The dust has now fully settled since the December’s Conference of the Parties 24 in Poland, allowing for some reflections. A quick glance at COP24 suggests three steps forward and two steps back. But whilst to the naïve optimist this may sound like progress, in reality it’s yet another retrograde bound towards a climate abyss.

Government negotiators play poker with the beauty of three billion years of evolution. And climate change emissions march on – with a stride 2.7 percent longer in 2018 than in the previous year – which itself was 1.6 percent longer than the year before. Whilst the reality is that every COP marks another step backwards, the hype of these extravaganzas gives the impression that we’re forging a pathway towards a decarbonised future.

Rising emissions

For me the fantasy-land of COP24 was epitomised at the UK’s ever-busy Green is Great stand. Here, the nation that kick-started the fossil-fuel era, regaled passers-by with a heart-warming tale of rapidly falling emissions and a growing green economy.

This cheerful narrative chimed with those desperate to believe these annual junkets are forging a decarbonised promise-land. Despite my cynicism, I was nevertheless surprised just how pervasive the UK’s mirage had become.

Adjacent to Brexit Blighty’s pavilion was the WWF’s Panda Hub. Here I attended a session at which two British speakers offered advice to the New Zealand government on their forthcoming energy law. The mantra of the UK being at the vanguard of climate action was reiterated by the ‘great & good’ of the NGO world and by the Director of Policy at a prestigious climate change institute. A similar fable from a couple of Government stooges would not have been a surprise. But surely the NGO and academic communities should demonstrate greater integrity and a more discerning appraisal of government assertions?

If you ignore rising emissions from aviation and shipping along with those related to the UK’s imports and exports, a chirpy yarn can be told. But then why not omit cars, cement production and other so- called “hard to decarbonise” sectors?

In reality, post-1990 carbon dioxide emissions associated with operating UK plc. have, in any meaningful sense, remained stubbornly static. But let’s not just pick on the UK. The same can be said of many self-avowed climate-progressive nations, Denmark, France and Sweden amongst them. And then there’s evergreen Norway with emissions up 50 percent since 1990.

Fundamental failures

Sadly the subterfuge of these supposed progressives was conveniently hidden behind the new axis of climate-evil emerging in Katowice: Trump’s USA; MBS’s Saudi; Putin’s Russia; and the Emir’s Kuwait – with Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, quietly sniggering from the side-lines.

But surely no one really expected more from this quintet of regressives. It’s the self-proclaimed paragons of virtue where the real intransigence (or absence of imagination) truly resides. When it comes to commitments made in Paris, the list of climate villains extends far and wide – with few if any world leaders escaping the net.

How is it that behind the glad-handing of policy makers and the mutterings of progress by many academics, NGOs and journalists, we continue to so fundamentally fail?

On mitigation, endless presentations infused with ‘negative emissions’, hints of geo-engineering and offsetting salved the conscience of Katowice’s high-carbon delegates. But when it came to addressing issues of international equity and climate change, no such soothing balm was available.

I left my brief foray into the murky realm of equity with the uneasy conclusion that, just as we have wilfully deluded ourselves over mitigation, so we are doing when it comes to issues of fairness and funding.

Weak targets

COP after COP has seen the principal framing of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ (CBDR) weakened. Put simply, CBDR requires wealthier nations (i.e. greater financial capacity) with high- emissions per capita (i.e. greater relative historical responsibility for emissions) to “take the lead in combating climate change”.

This was a central tenet of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and specifically committed such wealthy nations to peak their emissions before 2000. Virtually all failed to do so.

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol established binding but weak emission targets for these nations, with the intention of tightening them in a subsequent ‘commitment period’. The all-important second ‘commitment period’ was never ratified – partly because a new ‘regime’ for international mitigation was anticipated.

In 2015, and to wide acclaim, the new regime emerged in the guise of the Paris Agreement. This saw the dismantling of any legally binding framework for wealthier high CO2/capita countries to demonstrate leadership. Instead nations submitted voluntary bottom-up mitigation plans based on what they determined was their appropriate national responsibility for holding to a global rise of between 1.5 and 2°C.

True to form, world leaders dispensed with any pretence of integrity, choosing instead to continue playing poker with physics & nature. Even under the most optimistic interpretation of the collective nonsense offered, the aggregate of world leaders’ proposals aligned more with 3.5°C of warming than the 1.5 to 2°C that they had committed to.

Backtracking on funding 

So, has the shame of repeated failure on mitigation initiated greater international funding for those poorer nations vulnerable to climate impacts and in the early phases of establishing their energy systems?

In Copenhagen, ‘developing’ nations agreed to produce mitigation plans, with the understanding that their “means of implementation” would attract financial support from the wealthier hi-emitters. Move on to Paris, and the wealthy nations flex their financial muscles and begin to backtrack.

Rather than deliver a new and anticipated post-2020 finance package, they chose to extend what was supposed to be their 100 billion dollar per year ‘floor’ (i.e. starting value) out to 2025. To put that in perspective, 100 billion dollars equates to one twenty-eighth of the UK’s annual GDP – and even this paltry sum is proving difficult to collect from rich nations.

Surely COP24 couldn’t belittle poor nations further? Yet the Katowice text stoops to new lows.

Funding initially intended to mobilise action on mitigation and adaptation is transposed into various financial instruments, with the very real prospect of economically burdening poorer countries with still more debt.

New generation

Finally, I want to touch on something far outside my experience and probably one of the most damning aspects of the COPs that I’ve become aware of.

