The politics of carbon

The Hockey Stick phenomenon

Science Minded Friends
Here’s the latest re-analysis of the famous graph showing how greenhouse gas emissions have changed over time -It’s called the Hockey Stick curve. It’s not pretty.

Here is a recent discussion that wbt had on John Quiggins blog about growth and degrowth about his article in the Guardian titled Why neither growth nor degrowth make sense as long-term objectives for Australia’s economy

John Quiggin … if “growth” is meaningless, so is “degrowth”. There’s no technological or ecological reason why we can’t have more and more services, from health and education to TikTok videos. And, if we can continue to improve the technology, there’s no real limit to our supply of solar and wind energy. What we need to reduce is the “throughput” of the residual industrial economy, beginning with the extraction of resources and ending with the dumping of waste. It’s here that ideas like that of the “circular economy” remain relevant.

WBT  In 2024, the worldwide production of electricity generated by fossil fuels reached an all-time peak. In this light, can you explain why you think growth (in the energy industry) is no longer relevant? Do you say industrial capitalism is really finished when both China and India are growing so strongly?

John Quiggin The article was about Australia, industrial economy still has a way to run in China (maybe also India, though they may just jump to services).

WBT Aren’t the economies of Australia, China and India closely intertwined? Our extraction industries and their manufacturing industries. How do we de-carbonise when their growth is so dependent on Australian fossil fuels and Australian iron?

JW Name me a critical input that can’t be decarbonised. The EU has cut its of fossil gas quite significantly since 2022, and irreversibly. Australia will still be selling iron ore or pellets in 2030, into a declining market for virgin iron. Gas, not so much.

WBT The US$ can’t decarbonise while it is backed by Saudi oil.

John Quiggin The US doesn’t buy or rely on Saudi oil – they are both exporters and therefore in competition . And it is the US backing the Saudis in geopolitical terms, not vice versa. That’s a crazy and immoral policy, driven by the US Israel lobby, but if the US government were willing to break with Israel, they could dump the Saudis any time they choose.

WBT Saudi Arabia agrees to price its oil exports exclusively in U.S. dollars, ensuring a steady global demand for the currency.

JW Historical niggle: the US alliance with Saudi Arabia dates back to 1944 and FDR’s stopover on the way back from Yalta. The Israel lobby did not exist before the founding of the state three years later. There were of course Zionists lobbying the US and other Allied governments, but surely they were focused at the time on the Holocaust, and would have needed supernatural prescience to be thinking about the Saudis.

WBT FDR supported Balfour Declaration of 1916. In May 1946 Truman announced support for the creation of a Jewish state. Ben Gurion declared the state of Israel exactly two years later. US and Western Europe gave aid and weapons support for Zionist terrorists to establish the colonial settler state in Palestine, the Nakba in 1947. Israel could not have won three wars against Arab armies in 1948, ’67 and ’73 without huge supplies of arms from US, Britain, France and Germany.

John Quiggin. Nearly everybody (except Russia and to some extent China) trades in $US terms. US gets a benefit from this, though not as much as is often assumed (typical estimate $50 billion a year).

Nothing special about Saudi oil in this regard: it’s a tiny part (maybe 3 per cent) of dollar-denominated world trade, outside the top 20 exporters.

WBT  Sure oil is a global commodity. Saudi oil (along with other suppliers – Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) goes to Israel. Israel gets jet fuel for its war machine (genocide of the Palestinians) from Corpus Christi, Texas.

Afterword Twiggy Forest announced last night that Fortescue Metals would not meet its 2030 green hydrogen production deadline despite considerable subsidies from the Australian government. He claimed the main reason was high electricity prices.

John Quiggins substack is at https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/ and this discussion was titled