“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying.

This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so the real crisis, which is after all about something as mundane as food, has slipped off of the radar. The global meltdown of the banks, a grand Greek drama of the folly of the gods if ever there was one, has captured our attention. Have the problems with food thus disappeared? I think not. They are here to stay and getting stronger.

The problems we saw with the huge price rise in 2008 are still around, bio-fuels, huge agri-businesses exploiting market power, and so on. It is a myth that this was driven by increased demand from China and India, downwards pressure on wages in developing countries has actually reduced per capita food intake in the poor majority of these countries. Adding speculation in food markets yields a lovely recipe for population control (Thus Passim). Over the past two years, evidence has grown of the impact of Climate Change on agriculture. An FAO report by Cline in 2007 put agricultural yield losses by 2080 at between 5 and 20% globally. This hid a regional picture where India could lose 30-40% of its yield. As if this was not enough, he pointed out the glaringly obvious problem with equilibrium models, which mean even greater declines in food production.

These models assume systems tending to a steady state, and are used in both agro-economics and climate modeling. They mask extreme events and chaotic systems that refuse to settle down. Extreme weather is a fact of life in India, whose climate is driven by the dynamic monsoon weather system. No-one quite knows how this system will respond to changes in climate, but what we do know is that around 40% of India’s population depend directly on the rain. They live in terror of extreme weather, and this year, with a major drought from failure of the monsoon, India is importing food again. This just after India signed an accord to turn land over to fuel production to help keep American engines going.

Finally, there is sea-level rise to consider, something also not included in Cline’s report. For instance Egypt is facing the loss of much of its prime agricultural lands along the Nile Delta. So worry about the banks that hold in your money all you like, the food problem is not going away.

While Somali pirates are taking hostages, killing and getting killed by the French navy, French trawlermen are blockading Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk. The Somalis claim they have taken to robbery and kidnapping because their traditional fishing livelihoods have been abstracted by factory ships. The French trawlermen are protesting more or less the same thing, except that their fishing methods are somewhat more automated and their temporary victims are a bunch of tourists, truck drivers and ferry operators. I have no sympathy for either group. The French will exact concessions from their government – so far Eur 4 million has been offered in aid – and maybe the EU. The Somalis will probably end up dead. In either case the root cause will remain. If the matelots were protesting about the ghastly English in general or any number of legitimate gripes other than EU fish quotas, they’d have the full power of Thus behind their routine trashing of the UK Easter half-term holiday. But if they win this one, everyone loses. The restrictions to which they object are insufficient, impossible to enforce and arguably contribute more to the problem than to the solution. We need to pay them to stay in port and find them something sensible and dignified to do while they don’t go to sea. Ditto for the Somalis, but that’s another story.

Charles Clover presents a compelling and authoritative account of the overfishing of the world’s oceans, to which I can’t add much other than to urge you to look out for the documentary film, released in June. Scientists agree that while pollution and climate change, environment and food stocks all affect breeding patterns and populations, factory ships, super trawlers and the collateral damage they cause with their catch-all multi-kilometre nets have damaged fish stocks beyond the tipping point. While fishermen themselves are a breed in decline, it is insane to allow them to exercise their right to work by destroying what remains of the planet’s fish populations.

Spain has the biggest EU fishing fleet. Non-EU members Norway and Iceland, combined populations less than 5 million, account for 22% of the fleet.

The current French protest (now halted) is targeted against the 2008 EU quotas, which are are harmful and wasteful, but not because they are too stringent. They encourage fishermen throw back corpses of endangered fish they have caught by accident if it takes them over their quota of a specific species. While increasing net holes has theoretically helped immature fish to escape, trawling is at best an inexact science and the big ships create havoc as they scrape the seas in search of dwindling stocks in a compressed timeframe. Even if EU fleets comply with quotas, non-EU trawlers account for over 28% of the tonnage in European territorial waters. Quotas may be seen as a ploy to avoid the inevitable recognition that without a total moratorium on factory fishing, white fish in particular face extinction in the North Atlantic and North Sea within a maximum of 30 years, perhaps much earlier. Because this is politically unpalatable we will allow the next generation to take the consequences of our idiocy.

