Something bothering me about the likes of 'Plane Stupid'

sure and that is a valid point. The problem is that if we need to cut the emissions from flying by big percentages anyway, and people here talk about how it would be sorted in a libertarian communist utopia, you would need to cut it anyway.

So, no matter how you look at it it would need to be cut.

I think quotas would be the next best thing if we are allowed to come up with off the wall non realistic plans which wont hurt anyone. Every mofo gets a quota of flights per year

You see, the problem with your attitude is that we need to achieve 90% reduction in carbon emissions, but you think it should not hurt anyone, cause inconvenience or raise any prises of anything. Thats of course sweet thought, but please offer couple good counterexamples since we are doing this "blue sky thinking" here (to use management term).

Thanks revol

It's Joss, not Josh btw...

It's not that I don't think it should incovenience anyone, it's that I'm opposed to measures that place this incovenience of working class people who already have enough inconvenience in there lives and are by and large trapped into polluting because of work, commuting, lack of time etc.

I was speaking to a mate at the bookfair and we were talking about Robert Newman (the comedian) and I was aying how his politics are abit awful. Well my mate was saying about how he was banging on about not taking flights as part of his act and how he had travelled across the States on train for his tour.

I mean ffs how many of us wouldn't love to travel across the states or europe on a plane? I mean what a fucking martyr ole Rob is, next he'll be lecturing us on his eco friendly trip on the Orient Express! Unfortunately as Catch said I only get 25 days a year leave and don't have enough cash to afford to travel everywhere by train.
If we want to actually combat global warming we are going to have to do it in ways which empower us (proles) and force the cost onto capital.

yeah, we all agree that would be the best way. Any concrete suggestions?

Okay, so since I fucked up the link when I tried to post it earlier, I am posting this again.

So what do people think about this "alternative"? Apparently it is as climate neutral as carbon trading. It seems like the only solutions there are are using the free market.

edit: doh! posted it twice (I am a bit hungover...)

I dunno i'd imagine struggling over better public transport, shorter working weeks and a thousand other tactics and struggles that will appear on the horizon once we start struggling collectively.

OK, if we break down my arguement, I've pointed out the high percentage of unnecessary flights and explained that I think these should be done by train (45% in Europe less than 500km).

Then, I pointed out that, contrary to popular opinion, cheap fligths aren't helping the poor travel for the first time, they're helping the rich travel more. This was in response to one of the PS campaigners being called a posh cunt, and then later to accusations that taxation or similar coercive methods would hit the poor the hardest.

This is a libcom website. I can rant about fluffy squirrels and trees, but how well would that go down? Instead, I'll use readily available information, based on economic analysis of flight patterns, to demonstrate the inherently pro-rich bias of cheap flights.

Yup, I pointed out that the assumed growth rate of 50% of the rate experienced in 2004 may not be too far off, as the long haul market has started lowering the cost of flights.

Again, I would ask you how 'the poor' are expected to pay £80 each, plus the hotel bills, plus all the other costs associated with travel, plus their rent and bills and council tax on a low income wage?

Cheap flights to Canada is not about the working classes jetting off on holiday. It's about rich people taking 6 or 7 holidays a year. Just now, it's not to Spain, it's to Canada or Hong Kong or wherever else cheap flights spring up to.

And killing the planet as they do so.

Jack and revol- please keep this civil.

here, i know that it's scapegoat revol week but can I just point out that i've been nothing but civil. i mean my joke about Joss being a posh name is hardly a breach of the peace.

It's just a reflex now

aren't we talking about the poorest 25% of the population, not the working class as a whole anyway jack?

just for my own info, did u post some pics of u at ur parents house once - or was that someone else?

I've noticed

p.s. you know i love it though, i mean mummy and daddy never showed me any attention.

