The Green Revolution will not peaceful

The transition to a sustainable economy, the so called Green Revolution, will not be a peaceful affair, it will involve massive, and sometimes painful, whole scale change. Change in the way we work, the way we eat, change in the way the economy works, change in the way we even think about economics, what we value, what we care about. Work, the production and reproductions of things and providing services, physical, emotional, educative all will have to undergo a radical upheaval. How we see ourselves as humans, and our interaction with the natural world needs to change, how we re produce and care for the elderly needs a radical rethink. How we interact with others and our ideas of social value also need to be transformed, our ideas of gender and sexuality need to be taken back to the bone and rebuilt.

It will upset, and unsettle us. A lot of what we have learnt will have to be jettisoned as useless and a lot of lost skills and experience will have to be re learnt and re discovered. New value systems need to be created and spread through all aspects of life, we need to re think our view of the natural world, seeing ourselves as part of it and not above it.

Here in France a new book by the journalist and neurosciencist Sebastien Bohler, Le Bug Humain has been hitting the headlines. Bohler argues that the basic drives of the human brain are orientated around five pleasures, the acquisition of food, material goods, sex, social status, and, of course, reproduction. These five drives over ride any intellectual motivation, and in effect means that the human brain has a bug that prevents us taking the necessary action to avert climate change and the transition to a sustainable economy. It is a rather depressing take on the human condition, in  a world that can invent smartphones and shoot people into space we cannot build an energy system that does not change the climate, that now obesity is a bigger global killer than starvation, and that one in five clicks on the net are to visit porn sites. For Bohler the solution is a re boot of the human brain, to reboot our learning abilities, and to change the artificially created pleasure centres of our brains. The problem is that he predicts that this will take a generation, and that climate change requires a faster transition. But the key point is that these five motivations are not fixed, they are socially created, and society can change and our values with it.

Listening to a discussion of Bohler’s book on France Inter got me thinking about the two protest movements here in France that have touched on our lives recently, the Gilet Jaunes and the opposition to the proposed wind turbines up here in the Hautes Corbieres.

The Gilet Jaunes protest movement has now gripped France for twenty weeks, the weekly Saturday protests, and the heavy handed police response, have become required Saturday evening viewing and Sunday lunchtime conversation. . The protest movement had it’s origins in the rise in diesel prices, it then spread to embrace all manner of public anger with the present system. Centering on the “cost of living”, a rather broad all encompassing subject, but a real focus especially for those on low wages, with insecure jobs and poor housing. who are particularly hard hit by small increases in transport costs.

Although the Macron Presidency is the focus of much of the anger it does not hide the fact that much of this anger has been building for over two decades. The decline of industrial France that has been going on since the 80’s has rocked much of the post war certainties, the decline in secure jobs, the increasing gap between the incomes of the upper middle class and the owners of capital with those of the lower middle class and the working class has been accentuated by years of wages annual wage increases for the latter being below inflation. The election of Nicolas Sarkozyin 2007 exemplified, and personified this trend, the fact that this Bling Bling “Great Communicator” so spectacularly miss managed the sub prime financial crisis firmly lodged in the minds of the French that shareholders of banks matter more than working people. The lackluster Hollande regime that followed did little to change the views of most.

Marcon, France’s Tony Blair has done little to change this jaded view of politicians. The fact that the Government upon election rapidly  changed the tax rules for income earned on capital did not help. Income from capital is now taxed at 12%, the first band of income tax is 14%, so the rich pay less tax on their return from invested wealth than workers do on low wages.

That the government justified the increase of tax on diesel in environmental terms has given the impression that the Gilet Jaunes is a protest movement against the energy transition that ultimately seeks to  phase out diesel motors.

The problem for me is not the increase in cost of diesel, though it does really hit my bottom line, both our vehicles are diesel, the Landrover and my van. For us as organic producers living in a remote rural area we make our incomes from selling our produce in markets, that by their nature are in distant towns. At the height of pour season we do weekly markets in Lezignan Corbieres, Gruissan, Narbonne and Perpignan, the closest of which at least 100kms there and back again. Diesel is our single largest expense, not soil, not seeds, diesel. The hike in diesel prices has really hit us hard.

But again, that is not the problem, energy costs should reflect  it’s production costs, the fact that it is a finite resource and it’s environmental impact. The problem is that no thought appears to have gone into the impact in people’s lives, particularly people on low wages that can ill afford the increase costs. There is no holistic thinking, or even joined up thinking. If you are going to increase the cost of people’s consumption in order to change behavior and reduce environmental impact then you need to relieve the burden else where, raise the level of the lowest tax band for example, even, and here I venture into the neo liberal red zone, tax wealth heavier than you tax low wage salaries.

Now onto the proposed wind turbines in the Hautes Corbieres, and back to where this all started.

The proposal by EDF to site a series of large wind turbines on the Corbieres massif has caused a lot of concern in certain parts of the population. Quite rightly so, it is a massive project that will undoubtedly change the look and feel of the Hautes Corbieres. Those who oppose the project have a number of key concerns, about the noise the generators make, the impact on the bird population, particularly the golden and bonelli eagles, wind farms turbines are naturally situated on high points to maximise the wind potential, the same high points where raptures ride the thermal uplifts to gain altitude. There are also major concerns about the impact of the turbines on the tourist industry, they will be visible from the Cathar castles, and of course concerns about the impact of the turbines on house prices. There is also the conservationist agenda that the wind farms will do grave damage to the natural environment of the Hautes Corbieres.

