Scary volcano face isn't happy about climate change. I wouldn't fuck with him, even if I was Willie Walsh

Now that the flight ban is over, it’s estimated that the grounding of planes over the past few days has prevented around 2.8 million tonnes of carbon emissions by the aviation industry.

To put this in perspective, this is more than the annual emissions of around 50 different developing countries like Rwanda, Malawi or Sierra Leone.

It’s far from enough to prevent catastrophic global warming, but it’s a dent in the continuing self-inflicted poisoning of our home that capitalism is causing for humanity. It also serves to highlight the ridiculous dependence of the UK and other rich countries on planes.

The UK government likes to trumpet its record on the environment, claiming that UK carbon emissions are falling enough for us to more than meet our commitments under the Kyoto protocol.

Unfortunately, the government’s figures are about as fiddled as the ones on unemployment. They don’t take into account the cost of importing all the food we rely on Africa to grow for us, or the goods China manufactures for us. When you take into account the cost of shipping and aviation, UK carbon emissions are still rising, i.e. making the crisis worse. The governments figures also allow them to deduct carbon credits by paying for forests abroad etc., which is in fact a bit of a scam.

So taking this all into account, it’s pretty clear that the Eyjafjallajokull volcano has done more to tackle climate change than the UK government, or the US government, where carbon emissions also continue to rise. Not only are these governments not doing something about the problem, they’re making it worse.

The UK government has fought tooth and nail against local residents in Hillingdon, who are sick of noise and pollution, for a third runway at Heathrow airport. This is despite the fact that in independent report found that the third runway would actually COST the UK economy £5 billion, far from making money. But government policy is absolutely committed to the expansion of the aviation industry, no matter the long term cost.

How most of the stuff we buy gets here

As George Monbiot writes in a great piece for the Guardian, our society is now way over specialised and complex, which leaves it vulnerable to collapse. We depend so much on the developing world meeting our needs for us with cheap (virtually slave) labour, that the smallest disruption can have a ripple effect. Even in the few days flights were banned the UK was facing running out of certain food commodities.

Capitalism takes its decisions purely on what makes money, and doesn’t factor in the long term possibility of problems. Supermarkets rely on “just-in-time” deliveries, and any disruption pulls the whole thing down. What we should take away as a lesson from the volcanic disruption is that we urgently need to start meeting more of our needs closer to home. That means that cities need to start growing their own food, and regions must as much as possible be self sustaining. Of course there’ll always be a need to get some from outside, but right now we couldn’t sustain ourselves without the planes and ships bringing in our food.

Transforming our cities and regions into self sustaining, healthier places to live would be a lot of work. But its exactly the sort of work that would solve so many of our social problems, and give meaning to the lives of people who are unable to find a decent, meaningful job, and are left alienated by an economy that currently considers them useless because they aren’t rich.

Growing food in the heart of the city in socialist Cuba

The other thing we should learn from this crisis is that capitalism has weak links. Some workers have a lot of power that right now they aren’t using. The whole complex system in the developed world relies on the aviation, shipping, and transport industries, and if workers in these areas were organised and prepared to disrupt things, we could put a lot more pressure on capitalist governments than they’ve felt in a while. It’s no accident that British Airways management are so determined to smash the workers in one of the few airlines that has decent union organisation. Something for socialists to think about.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.