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Monbiot’s nuclear retreat
THE WELL-KNOWN green campaigner and Guardian
columnist George Monbiot has shocked green-lefts and radical
environmentalists by coming out in support of nuclear power. In an
article in The Guardian on August 5 he wrote in relation to global
warming: "I have now reached the point at which I no longer care whether
or not the answer is nuclear. Let it happen…".
Not surprisingly Monbiot’s new position was quickly
welcomed by the CBI, the bosses’ organisation, since big business and
its political mouthpiece in New Labour have been moving towards the
nuclear option for several years, because it represents a cheaper
alternative than renewable energy to burning the fossil fuels that cause
global warming. The ruling class did not need George Monbiot’s
endorsement to press on with new nuclear power stations, but it will
make overcoming opposition from the left and the environmental movement
much easier. Also, labour movement activists will find it much harder to
argue for renewables inside unions such as Unite and the GMB that
currently have pro-nuclear policies.
Monbiot put forward his new position in an article
welcoming the protest at Kingsnorth in Kent to prevent another
coal-fired power station being built by E.ON, the power company. In it
he identified coal burning as the chief threat to the environment and
correctly pointed out that the market permit-trading system that is
supposed to encourage firms such as E.ON to adopt clean coal technology
will be totally ineffective. As an alternative to this free market
approach, he proposes that a low mandatory cap should be set for carbon
emissions and, with this in place, "it [the government] could leave the
rest to the market". The logic of this position is that since the
cheapest alternative to fossil fuels that doesn’t produce significant
greenhouse gasses is nuclear power, this would be ‘the market’s choice’,
which explains why immediately afterwards he writes with regard to
nuclear, ‘let it happen’. Admittedly, Monbiot does hold out the hope
that the inherent environmental advantages of renewables will prevail
over nuclear, but he recognises that New Labour will only go down this
road if forced to by mass pressure from the environmental movement. How
his endorsement of nuclear will help build this movement he doesn’t
explain.
Ironically, it is possible that even George’s
nuclear ‘lesser evil’ will not get off the ground, since the developing
economic recession will make big business think twice about spending
money on new nuclear power stations, at a time when profits are being
decimated. In these circumstances, they would find ways round any
legally enforced carbon emission caps that governments may implement
under mass pressure, as they usually do with regulations that are not in
their interests. They would be aided in this by the fact that greenhouse
emissions will fall sharply anyway due to the economic downturn,
although this will of course be temporary, the duration depending on
when the next upturn takes place.
In a subsequent reply in The Guardian to George
Monbiot’s piece, Arthur Scargill, the former leader of the National
Union of Mineworkers, accused Monbiot either of selling-out his
environmental credentials or of amnesia, in forgetting the facts about
nuclear power. Scargill quite rightly pointed out, as has this column
for many years, that there is no way to store safely the toxic waste
that is a by-product of nuclear power generation or to prevent disasters
such as at Windscale in this country in the 1950s, Three Mile Island in
the USA in the 1970s, and Chernobyl in the USSR in the 1980s. As an
alternative, Scargill proposed that an integrated energy policy should
be adopted that puts at its heart a massive increase in coal production,
in conjunction with renewable energy, with coal being burnt in a
sustainable manner using clean coal technology, based on carbon capture
and storage.
Significantly, Scargill does not explain how his
integrated programme will come about (or for that matter consider the
potential safety issues with carbon storage). The problems in
introducing carbon capture are, however, starkly revealed in George
Monbiot’s article, where he quotes from an email to the government from
E.ON that makes clear the firm’s adamant opposition to implementing
clean coal technology, quite obviously because of the extra cost. New
Labour, needless to say, immediately and supinely acquiesced to the
company requirements, as the email correspondence somewhat amusingly
shows.
The failure to openly address the insurmountable
barrier to sustainability created by the capitalist market system makes
Arthur Scargill’s contribution abstract and utopian and also, in my
opinion, lies behind George Monbiot’s retreat on nuclear power and
embrace of the market, albeit with regulatory features. Monbiot has
often said that capitalist competitive markets are to blame for
environmental destruction, but fails to follow this deduction through to
its logical conclusion, ie the need for democratic, socialist planning.
In a meeting last November in London to build for the climate change
demo, he again reiterated his anti-capitalist position, but crucially
then added that he thought replacing capitalism will be a long-term
undertaking, whereas action needs to be taken now to tackle global
warming, so some other approach is needed in the short run. What this
approach should be wasn’t spelt out explicitly at the time, but he said
he supported internationally applied mandatory enforceable ceilings on
carbon emissions. But this immediately begs the question of how in a
framework of a rapacious antagonistic international market system such
ceilings could be enforced, when the much more market-friendly Kyoto
process proved to be impotent. His championing now of regulated markets
and nuclear power fills some of the gaps in his speech last November,
but he still has not addressed the question of what agency could enforce
an international limit on emissions and how this could be done.
George Monbiot’s postponing of an alternative to
capitalism to the distant future is a result both of his scepticism of
the ability of the organised working class to change society, and of a
fear that any replacement to capitalism will be totalitarian in
character.
For example, while correctly drawing the conclusion
in one of his columns that the left should champion environmentalism, he
argued this on the grounds that "the corporations have so effectively
crushed the global workforce, much of the pressure for change now comes
from outside the factory gates... The limiting factor for corporations,
in other words, is no longer labour, but the ecosystem and the
regulations which protect it". (The Guardian, 6 April 2004) At the time
of the European Social Forum in 2003, he concluded that none of the
alternatives to capitalism that were discussed "could be applied
universally without totalitarianism" and, as a result, "should we not...
concentrate on capturing and taming the beast whose den we already
inhabit?" (The Guardian, 18 November 2003) He also pointed to the
shortcomings of the command system in the Soviet Union and the alleged
failure of the revolutionary left to address this.
It is not possible to deal in any detail in this
column with the broad issues that are raised by George Monbiot in the
above paragraph, beyond saying that the questions raised about how
capitalism can be overthrown have been explained many times in this
magazine and elsewhere, including drawing on the lessons of the Russian
revolution. Similarly, the reasons for the subsequent degeneration of
the revolution and the establishment of a totalitarian state have been
analysed repeatedly, as have the ways this could have been avoided, and
can be avoided in the future. The editorial marking the hundredth
edition of Socialism Today included an answer to George Monbiot’s social
forum comments (Socialism Today No.100, April 2006).
But the point here is that the direction of
Monbiot’s thinking over the past few years is clearly seen by such
comments, and his embrace of nuclear power and market forces today is
the logical outcome of this.
Pete Dickenson
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