A growing movement against fracking

The news coming out of the UK that the MP Caroline Lucas has been cleared of all the charges laid against her for taking part in a protest against fracking is excellent to hear, and suggests that the movement against this particularly damaging form of energy extraction is gaining more and more popularity around the country. Lucas, Britain’s only Green Party MP, was arrested for obstructing a public highway in the southern town of Balcombe, where the energy company Cuadrilla planned to test out a fracking site.

In the end, Lucas and her fellow defendants were released more on a technicality than anything else, with the judge deciding that they were not made suitably aware of the police dispersal order before being arrested, and that no-one was really obstructed by their occupation of the highway for a few hours. Consequently, arguments about fracking and the dangers it poses do not yet have a position as a good reason to protest in British law – but they may do soon enough, if the movement continues to grow.

Fracking has begun to capture the imaginations and emotions of middle-class English people in a way that previous activist environmental campaigns have not. When roads were being built throughout the country during the Thatcher years, and the protestors were primarily dreadlocked hippies who objected to the cutting down of trees or the destruction of nature reserves, they were largely ignored by the more well-off members of society – roads were considered more important than the concerns of the activists. A similar approach has often been taken when it comes to drilling for oil in remote areas of the world, like the North Sea or the Arctic – the middle class tend to think that it’s very bad that we have to damage the environment, but we need the oil, and these people from Greenpeace or wherever are just being disruptive.

Fracking is different, because it works on a smaller and more local scale. It is designed to exploit the small pockets of gas that lie within the rocks underneath most towns and villages in the UK. It’s also very visible in the landscape in a way that roads simply aren’t – we all see roads every day of our life, so adding another one seems to make no difference to us. We don’t see fracking rigs on the outskirts of our charming little towns – so we consider their presence to be an imposition which ‘spoils’ the atmosphere and the view. More and more people in richer and richer parts of the country are thus coming to the view that even in our quest for energy, fracking is a step too far – they don’t want the potential water contamination, the destruction of the environment, or the possibility of earthquakes that the process brings with it.

Of course, poorer neighbourhoods in Britain and throughout the world have had to put up with environmental pollution and the drawbacks of energy excavation for many years, and have long been ignored by their richer counterparts in the middle class. Hopefully, the fracking issue will be one which finally unites both of these groups to realize that our fossil fuel based economy is a madness that damages lives and ecosystems indiscriminately. In the meantime, here at NRGLab, we will continue to work on new and cleaner forms of energy that can replace these dirty and dangerous methods.

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Hatred through the ages

To some extent, last week’s shooting at a Jewish community centre in Kansas City should seem unexceptional. After all, shootings in the US are not exactly rare – both in terms of individual gun crimes and multiple shootings like this one. The fact that only three people were killed should, if anything, make it seem less remarkable than many other similar incidents in which there were higher numbers of fatalities. However, the Kansas City shooting is shocking to us because of its targets – we generally go about our lives assuming that anti-Semitism is dead and buried, especially in places like the US where the memory of World War II is still so prevalent.

Ever since 9/11, it has seemed like the racists, nationalists, and xenophobes among the US population have targeted Arabs and Muslims instead – or anyone who happens to have the bad fortune to look like they might be an Arab or Muslim in the minds of these right-wingers. This hatred of Muslims has reached such a level that if we heard a story about someone entering a Mosque or Muslim-focused community centre and killing three people, we would not really be too shocked – that level of hatred seems almost ‘normal’ today. There would probably even be a fairly large percentage of the population that would think of such an attack as a good thing.

An attack on the Jewish community, however, is seen as out of the ordinary and shocking, because over the past 50 years Jews have come to be seen as ‘good citizens’ – to the extent that almost no one in America, outside of a few fringe extremists, could possibly say that the Kansas City shooting was justifiable. But this attack should remind us that a hundred years ago (and perhaps even more recently than that) Jews were viewed in the same way as Muslims are today.

What this shows us is that the target of right wing hate is always shifting along with the changes in society, economy, and migration. In 1914, the minority group that they encouraged us to hate were the Jews; in 2014, the tactics are the same, but the target has changed to the Muslims. Whichever is the most exploited, defenceless, and demonized minority group at the time will be the target of hate. We can see similar patterns in other places, for example in the UK, where each new wave of immigrants has attracted hate for a certain period of time, before becoming ‘normal’, with the hate then moving onto the latest group – Jews, blacks, Indians, Travellers, Poles, Romanians, and so on.

In each case, the aim is the same – to shift the focus of the poor away from the inherent instability and inequality of capitalism, and to get them to place the blame for their problems on immigrants and other ‘outsider’ groups. By emphasizing the difference of these groups – whether in terms of skin color, language, religion, or culture – the right wing encourages the British poor to take their anger out on the only people who are even poorer and even more exploited.