1) its not scapegoat revol week
2) your first post on the thread, suggesting the protestors should be imprisoned in guantanamo could be considered perhaps, hmmm, not quite the politest of contibutions.

off for my tea now, cauliflower cheese )

1) that's called a joke based on a hysterical amplification of a small truth.
2) again it's a joke, not any worse (though probably funnier) than you'd get on Have I Got News For You.
3) Do you really want to start a debate about civility after your Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels audition at the bookfair?

pretty good, used "struggle" word three times in one sentence.

So, your plan is that first we start struggling collectively as a class and then we campaign for shorter working weeks and better public transport, and thats your suggestion as a concrete way of combatting climate change? You got to be fucking joking mate, or just not too bothered about the climate change issue to take it in any seriousness or as a matter of urgency.

I bet even Al Gore has a more convincing strategy than that!

Anyways, does anyone else have any other ideas? To help the discussion, the recommendations for approaches have to be something which can be built on immediately, not wait until collective struggles come into our culture again in few decades time or something. Maybe comrade madashell was onto something, libertarian communists really do not have ANYTHING to offer in this issue...

Planestupid, dont take the tone of some of the posters personally, these folks dont go out much so when they get someone visiting on the board who is not well versed in the class struggle politics, they get shot down pretty fucking fast (which is why we dont get pretty much anyone else joining the boards than already committed anarcho/communist politico geeks). You just happen to be the latest victim

cool mate i'm not trying to knock u just establish u def aren't in that 25%

er, yeah I think in the UK at least, the majority of people wouldn't do their existing jobs at all (let alone commute to them), apart from a few people in essential industries.

Products are developed and innovated now to be obsolescent within a few months/years and nearly impossible to repair. It takes no improvements in technology to reverse that trend, just a bit of reorganisation.

If it's that urgent then I think we're all fucked. End of. If enough people start thinking/realising it's that urgent, then libertarian communism's pretty much the only viable solution - capital won't adapt within ten years, or at least not in a way that doesn't involve eco-fascism or vast populations being written off a la New Orleans.

OK. So Plane Stupid block runways to stop pleasurable but carbon heavy short-haul flights and they're doing something worthwhile. I mention possible ways of reducing highly stressful and carbon heavy rush-hour traffic, reducing unpaid work time, and I'm "about as radical as the Labour Government".

Petroleum input into food is a mess, yeah. Locally produced bacon isn't necessarily a worse culprit than flown in fruit or soya though, or highly processed foods of any description.

Biodiversity could repair itself in certain areas given favourable conditions, as long as there were species around elsewhere. Look at the rapidity of increase in cod stocks in fishing reserves.

Do you know who the "working classes" are?

I earn 15K a year, pay really fucking high rent in Zone 3, and have a wife and kid, but we manage to save enough to visit my in-laws in Japan every 18-30 months - since we only pay for the flight then sleep and eat for next to nothing once we're there. If the cost of flights doubled (as they did for a while over the summer when oil prices shot up), then that's my daughter never meeting her grandparents ever again unless we took a far more expensive 3-4 months off work to take the Trans-Siberian Express, whilst paying rent, council tax, bills, on a low wage.

You seem to be oblivious to the fact that you're discussing this issue with working class people who take both long and short distance flights on some kind of basis, and your generalisation of the "working classes" into some kind of undeserving poor, day trip to Clacton once a year amorphous 19th century Dickensian mass shows you really don't understand the agenda you're helping to push. The same agenda that gives people who live in Chelsea and Soho an 80% discount on the CC whilst nurses pay 8 quid a day to do night shifts.

PS, as to the rich being the only people using polluting cars, that's off as well.

SUVs (or big cars anyway) are often used as mobility vehicles, people on low incomes are also more likely to be driving older more polluting cars. One thing that definitely "only the rich" can afford is LPG and electric vehicles.

. Short haul flights are often used by the elderly and infirm when they can't manage long journeys or have accessibility issues on most forms of public transport.

I suggested one and you dismissed it as "as radical as the Labour party" earlier in the thread:

Job exchange for people with long commutes.

