From the Amazon to Australia, why is your money
funding Earth’s destruction?
George Monbiot
Fossil fuels, fisheries and farming: the world’s most
destructive industries are protected – and subsidised – by governments
Wed 30 Nov
2022 06.00 GMT
In every
conflict over the living world, something is being protected. And most of the
time, it’s the wrong thing.
The world’s
most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three
sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and
erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021,
governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn
(£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low.
The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for
the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale
industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help
the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish.
Every year,
governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no
regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often
inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar
two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better
used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on
propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically
destructive industry.
Pasture-fed
meat production destroys five times as much forest as palm oil does. It now
threatens some of the richest habitats on Earth, among which are forests in
Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil,
Mexico, Australia and Myanmar. Meat production could swallow 3m square
kilometres of the world’s most biodiverse places in 35 years. That’s almost the
size of India. In Australia, 94% of the deforestation in the catchment area of
the Great Barrier Reef – a major cause of coral loss – is associated with beef
production. Yet most of these catastrophes are delivered with the help of
public money.
The more
destructive the business, the more likely it is to enjoy political protection.
A study published this month claims that chicken factories being built in
Herefordshire and Shropshire are likely to destroy far more jobs than they
create, wrecking tourism through the river pollution, air pollution, smell and
scenic blight they cause. But none of the planning applications for these
factories has been obliged to provide an economic impact analysis. Planning
officers, the paper found, are highly dismissive of the hospitality industry,
treating it as “non-serious and trivial”. By comparison, the paper found,
“attitudes to farming were very different; described as serious, ‘proper’
(male) work”. The “tough”, “masculine” industries driving Earth systems towards
collapse are pampered and protected by governments, while less destructive
sectors must fend for themselves.
While there
is no shortage of public money for the destruction of life on Earth, budgets
for its protection always fall short. According to the UN, $536bn a year will
be needed to protect the living world – far less than the amount being paid to
destroy it – yet almost all this funding is missing. Some has been promised,
scarcely any has materialised. So much for public money for public goods.
The
political protection of destructive industries is woven into the fabric of
politics, not least because of the pollution paradox (“the more damaging the
commercial enterprise, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s
not regulated out of existence. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by
the most damaging commercial enterprises.”) Earth systems, by contrast, are
treated as an afterthought, an ornament: nice to have, but dispensable when
their protection conflicts with the necessity of extraction. In reality, the
irreducible essential is a habitable planet.
In 2010, at
a biodiversity summit in Nagoya, Japan, governments set themselves 20 goals, to
be met by 2020. None has been achieved. As they prepare for the biodiversity
Cop15 summit in Montreal next week, governments are investing not in the
defence of the living world but in greenwash.
The
headline objective is to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.
But what governments mean by protection often bears little resemblance to what
ecologists mean.
Take the
UK, for example. On paper, it has one of the highest proportions of protected
land in the rich world, at 28%. It could easily raise this proportion to 30%
and claim to have fulfilled its obligations. But it is also one of the most
nature-depleted countries on Earth. How can this be? Because most of our
“protected” areas are nothing of the kind.
One
analysis suggests that only 5% of our land meets the international definition
of a protected area. Even these scraps are at risk, as scarcely anyone is left
to enforce the law: the regulators have been stripped to the bone and beyond.
At sea, most of our marine protected areas are nothing but lines on the map:
trawlers still rip them apart.
All this is
likely to become much worse. If the retained EU law bill goes ahead, the entire
basis of legal protection in the UK could be torn down. Even by the standards
of this government, the mindless vandalism involved is gobsmacking. To prove
that Brexit means Brexit, 570 environmental laws must be deleted or replaced by
the end of next year. There will be no public consultation, no scope for
presenting evidence and, in all likelihood, no opportunity for parliamentary
debate. It is logistically impossible to replace so much legislation in such a
short period, so the most likely outcome is deletion. If so, it’s game over for
rivers, soil, air quality, groundwater, wildlife and habitats in the UK, and
game on for cheats and con artists. The whole country will, in effect, become a
freeport.
Never
underestimate the destructive instincts of the Conservative party, prepared to
ruin everything for the sake of an idea. Never underestimate its appetite for
chaos and dysfunction.
The
protected industries driving us towards destruction will take everything if
they are not checked. We face a brutal contest for control over land and sea:
between those who seek to convert our life support systems into profit, and
those who seek to defend, restore and, where possible, return them to the
indigenous people dispossessed by capitalism’s fire front. These are never just
technical or scientific issues. They cannot be resolved by management alone.
They are deeply political. We can protect the living world or we can protect
the companies destroying it. We cannot do both.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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