As a professor in the gentle world of academia, I can speak wherever I’m able to get a forum. I can explain my analysis in direct language that accurately reflects my judgements – free from any fear of being actively shut down.

Certainly, there are academics (usually senior) who favour backstabbing over face to face engagement, but typically their comments are later relayed via their own (and more honest) Post-Doc & PhD colleagues. If I find myself on a stage with climate glitterati and accidentally step on a few hi-emitting toes – the worse I face is an insincere smile and being crossed off their Christmas card list. Such bruising of egos and prestige is relatively harmless. Elsewhere however this is not the case – for both early career academics and civil society.

At COP24 I spoke at some length with both these groups. Not uncommonly early career researchers feared speaking out “as it would affect their chances of funding”. This specific example arose during a national side event on the miraculous low-carbon merits of coal and extractive industries.

However, similar language is frequently used to describe how hierarchical structures in universities stifle open debate amongst researchers working on short-term contracts. Given senior academics have collectively and demonstrably failed to catalyse a meaningful mitigation agenda, fresh perspectives are sorely needed.

Consequently, the new generation of academics and researchers should be encouraged to speak out, rather than be silenced and co-opted.

Orwellian dictator

Turning to wider civil society, I hadn’t realised just how tightly constrained their activities were, or that they are required to operate within clear rules. At first this appears not too unreasonable – but probe a bit further and the friendly face of the UNFCCC morphs into an Orwellian dictator.

Whilst country and industry representatives can extol the unrivalled virtues of their policies and commercial ventures, civil society is forced to resort to platitudes and oblique references. Directly questioning a rich oil-based regime’s deceptions or even openly referring to Poland’s addiction to “dirty “coal is outlawed.

By contrast, eulogising on the wonders of clean coal is welcomed, as is praising a government’s mitigation proposals – even if they are more in line with 4°C than the Paris commitments.

All this is itself disturbing. Whilst the negotiators haggle over the colour of the Titanic’s deckchairs and how to minimise assistance for poorer nations, the UNFCCC’s overlord ensures a manicured flow of platitudes.

The clever trick here is to facilitate the occasional and highly choreographed protest. To those outside the COP bubble, such events support the impression of a healthy balanced debate. National negotiators with their parochial interests and hydrocarbon firms with their slick PR, all being held to account by civil society organisations maintaining a bigger-picture & long-term perspective. But that is far from the truth.

Tight policing

For civil-society groups getting an “observer” status badge is an essential passport to the COPs. These are issued by the UNFCCC and can easily be revoked. Without ‘badges’, or worse still, by forcibly being “de-badged” (as it’s referred to), civil society delegates have very limited opportunity to hold nations and companies to account or to put counter positions to the press.

Such tight policing has a real impact in both diluting protests and, perhaps more disturbingly, enabling nations and companies to go relatively unchallenged. The latter would be less of a concern, if the eminent heads of NGOs were standing up to be counted. But over the years the relationship between the heads of many NGOs and senior company and government representatives has become all too cosy. 

So what level of ‘control’ is typically exerted at COPs? To avoid compromising badges for those wishing to attend future UNFCCC events, I can’t provide detail here, but the range is wide: highlighting the negative aspects of a country or company’s proposals or activities; displaying temporary (unauthorised) signs; asking too challenging questions in side events; circulating ‘negative’ photographs or images; and countering official accounts.

In brief, criticising a specific country, company or individual is not allowed in material circulated within the conference venue. Previously, some civil-society delegates have had to delete tweets and issue a UNFCCC dictated apology – or lose their badges.

This year, following a climate-related protest in Belgium, those involved were subsequently stopped from entering Poland and the Katowice COP; so much for the EU’s freedom of speech and movement.

Unsubstantiated optimism

If the COP demonstrated significant headway towards delivering on the Paris agreement, perhaps there would be some argument for giving the process leeway to proceed unhindered by anything that may delay progress.

But no amount of massaging by the policy-makers and the UNFCCC’s elite can counter the brutal and damning judgement of the numbers. Twenty-four COPs on, annual carbon dioxide emissions are over 60 percent higher now than in 1990, and set to rise further by almost 3 percent in 2018.

It’s over a month now since I returned from the surreal world of COP24. I’ve had time to flush out any residual and unsubstantiated optimism and remind myself that climate change is still a peripheral issue within the policy realm.

The UK is an interesting litmus of just how fragmented government thinking is. A huge effort went into the UK’s COP presence – yet back at home our Minister for Clean Growth celebrates the new Clair Ridge oil platform and its additional 50 thousand tonnes of CO2 per day (a quarter of a billion tonnes over its lifetime). Simultaneously, the government remains committed to a new shale gas revolution whilst plans are afoot for expanding Heathrow airport and the road network.

COP can be likened to an ocean gyre with the ‘axis of evil’, Machiavellian subterfuge and naïve optimism circulating with other climate flotsam and with nothing tangible escaping from it. Twenty- four COPs on, questions must surely be asked as to whether continuing with these high-carbon jamborees serves a worthwhile purpose or not?

Political tipping points

Thus far the incremental gains delivered by the yearly COPs are completely dwarfed by the annual build-up of atmospheric carbon emissions. In some respects the Paris Agreement hinted at a potential step change – but this moment of hope has quickly given way to Byzantine technocracy – the rulebook, stocktaking, financial scams, etc.; not yet a hint of mitigation or ethical conscience.

