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Episode 3: Carbon colonialism
280 Plays1 year ago
As consumers we now expect, or perhaps are willing to pay a premium for, goods and services with green credentials – recycled paper and plastics, no single use plastics, less packaging, carbon-neutral delivery and so on. It makes us feel good; it makes us feel like we are doing out bit. The UK government celebrates the country's reduction in carbon emissions - we are moving towards cleaner more environmentally-friendly future.
And yet, global emissions are growing. Levels of carbon released into the atmosphere are increasing. What is going on?
I am joined by Dr Laurie Parsons who has grappled with this challenge in his book Carbon Colonialism: How rich countries explore climate breakdown (Manchester University Press, 2023).
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Beyond the Map, a podcast that looks beyond the obvious to understand the hidden geographies that make our world. I am Jo Sharpe, Professor of Geography and Scotland's Geographer Royal.
00:00:23
Speaker
On Wednesday 20th September 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made a statement about the UK's progress to net zero. He said the following.
UK's Carbon Targets and Green Consumerism
00:00:32
Speaker
The UK has set the most ambitious target to reduce carbon emissions by 68% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, and is the only major economy to have set a target of 77% for 2035.
00:00:48
Speaker
Thanks to this progress already made, reaching the UK's 2030 and 2035 targets do not have to come at the expense of British citizens who are continuing to face higher costs of living, particularly as the UK's share of global emissions is less than 1%. This means, he continued, some measures that were planned are no longer needed to fulfil them.
00:01:11
Speaker
In the first part of this quote, Sunak was building on a figure that Boris Johnson used to celebrate, that the UK had already achieved 44% of reductions in emissions since 1990. So here in the West we are, slowly, moving towards a cleaner environment, more solar and wind power, electric vehicles we all dutifully recycle and look for sustainable products. The soot and dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution are long behind us.
00:01:39
Speaker
This would seem to be a hopeful story. Yes, there are countries around the world still dependent on coal, where workers still struggle in dirty, polluted environments. But in time, surely their economies will decarbonize like ours, and we will reach a sustainable, greener future.
Sustainable Development and Greenwashing
00:01:55
Speaker
The second part of Sunak's statement, that these cuts do not have to come at the cost of cuts to British citizens' standard of living, is the dream of green consumerism. We can have sustainable development, a form of growth in standards of living, alongside a commitment to the planet and to the lives of future generations. But is this dream of green growth really achievable?
00:02:20
Speaker
The term greenwashing was coined by environmentalist Jay Westervelt in 1986, in an essay criticising the irony of the save the towel movement in hotels at the time. He noticed the vast amount of waste he had come across throughout the rest of the hotel, where there was no visible signs of efforts being made to become more sustainable. He said that instead the hotel was simply trying to reduce costs by not having to wash towels as much, but while trying to market it to consumers as eco-friendly.
00:02:50
Speaker
As consumers, we have perhaps become a bit wiser to easy claims of green consumption, and we expect more from companies.
00:02:58
Speaker
And they've responded. More than 90% of Fortune 250 companies have signed up to corporate social responsibility standards. We now expect, or perhaps are willing to pay a premium for, goods and services with green credentials, recycled paper and plastics, no single use plastics, less packaging, carbon neutral delivery, and so on. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we're doing our bit.
Global Emissions and Carbon Colonialism
00:03:23
Speaker
And yet, global emissions are growing. Levels of carbon released into the atmosphere are increasing. What's going on? Today I'm joined by Dr. Laurie Parsons, a geographer at University College London, who has sought to disentangle the complex global supply chains and trade links that will let us understand the impacts of green consumerism. Laurie's recent book is Carbon Colonialism, How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown.
00:03:50
Speaker
I'm really glad the way that you framed that question around the arrow of time because that's something that we really have an issue with, I think, in the way in which we conceptualise the idea of the climate and our actions to resolve the issues that we're facing.
00:04:06
Speaker
Central to the narrative that the book is trying to challenge is this idea that Western countries at the rich world is essentially passed through this phase of dirty industry and then now finds itself in a cleaner and decarbonizing phase and other countries are essentially just behind us on the kind of conveyor belt of economic development and they will reach our stage in the future.