All of these concerns are natural, proposed projects like this will have a major impact and cause anxiety. But change is something we will have to get use to if we are to move to a sustainable economy. The Corbieres is not some fixed thing that has been the same for time immemorial. Pre Revolutionary Corbieres was a land of sheep,tens of thousand of sheep, to feed the textile factories of Limoux and Carcasonne. The basis of the wealth of the local aristocracy had four legs and required vast amounts of cleared land to feed. Post revolution the demands of the peasants for land, and the forges for charcoal led to a massive wave of de forestation, fololwed by grazing by poor people’s “sheep” , otherwise known as goats, destroyed the plants and saplings that held the top soil in place. rains washed the soil away leaving the now characteristic bare rocks of the Corbieres exposed. The explosion of a vine based monoculture in the mid 19th century transformed the mixed subsistence farming that had dominated the area. The industrial techniques that developed, particularly after the first world war turned the plains of the Corbieres into chemical deserts. The industrial revolution that followed the second world war, and the mechanisation of agriculture pulled young people away from the area, at the same time as making farming of inaccessible land less and less economically viable. The point is the Corbieres has already undergone three massive changes in the last 200 years. Yes the deserted farm land, forests are the result of nature reclaiming the land, but they are far from natural, the ecology of the Corbieres is a result of human activity.

The industrial revolution that transformed the developed world in the 19th  and early 20th was a brutal process, communities were torn asunder, The battle to control resources spread across the world, and ultimately lead to two world wards, and countless ‘minor engagements’ as local populations in colonial outposts were pushed aside, or eradicated to clear access to precious resources.  Whole landscapes changed, as a kid I remember climbing Roseberry Topping on evening and over looking Teesside. As far as the eye could see was a forest of flares from the ICI plants, the forges of this heartland of chemicals and heavy industry. The environmental impact of the carbon revolution was horrendous, polluted land, rivers seas atmospheres, lungs and minds. Equally the shift to a post industrial economy has lead to huge social changes, the miner’s strike, privatisation, economic devastation of the North East, or in the French case of the North.

To think that the next step to a sustainable economy will not be such an upheaval is wishful thinking. The transition form a carbon and nuclear based energy system to a renewable network of wind, solar, hydro, wave and tidal, and bio mass will involve massive change, some of it destructive, people will lose their jobs, the economies of certain regions will radically alter, but most of it creative, new industries will develop, more wealth will be created locally as more produce, services and energy are created loaclly, and spent locally.

The radical reduction in meat consumption, the shift to organic intensive farming (Not intensive in the sense of battery chickens but the intelligent intensive working and management of the soil),  will transform rural communities, requiring the return to the land of a large number of agricultural workers.The way these farms are worked will transform the nature of agricultural work, the effective management of carbon sinks, will also transform the way soil is managed.

All will require radical and unsettling change. It will scare and perturb us all. The old values that most of us hold will have to be transformed, to use Bohler’s metaphor, we will have to reboot our minds, and our hearts. It also means that the natural conservationist agenda’s need to be rethought. Conservation is a natural state of mind, we want things to stay the same, it makes the world more manageable, old certainties are easier to handle. It is however an illusion, change is happening whether we like it or not. Global warming is happening, and the impact for delicate eco systems like the Hautes Corbieres will be gradual but irreversible. Take a look and the Maisons, Padern,  Montguiard side of Mont Tauch and compare it to the Tuchan side of the same bit of rock. That is the impact of human activity. But it is also human activity which could half this process. But we have to deal with the consequences. A renewable energy system is not just a few solar panels and off shore wind farms. It is wind farms every where, every south facing surface covered in photo voltaics and photo thermals, the tapping of most viable water flows for marco and micro hydro generators, it is reforestation on unused land, it local food production, it means a more static lifestyle, although not a less physical one.

It does not necessarily mean learning to love every project EDF propose. Let’s be clear EDF have a plan for the transition to a sustainable energy network, the back bone of which is nuclear, with wind, solar and hydro taking up the slack. I worked with their Brussels lobbyists 20 years when I worked on The Economist Group’s weekly newspaper European Voice, we devised an advertising campaign that pictured a family riding their bikes through a forest with wind turbines in the background. Not a nuclear power station in sight. That was their strategy then, and it has not changed.

But another path is possible, as outlined by the International Panel on Climate Change’s report on renewable energy. and climate change mitigation. What the report argues is that a complex web of renewable systems is not only possible but necessary to reduce the risks of climate change. What that means in my mind is that the massive expansion of renewable energy generators is imperative. It may not be the proposed present system but we will have to get use to the fact that something similar will have to be put in place and soon.

The means that renewable energy will be omnipresent, we have to get use to it. Embrace it, bake on windy, or sunny days or at night, rip out that central heating put in wood burners, brick up those big patio windows, plant fruit trees to make shady and tasty gardens. Stop flying off on holidays, Grow vegetables, car share, rip out half those vines and plant cereals, grass for fodder, grow food along all the river banks. Get young people back in our villages, get all communal land into transition to organic,  lease communal land for small scale organic production, Create micro finance schemes to help people get set up. Re open local schools so kids can learn locally instead of being shipped off by bus daily. Buy disused houses in our villages and renovate them into low energy low cost social housing. Renovate the tumbled down old bergeries and use them. Build communal workshops to make cheese with underground cool cellars. Keep bees, train people in how to manage hives and make honey, buy communal honey making equipment. build local shared bakeries with wood burning ovens, manage and renew the forests, cut down all those pine trees and replace with deciduous trees. Now that would be a good use of energy.