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Posted on June 17, 2023 | 14 Comments
Time for a quick update on climate protest from your correspondent somewhere quite a long way behind the frontline, but still closer than you’ll read in the average news report. Then I’m going to bring it all back home before relating it to the present concerns of this blog around my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
So for starters, I’ve got to say that the British government has played a blinder in containing and derailing climate protest in these isles. If only it had displayed the same level of competence in, like, every single other area of its jurisdiction, the country might be in reasonable shape.
When Extinction Rebellion and then Insulate Britain made waves a couple of years back, with protestors pushing at a ‘fill the jails’ strategy, the powers that be opted not to take the bait and for the most part made sure the jails stayed resolutely empty, so that the protestors scored limited publicity wins. The government claimed it was hamstrung by inadequate legislation (it wasn’t), and that it needed to pass more stringent anti-protest legislation (it did).
The timing of the pandemic and the queen’s death weren’t kind to the movement, and when climate protest faded from the news cycle the government – armed with its shiny new Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill – has struck hard. Punitive prison sentences, over-zealous police clampdowns and, most outrageously in my opinion, the muzzling of defendants in court from mentioning climate change as a motivation for their actions – an abandonment of due process that sets up a very slippery slope indeed. Throw in journalists acting as agents provocateurs and a kind of kneejerk middle-of-the-road political gradualism of the ‘doomism and disruption are no way to get your message across’ kind even from sympathetic commentators, and the narrative descent to climate chaos is sealed.
I’m not uncritically supportive of every climate action I’ve seen, but I’m supportive of the fact that protestors are trying to figure out a better narrative that’s equal to the urgency of the times and that claims public space from the grassroots.
Ah well, at least the Labour Party, which may even get to be in government soon, voted against the police bill and has committed to stop new oil and gas exploration. However, Keir Starmer has also called for tougher sentences for protestors. I have a feeling I know which of these two commitments he’s most likely to honour if he manages to climb the greasy pole to power.
Inevitably, in the face of the harsh new legal regimen social media is abuzz with goons gloating along the lines of ‘serves you right, you self-entitled losers, for stopping ordinary people going about their business’ (expletives omitted). The thought occurs, as I track current temperature and political trends, that soon enough the legislation may also be working admirably well for silencing ordinary people going about their business of trying to secure self-entitlement to a square meal and basic human rights, but anyway.
Closer to home, my dear wife’s involvement in the Insulate Britain protests led to her being named on an injunction taken out by the National Highways Authority against protesting on its roads. She didn’t break the injunction, but the NHA sued all the people named on it for their expenses in serving it, and won in court. Meaning we now have an eye-wateringly large bill running to several thousands of pounds to pay. And also meaning that should any other agency take out a new injunction and copy-and-paste the names, there’s no end to the potential liability. Though that’s probably unlikely.
So that, dear reader, is why I said at the end of my last post that I was in need of the readies and desirous of people to buy my new book. Though, seriously, we’re okay financially, so if you’re minded to donate to a climate change cause please give to one that helps people in greater need than us. If, however, you find my writing worthwhile on its own merits, do please consider locating the ‘Donate’ button here on the new site and leaving a tip.
But let’s step back from personal woes and take a look at the bigger economic picture around the injunction. One reason the bill is so hefty is that the NHA’s lawyers charged for their time at over £300 per hour. I get that they have overheads to pay, but, hey, don’t we all?
My own climate protesting has been less full-on than my wife’s, but even so I’ve spent about ten hours twiddling my thumbs in police cells. If I charged out this important work of imploring the government to secure a liveable planet at an equivalent rate to the NHA’s lawyers, that’s £3,000 I’m owed right there. My wife must have clocked up at least fifty hours of cell-based downtime. Throw in about a week of my time devoted to protesting and six weeks on my wife’s part as a bare minimum, and we’re looking at a total expenses claim of around £90,000. There were some additional incidental expenses (public transport to protests isn’t cheap these days – unlike, y’know, driving) but let’s be generous and keep the claim to a round £90k. Subtract our share of the injunction costs and that should still leave us enough money to build the new barn we need. I’ve sent in the invoice, but the government hasn’t yet responded. Busy time of year for them, I guess.