The shooting in Kansas City, because it is an attack on a group that used to be seen as outsiders but who have now made the switch to being ‘good citizens’, jolts us into realizing the way this philosophy of hate works. We remember that Jews used to be as victimized as Muslims are now, and see that there is no reason to hate anyone for their religion or skin color. Instead, those of us who are poor and exploited by the mechanics of the capitalist system should join together and practice solidarity rather than hate – whether Jew, Muslim, black, white, or anything else.

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Time to Bring Down the Corporate Giants?

Over the past week, the new CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, has been in Congress. Unlike most occasions on which a CEO goes to Congress, she is not there to lobby for lighter regulations or to ask for a bail out because of the financial crisis. Instead, she is having to explain to Representatives and Senators why the company did not recall a large number of cars that have since been show to have potentially fatal safety faults. Barra (and it should be noted that she was not in charge when these events occurred) has not really had an answer beyond trying to deflect the blame away from any individual person. Essentially, her argument is that the right information never made its way up to the C-suite, and therefore the executives at GM could not be expected to act.

As the American website Gawker has argued, this seems to be a direct blow against the 'myth of the CEO' – the idea that corporate executives are supernaturally talented people whose work fully merits the multi-million dollar salaries they receive. CEOs are supposedly paid all of this money because of their leadership and their ability to make tough and correct decision. As the Barra testimony shows, they're mostly leading in the dark and making decisions without the correct information.

This isn't necessarily to say that CEOs are bad at leadership – it's something they have been trained in, and have probably shown some talent for at lower levels. But today's corporations are a totally different proposition from most management roles. They are behemoths, enormous entities with turnovers the size of many nation states' GDPs. They are incredibly complicated logistical operations, with branches across the globe, hundreds if not thousands of lower managerial roles, an equally large number of chains of command through which information must travel, and hundreds of millions of variables, any one of which could go wrong at any time and create a situation like the one Barra now faces. Basically, the modern corporation is too big to assume that any small group of directors can effectively lead it – even if they are being paid millions.

Although there is a general trend towards 'bigness' in the corporate world, we would actually very much benefit from having smaller companies rather than larger ones. A smaller company that was more focused on its core business would have noticed the flaws in their cars sooner, and would have been able to communicate the problem more quickly. But smaller businesses are often better for us in other ways too – they are likely to be more concerned with ensuring jobs stay in the local community, to be more environmentally friendly, to be fairer to their workers and to provide better pay and benefits. Generally speaking, they are less likely to see profit as the only benchmark of success, as the companies of corporate America do. A company with this 'small is beautiful' mindset would be less likely to see worker deaths and injuries, less likely to send out faulty cars, and less likely to encourage the inequality of wealth that America currently suffers from.

To this end, it might be time to start arguing for new corporation laws and regulations to limit the overall size of businesses and to encourage the rise of medium- and small-scale businesses that can better bring some humanity back to the world of work and make things fairer for employees. Legislation that encourages worker-owned cooperatives would be even better – as such businesses inevitably have the interests of the poorer workers at their heart – although it may be some time until we see such a thing in the US. Either way, as the case of GM shows, it's time for the corporate giants that have dominated America for so long to be brought down in favor of a new model of business.

corporate giants, General motors, Marry Barra, financial crisis, C-suite, GDP, management roles, logistical operations, environmentally friendly

Never again…or again, or again

The last week has seen the twentieth anniversary of one of the most terrible moments of modern history – the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. As many as 1 million people, mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group, were murdered over a period of just 100 days by members of the country’s other major ethnic group, the Hutu (to emphasize the utter senselessness of the entire episode, it is worth noting that the categories of Hutu and Tutsi were artificial distinctions put in place by the former European colonizers of the area). Meanwhile, the UN and countries with a stake in the region like the US, UK, and Belgium simply stood by and watched – the massacre ended not with an intervention from peacekeeping troops, but with an armed fightback from Tutsi militia groups.

Memorials have been held to commemorate the events and the loss of life, and as with all such cases of genocide, the world has promised ‘never again’. And yet, we have found ourselves in such a confusing place in world geopolitics over the past two decades that we have in fact continued to let similar events occur, and we find it almost impossible to agree over when an intervention is necessary.

Take Syria for example, where it seems chemical weapons are being used against civilian populations, and where a constant flood of refugees is trying to make it to the Turkish border to escape the fighting which has gone on for three years now. Look at Afghanistan, where we initially allowed (and even supported) the insanity of the Taliban and its attempts to destroy the country from within, before eventually turning against them when they were deemed to have gone too far. In Africa, we have the Darfur crisis – the world talked a lot, but there was very little action. Essentially, we simply watched again, and even now Sudan has not been punished for its actions in the region. We are now seeing similar massacres and instability playing out in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, and we have no idea what to do.