Environmental Impact and International Production
00:04:30
Speaker
And there's a kind of scientific basis for this or scientific slightly in inverted commas, the Kuznets environmental curve. So this essentially says that all economies pass through a phase whereby they initially have a low environmental impact. Then when they begin to get richer and to industrialize, their environmental impact goes up. And that reaches a peak around the era of heavy industry where we in kind of Europe were around like the early 20th century to the mid 20th century.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then subsequently that declines as we reach the era of mass consumption that we're now in today. And this data that you mentioned, that 44% that we see in the UK, the fact that countries like the UK are massively reducing their carbon emissions if you measure it domestically, that's just fodder to that idea that we just need to keep progressing, keep everything on the same track, move forward economically, and ultimately the environment will take care of itself.
00:05:25
Speaker
But the problem is this whole narrative only works if you take a domestic lens on this issue, if you just look within the borders themselves. So what I try to do is to essentially show that actually know our economy doesn't stop at our borders. So the way that we measure our environmental impact shouldn't stop there either. We need to take account of our huge international economy, which is not this complex spider web that extends all around the world, and to recognize that the environmental impacts that happen as a result of production processes
00:05:55
Speaker
that ultimately create goods we're using and eating and purchasing and driving. And all of those things are our environmental impacts too. And if you bring all of that into the story, then it's a completely different picture. Actually that 44% mostly disappears. It goes down to even the government admits that it goes down to 15%.
00:06:13
Speaker
But even that 15% is dubious if you actually begin to look at things in an actual physical way and actually begin to look over those factory walls and through the cracks in the fences of production.
Complex Global Supply Chains
00:06:27
Speaker
So it's not a rosy picture, but I think it's important to challenge it.
00:06:31
Speaker
Yeah. And the reason that that 44% is so misleading is because of the nature of supply chains that characterize the global economy just now. When I was doing my undergraduate geography degree many, many moons ago, I remember being asked to think about where my breakfast had come from, to think about the way that the global supply chains of orange juice and cereals, sugar and coffee and these sorts of things.
00:06:54
Speaker
We're integral to the very most everyday acts, and that was quite crucial to the way that we began to think about globalization. But your book shows that that kind of a geographical awareness is now impossible because supply chains have become so complex. Is that what's key to this, I suppose, this mismatch between these two different accounts of what the world is looking like?
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean absolutely. So in one sense it's a good question because you know if you start to break down these kind of everyday commodities that we encounter in our everyday lives, even the very food that nourishes us and you realize just the sheer number of miles that have gone into putting that on your plate in front of you, it's a good question in terms of actually just bringing that home to you. But you're absolutely right that what has happened in the last 50 years is not that we've become for the first time international because actually as I tried to show in the book we have a long history of international
00:07:52
Speaker
trade and international integration and no country as an island. But that the last 50 years has seen these huge technological innovations, in particular changes to logistics and the fact we've now got this shipping container which can go all around the world and be very efficiently moved through the global factory as I call it, and then also telecommunications that mean we can manage and control essentially factory processes on the
00:08:19
Speaker
These have essentially facilitated an intensification of production. That is now so complex that we've lost genuine oversight over it. And this is a massive problem. And I use the example of the garment industry all the time, because this is just a great example of A, it's a very old industry that goes back hundreds of years and you can trace a kind of unbroken thread back to, to use a metaphor the other way back to the 18th century.
00:08:47
Speaker
But it's also one of the most complex and messy industries.
00:08:51
Speaker
because it's so broken up around the world. I talk about Cambodia a lot in the book. Cambodia's economy is incredibly dependent on the garment industry, but it doesn't make any materials. It doesn't make any cotton. It doesn't make any synthetic fabrics. All of that gets imported from other countries. Recognizing how all of this is tangled up is really, really important. In theory, you can have this global factory that runs through all these different countries like a conveyor belt, an international conveyor belt,
00:09:21
Speaker
In reality, each of those different countries has a different system of jurisdiction and regulation. And it doesn't add up to some of its parts, essentially. Things get lost in this hugely complex array of different production processes. And yeah, I mean, just like food, this web of connections essentially leaves us with a lot of black holes in our understanding of the environmental impacts of that production.
00:09:47
Speaker
Reading about the, the garment industry and bricks in your book was absolutely fascinating and it reminded me of my, my first kind of realization of the increasing complexity of these supply chains in in 2013 when
00:10:02
Speaker
There was the horse meat scandal. Remember, there was horse meat in in Reddy fields. And the Guardian sought to map out how this had happened. And I think most of us assumed meat would have been sourced from somewhere. It would come to the.
00:10:19
Speaker
I don't know, Findus lasagna processing plant, whatever that was. And that would be the end of the process. But I remember it was the supply chain, and I guess sometimes this was just information or value being exchanged, but sometimes the meat itself moved back and forth over European borders, starting with the HQ in France. Then it went to Luxembourg, then Spain, then Cyprus, then the Netherlands, then Romania, then back to Luxembourg, and then on to the UK. I mean, just for that one product.