Anyway, all this seems vaguely relevant to the present theme of this blog around my new book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – which is substantially a criticism of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. Monbiot says in Regenesis that extensive livestock farming is “everywhere an economic fantasy” in the sense that nobody makes decent money from it. Which is true enough, although I’d further generalise his remark across the agricultural sector at all scales worldwide and suggest that most farming to produce basic foodstuffs in most places is an economic fantasy. Very few people in the sector make what would be regarded as a good income from it by the standards of the wider economy.
When the modern economy makes the production of the food upon which everybody relies to stay alive an economic fantasy, while remunerating corporate lawyers orders of magnitude more than food producers, it starts to seem like the real economic fantasy is the modern economy itself. It would be interesting to discuss how this state of affairs has come to pass and what kind of future it portends. What real or unreal, fact-based or fantastic, aspects of our world allocate resources respectively to farmers, lawyers and protestors in this way, and what does it tell us about where we’re headed? I have some thoughts about this, but maybe I’ll avoid pre-empting any discussion below by sharing them just now.
What I will say is that modern culture has a lot of theories about why the distribution of work, reward and punishment in our societies is as it is and as it must be. These theories look increasingly implausible, and are probably now on the last, unavoidable part of a crash course with reality. A problem I have with a lot of ecomodernist solutions to present problems, Monbiot’s included, is that they focus too much on why occupations like farming are an economic fantasy and not enough on why occupations like corporate law are. From that mistake, many other errors flow.
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Thanks for you and Cordelia for stepping up to the front lines in the effort to bring some public awareness to the problems of energy use and climate change. The is a lot of inertia and self serving self interest in the current industrial system. They make the rules to benefit themselves and are very shortsighted. It is hard to change the world but you have to try to make a difference.
Even the dimmest, most rabid Trumpist knows there is something wrong with the system. Unfortuneately they have landed on the simplest explanation and the wrong solution. They are easily distracted and are solving the wrong problem.
Ecomodernists have recognized the problem but can’t grasp that the future world will be vastly different than today. Hand waving and they-will-figure-something-out arguments show that they have not worked through all the externalities of their solution.
Somewhere in his all his writing the author Frank Herbert says that wherever one finds specialist language developing in a society what you’re seeing is the accumulation of power (that can be translated into wealth, status etc). I think the law is a perfect example of this – I had to get a document witnessed & signed by a solicitor – took them all of 10 minutes to read the document and to watch me sign it and then sign it to say they’d seen me signing it – cost £120. When they told me what it was going to cost they asked if I was ok with that – I told them I really wasn’t but couldn’t avoid it so I paid.
One of the original demands of those who became the Parliamentarian side in the English Civil War was that the Law should be transacted in English, rather than Legal French. Legal French was an obscure language – I’m not sure the French even spoke it – but using an obscure language allowed the legal profession to accumlate power/wealth within society in the period leading upto the Civil War. So with a Parliamentarian victory the Law is transacted in English but it seems it didn’t take lawyers long to reestablish a form of language unintelligible to most people, thereby ensuring the necessity for ordinary people to use lawyers. I’ve often thought the same thing about tax – the process of filling in a tax return is often so complicated that without an acountant one easily runs the risk of inadvertently falling foul of the HMRC and who writes tax codes – accountants! In fact I’ve always felt that if I can’t easily understand what the forms are asking me I shouldn’t have to fill them out – HMRC have never agreed with me about that though.
I whole heartedly agree with your points about the way our society values certain professions over others. To me these things have always seemed topsy turvy. But the fact that things like the lawyers were able to maintain an over-valued position in society even in an agrarian society like that of 17th century England and were able to re-assert that position even though challenging it had been one of the original demands of the victors in the English Civil War suggests to me that this isn’t a problem of fossil fuelled modernity.
I suspect its a problem in any society in which specialisation develops to any great degree and in which institutions develop more than meagre power within that society.
Wasn’t it also Herbert who wrote that specialisation is for insects?
Ah — no, I see I am thinking of Heinlein:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Not a bad list to start with, I suppose. Though some of these are easier to get practice at than others.