But is this jettisoning of COPs too simple? Perhaps international negotiations could run alongside strong bilateral agreements (e.g. China and the EU)? Stringent emission standards imposed on all imports and exports to these regions could potentially lead to a much more ambitious international agenda.

The US provides an interesting and long-running model for this approach. For just over half a century, California has established increasingly tighter vehicle emission standards, each time quickly adopted at the federal level by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Clearly internationalising such a model would have implications for WTO. But in 2018, and with global emissions still on the rise, perhaps now is the time for a profound political tipping point where meaningful mitigation takes precedent over political expediency?

Of course, the COPs are much more than simply a space for negotiations. They are where a significant swathe of the climate community comes together, with all the direct and tacit benefits physical engagement offers. But did Katowice, Fiji-Bonn, Marrakech or even Paris represent the pinnacle of high-quality and low carbon discussion and debate? Could we have done much better?

Virtual engagement 

Perhaps we need established regional COP hubs throughout the different continents of the world, all with seamless virtual links to each other and the central venue. Could journalists have listened, interviewed and written from their offices? Could civil society have engaged vociferously in their home nations whilst facilitating climate vulnerable communities in having their voices heard?

Almost fifty years on from the first moon landing, are the challenges of delivering high-quality virtual engagement really beyond our ability to resolve?

If the COPs are to become part of the solution rather than continuing to contribute to the problem, then they need to undergo a fundamental transformation. Moreover the UNFCCC’s elite needs to escape their Big Sister approach and embrace rather than endeavour to close down a wider constituency of voices.

Neither of these will occur without considerable and ongoing pressure from those external to, as well as within, the UNFCCC. The time for action is not at COP25, but now and during the intervening months.

This Author 

Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change in the School of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester. He was previously director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s leading academic climate change research organisation, during which time he held a joint post with the University of East Anglia. Kevin now leads Tyndall Manchester’s energy and climate change research programme and is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre. Read more highlights and lowlights from COP24 on Kevin Anderson’s blog. 

Image: IRENA, Flickr. 

Cattle were being used to pull loads as early as 6,000 BC, according to new research led by UCL. The study provides the earliest systematic evidence of animals being used as engines.

In the study, published in Antiquity, archaeologists discovered that the bones in the feet of Neolithic cattle demonstrated distinctive wear patterns, indicative of exploitation as ‘animal engines’.

If these practices can be proven elsewhere, it is expected to have major ramifications on our understanding of animal use in the Neolithic.

Gaining traction 

Dr Jane Gaastra of UCL Archaeology), the lead author, said: “We have been able to provide the first conclusive evidence that farmers were using cattle for ‘traction’ almost 2,000 years earlier than the previous consensus date. There has only been one other foot sample from the Neolithic period found in Syria but this was inconclusive.

“The part of the Balkans where we found the bones was heavily forested in the Neolithic period, so chopping trees to create settlements would have required a lot of man power. Cattle would therefore have been a vital asset helping to transport items such timber for housing.”

The study was conducted in the central and western Balkans and shows that the earliest European farmers were not simply using cattle as a source of meat or dairy products, but also as a source of propulsion.

The findings indicate that traction in some form, and not necessarily through the use of ploughs or wagons, was present much earlier than previously thought.

Most other studies have focused on the use of traction in much later periods, because it has often been conflated with ploughing or the use of carts which came much later.

Archaeological record

Fundamentally, however, traction is the use of animals as engines to pull loads. While ploughing and cartage are forms of traction, they represent only two types of activity on a much broader spectrum of exploitative practices from specialised animals bred and used for regular work through to animals used for more occasional pulling activities, or for regular labour over a short number of years. 

Co-author Dr Marc Vander Linden, formerly of UCL Archaeology and now at University of Cambridge, said: “Until now it has generally been considered that traction only emerged by the fifth and forth  millennium BC, parallel to the introduction of the plough and the wheel, but our study demonstrates that this is not the case.

“We reveal that when the wheel and the plough became available farmers were already experienced in using cattle for traction, and this could have facilitated the spread of these innovations.”

The researchers investigated twelve cattle foot bone samples, from both male and female cattle, predominantly cows from eleven Neolithic sites in the central and western Balkans – modern-day Croatia, Serbia, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina – spanning from 6,000 to 4,500 BC. The sites were open air settlements from multiple phases of the Neolithic.

Foot bone was chosen as it is most affected by the stress of pulling and happens to be most commonly preserved in the archaeological record. In determining traction, the archaeologists were looking for extra bone growth in the inner part of the foot, as this is typically where the foot takes most of the load. 

Prehistoric societies

The researchers hope to replicate the study in other European regions to determine the extent and duration of this form of traction. It is still unknown whether this form of traction is seen in only a selection of Neolithic groups or was a common practice across Europe.

A firm understanding of the nature of early traction evidence in prehistoric Europe has significant implications for our knowledge of both management practices and the nature of labour and movement in prehistoric societies.

Dr Gaastra concluded: “What is now needed is a wider comparative assessment of sub-pathological evidence for cattle traction in Neolithic (and post-Neolithic) Europe to determine both how widely this pattern of early traction was distributed and at what point we begin to see evidence for specialised heavy-traction animals.”

The project is funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Manitoba, the International Research and Exchanges Board of Washington, D.C. and the Fulbright-Hayes Program.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from University College London. 

Environmental damage will be widespread within 100 years if microplastics continue to build up, the European academic advisory body SAPEA has said.

Its report, launched at The European Parliament, highlights a serious lack of knowledge about the future fall-out for people and the environment.

