we need to recover our focus.

http://www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

Oh dear, oh dear!

One hates to be alarmist and yet Monbiot is a very smart reporter and this is truly important.

Oh dear, oh dear!