“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
— Arundhati Roy, April 2020
Oil giants BP and Shell are on course to make a combined profit of about £40bn this year from the rocketing price of petrol and gas.
North Sea oil and gas companies that already benefit from huge tax breaks could use fresh rules to slash how much they pay under a new windfall tax announced by Rishi Sunak as part of his £15bn cost of living package, according to a thinktank. The chancellor risks raising a fraction of the £5bn he expects from the complex scheme – which allows the cost of new investments to be offset against profits – should oil and gas companies take the opportunity to dramatically reduce their contribution to the exchequer, said the thinktank Common Wealth.
Research carried out with the New Economics Foundation, which found that the government had handed firms operating in British waters tax breaks worth about £3.1bn in 2019-20 and £2.5bn in 2020. Most of the funds were directed to shareholders in share buy-back schemes. The Treasury has not calculated how much of the £5bn in extra tax could be lost if North Sea operators claim extra investment allowances over the next three years.
Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson, said Sunak’s “11th hour” 25% windfall tax on oil and gas company profits allowed them to carry on “with business as usual” and direct most of their profits to shareholders.
“It’s bad enough that the chancellor waited until the 11th hour to tax big oil and gas, when Liberal Democrats first called for a windfall tax last October. Now it looks like it may not even raise what he said it will. That’s more levy lite than windfall tax.” She accused the chancellor of “going soft on huge companies making a killing out of a crisis”.
The UK’s top scientists working on carbon capture technologies do not believe they will be developed and scaled up in time to reach net zero and limit global heating to 1.5C.
Experts speaking at a Greenhouse Gas Removal Hub event in London warned that these techniques, including direct air capture, biofuels, biochar, afforestation and advanced weathering, are not a silver bullet and should make up just a fraction of the efforts to decarbonise. Of 114 scientists in the audience, 57% said they were “not confident” the UK would meet the 2030 goals in the net zero strategy of 5m tonnes of engineered greenhouse gas removal, and 30,000 hectares a year of tree planting; 25% said they were quite confident, and 11% said there was no chance.
Gideon Henderson, the chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: “GGR [greenhouse gas removal] is hard and expensive. And we cannot afford to see it as a surrogate to compensate for continued emissions in sectors that can be decarbonised. It is not an excuse not to decarbonise, so we must drive down emissions anyway.” Henderson said afforestation is the “poster child” of GGR, because “everyone seems to love it, and it’s nice to have more trees”. However, he said trees “are not a panacea” because of the amount of land they need, which is taken out of food production, which then causes tensions with food security. There is also a tension between woodland, which has more biodiversity benefits but is slower growing, and forests, which grow quickly and lock in more carbon sooner.
Prof Mark Taylor, the deputy director of energy innovation at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), said: “People see it as having the biggest market, there’s been funding from American companies – it feels like a silver bullet, there are lots of people who like it. Ministers like it because they think: ‘Oh, that sounds easy, you can take it out the air and that’s it.’ And that’s the thing that gets investment…”
Storing carbon in soil is a popular method, according to Henderson there are concerns over how long the carbon can be stored in the soil and how it is measured. If the soil begins to release carbon again shortly after it is stored, this could cause problems, especially if it is not being measured effectively and counted in net zero targets. He explained: “I think that if we see significant financial resources coming into this area to incentivise storing soil carbon without being able to measure it, and being sure of its permanence, there’s a risk of continued emission from storage which isn’t permanent or sufficiently well measured.”
The idea of a machine that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stick it permanently in rocks is a very attractive one, and it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the most popular technology for scientists trying to solve this problem.
But it is currently a very energy intensive process. Taylor explained: “We need to use energy to extract the CO2, the pure stream CO2 from the solid, so what we’re looking for an integration that can drive down the costs of DAC, and particularly drive down the cost of extracting the CO2 and the energy costs of extracting the CO2. Because at the moment, there’s no point in capturing CO2 from the air and then using natural gas to run a heat process to extract a pure CO2 stream.”