Dr Lesley Henderson, a Brunel University London media sociologist, said: “I knew that there was very little research that explores what the public understand about microplastics and risk.

Cultural change

“But I was surprised there are so many research gaps in the natural sciences. For example, how microplastics and nanoplastics are defined and measured can differ, and there are no standard measures for exposure and hazard.”

Dr Henderson’s insight will put policy makers in the picture about what messages people might take from what they hear, read and see about microplastics and risk.

Henderson continued: “We won’t solve the problem of plastic pollution without huge cultural and social change, and it is important to recognise this. 

“So policymakers need to be aware of the messages coming through different media. This is even more important given the speed with which scientific stories can be diffused across social media.

“Media plays a vital role in bringing about positive societal change, so it’s important to work with media and be clear where there is uncertainty in the scientific evidence.”

The report has been handed over to the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, who will use it to shape their scientific opinion on microplastics.

Professor Bart Koelmans, from SAPEA, said: “The evidence about nano- and microplastics remains uncertain and complex. But a lack of evidence for risk doesn’t mean we should assume that there is no risk.

“As our social science colleagues point out, it’s vital we communicate clearly about uncertainties in the evidence, rather than just assuming that everything is fine just because we don’t know for sure.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Brunel University, London. Read ‘A scientific perspective on microplastics in nature and society’ in full here

Environmental damage will be widespread within 100 years if microplastics continue to build up, the European academic advisory body SAPEA has said.

Its report, launched at The European Parliament, highlights a serious lack of knowledge about the future fall-out for people and the environment.

Dr Lesley Henderson, a Brunel University London media sociologist, said: “I knew that there was very little research that explores what the public understand about microplastics and risk.

Cultural change

“But I was surprised there are so many research gaps in the natural sciences. For example, how microplastics and nanoplastics are defined and measured can differ, and there are no standard measures for exposure and hazard.”

Dr Henderson’s insight will put policy makers in the picture about what messages people might take from what they hear, read and see about microplastics and risk.

Henderson continued: “We won’t solve the problem of plastic pollution without huge cultural and social change, and it is important to recognise this. 

“So policymakers need to be aware of the messages coming through different media. This is even more important given the speed with which scientific stories can be diffused across social media.

“Media plays a vital role in bringing about positive societal change, so it’s important to work with media and be clear where there is uncertainty in the scientific evidence.”

The report has been handed over to the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, who will use it to shape their scientific opinion on microplastics.

Professor Bart Koelmans, from SAPEA, said: “The evidence about nano- and microplastics remains uncertain and complex. But a lack of evidence for risk doesn’t mean we should assume that there is no risk.

“As our social science colleagues point out, it’s vital we communicate clearly about uncertainties in the evidence, rather than just assuming that everything is fine just because we don’t know for sure.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Brunel University, London. Read ‘A scientific perspective on microplastics in nature and society’ in full here

Environmental damage will be widespread within 100 years if microplastics continue to build up, the European academic advisory body SAPEA has said.

Its report, launched at The European Parliament, highlights a serious lack of knowledge about the future fall-out for people and the environment.

Dr Lesley Henderson, a Brunel University London media sociologist, said: “I knew that there was very little research that explores what the public understand about microplastics and risk.

Cultural change

“But I was surprised there are so many research gaps in the natural sciences. For example, how microplastics and nanoplastics are defined and measured can differ, and there are no standard measures for exposure and hazard.”

Dr Henderson’s insight will put policy makers in the picture about what messages people might take from what they hear, read and see about microplastics and risk.

Henderson continued: “We won’t solve the problem of plastic pollution without huge cultural and social change, and it is important to recognise this. 

“So policymakers need to be aware of the messages coming through different media. This is even more important given the speed with which scientific stories can be diffused across social media.

“Media plays a vital role in bringing about positive societal change, so it’s important to work with media and be clear where there is uncertainty in the scientific evidence.”

The report has been handed over to the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, who will use it to shape their scientific opinion on microplastics.

Professor Bart Koelmans, from SAPEA, said: “The evidence about nano- and microplastics remains uncertain and complex. But a lack of evidence for risk doesn’t mean we should assume that there is no risk.

“As our social science colleagues point out, it’s vital we communicate clearly about uncertainties in the evidence, rather than just assuming that everything is fine just because we don’t know for sure.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Brunel University, London. Read ‘A scientific perspective on microplastics in nature and society’ in full here

Environmental damage will be widespread within 100 years if microplastics continue to build up, the European academic advisory body SAPEA has said.

Its report, launched at The European Parliament, highlights a serious lack of knowledge about the future fall-out for people and the environment.

Dr Lesley Henderson, a Brunel University London media sociologist, said: “I knew that there was very little research that explores what the public understand about microplastics and risk.

Cultural change

“But I was surprised there are so many research gaps in the natural sciences. For example, how microplastics and nanoplastics are defined and measured can differ, and there are no standard measures for exposure and hazard.”

Dr Henderson’s insight will put policy makers in the picture about what messages people might take from what they hear, read and see about microplastics and risk.

Henderson continued: “We won’t solve the problem of plastic pollution without huge cultural and social change, and it is important to recognise this. 

“So policymakers need to be aware of the messages coming through different media. This is even more important given the speed with which scientific stories can be diffused across social media.

“Media plays a vital role in bringing about positive societal change, so it’s important to work with media and be clear where there is uncertainty in the scientific evidence.”