In fact, even directly after the Rwandan genocide we continued to stand by and watch as ethnic conflicts ripped Central Africa apart in the Congo wars – in which Rwanda was a key aggressor. The West felt that it could not intervene because it had a duty to support the new post-genocide Tutsi government in Rwanda, even if that government was responsible for creating a similar situation across the border.

We are left with a seemingly simple, but actually almost impossibly complicated question: what should the world do in situations like this? When we see poor, innocent civilians who get caught up in these political, religious, or ethnic wars, we have an immediate reaction of wanting to do something to help. We hear calls for humanitarian intervention and assume that if we send in the strong militaries of the developed nations, the fighting will be over quickly. This is a natural response. But the past decade of extremely questionable interventions – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in oil-rich Libya but not in US-friendly dictatorial Egypt, and now Russia in the Crimea – has tarnished the very idea of humanitarian motives. It is now assumed that any time a Western nation sends its troops to ‘stabilize’ a region, it is doing so out of self-interest rather than a genuine desire to help. We always assume an ulterior motive, and are probably right to do so.

Twenty years on from the Rwandan genocide, this is an equally important thing to notice and to think about – the fact that we seem to have painted ourselves into an unfortunate corner that delegitimizes the very idea of a peaceful, humanitarian intervention to assist people who need help and to stop massacres and genocide. This is a very unfortunate situation indeed, and one which will only be overcome if Western nations begin to act more honestly and with much better motives – motives to help people, rather than to make a profit from suffering.

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Robin Hood in reverse

Things seem to be getting bigger and bigger every day in the modern world – in fact, it’s increasingly assumed that unless you’re a big country you have no chance in the global economy. Consequently, when looking at a map of the world, people often wonder how small countries like Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Jersey, and various islands in the Caribbean can keep on existing in this cut-throat world, with such small populations and no natural resources. The answer in many cases is through tax – not the tax of their own citizens, but that from other countries. Many of the smaller nations of the world have become what is known as ‘tax havens’.

Tax havens are like a reverse version of the famous character Robin Hood. While Robin stole from the rich and gave to the poor, the tax havens essentially take money away from the poor and give it to the rich. They operate in this way: rich people in larger countries like the US, UK, France, or Germany would normally have to pay a reasonable amount of their money in tax. This tax would be used to pay for hospitals, schools, and other services for the poorer people of the country, helping everyone to survive. But the rich instead move their money to a tax haven, where they often pay a tax of only 1-2%. The amount of money this raises is more than enough for the citizens of, say, Lichtenstein. But it means the rich people get to keep more of their money, rather than helping their fellow citizens.

Many tax havens are also known for their secrecy – after all, the rich do not want their home countries to find out about how much money they have, in case they insist that they pay their fair share of taxes. The secrecy of the banks in tax haven countries (most famously in Switzerland) is often exploited by corrupt leaders in developing nations, who take aid money and developmental loans and deposit the money in their own account rather than using it to help their people as intended. This has been a major factor in the debt crisis that places like Africa are in – the money still needs to be paid back by the citizens, even though their leaders have stolen it and placed it in tax havens.

In the UK, whenever it is suggested that taxes should be raised on the richest people to help pay for public services, the media will argue that such policies will end with the rich leaving the country and taking their money with them. In truth, their money is mostly already gone, it’s in Switzerland and Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, where they can avoid paying any tax at all.

What is needed is concerted action from all of the countries of the world to shut down these tax havens by ostracizing them from the world economy until they agree to play by the same rules as the rest of us. This has already started to work with Switzerland, which was always the most vulnerable to pressure because it does not only depend on the income from its tax haven status. Legislation is now being put in place for Swiss banks to disclose information to US authorities to ensure the correct tax is being paid. Now we need to place the same pressure on smaller tax havens, while also offering help with diversifying their economies towards more useful and productive work. The rich will oppose it, because the current arrangement works in their favor – but we must ignore their self-interested claims and realize that by shutting down the havens we can ensure that tax  money is used to pay for services rather than for yachts.

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Cleaning up our act

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989, when the ship of that name spilt its contents off the coast of Alaska and created an iconic image for the then-rising environmental movement. This was a big moment for greens around the world – the visceral images of birds, seals, and the normally pristine Alaskan shoreline covered in slimy oil caught the public’s imagination in a way that many environmental issues cannot.

