Letters

Climate doom

Almost needless to say, I wholeheartedly disagree with Jim Moody’s climate doom article in last week’s paper (‘Background to the Capitalocene’, September 1). To respond in detail would fill the entire paper, so I confine myself to a few observations and recommend to you my book, Coal, climate change and the total destruction of the British coal mining industry, which you can purchase from me for £15 inclusive of post.

The first paragraph of Jim’s piece tells us that life for human beings is less conducive because of our industrial development, and the illustration shows us power stations (incidentally with steam coming out of the cooler: that is, water) and some smokestacks with smoke. This is alongside power cables - presumably then, electricity, especially when fossil-fuel power is the problem of our worsening lives.

In fact, the reverse is true. It was the industrial revolution - initially at great human cost - which brought us from backward, primitive agriculture to where we are today - living longer, healthier, more productive and prosperous lives than during some non-existent golden age of happy agricultural labour. In any case eight billion people on the planet cannot and will not return to some primitive phase of hunter-gathering. Fossil fuel - in particular coal - is driving development in third world countries. China, Indochina and India are dragging themselves up by their pitboot straps.

Power generation brings clean water, electricity, hygiene, improved health, added life expectancy, better infant mortality rates, education and higher standards of life. Why else would poor countries ignore the clamour for them to ‘leave it in the ground’? Because that means ‘leave us in the dark and cold’. Likewise, numbers of people dying from environmental catastrophes has dropped over the last half century, as fossil fuel production and use has increased. That’s not to say the number of environmental events has got less: just that we are doing what we have done throughout our existence - learn to anticipate them and prepare and adapt.

No, there is no “generally agreed tipping point”, which remains very much part of the litany of ‘sky is falling’ doomsday scenarios put out by a group of highly motivated scientists and politicians, which have usually fallen flat. Neither is it true that ‘the science is settled’ or ‘most scientists’ (they usually say 90%) agree CO₂ is driving climate change and ‘global warming’. Ancient ice core samples prove that CO₂ levels were twice as high as now during pre-human periods of deep ice age. The rises in CO₂ levels during human inhabitancy do not match rises in earth temperatures and usually follow the heat rather than the other way round.

But what does Jim propose? Here we are in a very real catastrophe of the worse energy crisis in our history. Would it have happened if, as in the 80s, more than 80% of our power was supplied by coal? No, it would not. Nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, which was simply grist to the mill of cutting off our noses to spite the miners’ faces. Our reserves of gas should never and need never have been burned off up power station flues to displace coal stations in a purely political, class-motivated move. It is monstrous that 38% of electric power is generated from ever-declining gas supplies, when this should be kept for largely domestic consumption and specialist industries. We have, conservatively, 70 trillion tonnes of coal under our feet and seas, and therefore no shortage of energy, should we choose to mine it.

So energy shortage is the actual catastrophe and the reason why our environment - ie, where we actually live - is becoming less conducive to life, at least as we have come to expect it. Jim implies the abolition of the capitalist system, which, of course, I agree with - but then what? Sit by the glorious glow of socialist ideology, while we freeze in our homes and workplaces? Any form of socialist system has to have a plan for energy, and coal, gas and oil will still be major features in any serious energy programme.

Levels of CO₂, and of heat and cold, rose and fell much more sharply before humans came on the planet, and well before the industrial revolution. I don’t deny mass industrial growth - and with it population growth and demands on the earth’s resources - have risen since the 1750s, but look at any graph of overall temperatures on the planet and there is a steady and marked decline. It depends where you choose to cut off the graph and statistics, and this feature has been rudely manipulated by climate catastrophists. Thirty-six percent of methane in the atmosphere comes from animal production for meat consumption, far more than gas, coal and oil consumption - but I note Jim prefers to focus on the less harmful fracking operations as a bogeyman. One suspects that his hamburger colours his judgement.

Coal still is integral to steel production and there is simply no practical alternative to the coke blast furnace if you want to build a socialist society any time soon. In two centuries maybe steel will have a rival substance to take its place, but the blast furnace will not have a rival for making capital primary steel.

Jim refers to me in talking about carbon capture and storage (CCS). I repeat that vast, air-proof, leak-proof caverns exist now, which once held oil and gas (not coal, Jim - we don’t mine coal like that). That there was any gas and oil in them in the first place proved them to be airtight. We can seal the pump hole harder than the original rock. But suppose small amounts did leak - so what? At present it is released unfettered en masse. CCS would ensure that the vast bulk of it is secure underground, where, incidentally, it becomes solid - it is not flying about, trying to escape.

