Contraction and Convergence: the Global Solution to Climate Change published by Green Books for the Schumacher Society, first published 2000, £5.00 lead to the contraction of high polluting and Trading Scheme (ETS), carbon dioxide is now growth of low polluting industry. The aim is a commodity bought and sold on the open to achieve gradual convergence in emissions market. However, that such marketisation between the two. And if they keep to the is more about making money than reducing Meyer describes how he and his colleagues business leaders have simply set domestic from the Global Commons Institute (a group targets either artificially low, thus failing Reviewed by Sheila Malone ubrey Meyer is a musician. But over a A decade ago he a dren his wein o da computer and threw himself into finding a solution to the looming threat of global heating. This book is about his quest. Meyer describes how he felt, 'crushed and frightened by the realisation that humanity's pollution was destroying the future by changing the global climate'. He details just how bad this crisis was even in 2000, when the book was first published. The upward-curving 'hockey stick' diagram is used to illustrate the relationship between the human activity of fossil fuel burning, the release of greenhouse gases (ghg) and its warming effect on the atmosphere. These have all accelerated during the last 200 years since industrialisation, but dramatically so in the last few decades. 1960, for instance, carbon dioxide levels had risen by twenty percent on pre-industrial levels. But as early as 2030 they are predicted to rise by 100 percent. The big fear amongst climatologists is that if this causes global temperatures to rise beyond a 'tipping point' of two degrees, positive feedbacks as the release of methane from melting Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide and could rapidly accelerate the heating process, a catastrophic destabilisation of the climate. Rising levels will result in floods, hurricanes of frequency and intensity in coastal and low lying areas and rising temperatures inland will cause widespread drought and desertification As Meyer points out, political and business been aware of this threat for more than a decade, and have been discussing solutions since the1992 Rio Earth Summit. Nevertheless, fossil fuel burn, ghg emissions and global temperatures have all One atmosphere - one agreement Meyer's proposed answer is Contraction and Convergence (C&C). Its starting point is that any solution must be international: since there is only one atmosphere, what each nation emits effects the others. All countries must agree on a global target in order to avoid catastrophic warming, for instance sixty percent reduction by 2050. Each is then given a quota, based on population, allowing it to emit within this overall target. This should he set up in 1991) took this plan to the various climate talks and conferences of the His first challenge came from Since under capitalism these are passed on to the consumer, hitting the poor hardest, Meyer rejects them as unfair. In contrast, C&C's allocation of quotas he sees as equitable, in a way similar to rationing. At the same time he ties this to an individualist notion that 'the right to emit carbon dioxide On quota allocation Meyer adopts the idea of 'debtors' and 'creditors', popularised by Andrew Simms. The rich, industrialised nations are debtors, since they have polluted the planet for hundreds of years and need to pay back by drastically cutting their emissions. Developing countries are creditors and are allowed to increase emissions to 'catch up'. As some NGOs point out, however, as long as they remain locked into the global economy on an unequal and dependent basis, this could result in developing countries pursuing the same ecologically harmful mode of development that has caused the problem in the first place. Interestingly, the United States backs international quotas, it includes their rivals such as China and However, the Americans insist that quotas must be tradeable. Meyer also agrees that in this way C&C brings together both the Right who, have to swallow a gobally egalitarian, pre distribution of emissions rights and the Left who will have to go along with commercial dealing in those rights through international emissions trading'. Trading in emissions Although the USA did not sign the Kyoto Protocol because not all countries were involved, this first treaty on emissions cuts adopted tradeable quotas as a main mechanism. Under the European Emissions 28 by Aubrey Meyer carbon emissions seems clear from the recent scandals surrounding the ETS. Political and to make sufficient cuts, or artificially high, enabling them to make big profits selling their surplus quotas to others - who of course meagre Kyoto targets are unlikely to be met. agree on any future stricter quotas. It is possible that had he been writing earlier, Meyer's original ideas of fairness equality might have fitted in with Social Democratic, welfare state solutions. For instance, a clean environment and a stable climate could be presented as a common social good - like health and education. Governments would then have had a responsibility to provide this through general taxation, subsidising renewables and penalising waste and inefficiency. But over the last decades, neo-liberalism has been busy dismantling the welfare state under the mantra of public provision bad, private provision good. The theory is that as long as capitalism can see tackling climate a business opportunity it will change provide a solution. It is true that individual capitalists will invest in waste-reduction and energy efficiency to cut their own costs. But at the same time they are in business to sell as much of their product as possible to compete with their rivals, increasing production and demand. However, the neo-liberal agenda has not gone unchallenged from below. The super- exploited workers and the poor in both North and South are the victims of both its social and economic and also its ecologically disastrous policies. Campaigns around water, energy, infrastructure and transport have challenged big polluting companies and raised the alternatives of social ownership and rational public planning. In contrast, Contraction and Convergence, backed in Britain by although most environmental groups, including the Green Party, Liberal Democrats and a number of Labour MPs, remains a top-down, market- based solution. As such it is unlikely to be able to offer a radical enough answer to the enormous and increasing threat of climate change.