The ecomodernists are just as blinkered as the political right and looking at their ideas that are driving the politics are just as right wing , industry buys carbon credits farmers are closed down , they will find in the future ya can’t eat carbon credits .I
Neither left nor right have ideas based on the reality of failing systems , energy , climate or financial , they look at them as separate issues not as whole problem plus they look no further than the G7 .
As for the oil men in the oil patch here , they know we will never run out of oil , we will run out of oil that we can afford , they know there will be millions of barrels underground waiting for geology and time to grind away the overburden and release the oil into the environment . ( Canadian tar sands are what’s left of a oilfield that surfaced )their kids have not followed them into the oil industry they know that line of work is over !
What the future holds I have no idea but I do know that the wind farms round here only work because of subsidies paid from royalties from oil / gas production . The entire world is set up on cheap abundant energy Monbiot et all don’t figure that into their technoutopian future .
This might be amusing, or bemusing. At the end of Chapter 16 in the book “The Community Resilience Handbook” is this conclusion about agricultural resilience:
“Agricultural resilience is a diverse, complex, and very broad topic of critical importance to society.”
So far, so good. Continuing…
“While traditionally left to agronomists, agriculturalists, animal scientists, and farmers and ranchers, the day-to-day activities of agricultural production can benefit substantially…”
“…by input and guidance from the legal profession.”
https://nhma.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/J.WeinerChapter-ABA2020ManyRolesOfLawyersAgResil-withSassenrath11-25-20.pdf
(The book was published by the American Bar Association.)
I am appalled, Chris. Punished for just being associated with something. There is justice, and there is the law, and the two are not the same. The law protects the powerful, justice protects the weak, and there is no justice.
I think ecomodernism, apart from being a counter-sense theory*, is a distraction. Easier to take the fantasies of a despairing George down than upbeat Cargill, or the happy Pentagon, who do more harm. Also, if people are willing through Bernays-style brainwashing to eat unrecognisable lumps of chicken in batter, why not just give them techoglop instead and have a living river Wye? One installation would produce enough studge to feed “turkey” twizzlers to half the country, and the Wye valley could become an oasis of butterflies, beavers, etc. Eating the studge would make people too lethargic to destroy the riverbed with canoe paddles and I, who eat organic pastured beef, could have the whole place to myself until the cholesterol buildup kills me. Or not, depending which heavily-referenced book written by a qualified author you pick up.
*You cannot be modern and ecological, obvs.
“why not just…”?
Two reasons spring to mind.
1) As previously noted, studge or technoglop or whatever doesn’t appear to add up, energetically
2) In an over-financialised world where profit is routinely placed above wellbeing, we might think “OK then, as a compromise let’s have studge and also have pastured beef” but there’s a strong possibility that what we’ll actually get is studge and… battery chickens. And maybe a golf course for the rich, maintained with fossil fuel fertiliser and glyphosate, where the pasture used to be.
https://gatesofvienna.net/2023/06/i-cant-wait-for-that-yummy-soylent-green/
“So far, the social acceptance of such meat, which could also be described as proteins from animal cancer cells”
Hmmmmm taisty , 4000 tonnes a year
Just a quick aside to say how thoroughly enjoyable it is to read the Google preview of ‘Saying NO…’ via Chelsea Green’s website. Yes, I have my biases, but I already get the good feeling that it’s the literary equivalent of a slam-dunk. Well done, Chris.
Thanks for the comments. A bit short on time to respond, as I previously indicated. But informative.
Professional boundary policing, which is not a new thing. Yup, I’d agree there.
As I have said before the government puts up with protests untill it does not , there is a long history from the peasants revolt to today , nothing much changes ……
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5yStXjQSOR4
US version of you Chris .
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/25/siemens-energys-troubles-a-case-study-in-the-misallocation-of-resources/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/25/offshore-windfarms-threaten-to-pull-out-of-uneconomical-contracts/
Two reports on the problems of technoutopia
The professional classes will be one of the largest obstacles to a planned transition to a small farm future, if one is possible.
I think we can see the lines being drawn as the corporate aristocracy stifles the last remnants of descent through law and the economy. Banking, insurance, accountancy and law are now rallying against the rabble!
Perhaps this is a good sign. Hallam calls these oppressions by the state ‘a roll of the dice’ as they don’t know if it will stifle or enflame.
Thank you and your wife for your work and your actions.