Trump’s
climate denial is just one of the forces that point towards war
George Monbiot
The
failure to get to grips with our crises, by all mainstream political
parties, is likely to lead to a war between the major powers in my
lifetime
Wednesday 23
November 2016 06.30 GMT
Wave the magic wand
and the problem goes away. Those pesky pollution laws, carbon caps
and clean-power plans: swish them away and the golden age of
blue-collar employment will return. This is Donald Trump’s promise,
in his video message on Monday, in which the US president-elect
claimed that unleashing coal and fracking would create “many
millions of high-paid jobs”. He will tear down everything to make
it come true.
But it won’t come
true. Even if we ripped the world to pieces in the search for full
employment, leaving no mountain unturned, we would not find it.
Instead, we would merely jeopardise the prosperity – and the lives
– of people everywhere. However slavishly governments grovel to
corporate Luddism, they will not bring the smog economy back.
No one can deny the
problem Trump claims to be addressing. The old mining and industrial
areas are in crisis throughout the rich world. And we have seen
nothing yet. I have just reread the study published by the Oxford
Martin School in 2013 on the impacts of computerisation. What jumps
out, to put it crudely, is that jobs in the rust belts and rural
towns that voted for Trump are at high risk of automation, while the
professions of many Hillary Clinton supporters are at low risk.
The jobs most likely
to be destroyed are in mining, raw materials, manufacturing,
transport and logistics, cargo handling, warehousing and retailing,
construction (prefabricated buildings will be assembled by robots in
factories), office support, administration and telemarketing. So
what, in the areas that voted for Trump, will be left?
Farm jobs have
mostly gone already. Service and care work, where hope for some
appeared to lie, will be threatened by a further wave of automation,
as service robots – commercial and domestic – take over.
Yes, there will be
jobs in the green economy: more and better than any that could be
revived in the fossil economy. But they won’t be enough to fill the
gaps, and many will be in the wrong places for those losing their
professions.
At lower risk is
work that requires negotiation, persuasion, originality and
creativity. The management and business jobs that demand these skills
are comparatively safe from automation; so are those of lawyers,
teachers, researchers, doctors, journalists, actors and artists. The
jobs that demand the highest educational attainment are the least
susceptible to computerisation. The divisions tearing America apart
will only widen.
Even this bleak
analysis does not capture in full the underlying reasons why good,
abundant jobs will not return to the places that need them most. As
Paul Mason argues in PostCapitalism, the impacts of information
technology go way beyond simple automation: they are likely to
destroy the very basis of the market economy, and the relationship
between work and wages.
An open-cast mine
in Jaenschwalde, eastern Germany. Photograph: Michael Sohn/AP
And, as the French
writer Paul Arbair notes in the most interesting essay I have read
this year, beyond a certain level of complexity economies become
harder to sustain. There’s a point at which further complexity
delivers diminishing returns; society is then overwhelmed by its
demands, and breaks down. He argues that the political crisis in
western countries suggests we may have reached this point.
Trump has also
announced that on his first day in office he will withdraw America
from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He is right to do so, but
for the wrong reasons. Like TTIP and Ceta, the TPP is a fake trade
treaty whose primary impact is to extend corporate property rights at
the expense of both competition and democracy. But withdrawal will
not, as he claims, “bring jobs and industry back to American
shores”. The work in Mexico and China that Trump wants to reclaim
will evaporate long before it can be repatriated.
As for the
high-quality, high-waged working-class jobs he promised, these are
never handed down from on high. They are secured through the
organisation of labour. But the unions were smashed by Ronald Reagan,
and collective bargaining has been suppressed ever since by
casualisation and fragmentation. So how is this going to happen? Out
of the kindness of Trump’s heart? Kindness, Trump, heart?
But it’s not just
Trump. Clinton and Bernie Sanders also made impossible promises to
bring back jobs. Half the platform of each party was based on a
delusion. The social, environmental and economic crises we face
require a complete reappraisal of the way we live and work. The
failure by mainstream political parties to produce a new and
persuasive economic narrative, which does not rely on sustaining
impossible levels of growth and generating illusory jobs, provides a
marvellous opening for demagogues everywhere.
Governments across
the world are making promises they cannot keep. In the absence of a
new vision, their failure to materialise will mean only one thing:
something or someone must be found to blame. As people become angrier
and more alienated, as the complexity and connectivity of global
systems becomes ever harder to manage, as institutions such as the
European Union collapse and as climate change renders parts of the
world uninhabitable, forcing hundreds of millions of people from
their homes, the net of blame will be cast ever wider.
Eventually the anger
that cannot be assuaged through policy will be turned outwards,
towards other nations. Faced with a choice between hard truths and
easy lies, politicians and their supporters in the media will
discover that foreign aggression is among the few options for
political survival. I now believe that we will see war between the
major powers within my lifetime. Which ones it will involve, and on
what apparent cause, remains far from clear. But something that once
seemed remote now looks probable.
A complete reframing
of economic life is needed not just to suppress the existential risk
that climate change presents (a risk marked by a 20°C anomaly
reported in the Arctic Ocean while I was writing this article), but
other existential threats as well – including war. Today’s
governments, whether they are run by Trump or Obama or May or Merkel,
lack the courage and imagination even to open this conversation. It
is left to others to conceive of a more plausible vision than trying
to magic back the good old days. The task for all those who love this
world and fear for our children is to imagine a different future
rather than another past.
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