30 Nov
A Foreign Perspective, News and Analyses
English Online International Newspapers
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The week in wildlife – in pictures
The pick of the best flora and fauna photos from around the world, including a giant tortoise and a painted stork
Compiled by Eric Hilaire
An Asian giant tortoise is pictured at the Turtle Conservation Centre at a forest reserve in Rajendrapur, Bangladesh.
Photograph: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP via Getty Images
A young male lion yawns as he wakes up in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park.
Photograph: Jérôme Delay/AP
Plan is part of ‘green new deal’ but campaigners say it is not enough to tackle climate crisis
Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president-elect, has pledged to bring forward the proposal within 100 days of taking office. Photograph: Vincent Kessler/Reuters
The first EU-wide “climate law” would enshrine a legally binding target of reaching net-zero carbon by 2050, and Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions would be halved by 2030, under a set of proposals being discussed by the incoming European commission.
Cars would be subject to new air pollution standards, following the disastrous cheating that allowed diesel pollutants to be masked, and all vehicles may be brought within the EU’s carbon emissions trading scheme, which would affect drivers across the bloc. Three quarters of road transport would have to be moved to rail and inland waterways, and pricing would have to be adjusted to reflect the carbon output of different modes of transport, which is likely to prove controversial.
The proposals are part of the “green new deal”, the centrepiece of the new commission’s action plan, focused on climate and the environment. Ursula von der Leyen, the new president of the commission, has pledged to bring forward the proposals within 100 days of taking office on 1 December.
According to a draft seen by the Guardian, moving to zero transport emissions will be a key goal, as will radical reform of the common agricultural policy, which has been widely criticised in recent years for drastic damage to the natural environment. There will be measures for an EU-wide industrial strategy, and innovation funding for promising clean technologies.
The central pledge to cut greenhouse gases by “at least 50% and towards 55% in a responsible way” had been long expected, but will not satisfy green campaigners, who say more urgent action is needed. Many measures in the five-page draft are also still vague, missing or hedged with question marks, and many have no firm target date attached.
Ministers and government officials from around the world are starting to arrive in Madrid for two weeks of difficult negotiations on implementing the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, beginning on Monday. While scientific warnings have grown clearer, countries have stalled on strengthening their emissions-reduction targets to keep up with the Paris goals.
Green campaigners criticised the EU’s draft for not going far enough, and said tougher targets should be enacted sooner in order to meet the Paris obligations.
Wendel Trio, director of Climate Action Network, called for the central emissions reduction target to be 65% by 2030, in line with scientific advice on holding temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. He also called for that goal to be set out in the first half of next year, instead of October as planned in the document, to aid international negotiations on the Paris commitments which will reach a conclusion next November.
“The commission’s reluctance to propose a new, much higher target early next year shows its failure to recognise the urgency of the climate crisis. Delaying this decision could put the EU in the back seat of global climate negotiations and undermine its role in shaping the discussions on the increase of the targets next year,” Trio said. “It would be a blow to [the] millions of Europeans who take to the streets demanding immediate action to tackle the climate crisis.”
The plan marked an improvement from the priorities of the last commission, said Franziska Achterberg of Greenpeace, but failed to measure up to the scale of change needed.
European parliament declares climate emergency: ‘do we want to leave our children a world?’ – video
“This is a vast policy programme that marks a shift away from the Juncker commission’s deregulation agenda,” she said. “But you just have to look beyond the top lines to see that the proposed measures are either too weak, half-baked or missing altogether. Responding to the climate and ecological crises requires a fundamental rethink of the economic system that for decades has rewarded pollution, environmental destruction and human exploitation. This plan barely scratches the surface.”
On Thursday, the European parliament voted to declare a “climate emergency”, which campaigners said would be meaningless if not backed up by strong and swift action.
Genuine fascists remain on the political margins, but we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy
‘Eco-fascism will emerge not through the state but as people like the El Paso perpetrator violently defend climate privilege against immigrants, environmentalists and progressives.’ Photograph: chameleonseye/Getty Images
Earlier this year, when the fascist responsible for the El Paso massacre cited ecological degradation as part motivation for his killing spree, many considered him entirely deranged.
Eco-fascism sounds oxymoronic, a mashup of irreconcilable philosophies.
Yet, while eco-fascists violently oppose contemporary environmentalists, they often appropriate ideas from the past of the environmental movement.
In the United States, the first conservationists – men like Teddy Roosevelt – were wealthy big-game hunters trying to preserve creatures they liked to shoot.
These elite enthusiasts for “the manly sport with the rifle” blamed impoverished arrivals from eastern and central Europe for “pot hunting” – that is, for killing game for food or money rather than for fun. But they also saw immigrants as polluting America’s racial stock, making an explicit parallel between “lesser races” and the invasive species threatening native animals and plants.
On that basis, Julia Scott from the Daughters of the American Revolution could speak at the National Conservation Congress of 1910, urging attendees not only to protect flora and fauna but to conserve “the supremacy of the Caucasian race in our land”.
You can get a sense of the centrality of eugenic theory to the early movement from the career of Madison Grant, the most important environmentalist of his generation.
We can thank Grant for saving the American bison, the bald eagle, the pronghorn antelope, the Alaskan bear and the fur seal, as well as, according to his biographer, contributing to the preservation of elephants, gorillas, koalas and many other charismatic species.
But Grant also campaigned for the racist Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, and wrote the bestselling The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, an impassioned defence of white supremacy that Hitler described as his personal “bible”.
The book’s popularity in Germany was not coincidental. Grant, like many of his colleagues, derived his environmentalism from a conservative Romanticism, the philosophical source for Nazi concepts about the importance of Lebensraum (living room) and Blut und Boden (blood and soil).