You post up the job you do, the area you work in, and the area you live (which is where you want to work if you're posting it up). Other people do the same thing. Then the system matches people who are travelling in opposite directions to work (or with a bit of clever programming allows for 3-or-more-way switches). You then inform your employer that to reduce your carbon footprint, you'll be swapping with an employee from another workplace so that you can both reduce your commutes. Obviously this'd be easiest in the public sector where jobs are standardised first off, but I think it's something that'd be a popular idea in its own right, outside of reducing traffic and fuel emissions.

The only people who lose are the employers in the amount of control they have over their workforce, but if we really wanted to get into "managing capital" territory, it could even be sold to them on "less tired", "more punctual (not held up in traffic)" staff.

the difference is that you try to redirect attention to a single source of carbon emissions. Planestupid would do the same mistake if they would pit one form of emissions against eachother (this is pretty bad, but dont look at that, because this is even worse etc), which is why i challenged PS when he/she made that comment about undoing all good from sustainable local commuting with one flight.

So i think you are correct in pointing out some areas like public transport, but wrong in trying to blind another one, in this case short haul flights.

UK being so small, animal production relies on imported feed, large part of which is soya.

sure but you are not talking of biodiversity loss due to climate change.

In a nutshell what makes the climate change biodiversity loss worrying and inreversable is the speed of temperature rise. In "natural" temperature changes the change is so slow species can adapt to it, for instance when it warmed up after ice age plant species had centuries time to "travel" north and adapt to new conditions. With human caused climate change forrests etc do not have time to do the same which will lead to dramatic drop in biodiversity. Add to that the lack of natural south-north natural area passageways because of habitat destruction and things look pretty fucked.

And i dont think that can be reversed.

From my point of view, being such a green person, what you guys are saying is that when communism might come, it will be really shit

You're trying to have it both ways here, and you can't. If you're contending that capital can't deal with environmental destruction because it's founded on principles that are necessarily destructive (infinite growth or whatever), then any strategy for dealing with climate change is necessarily revolutionary. You can't criticise people for not having an 'immediate, practical' suggestion for dismantling the economic basis of our entire society, because that's what you're asking for. If you take this line then revolution is the only way forward and 'how do we stop climate change' collapses into the question of 'how do we destroy capitalism'.

If on the other hand, you believe that capital can deal with climate change, but that the effects of that on the working class are going to be brutal then it follows that the question is not 'how do we stop climate change' but 'how do we defend ourselves'. There have been a number of suggestions about that ranging from the Common Ground Collective to resistance to 'green' taxation.

As usual and laudably, you're looking for a compromise position, a way to take the best from both approaches. Usually that's a good idea, but here the underlying analyses mean that there can be no compromise between the two positions. It's either one or the other.

This is not fair. He got shot down because Plane Stupid's approach is flat out dangerous for us. In it's small way it is giving ammunition to the 'green' lobby that would use, in the first instance, taxation to shift some of the costs of climate change away from production and onto consumers, in exactly the same way that the climate camp gave ammunition to the nuclear industry. I normally ignore this kind of activism because I don't think it's that important and sometimes it's even useful. This new round of environmental activism, however, is different and dangerous because there is a pre-existing script into which it fits. It's playing right into the hands of the ruling class in exactly the same way that something like Amnesty does.

The arguments over whether working class people fly or not are just irrelevant. What matters is the focus on individuals as CO2 producers and the media script into which these actions will be forced. So this

is just froth. It doesn't matter whether ABCs or BCD's or whatever are hit hardest (we're taking our class analysis from advertising now?), what matters is the legitimisation of state action to transfer the costs of climate change to consumers. This is an important ruling class weapon which will be used against us. The fact is that the new enironmental groups are providing an important grassroots smokescreen for this weapon, and they're doing so because their analysis of the situation is hopelessly confused. I'm not going to try and find a compromise with something which I think is actively dangerous.

And now, more fucking job applications (which is why I'm only posting once or twice a day at the moment).

hey, ticking_fool, isn't transfering cost to production within capitalist framework same than taxing consumption? (higher production costs trasfered immediately to end consumable prices).