The report has been handed over to the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, who will use it to shape their scientific opinion on microplastics.

Professor Bart Koelmans, from SAPEA, said: “The evidence about nano- and microplastics remains uncertain and complex. But a lack of evidence for risk doesn’t mean we should assume that there is no risk.

“As our social science colleagues point out, it’s vital we communicate clearly about uncertainties in the evidence, rather than just assuming that everything is fine just because we don’t know for sure.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Brunel University, London. Read ‘A scientific perspective on microplastics in nature and society’ in full here

Environmental damage will be widespread within 100 years if microplastics continue to build up, the European academic advisory body SAPEA has said.

Its report, launched at The European Parliament, highlights a serious lack of knowledge about the future fall-out for people and the environment.

Dr Lesley Henderson, a Brunel University London media sociologist, said: “I knew that there was very little research that explores what the public understand about microplastics and risk.

Cultural change

“But I was surprised there are so many research gaps in the natural sciences. For example, how microplastics and nanoplastics are defined and measured can differ, and there are no standard measures for exposure and hazard.”

Dr Henderson’s insight will put policy makers in the picture about what messages people might take from what they hear, read and see about microplastics and risk.

Henderson continued: “We won’t solve the problem of plastic pollution without huge cultural and social change, and it is important to recognise this. 

“So policymakers need to be aware of the messages coming through different media. This is even more important given the speed with which scientific stories can be diffused across social media.

“Media plays a vital role in bringing about positive societal change, so it’s important to work with media and be clear where there is uncertainty in the scientific evidence.”

The report has been handed over to the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, who will use it to shape their scientific opinion on microplastics.

Professor Bart Koelmans, from SAPEA, said: “The evidence about nano- and microplastics remains uncertain and complex. But a lack of evidence for risk doesn’t mean we should assume that there is no risk.

“As our social science colleagues point out, it’s vital we communicate clearly about uncertainties in the evidence, rather than just assuming that everything is fine just because we don’t know for sure.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Brunel University, London. Read ‘A scientific perspective on microplastics in nature and society’ in full here

Environmental damage will be widespread within 100 years if microplastics continue to build up, the European academic advisory body SAPEA has said.

Its report, launched at The European Parliament, highlights a serious lack of knowledge about the future fall-out for people and the environment.

Dr Lesley Henderson, a Brunel University London media sociologist, said: “I knew that there was very little research that explores what the public understand about microplastics and risk.

Cultural change

“But I was surprised there are so many research gaps in the natural sciences. For example, how microplastics and nanoplastics are defined and measured can differ, and there are no standard measures for exposure and hazard.”

Dr Henderson’s insight will put policy makers in the picture about what messages people might take from what they hear, read and see about microplastics and risk.

Henderson continued: “We won’t solve the problem of plastic pollution without huge cultural and social change, and it is important to recognise this. 

“So policymakers need to be aware of the messages coming through different media. This is even more important given the speed with which scientific stories can be diffused across social media.

“Media plays a vital role in bringing about positive societal change, so it’s important to work with media and be clear where there is uncertainty in the scientific evidence.”

The report has been handed over to the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, who will use it to shape their scientific opinion on microplastics.

Professor Bart Koelmans, from SAPEA, said: “The evidence about nano- and microplastics remains uncertain and complex. But a lack of evidence for risk doesn’t mean we should assume that there is no risk.

“As our social science colleagues point out, it’s vital we communicate clearly about uncertainties in the evidence, rather than just assuming that everything is fine just because we don’t know for sure.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Brunel University, London. Read ‘A scientific perspective on microplastics in nature and society’ in full here

A non-biting species of midge currently presents one of the highest risks to terrestrial ecosystems out of all the non-native species found in Antarctica, researchers have found.

Eretmoptera murphyi is a flightless midge that is thought to have been inadvertently transferred from South Georgia (sub-Antarctic), where it is endemic, to Signy Island (maritime Antarctic) during a plant transplant experiment in the 1960s.

It has since been able to establish itself with great success on Signy Island, leading to an estimated biomass 2-5 times greater than all native arthropods combined at sites where it occurs.

‘Decomposer’ species

A research team from the University of Birmingham and the British Antarctic Survey is studying how the midge is able to survive in extreme polar conditions and the impact it may have on the region.

The preliminary results, presented today at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting in Birmingham, suggest that this single ‘decomposer’ species can lead to the release of as much nitrogen as is introduced in areas frequented by seals.

On Signy Island, this equates to a three- to four-fold increase relative to areas where the midge is not found.

As an animal which feeds on dead organic matter, and with no competitors or predators on the island, E. murphyi is able to release large volumes of nutrients into the soil, which in turn will affect peat decomposition and soil structure, thereby having wider impacts on all levels of biodiversity.

Jesamine Bartlett, a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham who presented the findings at a conference, said: “It is basically doing the job of an earthworm, but in an ecosystem that has never had earthworms.”

Ecological impacts

To assess the ecological impacts of E. murphyi, the team collected information on its abundance and those of other invertebrates and microbes as well as environmental variables such as water content, organic carbon, soil nitrogen content and substrate composition. These were then compared to locations on the island where the midge did not occur.

More soil and shallower moss banks were present at sites where the midge was most abundant, suggesting that the midge is eating its way through the peat in the moss banks and turning it into soil.

Bartlett said: “This is concerning as Signy Island hosts some of the best examples of moss banks in the Antarctic region. It is also home to Antarctica’s only two flowering plant species, the hair grass and pearlwort.”