Who Let the Dogs Out? In this article, based on a talk given to the Brecht Forum, home to the New York Marxist School in January 2006, Cliff Conner discusses his recent book, A Peoples' History of Science, published by Nation. "A delightfully refreshing new look at the history of science." _ HOWARD ZINN A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF SCIENCE "VERS. MIDWIVES. :. "LOW MECHANICKS" CLIFFORD D. CONNER 29 he book has two main purposes. The first has to do mostly with with the present. With regard to the past, I'm trying to show that science was not created out of the minds of great individuals, but was always a collective endeavour, including large numbers of working people - people who worked with their hands as well as their minds. Traditional history of science is discussed in terms of individual geniuses like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein. Not that what famous figures did was useless or uninteresting, but there is much, much more to the history of science than that. That, 'much more' - the collective contributions of many anonymous people - has traditionally been ignored. Some are not anonymous; a few of their names have actually been preserved in the historical record. For example Onesimus, the African slave responsible for introducing the knowledge of smallpox prevention to North America early in the eighteenth century. His contribution represented a major leap forward in the science of epidemiology. But the knowledge he transmitted was produced by the experimentation of thousands of his African forebears, whose names are unknown to us. The same is true of Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator whose name was recorded in Captain Cook's journals. Tupaia and a few others have to stand in for the many generations of Polynesian navigators whose knowledge of the Pacific enriched the sciences of oceanography, geography, and cartography. Miners, Midwives, and 'Low Mechanicks' Rather than individual contributions to
most effective critic of the old science that is what the 'science wars' are all scientific knowledge, it might be better to think in terms of occupational categories. This is what the book's subtitle implies: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks. But there are hundreds of occupational that could be considered, so groups these three are only symbolic of a much 'Low Mechanicks', for larger number. example, was a catchall term used by the intellectual elite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to disparage all artisans, or anybody who worked with their hands, for that matter. Miners were a particularly important occupational and dangerous work. But they made important collective contributions to the sciences. They were the first metallurgists, and metallurgy major wellspring of chemistry. As they dug through the layers of rocks, miners contributed a lot of information about the structure of the earth, which gave the initial impulse to the science of geology. And when miners discovered buried fossilized plants and animals that is how paleontology began. 'Midwives' is to be understood not only as women who participated in the birthing process, but all of the female healers whose folk medicine was, for many centuries, generally more effective than the practices of the university-trained doctors. With regard to the argument about the collective nature of knowledge production, I'm trying to show that it applies to two main stages in the history of science: first, in the origins of the very earliest scientific knowledge everywhere in the world; and second, in the origins of modern science most familiar to us today. If science is the knowledge of nature, it should not be surprising to find that it originated with the people closest to nature: those forced by the conditions of their lives to wrest the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis. The earliest contributions to science were made by prehistoric peoples, so the book includes a chapter on what hunter-gatherers came to know about nature. As for modern science, I show that the Scientific Revolution of the was the work, primarily, of artisans: miners, blacksmiths, sailors, mechanics, carpenters, watch-makers, lens-grinders, and others like them. One of the traditional heroes of the Scientific Revolution is Francis Bacon, frequently credited with creating the ideology of modern science. He was the then dominant in the universities, the science that looked to Aristotle's writings for all the answers. That old-fashioned kind of science was dead and lifeless, he argued and the only people really gaining new knowledge were the artisans, the craftsmen. If educated people wanted to