00:10:50
Speaker
It was just impossible to trace the product, but also, and I think this is key in your book, tracing responsibility for different decisions, for different emissions, for different labor issues. How on earth you start to trace out responsibility?
Outsourcing Environmental Impact
00:11:09
Speaker
And I guess the other question which I suspect is related to this is, is this complexity intentional?
00:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, actually, I'm glad you raised the Tesco lasagna thing. I think it was Tesco. Apologies if I'm doing anything libelous there. But I do remember the headlines at the time. It was, you know, it did say 80% horse kind of splashed all over the headlines. And at the time I was a PhD student. I was actually probably eating quite a lot of these lasagnas. How many GGs have I consumed?
00:11:42
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, that's exactly the crux of the issue, not just about the logistical difficulty of tracking all of this, but actually the key thing that this does is it makes it incredibly difficult to pin responsibility. I mean, you've mentioned six or seven countries there in the production of that horse meat. Who ultimately is responsible? I mean, you'd think the buck stops.
00:12:05
Speaker
with the lead company, but that's almost never the case because the lead company doesn't own the production processes that happen along that supply chain. It partners with different suppliers along that supply chain who all do one little bit of the process.
00:12:20
Speaker
people before them in that kind of process and ultimately responsibility gets passed up and down that supply chain to the extent that it never actually lands anywhere. It's really really difficult to place responsibility on a lead firm. I mean I say difficult it's been almost impossible and actually that's been one of the key incentives for
00:12:41
Speaker
that kind of increasing complexity of this global factory that ultimately makes a lot more sense for lead firms to conduct their production processes overseas, not only where it's cheaper, but also where regulation is looser and ultimately where they don't have to take responsibility for anything that does happen in that production process along the way.
00:13:04
Speaker
And that, of course, has incredible knock-on effects. And this is really what your book explores so brilliantly and so chillingly. The kind of processes of countries and economies becoming more tied up with the global. In terms of the more conventional narratives of development is what development is all about. You become more modern, you become more integrated into the
00:13:30
Speaker
the global economy. So that conventional narrative is international development is a way of helping to alleviate the impacts of climate change around the world, providing drought resistant seeds, irrigation, mechanization, particular forms of education and so forth. But what you're showing in your book is that this process instead is, you call it a systematic outsourcing of climate breakdown. Can you explain how that happens?
00:13:56
Speaker
because in terms of that kind of conventional narrative, it seems slightly counterintuitive. Yeah, right. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned development because that is, well, it's the reason that I've spent so long in Cambodia going all the way back to when I was 22, 23. I mean, the reason I was interested in international development as an area to become involved in, I really cared about that. And Cambodia at the time was really the poster child of global development for the first decade
00:14:27
Speaker
coming from an incredibly low base, but that made it all the more extraordinary. And in the tragic history of Cambodia, I mean, I think it was King Chinook put it, like his people have known suffering like no others in the world. It was just, you know, several decades of just appalling tragedy. And then for that to be turned around in the late 90s to the early noughties, you know, to really have this incredible double digit growth year after year, it was seen as miraculous. It was called the Cambodian miracle.
00:14:56
Speaker
So having kind of witnessed that and been present for a lot of it, but at the same time to kind of witness the environmental degradation which has gone alongside it. I suppose living through that, a part of what this book tries to do is to reconcile these two things.
00:15:12
Speaker
And I've come to the conclusion, essentially, that these are not separate, discrete processes. Actually, this is very much part of an interconnected story. And that integration into this global factory, integration into this global system of production very often does mean significant environmental degradation. It's marketizing the environment in a way that frequently means that the environment will ultimately become degraded. And that's what we've seen in Cambodia, who's lost
00:15:46
Speaker
which has seen a huge amount of damage to waterways in particular. I mean, the Tonle Sap Lake is something that I talk about quite a lot. There are many people who are more expert than me in the Tonle Sap, but it's a real tragedy to see what goes on there. I mean, everyone who lives on it says there's 10% of the fish that there used to be. And this is just such an important waterway for everybody there. I mean, it provides 70% of the protein for all Cambodians.
00:16:14
Speaker
So yes, it is a challenge to the conventional narrative that development means progress and environmental improvement in the long term. It actually shows that a lot of the environmental impact associated with production that we used to experience within our borders has ultimately just gone elsewhere.
