I congratulate Paul Kingsnorth on the literary award for his innovative novel The Wake (A novel approach to the use of Old English, 10 November), but seriously question his environmental activism. Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, described as “a network of artists, writers and thinkers who basically see the world as being doomed – ecologically and economically”, is hardly the message we need to hear in the week following the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change setting out the challenging, but achievable, targets for control of carbon release and temperature rise; in fact, for our Earth’s survival.
This despairing doomsday scenario emerges clearly in Kingsnorth’s recent review of two books (The four degrees, London Review of Books, 23 October). The first, George Marshall’s Don’t Even Think About It, is heavily influenced by US psychologists, Dan Kahan and Daniel Kahneman, who clearly share the pessimistic doomsday scenario. The second, Naomi Klein’s deeply researched This Changes Everything: Capitalism v The Climate, is peremptorily dismissed by Kingsnorth as “an American liberal wishlist”. The climate-change threat is the ultimate challenge to human creativity and capacity for change. This is no time for our creative elites to be opting for despairing nihilism. Realism with optimism is the Arts Social Action way.
Ralph Windle
Arts Social Action, Witney, Oxfordshire
• The G20 countries’ handout of $88bn a year in fossil-fuel subsidies is appalling (Report, 11 November). The new report’s recognition that investments through RBS and UK Export Finance are UK subsidies is particularly important. But we need to go even further. The support of the government for frontier oil drilling also includes diplomatic and military intervention on behalf of oil companies. The Foreign Office maintained a consulate in Basra whose job largely consisted of supporting UK oil companies, with three diplomats on staff and a £6.5m budget. High-profile UK political figures appear on request of oil companies for deal signing, such as Chris Huhne attending the signing ceremony during BPs first attempt to broker a deal with Russia’s Rosneft.
If these forms of support don’t add hugely to the figures governments spend on supporting fossil fuels, they certainly add billions to oil companies’ balance sheets through enabling major deals. Moreover, according to our calculations, if the UK’s tax regime was modelled on Norway’s, the country’s budget would have received an extra £74bn due to windfall profits on oil in the years 2002-08. We need not just to stop handing out tax breaks to oil companies, but to change the taxation regime in the first place, instead of catering to oil companies’ every whim.
Anna Galkina
Platform