I’m baffled by his comment that “sea coal was historically picked off beaches”. Well, it still is, but what’s the point? That coal isn’t ‘escaping’ or breaking out from underground captivity: it comes from coal seams which outcrop to the seabed, and the sea washes lumps of it free. That’s got nothing to do with oil or gas miles deep, encased in millions of years of rock.

The problems of energy and environment, and humanity and environment, will only be solved in the context of a world communist/anarchist system. But we move there from here not by taking a backward route to pre-industry and wood and wicker.

David Douglass
South Shields

Neanderthal

Ted Talbot presents a very one-sided view of the sexual grooming issue - one that might have come straight out of a tabloid newspaper and very likely the English Defence League, English Democrats or any other opportunistic, far-right group (Letters, September 1).

I live in a community that had to suffer endless far-right group provocations during the height of the hysteria surrounding these grooming cases. These thugs were attempting to sow divisions in diverse communities. Luckily, most people told them where to get off. We were subjected to, on an almost daily occurrence, foul-mouthed, incoherent, thuggish, rightwing mobs spouting very similar ignorant bile that Ted Talbot presented in his letter. For these morons, the complexities of the case and the sensitive issues that arose were not to be considered - all they cared about was spouting their racist filth, sowing divisions and demanding evil be dealt with.

There is a section of the left that want to parrot the right in this regard. Instead of looking at this lumpen thuggish mass with contempt, these leftists want to cajole, empathise with and generally tail whatever these people say. Which is strange, because, as I said, the majority of people - at least in the affected communities - rejected these facile narratives peddled by far-right groups and the Neanderthal left.

The likes of Ted Talbot are a product of the left having reached a desperate state. In Britain, I would argue, there is no real working class as such, so leftists desperately flail around, looking for anything that might get the great unwashed onside. In Britain, you have an aristocracy, an upper class, down to a lower middle class and at the bottom, serving them all, is a precariat. The working class of Britain can be found in the global south, such as China. If you don’t believe me, then just go through your commodities and check the ‘Made in …’ label.

I could go into the complexities of these grooming cases, but with people like Ted Talbot is there really any point?

Steve Cousins
email

Publishing filth

I realise that the CPGB takes an absolutist approach to freedom of speech for racists, but the letter from Ted Talbot set new standards (Letters, September 1). Under the guise of concern for ‘white girls’, Talbot engages in the racialised demonisation of all Muslim men and presumably their protectors, Muslim women.

The pretext for his racist rant was my unremarkable statement that, whilst there were undoubtedly a few paedophiles in the Labour Party statistically, this was no more a problem than the handful of genuine anti-Semites (‘An open letter to ACR’, July 21). My mentioning of the word ‘paedophile’ was the cue for Talbot to indulge his racist fantasies about Muslims preying on young, white girls.

In accusing me of being an “Islamic apologist” Talbot makes his agenda crystal-clear. Rape, child sexual abuse and exploitation is a Muslim phenomenon, the product of a particularly misogynist religion whose adherents prey on young white girls. No doubt this is due to Mohammed himself having married a child bride. The fact that in the 17th century the chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, ruled that the marriage of girls under 12 was normal will have no impact on bigots like Talbot, who are incapable of understanding that the very concept of a ‘child’ was unknown until the age of industrialisation.

That this kind of racist filth makes an appearance in a socialist paper is deplorable in itself. To lend a spurious air of credibility to this racist filth has nothing to do with working class unity or the struggle for socialism. That it merited no editorial comment I find equally shocking.

I am, of course, an atheist and I apologise for no religion. However, unlike Talbot I don’t run with the ‘grooming gang’ narrative of the Murdoch press either. All religions are misogynist and Islam is no exception, but the suggestion that Muslim men rape white women because of their religion is one of the foulest of racist tropes. It is the “staple” conversation of the fascist right in this country.

To quote Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail in their Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative: “The term ‘grooming gangs’, however, is itself a spurious media construct and one that has been heavily racialised from the very start. ‘Grooming gangs’ simply do not correspond to established legal or social scientific categories and the various weak definitions offered up by proponents of this racialised narrative fail to delineate these offenders meaningfully from other groups of child sex offenders.”

There has been massive publicity focusing on groups of Asian men convicted in northern towns of sexual abuse, whilst, at the same time, the abuse of black children by white men has gone unreported and unnoticed. Child sexual abuse is endemic to all communities and to lay the blame at the feet of Muslim men is to demonise a whole community. There may indeed be a correlation between those involved in night-time trades, such as taxi-driving and takeaways, and sexual abuse and it may well be that Muslim men are concentrated in such trades, but to suggest that rape and abuse is inherent in a particular religion is not merely abhorrent, but is to reject class for race.