00:16:38
Speaker
effluvia in their own soil. The fact that these two narratives are so entangled comes through so powerfully in various parts of the book but particularly a couple of quotes from the World Bank around how we value the environment and it's quite astonishing to read these in the context of the book and yet
00:17:00
Speaker
This wasn't some kind of outlier. This was from the heart of the Washington Consensus, from the heart of those organizations that ultimately shaped
00:17:12
Speaker
this narrative of development, the direction of development. And I'm just going to quote it from the Lawrence Summers, the World Bank Chief Economist from 1991. And you quoted in the book. And he says, I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable. And we should face up to that.
00:17:32
Speaker
I've always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted. Their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. Just between you and me, I'm not quite sure who the you and me are in that particular context, but he says just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the least developed countries? I mean,
Bhutan and Economic Logic in Environmental Policies
00:17:55
Speaker
that's just astonishing that they could say that. And yet elsewhere you talk about
00:18:02
Speaker
the critique of Bhutan, which is the one country that you highlight that is not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative, that its forests are contributing much more decarbonisation than they're consuming in terms of carbon. And yet the World Bank is concerned that the forest sector remains underutilised. How can the country sustainably invest in its forests? And it's such a mind blowing way of thinking about the world. And yet it's become so dominant.
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's become so dominant. I mean, the great thing about this level of dominance is you lose the sight of the forest for the trees. It's so dominant, you can't see anything else. Apart from very few examples like Bhutan, for example. But yeah, no, I mean, that quote is just, that particular, I mean, it was an internal memo that leaked. I think it probably is reflective of a way of thinking, which is more widespread than just that one single quote.
00:19:00
Speaker
especially because we've seen that actually that was written in I think it was 1994 and in the last 29 years exactly that has come to pass and on absolutely massive scale the dirty industries as Lawrence Summers specifically calls them have indeed migrated en masse to the global south and that's what we've seen and you know the dirt has gone with them and of course then we've ultimately enacted a system of
00:19:33
Speaker
shall progress and be impressed but ultimately you have to take a global view and I mean that's that's one of the key messages if you take global view things look very very different and it makes for very uncomfortable reading for um
00:19:47
Speaker
someone like myself who considers themselves progressive, who tries to do some of the right things in terms of living sustainably, who celebrates some of the small wins around me.
Sustainable Practices and Citizenship
00:20:02
Speaker
And yet, as you point out at various points in the book, the cleaner, safer, nicer environment that I'm beginning to enjoy
00:20:11
Speaker
is predicated on that risk, that dirt, that pollution, that danger effectively being exported elsewhere. No, exactly. And that's one of the reasons that it is uncomfortable, unfortunately. And I guess that's, you know, kind of bringing you face to face.
00:20:30
Speaker
with the people who are in those endangered environments is one of the key goals to try and actually give them flesh and personalities and faces and allow you to kind of see what things are really like. It's one of the things I guess I was most kind of conflicted with in writing the book around this kind of
00:20:48
Speaker
destabilizing this unsettling of people's sustainability comforts. But I think it is really important because we're not at the stage of tackling climate breakdown. We used to be at where it's a case of you either care or you don't. You're either an outright denialist or you're someone who does stuff about it. A huge amount of the battleground at the moment is dedicated to creating and servicing these red herring corridors which direct people's very
00:21:17
Speaker
well-meaning intentions down essentially blind alleys of things that will not produce an outcome.
00:21:25
Speaker
was efficiently fast to make a real difference. So troubling those narratives around that is one of the key things that I do and I try to do it sensitively as much as possible because we all make these things. I avoid flying whenever I can, I predominantly buy second-hand clothes, I try to eat little meat, you know, a planetary health diet as much as possible. These things make me feel better but I try not to take that too seriously because the ultimate impact
00:21:52
Speaker
is not sufficient to make the impact that I want to see. It's not the correct scale. So what I've consistently advocated is recognizing the power that we hold as privileged citizens of Western democracies, which gives us the power to involve ourselves in local politics and to involve ourselves ultimately as a group in national politics and to reshape how we manage our global economy around the world.
Climate Change and Economic Challenges
00:22:20
Speaker
Yes, and I'd like to come back to that in just a minute, but just before that, I think one of the other ways of thinking about the world or imagining the connections between different parts of the world that you challenge is how climate change
00:22:36
Speaker
and the impacts of climate breakdown are being experienced by folks in the global south. That I think we tend, again, because of the way that the west dominates the narrative and the western media dominates the way we imagine the world, that it's the big catastrophic events that we see on television, the floods, the hurricanes and so forth. But what you explain in the book is that for
00:23:03
Speaker
For most, climate instability is experienced as a ratcheting up of pressure, just making everything a bit more precarious and vulnerable, eventually leading to dislocation from traditional forms of production and resilience, ultimately leading to the displacement of people from the land to the cities, feeding into these kind of dirty polluted industries that we're talking about. So it's not just that we're exporting carbon.