Modern eco-fascists still draw on the same Romantic contrast between the sublime hierarchies of nature and the supposedly effete degeneracy of modernity.
They also exploit the legacy of a tendency influential in environmental circles in much more recent times.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published a book called The Population Bomb, in which he argued that ecological destruction – and, indeed, almost all social problems – could be attributed to overpopulation.
As the historian Thomas Robertson notes, few signs of a mass environmental movement existed when The Population Bomb first appeared. Yet, “by the spring of 1970, Americans could hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper without seeing mention of ecology and the environment”. That year, the first Earth Day attracted an astonishing 20 million people to environmental teach-ins, a result attributable at least in part to Ehrlich.
Today, his influence – and that of population theory more generally – has waned considerably, not least because the rate of world population growth has slowed substantially while his predictions of ever-worsening famines in the 1970s proved spectacularly wrong.
But progressive environmentalists also recognised the succour populationism provided to the extreme right.
The attribution of ecological destruction to demographic growth obscures the social relations through which, for instance, a mere 20 fossil fuel companies can be linked to more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.
Worse still, arguments that (in theory) blame all people often (in practice) target particular people: usually the poor and the oppressed.
The Population Bomb itself opened with Ehrlich describing how he’d understood the case for population control “emotionally” during a visit to Delhi where, he said, the streets “seemed alive with people” and the “dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect”. At the time, Delhi housed some 2.8 million while the population of Paris stood at about eight million – and yet it would be difficult to imagine Ehrlich reacting with equivalent disgust to crowds on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
Other populationists came to oppose not just fertility but also immigration, on the basis that, if the teeming masses from poor nations moved to the rich world, they’d adopt a western resource-heavy lifestyle. As a result, as academics Sebastian Normandin and Sean A Valles argue, America’s modern anti-immigrant movement “was built and led by – and in some cases is still led by – a network of conservationists and population control activists”.
The vast majority of greens now disavow the environmental populationist John Tanton, who, according to Susan A Berger, constructed many of the anti-Mexican organisations relied upon by Donald Trump as he electioneered for his border wall during the 2016 poll.
Yet the argument that ordinary people, rather than social structures, should be blamed for climate change still circulates – and invariably pushes in rightwing directions.
Think of the El Paso shooter and the document in which he justified his racial massacre.
“If we can get rid of enough people,” he wrote, “then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
The glibness with which he advocates environmental murder marks the El Paso perpetrator as distinctly fascist.
Fortunately, genuine fascists remain on the political margins in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy. When asylum seekers fleeing floods and famines arrive on Australian shores in their millions, how will politicians respond?
Unless there’s a radical shift in the political culture, they will, presumably, rely upon the strategies perfected during decades of bipartisan anti-refugee campaigning, deploying the familiar arsenal of boat turnbacks, naval patrols and offshore detention, albeit on a much, much larger scale.
In other words, they’ll embrace an approach already advocated by European racist populists like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, who posits massively intensified border policing as a “realistic” response to the inevitability of the environmental disaster.
Just as the stop-the-boats campaigners of recent decades depict refugee advocates as indifferent to drownings at sea, the supporters of “green” border policing will denounce climate activists for sabotaging “practical” responses to climate change with their utopianism.
It’s not difficult to imagine “eco-authoritarianism” or what Naomi Klein calls “climate barbarism”: a politics centred on the state making “our way of life” sustainable as the environment disintegrates. Future governments committed to this project will be able to draw upon the vast array of coercive powers they’ve acquired over the past decades: draconian anti-protest laws; secret trials and imprisonment; the deployment of the army to quell civil disturbances; and so on.
Eco-fascism represents a related but distinctive tendency. It will emerge not through the state but as a political movement, with people like the El Paso perpetrator violently defending climate privilege against immigrants, environmentalists and progressives.
We’re nowhere near that point yet. But it’s a lot less unimaginable than it should be.
Jeff Sparrow’s new book, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre, is out now through Scribe
World Politics
United States
Altered rules would also cut monthly benefits and end free or discounted lunches to nearly a million students
A vendor picks up the yellow chips that people on Snap use to buy food at a San Francisco farmers’ market. Photograph: Talia Herman/The Guardian
Millions of Americans face losing access to food assistance under proposed rule changes by the Trump administration, a new analysis has found.
The changes, if they had been instituted last year, would have resulted in 3.7 million fewer people and 2.1m fewer households receiving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as Snap or food stamps, during an average month, according to the study.
The altered rules would also reduce benefits received by many people, with 2.2m households set to have their average monthly assistance cut by $127. Nearly one million students would lose access to free or discounted lunches.
The analysis, by the not-for-profit Urban Institute, said that three planned changes to Snap would “significantly alter” food-based help provided to poor Americans, with disparities across the country in terms of impact. Benefits would be cut in most states, although states including Vermont, New York, Nevada and Connecticut would fare particularly badly.
The Urban Institute said Snap had a “proven track record of reducing both poverty and food insecurity”.
The US Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Snap program, has put forward new rules that would create stricter work requirements to be eligible for Snap and cap deductions for utility allowances. The third change would restrict the way 40 states automatically provide Snap to families once they get other types of federal assistance.
Sonny Perdue, the US agriculture secretary, wrote in a USA Today op-ed that the Trump administration was “taking steps to restore integrity to Snap and move people toward self-sufficiency”.
The rule changes, Perdue wrote, restore “the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population, while it is also respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program”.
Medals were awarded for ‘gallantry’ and ‘bravery’ after US soldiers killed hundreds of mostly unarmed Native Americans in 1890