The French government offer of EUR 4 million aid to the trawlermen won’t even pay the legal fees of the proposed litigation from the ferry owners whose businesses have been affected by the blockade. According to the European Environmental Agency, France accounts for around 8% of the tonnage of the EU fishing fleet, similar to Britain and Italy, with combined populations of over 180 million. The Netherlands accounts for 6%. At 19%, Spain is the biggest EU member state fleet. Iceland (7%) and Norway (15%) are not EU members and have a combined population of less than 6 million. Both are grudging signatories to EU memoranda. 28% of the fishing fleet is described as ‘other.’

EU figures show that the while numbers of ships fell by 10%, total tonnage, engine power and overall numbers of vessels in the combined fishing fleets of member states has remained roughly constant since 1997. Factory ships, which do the most damage, have come to the fore. It is a classic example of EU funhouse economics. Giving the same number of people the right to catch 30% less fish from a naturally-declining supply is bound to cause price inflation and bring misery to all but the most ruthless and best-equipped operators, who cause the most environmental damage. A fishy version of the EU Common Agricultural Policy ‘set aside’ scheme (itself flawed) should be enacted, paying trawlermen to lay up for a significant period while stocks recover. Punitive taxes, based on tonnage, could be applied to the big ships. Klondikers from Asia, Japan, Russia and, it has to be said, Spain, should be made very unwelcome indeed in EU territorial waters and fish markets should be better monitored for smuggled catches.

I have recently eaten gambas in a pictureseque waterfront café in a remote corner of southern Spain, to be informed that they were caught and shipped from Northern Scotland – the local stocks were exhausted long ago. I have heard of Klondike trawlers from the Vladivostok fleet, forced to fish half a world away from home, unloading illegal catches of North Atlantic cod at Lowestoft, Yarmouth and Ipswich, where they fetch bullion-robbery prices. Populations of Atlantic herring have declined by almost 95% over the past two decades. Atlantic salmon smoult numbers have fallen by 70% over half that period. I’m no Cousteau – more of a Clouseau if the truth were told – but I know a red herring when it’s under my nose. EU fishing quotas are dangerous, unworkable and shift the balance in favour of the very factory ships which have destroyed the seas and the livelihoods of ‘traditional’ fishermen.

By John J Kelly.

Foolish people have argued that there is a choice between preventing the worst effects of climate change and adapting to unavoidable changes, despite compelling evidence, such as that produced at the latest meeting at Copenhagen that the majority cannot survive without drastic emissions reductions and even if we do, adapting to a lot of changes. While there is a very lively debate on mitigation, on reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the debates on adaptation have been sidelined, perhaps becuase they are seen as distracting from the serious task of saving the world – or perhaps saving the relatively rich English-speakers having the debate. Most measures supposedly designed to reduce carbon in the air also tend to have a horrible impact on the poor. Bio-fuels, which would allow a kind of business-as-usual in terms of running car on liquid fuels, are a prime example – large scale cultivation will disrupt food production. Indeed, the World Bank claims that 75% of last year’s food price spike was down to this very factor.

Another example is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) designed to get developing countries involved in  Carbon Trading. These are mitigation measures, this money might help adaptation as well, but, under the current system, it won’t.  India’s Center for Science and Environment has been very critical of CDM, which lets the rich buy all the cheap ways of reducing their carbon outputs, forcing the rest to pay more for this later. In addition, the complex process of obtaining carbon credits means it is only really suitable for big companies. So the money won’t go to helping the poor adapt, but will go to the big companies, who do most of the polluting in the first place.

Aided and abetted by consultants from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, business lobbies have managed to get environmental impact assessment laws diluted in India. Bribery and political influence from big companies is so widespread that several activists have been forced to send industrial water pollution samples to the US to get them processed, because no Indian laboratory dares to return results that would upset big business. Are we seriously going to direct more resources at this lobby in the hope that this will reduce emissions? And how exactly will this help the poor to adapt?

Alternatives will need to be fought for. The recent Forest Rights Act has made its way through Indian Parliament and is now being put into practice. It sets an interesting precedent by putting into law a framework of rights to underpin local democratic control of natural resources. This highlights one of the few advantages the poor have in terms of winning real adaptation concessions. Despite the tiny character of their landholdings,  due to their sheer numbers, they command control of a sizeable proportion of the land.

If you combine the recent findings about climate change with likely emissions reductions paths, you see that we little chance of making it through this crisis without taking some of the carbon back out of the air. The global carbon cycle suggests two main ways of doing this: put it into the sea, by seeding the oceans for instance, but the technology is not developed yet. Alternativey, you can put it into the land, either through minerals like Olivine, or through biomass, and turning it into charcoal (Biochar). It has been correctly observed that using charcoal as a global commercialised solution to climate change has the same effect as bio-fuels on displacing food production. However, dismissing biochar out of hand misses an important strategic point.