00:23:30
Speaker
but we're also exporting terrible labor conditions and increasing vulnerability and precarity to the populations in the South. So it's not about, you know, we might kid ourselves that, okay, there's carbon issues with consumption, but at least we're providing good jobs and security for folks in the factories in the South. And yet it's, all of this again is tied up to produce greater precarity.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things, I mean, I guess one of the messages, especially of that second part of the book, is how difficult it is and how impossible and perhaps unnecessary it is to try and separate the environmental and the economic side of this climate precarity. And I think that's one of the, there's several things that I've sort of been in writing this because it goes back a number of years.
00:24:22
Speaker
that I've tried to kind of tie together after years of attempting to get my head around these things. And one of the things that so a lot of my work prior to this has been around climate migration and environment linked migration. And Cambodia is obviously it comes across in the book is a very climate vulnerable country is often cited in the top 10 most climate vulnerable countries in the world. And it has a lot of migrants.
00:24:44
Speaker
But I mean, having worked with migrants and in a kind of environmental sphere since I was in my early 20s, I'm not sure I've ever met a climate migrant, which is what this kind of book is trying to show. It's very, very rare for someone to say it was only the environment or only the climate that caused me to move. There's always other factors involved. There's an economic structure, a kind of an economic set of circumstances that people live in, which is often clearer to them.
00:25:13
Speaker
than the climatic and the environmental aspects themselves. I think it's important to recognize that because it's both a responsibility and an opportunity. We create the circumstances that the environment meets, that these kind of risks meet. And so if people find themselves being pushed by a particular, you know, a very heavy drought, for example, or a flood, that's not just the weather doing that, it's the circumstances, it's the economics of the situation.
00:25:41
Speaker
people find themselves it's the fact they couldn't cope because of the economic risk that they face which created that vulnerability and ultimately saw them having to leave so we have control over that we've unleashed something that we don't have direct control of anymore at the moment in the increasingly risky climate we do have direct control over the situations that people find themselves in and we can help people to better weather and be more resilient to these issues in a positive way i think that's
00:26:11
Speaker
Well, to me, I find that heartening because we can do something about that in a more direct way that we can.
Wealth, Poverty, and Environmental Impact
00:26:17
Speaker
Yes. And you say that when it comes to adapting to the impacts of climate change, there's no solution that even comes close to the effectiveness of making poor people less poor. Is there not a danger that you make poor people less poor and they increase consumption? You talk about two people could be in the same place, but not in the same environment.
00:26:38
Speaker
devastating heat waves. If you've got money for a fan, you can pay for the electricity. You are literally not in the same environment as the person who lives next door who doesn't. But of course that has consequences. And is that where that relationship breaks down between
00:26:57
Speaker
poverty and environment? Or is that where we need to start looking to other traditions and other cultures that have different relationships to nature in terms of the economic value that we place on nature? Sorry, that was too ambitious. Just to unpack that, I think there's a lot there that I completely agree with, but
00:27:23
Speaker
I don't think it's inevitable that we have to say that we have to necessarily lead on from making people less poor, making them less vulnerable, and then necessarily moving down this path of increasing consumption. One of the key things that I do talk about, and I think it's actually interestingly one of the key divides in the realm of sustainability is this question of whether it's people or it's capital, it's money, which creates environmental breakdown.
00:27:49
Speaker
And I mean, the evidence to me kind of really points to the idea that it's money. I mean, you know, as I've said, the carbon footprint of an average Ethiopian person is around 100 kilograms per year. And the carbon footprint of an average person from the United States is 16 tons. So it's 160 times more. You can't really say it's just one and one in those situations. Clearly, there's something very different between those two people. But that kind of
00:28:18
Speaker
environmental impact associated with mass consumption is not inevitable. Most people around the world don't necessarily live in that way. I think it's possible to have wealth, but in a different sense. Wealth in terms of security, wealth in terms of well-being, in terms of having confidence in the future. And that's something that we can invest in and work towards in a different way.
00:28:40
Speaker
difficult because again it comes back to that same thing of like we're so deep in this forest we can't see the trees but I tried to point out some ways in which we can see different alternatives. Bhutan is one but Latin America also has a number of different alternatives and there's different ways in which this can happen like the idea of giving a personhood to nature.