The threat of introducing invasive species into the Antarctic’s long-isolated ecosystems is growing, not least due to rapid regional warming and increased levels of human activity.  

Accidental introductions

Professor Peter Convey of the British Antarctic Survey, said: “Visitors to Antarctica are subject to increasingly strict biosecurity measures but accidental introductions continue to occur. Midge larvae, for instance, are tiny and cannot be seen easily with the naked eye.

“Tourists and researchers may be bringing them in from their stopovers in the sub-Antarctic and moving them around the continent in the mud on their boots.”

As part of this study, the ecologists are highlighting the risk of transferring soil and invertebrates throughout the Antarctic Treaty area and are looking at existing biosecurity protocols in order to minimise the spread of invasive species.

Dr Scott Hayward, also from the University of Birmingham, concluded: “We already know that E. murphyi is physiologically capable of surviving conditions much further south, for example on the Antarctic Peninsula, so controlling the risk of spread is critically important.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the British Ecological Society. 

It’s Davos time again. Our overlords are arriving at the Alpine resort for the World Economic Forum (WEF). But the ski slopes all around are melting. The mountain’s snowline is receding.

As they gather, they’re unpacking environmental anxieties and comparing magic bullets. We hear Adair Turner, the former CBI Director, call for the large-scale expansion of agrofuels and hydrogen—without the slightest grasp of the destructive effects of the former or the wastefulness and colossal energy thirst of the latter.

Turner’s colleague, WEF Director Klaus Schwab, is gesturing airily at ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘technology.’ Business as almost-usual. Future hope, he says, lies with the CEOs (and shhh, please tiptoe around the oil giants). It’s the polite liberal etiquette of climate change: rhetorical dedication, practical denial.

Schwab tries to integrate ‘time’ into his diagnosis. “Quarterly reporting cycles and shorter terms of office cut time horizons for decision-makers. The urgent scientific message on climate change finds it hard to cut through the news cycle.” This is not wrong, but is flimsy and evasive. For time is indeed of the essence. What is ‘Davos time’? How does ‘capitalist time’ intersect with ‘ecological time’ — the CEOs amidst the snowmelt?

Economies of time

We can find a few pointers in a novel set in early twentieth-century Davos: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Davos today is a jet-set magnet, thanks to its climate and elevation – ideal for skiing. Back then a sprinkling of Europe’s upper crust congregated at its sanatoriums, for which the climate and elevation were similarly suited.

Magic Mountain is a time-rich novel. It asks: is time a linear axis of existence or is it subjective and non-linear, a concertina? Is boredom the ‘compression of time’?

The novel interrogates temporality. By this I mean the structures through which humans perceive and organise time, through the rhythms of their interaction with the natural environment (diurnal and seasonal cycles) and through technologies, myths, music, and so forth.

Temporalities and timescapes vary across space and through history, with different ‘economies’ embodying diverse dispositions of time. Who owns the future: the gods on Mount Olympus, or is it – like credit – a resource to be exploited by the monied classes? In a capitalist society, time is sliced and priced by states and capital — a time-money continuum.

“Time and the world”

In its own temporality, The Magic Mountain is classically ‘modern.’ Through a protagonist-centred narrative continuum, the present is looped through the past and toward the future. Narrative time is synced to clock time, and a focus on the detailed interactions of everyday life facilitates a tight control of tempo. As a Bildungsroman, it foregrounds processes of development and (self-)discovery. 

In short, it represents a late flourish of classical literary realism. The novel’s genre was keyed to a particular social order: bourgeois, individualistic and meliorist; its advent, some 150 years earlier, signalled a profound shift in sensibility. For the first time in literary consciousness, as Mikhail Bakhtin observed, “time and the world” became historical, unfolding “as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.”

The conceptual twin of this ‘modern’ literary sensibility is Progress. It too courses through Mann’s novel. Its champion is the Italian lawyer Lodovico Settembrini, who sees himself as a warrior for freedom, knowledge, transformative action, and ‘Europe,’ in opposition to tyranny, bondage, passivity, and inertia—in short, ‘Asia.’

In Settembrini’s view, time and history are propelled by machines. “As technology brought nature increasingly under its control,” improving communication “and triumphing over climatic conditions,” it also brought the peoples of the world together, driving a global shift from “darkness and fear” to happiness and virtue. Technological progress paves the road to a shining moral order. Through dominating nature, it secures liberation.

In Davos this week, Settembrini’s ghost feels right at home. It laps up the WEF mission statement, “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” and the ubiquitous undertakings to “shape the future of economic progress.”

The Magic Mountain is set prior to 1914, but Mann wrote it between 1912 and 1924, as liberal order crumpled and burned. Its narrative acceleration conjures a society hurtling toward doom. One hundred years on, ecological collapse is provoking a crisis in our perception of the ontological coordinates of human life, including nature and time. I’ll return to these. But first, how did we get here? And what is ‘capitalist time’?

Ringing the changes

The revolution in temporality of the last millennium is conventionally associated with the diffusion of the mechanical clock. By producing minutes and hours in fixed ticks, it enabled the reproducibility and universal standardisation of time. In severing time from the natural and supernatural realms, it helped foster a vision of an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, the sphere of Newtonian science. Time could now be imagined as a uniform continuum: linear, divisible, and abstract.

But the transformation cannot have been the work of mechanical clocks alone. Clock time is a productive force, enabling the synchronisation of human purposes—but these are under whose command?