Oxfam and others argue that Human Rights should be put at the heart of the climate debates, particularly adaptation. However, they are somewhat more coy in public about the fact that rights are generally never given freely by the powerful, but forced as concessions from them by the struggles of others. But what on earth do the rich need the poor for? One area is to get access to land. Tata’s troubles in building a plant to manufacture the new Nano car illustrates that the poor will not give up control of what little land they have so easily. If the rich need to use land for getting carbon out of the air, and if the poor can prevent the rich  from doing so by thwarting their plans, perhaps this gives them leverage to demand more rights over their natural resources.

Despite biochar being criticised as an unreliable way to improve soil quality, there have been studies that show that used correctly it can be a useful input into organic agriculture, as well as offering a credible method for sinking carbon into the soil, especially when considered as a part of strategies to increase tree-cover overall. Can we afford to dismiss Biochar as an option because we fear the implications of its commercialisation? As a potential low cost-technology that the poor could implement to improve their land, and a possible source of some leverage on the rich in adaptation negotiations, it may be rash to dismiss it out of hand. With only $1Bn of the already pitiful $18Bn of adaptation funding having been paid out, current approaches to mobilising those resources are clearly not working. Can we afford to overlook the potential advantage the poor may have in the one resource they may control?

If the Indian Forest Rights model can be extended to support dryland organic agricultural practices within a democratised natural resource management framework, this actually creates a model where subsidy for mitigation, in the form of support of increased tree coverage and use of biochar might be used to build productive assets for the poor that may help them adapt. The experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India shows that productive use of subsidy is crucial to prevent the subsidy from undercutting the existing local economy, especially agriculture. Thus the issue of having a rights regime to protect access to the environment and thus local economic activity is crucial to any adaptation approach. There is almost no chance of realising such regimes unless the poor have some real leverage to exercise in order to get them.

 Anyone see any other leverage out there?

‘Over the ages, great changes have tended to come out of adversity.  The welfare state was after all born out of depression and global conflict.  A moment of crisis is precisely the time to think boldly about what it was that precipitated the disaster, and to plan for doing things better in the future.  For some years now I’ve felt that our national politics in Britain has lost the ability to be bold.  It has become too “managerial”, too absorbed with minor adjustments – tinkering, almost – and too little prepared to set ambitious goals and seek to persuade people to join the journey towards them.  We need to recapture some of that spirit, in the same way that politics and political discourse have been triumphantly revived over the past couple of years on the other side of the Atlantic.

‘When we emerge from this economic turmoil what we mustn’t do is simply re-establish what went before, and continue with all the old assumptions – about patterns of growth, consumption, and impact – as if nothing had happened.  2009 could be the year when we radically change some of our economic and social habits, and make a historic shift towards a more sustainable pattern of human activity and economic interaction. 

‘It was notable that when the Climate Change Act finally passed through the House of Commons there were only three votes against it.  It is rare for such a fundamental piece of legislation to arrive on the statute book with such overwhelming cross-party support.  Could we dare to hope that this same non-partisan approach could be established more generally for the environmental and climate change agenda?  How about, as a start, an official mechanism for sharing information and papers between government and opposition parties, on privy council terms, on a regular basis?  It’s done when the country is preparing for war; given the sheer importance of the issue, can’t it be done for the war on climate change?  And how about a cross-party delegation at Copenhagen, to demonstrate the national commitment that transcends any single government or parliament?

‘Not only should the Government be doing things itself in the short term, but it must also be acting as a catalyst for much wider change . . . They could start by developing a full-scale, comprehensive, nationally publicised programme to fit better insulation and provide improved energy efficiency to people’s homes.  We’ve had some scattered initiatives to date, but no sense of a full-scale national endeavour.  When the change was made, years ago, to natural gas in the home, there was a team of people who called door to door, making changes, fitting new meters and valves, and explaining what was happening.  Everyone knew about it, everyone made sure they participated, and a remarkably smooth and successful transformation was achieved.  We need the same approach. 