Legal and Economic Solutions for Sustainability
00:29:00
Speaker
Pachamama is what is called in Ecuador I think the idea of nature having a personhood that you have to protect like
00:29:08
Speaker
that means giving nature the capacity to self reproduce. Just paying attention to that kind of preservative and more kind of holistic way of looking at the environment I think potentially can help to square this circle. It doesn't just have to be pumping kind of
00:29:28
Speaker
raw wealth in the sense that we know it today into these environments. In fact, I think there's a much more progressive way to tackle it. Yeah, I was fortunate enough to be in Ottawa, New Zealand last year and got to visit Whanganui where the river has had legal personhood status.
00:29:47
Speaker
And so it's not about that kind of paternalistic protection of nature, but you can be sued in the same way as if you'd damaged a person. And I don't know long-term exactly what the impacts of that is, but it changes the narrative. It stops people in their tracks and they have to think differently about what they're assuming is valued and not. No, exactly. Sorry. No, I was just going to say, I'm really glad to bring it. I mean, the law is quite unprofessionable. People always
00:30:18
Speaker
Everything's got to be an economic solution. We've got to grow our way out of everything. The law is hugely powerful in giving ordinary people the capacity to push back against the impacts of economic actors or people who cause damage to their community. It's something that we've moved away from a lot in our thinking.
00:30:39
Speaker
you know, we have to just kind of achieve sustainability with money and pricing in the market. The law is a very effective tool. Yes. And that takes us on to sort of the final part of the book that and I think in many ways what some people will find the most challenging part of the book, perhaps that, you know, as we started off saying, you know, many of us now consciously try to make better choices, looking out for different badges of sustainability,
00:31:08
Speaker
on the products that we buy or carbon neutrality and so forth.
Limits of Green Consumerism
00:31:11
Speaker
But another bold and quite controversial claim of your book is that you, I mean, you state quite clearly, you do not believe that consumer power can lead to a more ethical or sustainable global economy. Now, this is often what people fall back on when they recognize, for example, the limitations of international development, the limitations of these kind of big institutions like the World Bank and so forth, or the burgeoning
00:31:37
Speaker
array of development actors that now are part of what some would call the development industry. So we move away towards, okay, consumer power, we can all do something. This is not something we should be expecting others to do or someone else to solve. We can all make a difference.
00:31:53
Speaker
probably because we're the band-aid generation and we've heard Bob Geldof hammering on the table saying, we've all got to do something. But you go further and you say, we need to wean people off the opium of sustainable consumption. That's quite a bold statement. Yeah, and intentionally so. And again, it's something I am quite torn about in the sense that, you know,
00:32:18
Speaker
It comes down to this question, and people often say to me, surely it's better than not having sustainable consumption. It's just like, well, yes, in one sense. But the problem is, if people's efforts are being directed only towards sustainable consumption,
00:32:34
Speaker
we're not going to achieve anything like the change that we want. So there is a level of change and a level of kind of sustainability that people want to achieve. And then there's a level that can be achieved with sustainable consumption under the current system. And those things don't match. And the key problem is that we've lost as people the capacity to actually have a meaningful oversight over those production processes. We talked all over about this huge web of international production.
00:33:02
Speaker
Now, I've seen firsthand all of the contradictions between what's on a label and what actually happens in a factory. It makes you very cynical about production, to be honest, which is one of the reasons I've taken such a hard line on it. But more than that, the problem is it's just too difficult for an ordinary person today to be able to tell the difference between something that is genuinely green and something that has just been made to appear green.
00:33:32
Speaker
There just isn't the legal oversight. There's not the regulatory framework to actually, you know, make companies stick to what they're saying.
Regulatory Frameworks and Supply Chains
00:33:42
Speaker
And that's a massive problem. I mean, just on a basic level, you know, like every clothing company says zero deforestation. Every clothing company says zero waste of landfill. And I can name, you know, a dozen producing Cambodia and they're all doing both of those things.
00:33:57
Speaker
And we've pointed this out. It's been in the media. It's been released. It's in the public domain. Have they ceased these claims? Absolutely not. We just said we've touched ties with that producer. And then the roundabout continues. It's another producer doing exactly the same thing.
00:34:12
Speaker
This is the situation we're in. It's rather depressing, but this is why you need to push. Well, we need to push for the laws rather than the sustainable consumption at present. In future, those same sustainable consumption processes will be effective because we'll have the laws to back them up. But right now we need the laws first, then the consumption can come later.
