Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No
government should offer them a lifeline
George
Monbiot
This crisis is a chance to rebuild our economy for the
good of humanity. Let’s bail out the living world, not its destroyers
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 29 Apr
2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 29 Apr 2020 07.26 BST
‘Governments
have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of unsaleable
barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a barrel in
2008.’
Do Not
Resuscitate. This tag should be attached to the oil, airline and car
industries. Governments should provide financial support to company workers
while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs in different sectors. They
should prop up only those sectors that will help secure the survival of
humanity and the rest of the living world.
They should
either buy up the dirty industries and turn them towards clean technologies, or
do what they often call for but never really want: let the market decide. In
other words, allow these companies to fail.
This is our
second great chance to do things differently. It could be our last. The first,
in 2008, was spectacularly squandered. Vast amounts of public money were spent
reassembling the filthy old economy, while ensuring that wealth remained in the
hands of the rich. Today, many governments appear determined to repeat that
catastrophic mistake.
The “free
market” has always been a product of government policy. If antitrust laws are
weak, a few behemoths survive while everyone else goes down. If dirty
industries are tightly regulated, clean ones flourish. If not, the
corner-cutters win. But the dependency of enterprises on public policy has
seldom been greater in capitalist nations than it is today. Many major
industries are now entirely beholden to the state for their survival.
Governments have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of
unsaleable barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a
barrel in 2008. Then, they failed to use their power to eradicate the sector’s
socially destructive practices and rebuild it around human needs. They are
making the same mistake today.
The Bank of
England has decided to buy debt from oil companies such as BP, Shell and Total.
The government has given easyJet a £600m loan even though, just a few weeks
ago, the company frittered away £171m in dividends: profit is privatised, risk
is socialised. In the US, the first bailout includes $60bn (£48bn) for
airlines. Overall, the bailout involves sucking as much oil as possible into
strategic petroleum reserves and sweeping away pollution laws, while freezing
out renewable energy. Several European countries are seeking to rescue their
airlines and car manufacturers.
Don’t
believe them when they tell you they do this on our behalf. A recent survey by
Ipsos of 14 countries suggests that, on average, 65% of people want climate change
to be prioritised in the economic recovery. Everywhere, electorates must
struggle to persuade governments to act in the interests of the people, rather
than the corporations and billionaires who fund and lobby them. The perennial
democratic challenge is to break the bonds between politicians and the economic
sectors they should be regulating, or, in this case, closing down.
Even when
legislators seek to represent these concerns, their efforts are often feeble
and naive. The recent letter to the government from a cross-party group of MPs
calling for airlines to receive a bailout only if they “do more to tackle the
climate crisis” could have been written in 1990. Air travel is inherently
polluting. There are no realistic measures that could, even in the medium term,
make a significant difference. We now know that the carbon offsetting schemes
the MPs call for is useless: every economic sector needs to maximise cuts in
greenhouse gases, so shifting the responsibility from one sector to another
solves nothing. The only meaningful reform is fewer flights. Anything that
impedes the contraction of the aviation industry impedes the reduction of its
impacts.
The current
crisis gives us a glimpse of how much we need to do to pull out of our
disastrous trajectory. Despite the vast changes we have made in our lives,
global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to reduce by only about 5.5% this
year. A UN report shows that to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding 1.5C or
more of global heating, we need to cut emissions by 7.6% per year for the next
decade. In other words, the lockdown exposes the limits of individual action.
Travelling less helps, but not enough. To make the necessary cuts we need
structural change. This means an entirely new industrial policy, created and
guided by government.
Governments
like the UK’s should drop their road-building plans. Instead of expanding
airports, they should publish plans for reducing landing slots. They should
commit to an explicit policy of leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
During the
pandemic, many of us have begun to discover how much of our travel is
unnecessary. Governments can build on this to create plans for reducing the
need to move, while investing in walking, cycling and – when physical
distancing is less necessary – public transport. This means wider pavements,
better cycle lanes, buses run for service not profit. They should invest
heavily in green energy, and even more heavily in reducing energy demand –
through, for example, home insulation and better heating and lighting. The
pandemic exposes the need for better neighbourhood design, with less public
space given to cars and more to people. It also shows how badly we need the
kind of security that a lightly taxed, deregulated economy cannot deliver.
In other
words, let’s have what many people were calling for long before this disaster
hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus
package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which
is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose
purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without
stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations.
Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let’s not waste our second
chance.
George
Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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