‘In the immediate term, Government – and the broader public sector – should be leading by example.  All public buildings should be fitted with solar or photovoltaic panels.  New buildings should be fitted with ground-source pumps.  Public land should be used, where possible, for wind power generation.  Every new public building should meet the highest possible standards for energy and water efficiency, becoming a showcase of good practice for other local businesses and organisations to follow.  Government and public bodies should be switching their fleet vehicles to those with low-emission and hybrid engines, and reducing mileage wherever possible.  Video-conferencing should be used more frequently.  And I would like to see every government department and public-sector organisation required to publish an Environmental Responsibility Report alongside its budget each year.

‘Government can also make it much easier for households to get access to photovoltaic panel technology, and wind turbine technology, for their own homes.  Feed-in tariffs are an important part of the picture, but how about a one-stop-shop clearing house for arranging and organising the work, run by each local authority or a cluster of local authorities, to enable householders to get it done with a minimum of fuss and effort?  And how about interest-free loans to assist those households who might find it difficult to pay up-front?  How about priority access to the electricity grid for household renewables, as happened in Germany?  This resulted in far higher take-up by households than here, and we should learn from the incentives and procedures they put in place.

‘One of the great tragedies of the past twenty years has been that some of these early forms of renewable technology – wind turbines, and solar and photovoltaic panels – have been seized on and developed by other countries, and not by firms based here in Britain.  Does this have to be a permanent state of affairs?  As we increasingly ratchet up the demand for these forms of energy generation, isn’t there a strong case for trying to develop a large-scale manufacturing capacity here?  There are some small investments . . . . struggling against mega-competition from Denmark and Germany and elsewhere – but these are isolated examples.  Surely this should be a case of genuine opportunity that could be unlocked by investment from the Regional Development Agencies?  

‘Nick Stern, for example, said at the recent Davos summit that the world needed to invest $400 billion in low-carbon technologies and infrastructure over the next two years.  President Obama has placed green technology and renewable energy at the core of his proposals for a major public-works stimulus to the US economy: making the argument on energy-security and environmental and economic grounds.  There is good precedent for this.  Franklin Roosevelt planted hundreds of thousands of trees as part of the New Deal public-works programme – and in the process helped to stabilise the shifting soils of the dustbowl lands that had created such agricultural poverty over earlier decades.  He built dams and channelled water and irrigated new pastures.  He understood precisely how the deployment of publicly-led investment could help to transform the relationship between the land and the people who could derive work and benefit from it.  Barack Obama recognises this too, for energy as well as for land. 

‘The centrality of green initiatives to the Obama rescue package is highlighted by estimates from the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC, comparing the green percentage content of stimulus packages on a country by country basis.  The initial analysis shows that green investments represented only 2% of the Bush Stabilization Act measures;  they represent 16% of the Obama proposals.  The comparative figures for the other highly-performing countries are 34% for China, 19% for Germany, 10% for Spain, and 69% for South Korea.  The equivalent figure for the UK is 7%.  This is disappointing for the UK.  It represents some good specific initiatives, but it has tended to be in bits and pieces.  There is as yet no sense of an overall, coherent, planned, national strategy to see green investment as central to the recovery.  There should be.  And surely the forthcoming Budget – together with the publication of the low-carbon industrial strategy – is precisely the place to do it.

‘At the heart of any such green investment strategy must be nothing less than the complete transformation of energy generation in Britain.  If we are to have the remotest chance of meeting our 80% reduction target by 2050, we have to have more or less de-carbonised our electricity production completely by 2030.  And in order to do so, we have to ensure that carbon is removed from fossil-fuel-burning processes (more of this in a moment).  We have to include new nuclear generation within the overall mix –and this means solving the major outstanding dilemma of how to find a safe and secure repository for our high-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste.  And we have to make huge strides in our hitherto faltering progress in the development of renewables.

‘There’s a tendency amongst some within the “green movement” to talk only of doom and gloom.  To paint a picture of rising sea-levels and disappearing forests and growing deserts and violent storms and food and water scarcity and destroyed biodiversity and wars over environmental territory, and to tell us all that we’re going to hell in a handcart unless we all turn into green hippies and live off the land.  The problem is, it simply isn’t going to happen;  people won’t want to live their lives like this.  It’s difficult enough to convince people to do something, however small, to help to avoid a disaster that is waiting to happen but hasn’t happened yet.  To do so on the back of an unrelievedly doom-laden analysis isn’t going to persuade very many people.  We need to learn the classic lesson that Barack Obama has re-taught us:  tell it as it is, yes, but give a sense of hope that things could be made to be different.  And that all we need is the will to do it.