00:34:31
Speaker
And the reason that these companies can get around that process at the moment without the laws is that, first of all, they're voluntary sign-up badges, so it doesn't have the kind of teeth that a law would have. But also, and what you explain
00:34:49
Speaker
brilliantly in the book is how there's a subcontracting of parts of the supply chain so that it's not Marks and Spencer's or Primark or whoever
00:35:02
Speaker
who has the factory in Cambodia. But there's so many levels of people subtracting different parts of orders out to other producers. And we come back to that question of responsibility again. The, you know, your high street stores can say, you know, we asked for reassurances for X, Y and Z. We got them from the supplier. But of course,
00:35:25
Speaker
not taking responsibility for a supplier two or three connections further down the chain, let alone seven or eight different connections down the chain. And in part, it is still consumer demand that's driving that, the kind of just-in-time production that's required for
00:35:41
Speaker
I mean, you point out even some of the more ethical types of consumption, like veganism, a sudden uptick in the number of people wanting vegan products means suddenly the supply chains have to respond in the way that we've come to expect to produce things quickly. And so it has to have those kind of flexible, sort of somewhat contingent and temporary links to be able to quickly get the products that are needed to market.
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the have to is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because we've got used to it. But actually, I think I think people would quite like to have a different way of producing if they could have genuine, uncynical confidence in the fact that actually, this is a really sustainable way of producing goods. I think people would be happy to maybe wait a little bit longer for those goods. And yeah, the rise of big vegan as you allude to that is
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah, slightly depressing co-optation of what is overall quite a laudable transition in people's lives and is driven by very good intentions. And then subsequently, you end up with something that isn't doing all the good that you would hope. So yeah, this co-optation is a problem. And I think that's why we need to be, I don't know, to have an activist cynicism about these kinds of things.
00:36:59
Speaker
an activist cynicism, I like that. So you say we need laws and absolutely I can see the value of that. So it's not a voluntary code that you get your gold star for siding up to, but an actual legal requirement. But given the complexity and multinational nature of these supply chains, how on earth can these be enacted?
00:37:22
Speaker
Well, that's one of the things that I hope I brought across as one of the more positive things in the books. There's a lot of negativity. Of course, it's not all sunshine and roses, as you will know, having read it, but actually the capacity of us to put in place some sort of regulation, meaningful regulation. That's something that I feel like is a good news story.
00:37:44
Speaker
of the very recent past, really, starting in about 2017. We haven't come very far, but we've kind of moved away from what was previously the dominant idea that you cannot regulate the international economy because it's outside of our borders, it's outside of our jurisdiction. When I talked to government actors in the past, they literally just said, straight up, this is not our responsibility. We can't tackle that. Now, that has begun to change in a way that I think is hugely
00:38:15
Speaker
paradigm shift in the way that we think about our international economy. We've never had that mindset before. And I kind of spend time in the book tracing this idea of the terra nullius, the idea of, you know, kind of empty territory into which any economic process is almost an improvement by default. And I think that's a logic which has continued for centuries.
00:38:37
Speaker
But this idea that you can actually have responsibility for what happens in those international supply chains is hugely powerful and absolutely vital in combating these issues that are raised. And there have been a succession of laws in recent years, starting with the France supply chain law in 2017, and you get the UK has a very weak law also in 2020.
00:38:57
Speaker
It's introducing some kind of plastic provisions this year, and the German supply chain law, which I'm more positive about happening this year, and then the whole EU bloc is voting on it. I've actually been taken to task for being too positive about this, because it's of course been very watered down, and it's been robbed of a lot of the power that it would have had if it had gone through in its initial form. But I believe this is the beginning of a shift in the way that we think about our international economy.
00:39:27
Speaker
and the way we think about it. I mean, on a basic level, it just means that we apply laws to goods we import as if they were being produced within our borders.
Carbon Accounting and Consumption Focus
00:39:36
Speaker
And then companies have to take responsibility for how that's produced. If they're found to contravene what they've said, then they're breaking their own environmental laws. I mean, that is a simple but very, very important shift. And we're just starting to move towards that, I hope, with some kind of acceleration in the next few years.
00:39:56
Speaker
So that would mean that the much lauded 44% that Boris Johnson and others like to wave about in terms of UK decarbonisation would be replaced. So that figure, I'm just making sure that I've got this clear, was essentially what was produced within the national economy, which of course is a bit of a joke because I can't remember the statistic you gave, but the amount of imported emissions, as you call it, the outsourced emissions,
00:40:26
Speaker
has gone up remarkably during that period. So overall, in terms of what we consume in this country, carbon has increased, not decreased. And so the new way of accounting that is coming into play slowly would be much more about the carbon impact of national consumption rather than national production, because that's a more accurate accounting of what, in this case, British people are contributing to world carbon production.