The public reaction to the spill contributed to the years of strong environmental action that happened in its immediate aftermath. Along with the ozone hole which was being addressed by international treaties at the time, we also saw the 1992 Rio Conference at which the Agenda 21 plan for sustainable development was agreed and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (eventually leading to the famous 1997 Kyoto Protocol) was signed. Ultimately though, we have gone backwards since the 1990s in terms of care for our environment, and with the Exxon Valdez now firmly relegated to the back of our collective memory, we have once again elevated oil to a paramount position in our economy.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of this is the fact that we let it happen again, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 – a spill which was actually bigger in size than the Exxon one (although the Exxon one was harder to deal with due to its remote location). But the oil industry is also responsible for many smaller spills on an almost daily basis, which hardly ever make it further than the local news because we consider them almost a normal part of life or because they are in equally remote areas with small populations. These spills contaminate water supplies and damage ecosystems, but that’s considered a small price to pay compared to the need to keep our oil-based economy going at full speed.

In Ontario, Canada, the government has recently approved the ‘Line 9′ project, in which a pipeline which usually transports processed oil from the east coast to the inland US will be reversed to carry heavy tar sands from the Canadian interior to the eastern ports. The line is already ageing, and regularly leaks. It goes through large areas of land owned by indigenous Canadians, and runs just north of densely populated Toronto. There remains numerous questions over the safety of using this pipeline to carry tar sands, and there has been a spirited campaign against it for well over a year. But none of this holds any weight with the people who make the decisions – as far as they are concerned, the oil economy is more important than safety, health, indigenous rights, or the economy.

It is clear to see that after the initial burst of concern for the environment in the wake of Exxon Valdez, we have since travelled backwards when it comes to protecting our ecology and the health of our citizens. Despite the fact that companies and government must today put on an image of being ‘green’, the truth is that we are as trapped by our use of oil today as we have been at any time. Serious alternatives are not being developed at any reasonable speed, and politicians continue to pay more attention to oil executives than to their own voters. On this anniversary, it’s time to look back at Exxon Valdez, remind ourselves of the damage that oil is doing to us all, and strengthen our efforts to change our economy and get ourselves of this terribly addictive black liquid.

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Right Wing, Wrong Choice

The French municipal elections that have just been held mostly hit the headlines due to the milestone of Paris electing its first ever female mayor – and that's something we should definitely applaud, especially considering our blog about International Women's Day a few weeks ago. But the bigger story in the long-term, despite it being somewhat relegated to secondary articles, is the strong showing by the Front National, the extremely right wing party led by Marine Le Pen. The FN won control of 11 towns around the country, the most successful it has ever been in local elections, despite (or perhaps because of) its anti-immigrant agenda.

Meanwhile, in the upcoming European Parliament elections, it is likely that the United Kingdom Independence Party – who are not proto-fascists like the FN, but do push an anti-immigrant, isolationist vision of Britain – will likely score its strongest ever results and embarrass the ruling Conservative Party. To some extent, this kind of thing is to be expected in mid-term elections like these – people who are unsatisfied with their lives and see no end to the financial crisis vote as a reaction against the ruling government party. But in other ways, this can be seen as part of a recent trend towards right-wing, anti-immigrant, and even outright fascist parties in elections across Europe.

People in countries like the UK and France increasingly resent people from the poorer countries of the EU and from the rest of the world. They feel that their economic prospects are being damaged and that the newcomers are taking jobs that are 'rightfully' theirs. They are worried that their culture is being degraded and replaced when they walk around their towns and see Polish and Romanian shops and when they sit on the bus and hear people speaking languages they don't understand. Many of them will have looked at the recent referendum on restricting immigration to Switzerland and felt jealous of the Swiss – they want the same opportunity to keep foreigners out, and that's why an increasing number vote for parties of the right.

The truth is that these right wing parties with their focus on foreigners and immigrants are deflecting public pressure from the real cause of our collective problems. People in Western Europe are not poor because of Romanians and Bulgarians, or Somalians and Pakistanis – they're poor because of a recession caused by rich capitalists from their own country. Capitalists who destroyed the financial system through speculation, capitalists who have taken the opportunity the recession presents to fire workers and lower wages, and capitalists who actively want cheap labour from other countries to come to France and Britain in order to keep their profits high.

Parties like UKIP and the Front National are an ideal solution for the rich capitalists that rule the developed countries. They know that such parties are too scary for most people to vote for them, but they also know that having them available works as a way to relieve some of the pressure on the capitalist system. The poorer people of France and the UK vote for the right wing parties, who win a few minor elections here and there. The people then think something is being done about the issues they care about, and they turn their anger away from the capitalists and keep it fixed on people who are even poorer than they are. Rather than repeating this cycle over and over again, it's time for those of us who are consistently losing in this system to identify those who are the real winners that are keeping us down, and target our anger on them instead – it's not the Romanians, it's the rich.

[ French municipal elections, Front National, Marine Le Pen, proto-fascists, Conservative Party, cheap labour, UKIP ]