In medieval Europe and the Islamic civilisations, clocks were used less to measure time than by clerics to mark it — the call to prayer. (‘Clock’ derives from clocca/klocke: a bell.) But when clock-bells entered the public sphere to coordinate trade and public intercourse, and above all when they entered workplaces to quantify the working day, that changed.

If pre-capitalist systems were visibly kleptocratic – based on the extortion of labour’s product – in capitalism the goal is labour productivity. Capital is the command of labour time, with the worker appearing as a commodity: personified labour-time. Capitalist rationality is governed by the law of value, the imperative to reduce the labour time of production below the ‘socially necessary’ average required to sell commodities at or below their value—where value is an abstraction of social time.

Put more simply, capital’s aim is to increase profit by saving time. This accounts for the core dynamics of ‘modernity’: the systematic disciplining of labour and its segregation from the rest of the human experience, enabling labour time to be demarcated and measured; the endless acceleration of labour processes and of technical and social change; the centrality, and fetishism, of technology (in view of its key role in displacing labour and reducing circulation time); and the systematic derogation of the natural environment. Capitalism eats time, and in the process erases nature.

Weaponising the clock

Capitalist time can be thought of as a system of interlocking temporalities under the dominance of capital. To simplify, the pulse is capital’s, the wage relation determines the worker’s calendar, while the overarching framework is established by states — not least through the strict metronome of education institutions and other sites of ‘disciplinary social reproduction.’ Outside those structures, ‘social reproduction time’ tends to be cyclical, and gendered.

The imposition of capitalist temporality – a unity of time projected by capital and nation states – is sometimes crisis-prone and arrhythmic, is always contested, and never total. Capitalist temporalities are differentiated, contradictory and uneven across space and time, and they face resistance. In the system’s ‘primitive’ phases, the plantations and workshops and warships and factories became battlegrounds in a war of capitalist time-consciousness.

The same war was fought globally. The early-modern West European bourgeois defined himself by his separation from nature and a taste for regimes of abstract time and space. These predilections were weaponised, deployed in explicit justification of the domination of indigenous peoples whose space he was conquering and whose labour time he was appropriating. The very idea of the ‘savage’ was constructed on the belief that to be fully human requires a rigorous separation of ritual and habit from the rhythms of nature. Indigenous peoples’ lack of alienation from their land served to justify the colonists’ alienation of their land.

Put differently, bourgeois Europeans saw themselves in the mirror of their clocks. Clocks symbolised technological prowess and material well-being — a nation’s ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity.’ Abstract-regimented time was simultaneously the banner and goal of European militarists, merchants and missionaries in their colonisation of the world who defined their civilisation as orderly, regimented, linear, and uniform, a culture to be imposed on the irrational, irregular and timeless — hence childlike— Others. Punctuality was ordained a moral category: keeping the right time was right.

Choreographing modernity 

Religious time and capitalist time consciousness adapted to one another, most famously in seventeenth-century England, where Puritans “censored the social calendar, flattened the swinging seasonality of time and decreed instead a mechanical routine of six days’ work followed by one day’s pray.” Puritanism choreographed society along business lines, featuring employers for whom saving souls requires saving money, and prayerful-punctual employees. Here the time-money continuum came into being. Saving time is “gainful,” preached the Puritan Richard Baxter, so “spend it wholly in the way of duty.” “Time is money,” chimed Benjamin Franklin, setting the seal on time’s historic transition: once a gift from the gods, now a resource exchangeable for money.

In European visualisations of the human journey, the correlative shift was from Providence to Progress — from a sacred cosmology “bounded by the approach of the Last Judgment“ to a secular historical time in continuous forward motion. In early formulations of history as a stadial process of civilizational advance, the analogy was with the individual.

Just as individuals progress from infancy to maturity, said Lord Kames, “so there is a similar progress in every nation, from its savage state to its maturity in arts and sciences.“ Before long, the Progress idea became infused with connotations of ‘economic infinity’ — the beliefs that human industry has infinite wealth-creating potential and that the credit system is endlessly elastic. Later on, it fused with the growth paradigm — the ideology of unending economic growth.

In identifying a ladder of historical time from barbarism to civilisation, the progress idea hammered the diversity of human populations into a particular temporal-economic chain. Under its banner, abstract time and technological novelty became markers of modernity, defining the cities against the countryside and imperial powers against the colonies. Because the richer and higher-tech nations (and ‘races’) are indexed as history’s vanguard, they should boss the rest, and surgically redirect their faces to the future. When the future appears as a dream of infinite progress, the past is perpetually deficient and the present must be continually realigned with the future through political intervention. It is a manifesto that drums out capital’s rhythms – it appeared as ‘modernisation theory,’ ‘the development project,’ and so forth.

Empty time

In The Magic Mountain, the debate on progress pits the bourgeois progressive Settembrini against Naptha, a socialist-reactionary Jesuit. The latter was nostalgic for medieval hierarchy and sternly critical of liberal Progress. Yet the actual socialist movement of Thomas Mann’s day, above all the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was aligning itself unreservedly with ‘Settembrini.’

The thinker who joined the dots connecting the SPD’s “stubborn faith in progress“ and its “servile integration“ into the apparatuses of bourgeois order was Walter Benjamin. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin highlighted a paradox in the temporality of commodity society. Competition drives the production of ever greater masses of commodities for which buyers must be found, with ever new lines and new seductions, yet novelty is immediately rendered obsolete by its own onward rush.