00:40:54
Speaker
No, exactly. I mean, it makes no sense to calculate any other way. I mean, if we as a society are using all of this stuff and our lives depend on a certain amount of emissions being produced, it makes no sense to kind of just, we're only counting the bits on the island. I mean, we're still using it. We're still responsible for those emissions.
00:41:15
Speaker
And the thing is, we already collect these data, but it's a question of just presentation and focus and kind of priorities. But the government, Defra, has these data, and yet the headline figure is always the domestic emissions. That's what benefits countries like the UK, who can then say, we're the world's leading decarbonizer. We're at the forefront of this great green transition. And of course, it's not really true at all. But I wonder if it's, of course, and I wonder if it's also because of
00:41:43
Speaker
what you alluded to earlier, the kind of domination of an economic way of thinking, because that's the kind of units that we've always been used to thinking about, GDP or GNP.
Political Action and Sustainable Citizenship
00:41:53
Speaker
Of course, we're going to talk about production. But as you say, it's very conveniently also skating over what's actually happening. And I think it's that change in mindset
00:42:04
Speaker
that as soon as I read it in the book it was kind of like one of those duh that's obvious but you know just hadn't hadn't thought about it until that point and it really does change the way that we should be having these debates so I think you're right that that you end up much more positively what as individuals should we be doing because I think part of the reason that Green
00:42:27
Speaker
consumerism caught on, as well as making us feel good about ourselves. I think if we're ever a little bit more optimistic, it was about people wanting a sense of agency, of wanting to be part of the change, of wanting to do something. And this appeared to be a way that we could genuinely do something.
00:42:46
Speaker
you're suggesting that ultimately we as individual consumers, as individual citizens can do very little through consumption. So what is your message to us all in terms of how we can be good citizens in this particular new vision of understanding carbon? So that we can decolonize carbon or we can certainly not perpetuate a kind of form of colonialism.
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a good and inevitable question. And as you say, the book is actually spent with quite a lot of a lot of it is kind of reflecting on my my agonies over this question is genuinely, genuinely difficult. But what I advocate essentially is to move away from the idea of sustainable consumption as being the primary
00:43:36
Speaker
that we as people have in order to achieve sustainability goals, and rather to move towards the idea of sustainable citizenship. And that means being actively involved in the political structures that we have. It means becoming involved in your local council, for example. And you know, we have genuine power as citizens. As consumers, our power is stymied by the fact that we have so little visibility of what happens in the international supply chain.
00:44:04
Speaker
We need to give ourselves back that power before we can use consumption as a lever. So sustainable citizenship, bringing the politics back into the way that we tackle environmental problems. That's key to me and recognising that we have a lot more power than we are told that we don't only have
00:44:22
Speaker
the power that we can enact at the supermarket. We have the power of citizens in order to vote and participate and become involved in the huge political change that needs to happen. We need to give ourselves the tools in order to work our way out of this situation.
00:44:42
Speaker
And so in practical terms, the advice that you give in the book is don't go off shopping for green products and said, pick up your phone, pick up your pen and write to all your different political representatives to urge them to sign up to this new way of accounting, this new accountability.
Local Activism and Conclusion
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, this is possible. I mean, we've already done it in relation to some of the projects I've worked on. So for example, something like
00:45:11
Speaker
I don't know, imported bricks. That's something I talk about in the book quite a lot. It's something that not many people know about. And when they do know about it, they're like, well, this is terrible. Why are we importing 400 million bricks? Why are we importing 40 million from South Asia? When every single container of these weighs in, it's something like 600 tons of carbon on its 17,000 kilometer journey. This is absurd. So you can go and become involved in your local council and say, look, let's just not use those bricks.
00:45:43
Speaker
this council. And because so many of the things we do in our global economy and the kind of unregulated, you know, production use of these goods is so absurd that almost everyone will get behind it regardless of party. And that's a power that we have.
00:45:59
Speaker
being formed and just say, okay, in this jurisdiction, which I have influence in as a normal citizen, we're not doing this anymore. That is something that I believe has a genuine effectiveness far more so than the simply buying a supposedly more sustainable product. So this is what I mean by sustainable citizenship, to become active, become activist, and become radical cynics in the pursuit of a genuinely green future.
00:46:26
Speaker
Well, I think that's a brilliant place to stop. Thank you very much.