The tally of unionized Starbucks locations is continuing to grow. The Starbucks Workers United union campaign continues to produce astounding election wins week after week. 260 stores have petitioned for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections: The union has won 77 NLRB elections, (87%) most by overwhelming margins, including in places where union victories are rare, including in Mesa, Arizona; Boone, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Knoxville, Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; and Overland Park, Kansas.and has lost only nine elections.
By the union’s count, there are now 100 stores across the nation that have unionized, that milestone being achieved after successful votes at two stores in Seattle, the birthplace of Starbucks.
Starbuck workers in Greenville, South Carolina, once known as being “among the most relentlessly anti-union cities in the nation,” by The New York Times, voted eight to one to become the first unionized store in the state. For the past two years, South Carolina has been the least unionized state in the country, and union density in 2021 was just 1.7 percent. Greenville is even more anti-union than the rest of South Carolina. The metropolitan area has only seven employers with any union workers. Local employers brag about it. “In 2021, the private sector unionization rate for the Greenville area was only 0.3%. The Greenville Metropolitan Statistical Area is the least unionized Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States…There have been no reported work stoppages reported in the past ten years.”
SOURCES
Starbucks Workers United Wins in US’s Most Anti-Union City (truthout.org)
Organizers Herald 100th Win as Starbucks Unionization Wave Continues (commondreams.org)
A Short Story from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard
From the May 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard
A Home Office commissioned paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress over the past year reveals the origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population,
The 52-page analysis by an unnamed historian describes how “the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function”. It concludes that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.
The report states, “Major immigration legislation in 1962, 1968 and 1971 was designed to reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin.”
The unnamed Home Office historian writes: “The British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function, which in turn produced legislation aimed at keeping racial and ethnic groups apart … From the beginning, concern about Commonwealth immigration was about skin colour.” In the 1950s, British officials shared a “basic assumption that ‘coloured immigrants’, as they were referred to, were not good for British society,” the report states.
The document summarises decades of “dysfunctional relationships between Britain’s institutions and Black and minority ethnic people”, and concludes: “The politics of Britain’s borders, which have been administered for more than a century by the Home Office, are now inextricably connected with race and with Britain’s colonial history.”
The report also cites a letter from the prime minister of the Federation of the West Indies, Sir Grantley Adams, to the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan. Sir Grantley protested that “Britain has begun to take steps which are no different in kind to the basis on which the system of apartheid in South Africa is based” by introducing the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.
Rejecting the idea that Congress should legislate to restrict easy access to guns, Republicans echo the words of Trump that it is necessary to militarized schools with armed security, andarmed teachers. Schools are to be turned into fortresses.
Politicians bought and paid for by NRA campaign funding, actively obstruct any introduction of gun safety laws. They do not question why an 18-year-old cannot buy alcohol yet legally can buy an assault rifle. It has been over 20 years since the Columbine mass shooting and very little has changed. In recent days we have had gun massacres at Buffalo and Uvalde as evidence that lessons are not being learned and deliberately are ignored
The problem in the United States is not Trump. It is the total acquiescence to the capitalist brainwashing of American individualism and American exceptionalism. As long as capitalism exists, we, the working people, will have no say in our society is run.
A Short Story from the August 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard
A new study published by researchers from the University of Wisconsin (UW) in the journal GeoHealth on Monday, notes that, by eliminating air pollution resulting from energy-related activities in the U.S., more than 53,000 premature deaths could be avoided on an annual basis.
Researchers found that reducing the amount of air-based pollutants would have a profound impact on public health in the immediate term — and that it would also have long-term positive effects when it comes to transitioning away from unsustainable energy sources and addressing the climate crisis as a whole.
A reduction in pollutants would also likely benefit groups of people who are more susceptible than others to these types of pollutants, an EPA report stated.
“These groups include children, pregnant women, older adults, and individuals with pre-existing heart and lung disease,” the EPA said, as well as people “in low socioeconomic neighborhoods and communities [that] may be more vulnerable to air pollution.”
A study from last year, for example, found that 74 million lives could be saved by the end of this century if energy-based air pollution was eliminated by the year 2050.
Eliminating Air Pollution Could Save More Than 53,000 Lives Per Year, Study Says (truthout.org)