The paradigm is the fashion industry: the realm of the short shelf-life, the quick kiss. Commodity production inhabits twin temporalities, with a linear acceleration which – in its circularity, its repetitiveness – appears as stasis.

Benjamin uses the phrase “homogenous empty time“ to describe the infinite, inevitable timetable of bourgeois progress to which social democracy had pledged itself in the baseless belief that capitalism’s accelerative dynamic pointed to a socialist society as its pre-determined telos.

The SPD had become prisoner of its conviction that the historical tide was on its side, pushed ever onward by “technological development.” From there it was a short step “to the illusion that factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement,” and to a “corrupted conception” of industry that recognizes only “progress in mastering nature” and not the attendant regressions, and finally to the “naïvely complacent” belief — shared by social-democrat and liberal economists — that nature donates itself “gratis” for the benefit of humanity. These beliefs, Benjamin suggests, lay at the root of the SPD’s rejection of radical strategies geared to rupturing the historical present.

Great acceleration 

Capitalist progress, in Benjamin’s oracular phrase, “must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That it continues like this, is the catastrophe.” He wrote this in the late 1930s, following his exile from Nazi Germany, incarceration in Vichy France, and not long before his flight and (probable) suicide.

A complacent observer, a Settembrini, might assume Benjamin had needlessly generalised from the unfortunate juncture. After all, 1940 was “midnight in the century” but the good guys then won the war, eradicated Nazism, and soldered the world economy back together. Progress resumed full-throttle, powering miraculous advances in literacy, life expectancy and prosperity.

But Benjamin’s warnings were prescient. He had earlier described how the same coruscating technologies — gas, dyes, electricity — that had lit up late nineteenth-century city skies morphed into the ‘colourful infernos’ (in Esther Leslie’s paraphrase) and the ‘fire terror’ of the world wars.

A similar and even more treacherous dialectic was to follow. Fossil fuels had become the elixir of growth. As Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, long ago understood, fossil fuels confer on technologies “the invaluable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption’ in their work. Digging deep through geological layers to the Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous past brings present dividends to capital in the form of cheap energy which then, pumped out as exhaust gas, cues up future infernos and fire terror.

The capitalist system, in the wake of its postwar Great Acceleration, is producing new temporal twists, not least to ecological time and geological time.

Ecological time

Ecological time refers to humans’ interaction with natural events and processes, whether over the short or longer-term. Humans have long had the capacity to rapidly wrench local environments, but ecological time has been generally understood as cyclical and continuous. One sociologist of time describes it as ‘enduring time.’

Today, ecological time is changing globally, and fast. No longer is our image of the planetary future simply an extrapolation of the present. Ecological time is, for a significant minority, infused with a sense of hair-raising change.

A spin-off is that our sense of geological time is undergoing an irreversible shift. The geological past, in the form of carbon-bearing seams, irrupts into the present, irrevocably altering the future. Anthropocene is the buzz word, with Capitalocene its more accurate substitute.

Geological time is accelerating, and this will continue, thanks not least to the time-bending features of climate change: the gargantuan future warming pent up in the form of oceanic thermal inertia, and the irreversible non-linear positive feedback mechanisms (albedo decline, oceanic methane release, etc.) that are either already in train or in view — a climate time bomb that could propel the planet toward a ‘hothouse state.’

The earth’s climate of the last ten thousand years was uniquely benign and stable, if at times with sharp local and occasional minor global volatility. That age is over. Put differently: whereas all human-recorded timescapes were lived under a (relatively) serene sky, over the next thousands, or millions, of years the forecast is stormy.

Jetztzeit – ‘now time’

Facing the catastrophes of his era, and the complacency of progressives, Benjamin offered the image of the emergency brake: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.” The metaphor, Benjamin Noys argues, presents a “non-teleological politics of temporality,” grounded in a belief that future liberation cannot be entrusted to “the continuing dialectic of production/destruction” that generates a ceaseless “state of emergency.” 

In strategic terms, Benjamin insisted that movements of the “revolutionary classes,” at moments of crisis, must seek not to push history faster along its pre-existing tracks but seek “to make the continuum of history explode,” manifesting “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time,” and that, however, this will require a seizing of memories of past defeats when they ‘flash up’ at moments of collective peril.

This is a stance not of impotent voluntarism or aestheticized defeatism but a squaring up to the ways in which the present embodies the outcome of the catastrophic defeats of past struggles, in order precisely to warn against the “conformism“ that tends always to overpower us. Far from being an idiosyncratic fantasy peculiar to Benjamin, it is a red thread through radical politics. (To give a notable example, it’s there in W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of the tragically missed opportunity to unite workers across the “colour line,” in Black Reconstruction in America.)

As the ice melts, a helpless catastrophism can set in, breeding ennui or apathy in the face of predicted doom. But the dominant forms of passivity, surely, stem either from low levels of social-movement activity itself, which a catastrophist consciousness might in small ways improve (Extinction Rebellion is the obvious example), or from complacent hopes that those who gather at Davos, and their colleagues worldwide, will proffer business-almost-as-usual remedies in the form of green growth, geoengineering, and so forth. These, in turn, tap into the long-ingrained belief in the inevitability of progress, with its tendency to foster “apocalyptic blindness“: the reluctance of humans “to understand that their existence is threatened, and that this could lead to bad end.”

It’s against this background that Benjamin’s arguments, and his uncovering of the strings that attached the complacent historicism of his day to the modes and rhythms of capitalist time, appear, well, jetztzeitig.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

Image: Monica Blatton, Flickr.