I also notice that Talbot made no mention of the serial abuse of children by white Catholic and Protestant priests. Is that abuse a product of religion too or a product of a particular institutional setup? The public school that two of my children went to, Christ’s Hospital, suffered an epidemic of child sexual abuse - all by white men - but Talbot makes no mention of this for some reason. Indeed there has been an epidemic of abuse of children in a range of public schools such as the Catholic Downside.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation is common to all racial groups and the attempt to pin the blame on Pakistani men, whilst giving ‘credit’ to Rishi Sunak (and Sajid Javid) for following the racist discourse, as you would expect from these Uncle Toms, should tell readers exactly what Talbot’s agenda is.

In fact it was Margaret Hodge’s ‘white’ council of Islington (and no doubt similar councils) which presided over the abuse of children in their care homes. It had nothing to do with Muslim men and everything to do with institutional control and abuse. Likewise in southern Ireland, where abuse by the Catholic church led to the institution as a whole being discredited. Again there was no involvement of Muslims. Strange that.

I should perhaps add that the allegation that certain religious groups engage in the sexual abuse of children of the majority population is not new. This was precisely what lay behind the offence of Rassenschande in Nazi Germany. Jewish men were held to be preying on innocent young German girls. I think we know where that ended up and that is what Talbot is engaged in with his frothing-at-the-mouth assertions that white girls are at risk from Muslim men. Nor did Talbot mention the toleration and patronage given by the highest in this society, including royalty, to Jimmy Savile’s serial predatory behaviour.

I hope that as a communist paper the Weekly Worker does not print such filth in the future. Even free speech has to have some limits and those limits have been reached. Socialists preach class unity, not class division.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Balloons

Normally, I would not write to the Weekly Worker, but, as one or two publications seem to be reluctant to publish my letter, which outlines the truth about the recent Covid‑19 epidemic in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, I thought I would try it.

As revealed by the report of the State Emergency Epidemic Prevention Headquarters in the DPRK on June 30, the cause of the outbreak of Covid there, which claimed 74 lives and caused damage to the economy, was the inroad of the disease into the DPRK from South Korea. Later comrade Kim Yo-jong, vice-department director of the central committee of the Workers Party of Korea, pointed out: “Now that many countries in the world are taking more effective anti-epidemic measures …, it is a matter of grave concern that the disgusting ones in South Korea stage a farce of scattering leaflets, banknotes, awful booklets and things over our territory.”

The facts are that the Covid outbreak started in late April and was found to have originated in Kangwon province, which is near to the military demarcation line which separates the DPRK from the south. It cannot be a coincidence that the outbreak originated in an area that is so close to South Korea. On April 25‑26 so-called ‘defectors’ from the DPRK in South Korea - traitors to the Juche motherland - launched 20 balloons into the DPRK across the demilitarised zone. It now appears that these balloons carried objects infected with Covid.

It is a logical conclusion that the outbreak of Covid in the DPRK was deliberately caused by South Korea and probably the US. The DPRK had taken the most stringent counter-measures against it, such as closing the border. It was impossible for Covid to get into the DPRK unless someone gave it a helping hand.

We should always ask cui bono? Who stands to gain? Moreover, when any crime is committed, we always look at who had a motive. In this case it is the enemies of the DPRK, such as the US, South Korea and the vile defectors who hate the DPRK so much and want to do harm to it. They saw an outbreak of Covid as a golden opportunity to incite regime change and overthrow the socialist system. They calculated that at the very least the DPRK would be forced to accept the fake humanitarian aid of US and world imperialism and to ‘open up’ and ‘reform’, thus gradually destroying the socialist system. In their wildest dreams the imperialists and South Korean puppets hoped that millions would die in the DPRK and that chaos and disorder would break out. Of course, thanks to the measures taken by the government, this did not happen.

The deliberate spreading of Covid‑19 into the DPRK constitutes a criminal act by the South Korean puppets, the so-called ‘defectors’ and the US imperialists. It is a repeat of the biological warfare of the US imperialists against the DPRK in the 1950s. Those responsible for this crime - against the people of the DPRK and against humanity - should be brought to justice and receive the maximum punishment.

It is time the British left did more to expose the South Korean puppet fascist regime and actively campaigned against it in support of the DPRK!

Dermot Hudson
London