So whats the difference? If you support taxing the production the end result will be the same, higher end consumable prices. To me this seems as important as the order of deck chairs on titanic.

i dont quite accept the inherent self destructive nature of capitalism, when profits are at risk, climate change will be taken more seriously, but i think we have had arguments about this from both angles on this thread and maybe just disagree on this point.

This ignores the role of public subsidy and the state in propping up corporations. Organsiations of the size and massive inefficiency of corporations simply couldn't exist without significant state support through direct subsidy, indirect subsidy in things like arms manufacture, transport subsidy, legal protection and so on and so on. Free market competition hasn't determined prices or anything else since at least the twenties.

Dealing with climate change is going to be a matter of reorganising production, but if the tax burden gets significantly shifted to consumption it can be used to make the working class take all the suffering, while they fund subsidies which see the reorganising corporations make out like bandits.

I don't support either because the taxation system has been used for decades now to prop up so called 'private' enterprise. Taxes are pretty much always going to hurt the working class unless there's some countervailing force in our own organisations. We don't really have those at the moment therefore we're likely to get fucked.

I don't accept this either. Capitalism has always been much smarter than we are. As I'm constantly banging on about, there has never been a more flexible and adaptable social system and there's no reason to think that it won't get over this crisis in the same way that it got over the crises of the twenties and thirties. And with similar, if not greater, levels of suffering for our class.

This is why I see organising for self defence and not getting involved in ruling class agendas for 'managing' the crisis as crucial. As I say, I don't think there's a compromise position here.

i see absolutely no evidence for this tbh catch - looks like you are making assumptions personally.

Plane Stupid - ''this is about rich people flying more, not w/c people flying one in a blue moon''

Catch - ''no, because i get to go to japan once in a while, and by the way u think the working class look like dick van dyke in mary poppins.''

Personally i think theres a bit of a jump between the 2 statements.

link

i tend to agree that capitalists collectively aren't suicidal lemmings, and have in the past been prepared to attack their immediate interests to preserve their class power; thus they'll probably try and mitigate climate change and force the cost onto workers:

i fucking hate economists, like everything has a price ... fresh new ecosystem, how much mate?

PSSSFFFFFT!!! WHAT!!!!!!

Haven't you been following the cod debate!!

It's one of the major political issues of our time. Cod quotas for the whole British fleet have been lowered to 20000 tonnes, but more than that are still caught accidentally. Unless there's an immediate cessation and paid tied up in all North sea fisheries cod will never recover. It is currently showing no signs of recovery despite the nominal quotas at the moment.

In Canada the fishing lobby kept communities fishing for cod for too long. It's extinct there and is never coming back. We are seeing the same thing here with Cod. We almost had the same thing with haddock, and for the first time in recent history the fisherman voted to do the honourable thing and tie up the fleet for a year (this was 2000/2001), as long as the government was prepared to subsidize them (they wanted 50 million to save their industry and communities, and were not to fish for a whole year). Rhona Brankin (Scottish Fisheries minister at the time, and a short sighted labour scum fuck) said no, and haddock faced extinction; it was an environmental catastrohpy and yet again Central Belt labour scum had sold out the North East; fisherman then facing ruin because they couldn't land enough to make money, and because they knew their livelihood was no more with the end of haddock burnt effigies of Brankin, and even took direct action to stop fishing taking place. What saved the haddock fishery was the Norwegians. They'd wangled some kind of deal with the commision to massively up their factory shipping of sandeels. The haddock fishery was saved, and stocks of haddock recovered quickly, because of the virtuals annihilation of sand eels. Try getting your hands on some these days - they're virtually extinct.

Forward to more heroin in Peterheid...

The capitalists will solve global warming.

At present they all seem to have a plan. Some of which involve enormous parabolic mirrors on the poles and in space, some of which involve switing to helium 3 fusion nuclear power stations, and some involve satellites harnessing the suns rays.

I'm a lot less concerned about climate change than I am the coming crisis over peak oil, and over the destruction of natural resources. We need to get into space as a race, and fast.