learn anything new about nature, they should go to the workshops of artisans to learn it. Bacon was right, it was from the workshops of the artisans that the Scientific Revolution developed. But if that is so, how come the history books pay great attention to Francis Bacon and hardly any attention at all to the artisans he was talking about? How capitalism has corrupted science The second purpose of the book that has to do more with the present than the past, is the subject of the last two chapters, 'The Union of Capital and and The Scientific-Industrial Complex'. In these chapters, I discuss how the rise of capitalism has shaped the historical development of science, which has resulted in the paradoxical nature of science in today's world. Modern science is often put on a pedestal and portrayed as the most solid form of knowledge and the most dependable means of acquiring knowledge, but at the same time, the pronouncements of scientists are frequently perceived as untrustworthy, because the scientists are seen as paid apologists for the interests of self-seeking corporations or government agencies of dubious honesty. So, the last two chapters of the book examine how capitalism has science and knowledge by turning them into commodities, so that today when you hear a scientific claim, you have to take into consideration who has bought the scientists - who is paying their salaries. Science Wars The phrase 'science wars' is used to describe a subcategory of the culture wars that are raging in the United States today. At the heart of the science wars is a dispute over whether science should be seen as a source of unchallengeable authority. In the past, ruling classes sought to base their legitimacy on religion; in the western world it took the form of the so-called 'divine right of kings'. But Ruling groups may still appeal to religion, in the US today for example, but generally the secularization society reached at least a century ago where they felt the need for an alternative source of unchallengeable authority. That role was filled by modern science. It served that purpose very well for a while, but in the last few decades, the authority of science has been increasingly challenged. And 30 about. In this book, I join this ideological battle on the side of the challengers. To quote Richard Lewontin, the idealizers of science say: 'When Science speaks, let no dog bark'. Well, I say, 'let the dogs out'. By taking the spotlight off the traditional Great Heroes of Science and focusing instead on the social nature of knowledge production, I tried to show that modern science is not a product of unfathomable genius that transcends the puny powers of understanding of ordinary people like Marxism and history The book is very much a product of Marxist scholarship. A large proportion of the sources I drew on were Marxist historians and scientists such as Edgar Zilsel and Boris Hessen, M. I. Finley, Christopher Hill, Harry Braverman, Richard Lewontin, Roy Porter, Richard Levins and the late Stephen Jay Gould. The very notion of 'People's History' is of Marxist provenance. The first example of the genre was A People's History of England, which was published in England in the 1930s by a Marxist historian named A. L. Morton. To rediscover the scientific contributions of ordinary working people, is not simply to right a historical wrong to people who had been unjustly ignored by traditional historians. The traditional hero worship that raises Newton and Einstein to the skies and ignores almost everybody else is a reflection of an ideological commitment that shapes the way all of us perceive the world, so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we take it for granted. Richard Lewontin has written very eloquently about this; he identifies it as, 'the priority of the individual over the collective'. The deep commitment to individualism, he says, 'is simply a reflection of the ideologies of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century that placed the individual in the centre of everything'. The opposite of individualism - collectivism - is obviously an important component of Marxist and socialist ideology. A healthy socialist ideology would not demand the negation of individualism, but recognize a balance between the needs of individuals and the collective. My purpose in stressing the collective nature of scientific knowledge production was to take a step necessary balance between individualism and collectivism. Our current culture is afflicted with a cult of celebrity, whether that celebrity is a Michael Jackson or an Albert Einstein; I was trying to show that in the history of science we need to go in For further information go to: www.