‘What’s more, in relation to environmental change, we’ve done it before.  The past fifteen years have seen an 80% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions.  The hole in the ozone layer has been repaired.  The threat of acid rain has retreated.  It’s all happened because of human endeavour, incentives, and regulation.  And in the process we’ve demonstrated that it is possible to change environmentally-destructive behaviour for the better.  We need to apply the same dedication, now, to the issue of climate change. 

‘So, give everyone the facts, yes.  Give them hope too.  And then go beyond that, and give them the opportunity to shape the debate and discussion about what we want society to look like in forty years’ time.  Until last year, we tended to assume that the key to perpetual economic progress was ever-increasing consumption, and indeed that part of the cure for our economic ills is to re-start the consumption motor.  Could we, though, envisage a time when we think more of the balance between consumption and consolidation and – dare we think it – sharing;  when we try to find our way to a new economics that factors in the needs of future as well as current generations;  when we try to place a real value on the resources that we use up, and the waste we generate, and the impact on the rather fragile world around us without which we couldn’t do anything;  and when we see wisdom in some rather old concepts like husbandry and stewardship and well-being?  These aren’t easy things to shout about and inspire people with.  It means appealing to something more than the automatic immediate aspirations people have.  It doesn’t mean abandoning the sense of reaching for the best that life can offer.  But it does mean having the maturity to discuss and decide, seriously, what the shape of “the best” might be.  Surely it must be the case – in the shadow of  economic crisis – that the right time to have this discussion, to make this change, is here and now.

 As George Bernard Shaw used to say, “Some men see things as they are and say why;  I dream things that never were, and say – why not”.   

A surefire sign that something's wrong

India and China sit on an awful lot of coal, and there is a heated debate going on amongst agonized environmentalists that Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors might be necessary to avoid it all going up in smoke. Carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon as it leaves the chimney and then storing it underground-  sounds like a good idea, but it is a long way from being commercially viable, and there is not a lot of time left. The Greenpeace energy plan for India avoids coal and nuclear, but leans on “biomass.” This means plants mainly, and it raises the same problems as bio-fuels, namely that it becomes more economic to power machines than feed poor people.

One thing that has become clear with the recent nuclear deal is that the chances of the US stopping India from further developing its military nuclear capability are next to zero. So in this version of events, the risk of nuclear proliferation is a sad side-effect of what has to be done to stop us from cooking ourselves more slowly.  However, in another version of the story, proliferation is the main event. It involves a dark place, deep underground, where a small yellow bird sits in a cage.

Before the invention of the Davy lamp, canaries were used by miners because they are sensitive to gas. When they died, the miners knew they had to get out. Today’s canaries are the poor, such as subsistence farmers. When they start to perish in accelerating numbers, we know that there is a calamity upon its way. This makes the recent slew of farmer suicides in India a bit worrying. Actually a country with 80 odd percent of its people at or below starvation incomes – the 27% poverty figure you see for India is based on snide statistics –  can only really be described as a Canary state. India uses 90% of its freshwater for irrigation, and looks set to get drier. Tweet, tweet.

Canaries are useless if you don’t pay attention when they start expiring. Indeed, if recent trade rounds are anything to go by, the rich world seems unconcerned about the fate of Indian farmers under climate change. But here’s the twist. The US has just given India what looks like a license to power up their nukes.  So India is now unlikely to go out with just a chirrup. It also has nuclear-enabled neighbours, China and Pakistan, who are not going to sit on their hands as India tools up. So we have probably got the best part of Asia cooking up a nuclear storm.

Forget Africa, with its huge land area and tiny population (ten times the area and 200 million less population than India alone.) The subsistence farmers in Africa are not hugely dependent on chemical inputs, and thus on Oil prices as in Asia, and they have a lot more space to move around in, with a huge North-South gradient to traverse in search of the weather they need. No, it is Asia with its incredible population densities supported by mechanised agriculture that will feel the pinch between Climate Change and Peak Oil. And that is where America has been is tending its nuclear flower bed.

So things are bound to change a bit: Rather than valuing the Canaries based on their “willingness to pay” for their lives (THUS passim), we have to start thinking about what happens to their nuclear-armed governments if they show a strong willingness to riot. Ironically, this means that George “W” is an accidental hero. Having upped the ante, the world now needs to work hard to ensure that India is not forced into a situation where food riots lead to catastrophic nuclear proliferation, enabled by the US. In the words of another great American, Forrest Gump, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”

We need a Global Climate Deal right now, but when even a Greeny like Al Gore worked hard to dilute the Kyoto Protocol, you start to wonder if the Americans have a collective death-wish. The answer, of course, is no. But why then the insistence on oil? Why the crazy misadventures in the Middle East, when the time (and money) in between could have been spent on re-fitting our energy systems or getting ready for bad weather? Much though I like having a moan with John Pilger, (each to their own, JK) and have personally enjoyed many a tirade against American power (ibid), one of the things that Climate Change really hammers home that we are all in this together. Hence, perhaps, the rather weak sounding position of the UN’s chief climate negotiator, Yvo de Boer, that Americans have economic interests they need to protect, and that we must to respect this. He is right though. We cannot expect even a relatively worldly President like Obama to ignore these interests. The EU are currently negotiating target carbon emission reductions of up to 40% by 2020, but if America continues to pursue a retrograde energy policy, the developing world can hardly be expected to line up with Europe.

America’s conundrum in relation to oil actually goes right to the base of their power-position in the world. America got into the position of being the main global power in the aftermath of the two great European Civil Wars (WWI and WWII as we like to call them.) The American negotiators were in a position, in the 1945-1948 period, to largely set the terms to the bankrupted powers of the old world. The deal negotiated was not Keynesian, as many say, but was created by the American negotiator, Harry Dexter White.

Keynes recommended a world currency. We got the dollar instead. It was fine for a while but . . .

Two crucial points emerged from this. The first was that, against the advice of Keynes who wanted a new global currency, international finance would be built around the Dollar. The second was that European powers, particularly the British, would start to hand over the international seaways and strategic control of areas such as the Middle East. This was partly through the dismantling of formal Empire, but also through the opening up of key sectors to American investment, oil extraction in the Middle East being an area that emerged as crucial in the subsequent decades.As this new international system bedded in, and as the postwar industrial boom took shape, the link between oil and the dollar emerged. Countries needed a continuous supply of fuel- increasingly oil, and you could only 100% reliably purchase oil in an emergency if you held dollars in your national reserve. Thus the dollar strengthened as a global reserve currency. This was very much as Harry Dexter White had planned it, since it gave the US an ongoing economic advantage. All the dollars that were printed in America and spent abroad meant goods and services for free. That is for as long as they were held abroad and not spent back into the American Economy.

But here lies America’s central problem: These dollars are now sitting abroad in overseas banks, but what happens if the dollar-oil link unwinds, and these overseas dollars come home to roost?  Hyper-inflation of the scariest kind. Even the International Monetary Fund’s insistence that foreign reserves be held in dollars does not re-assure American policy makers when Saddam and OPEC start discussing trading oil in Euros, so this is clearly a major percieved threat.

De-carbonising America is not impossible

Now climate science demands that we move away from an oil-based global economy astoundingly fast, we are talking de-carbonisation rates of 3-6% a year here. To put this in context, the decarbonisation rate of Russia as it collapsed economically under Yeltsin was 1% per year, so this is a huge shift. How could America survive such a rapid lurch away from oil? One way is to make it look like oil can in some way be made green. You stick with the same infrastructure, and keep the trade going by using a liquid fuel with green credentials to try and dilute the impact of your power-base. In other words, you back biofuels. The FAO has just released its State of Food and Agriculture 2008 report, and it is clear that biofuels are part of what is currently pushing up starvation rates around the world.  So the current American strategy looks like building a house of cards (Thus passim) since it involves making the lives of those at the bottom of the Global Economy even more unstable.

There is  another way out but it requires a level of innovative thinking about the economy beyond even that presented in the recent Green New Deal, and way outside the scope of what is being considered in the current economic summits. The only way I can think of avoiding the unwinding of the dollar (which would probably make us all suffer) without sticking to an oil base (which will definitely make us all suffer) is to allow the conversion of foreign reserves of Dollars into a new Global currency. The crucial point is that this conversion process needs to take these overseas dollars out of circulation whilst retaining the value that they held. So the new currency will need to be tradeable for oil in the very short-term, but designed so that in the longer term it phases out international trade in fossil fuels.

I am no expert (look here and here for some), but my main point is that there is a need for this kind of blue sky financial thinking. If we do not in some way take into account the difficult position that America faces and try and find solutions, then America and its rulers will be forced by circumstance to keep us running towards the precipice. Despite people trumpeting the “End of History” and the “End of Ideology” (Thus Passim) we actually need to rethink and to some extent politicise our financial systems in order to get through the roadblock that we face.