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LAST UPDATE | 13 Jul 2023
FOR THE SECOND time this year, Sean Kelly MEP has gutted climate legislation in the European Parliament in the economic interest of the agri-food lobbyists surrounding his EPP group.
In Brussels in January he forced Ciarán Cuffe MEP, the Green senior parliamentary hurler, to accept demands effectively neutering the legislative effect of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.
Cuffe had to put a brave face on a pyrrhic victory when the vote came in March, with Kelly confidently stating his midnight agreement with Cuffe allowed another decade of inaction on much of Europe’s residential estate.
Déjà vu in Strasbourg this week, when Cuffe described through gritted teeth that “Everyone in Europe benefits” from a severely weakened Nature Restoration Law which gained a slender majority following a similar sellout to Kelly’s centre-right bloc. Fine Gael MEPs’ last-minute declaration of support conversely had a certain swagger, safe in the knowledge that the offending Article 9 of the Law compelling land to be rewetted was to be deleted by amendment.
There is a story we tell ourselves about European politics being based on ‘consensus’. The theory goes that democracy is about finding common ground between groups of MEPs. Rapporteurs like Cuffe are tasked with developing consensus from this starting point. The Nature Restoration Law and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive show this theory does not survive in practice.
Far from ‘consensus’, these are victories for the dominant force in the European political system – industrial lobbyists allergic to any climate action that hits their corporate clients’ pockets.
And they are defeats for those who stake their reputation on advancing climate action at the international level. Sometimes not everyone can be a winner. On questions of climate and the current political economy, there are choices to be made.
Farming lobby groups mounted a successful campaign of disinformation about the Nature Restoration Law striking fear into farmers with reclaimed peatland that they would be compelled to “restore” the land, meaning such lands would have to cease being productive and returned to “nature”. The Irish Farmers’ Association missed the point on the central premise of this argument in that the original version of the NRL was so weak that even the most ambitious of Ireland’s targets could be met by restoring lands already in public hands, notably those of Bord na Móna. But they were right about one thing, the NRL, coming as it did from the comparatively weak European Commission Directorate General for Environment, did not have any new funding attached to it for those affected.
That didn’t stop the IFA and their ecosystem of agents-provocateurs warning of catastrophe anyway, to the extent that Sinn Féin MEPs even saw value in engaging in this manufactured culture war over climate action. It’s all moot now, though. The version of the law that Parliament agreed upon doesn’t reference the rewetting of peatlands, a central issue to anything calling itself a Nature Restoration Law.
The official story following the vote in Strasbourg this week is that sense has prevailed, or indeed nature restoration has been “rescued”, in the words of Grace O’Sullivan MEP. The wearied progressive minority in a right-wing parliament held out and something between a totemic and symbolic piece of legislation has been passed to say climate action is winning.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation.
The palpable sense of histrionic catharsis emanating from such varied sources as Green Party hack Twitter accounts and other noted barometers of progressive opinion feels forced and emotional rather than strategic and rational. Surely they must know the farming lobby has won this round?
The problem with climate inaction is it is much more difficult to identify when those engaging in it pretend that climate action is happening when in reality it is not. In the wake of the hottest week since records began, the passing of a gutted nature restoration law feels very much like a scorched earth victory. The EPP, Renew and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael MEPs are allowed to wave the green flag and say that they have done something great for climate. Those such as the Green Party who told the electorate they would act as watchdog have instead proven themselves as observant as Ryan Tubridy looking at his own paychecks.
The whole episode should be taken as an example of how not to politicise climate action which is often presented to us as a moral imperative ‘beyond politics’ and a function of consensus. The relevant question is who can actually advance and politicise climate action? We already know from this episode and the collective failure that is our own Climate Act that the political system is incapable of advancing the change necessary in any way that does not manifest itself as a form of eco-austerity. A focus on technological solutions in the private sector has so far proved a damp squib.
In my view putting workers and carers in charge of climate action coordinated by trade unions in democratised workplaces would produce a transformed and decarbonised economy. On the narrower question of “nature restoration” itself, a clear alternative exists in member states surpassing the requirements of the law by themselves. That alternative is the Irish government and local authorities pressing ahead with funded schemes which incentivise rather than compel farmers and landowners to either sell or restore and maintain relevant land, particularly peatlands.
A strange argument for an urban socialist councillor, perhaps, but a more serious one than that presented in disharmonious unity by Seán Kelly and Ciarán Cuffe that a worthless piece of climate legislation is some kind of achievement. A viable politics of climate is one that produces agency among workers and carers rather than disciplining them for not ‘doing the right thing’. It is up to us to build that politics ourselves.
Lorna Bogue is a Cork City Councillor and the An Rabharta Glas – Green Left candidate for the South constituency.
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RIP. A truly dedicated and great, human being.
Why didn’t he go after Stalin? It’s estimated that that dictator was responsible for the mass genocide of in excess of 10 – 15 million men, women and children (including Jews) prior and during WWII.
@Paul: because the Soviet Union won the war and were on the side of the good guys. Like North Korea and Iran today, you can pretty much kill your own people at will, it’s only when you start on those outside your borders that anybody wakes up.
@Paul Shepherd: the soviet Union won the war?
@Allora: originally they had a non-aggression pact with the Nazis but after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR with Operation Barbarossa they changed sides and joined the allied forces. As the allies were the ultimate victors in WW2 Russia is acknowledged as being part of the winning side.
@Karen Delaney: yes thats correct but the way that that was presented looked as if the soviets won it unilaterally.
@Paul: he was only 27 at the time to be fair. I think if he did “go after” Stalin as well you probably wouldn’t be happy. There’s no pleasing some people.
@Allora: in fairness the soviets counter offensive after the doomed operation Barbarossa was unstoppable.by the time of the Normandy landings the Nazis were incredibly weak and under resourced on that front as Hitler had pulled so many divisions from France to try and stop the soviets.they would have won the war even if the Normandy landings had never happened.
I didn’t know he was that old, watched “Getting away with murder(s)” only last night, highly recommended.
A wonderful man who talked the talk and walked the walk. His determination to bring those involved in the horrific Nazi crimes should be a lesson to all involved in prosecuting crime. RIP
It is perhaps because the issue is so intense when framed as the Holocaust that the majority of readers have turned away yet someone has to demonstrate the ideology which led to the extermination of so many human beings. There is no judge and jury here, just information sharing that the ideology which was behind the actions of an advanced society like Germany still remains within the education system as an achievement-
” Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. Wannsee Conference, 1942
” In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Charles Darwin, 1862
I feel sorry for those who died during the invasion, the extermination and fighting on the fields of battle on land, on the sea and in the skies. What can be said for people today who are prepared to maintain the fiction and the sanitised versions of natural selection for the sake of a later science versus religion American variant?
I hope younger readers already know.
@Carrickview: sounds like Palestine
@Sean Padraig O Brien: They fly the swastika in Palestine, so unfortunately you have a point.
Alan, your educational achievements are not determined by your adherence to the truth in the Bible. They are determined by your adherence to the lies espoused by Charles Darwin.
@TheQueenofHibernia:
Darwin was forthright however dangerous and his misguided his and those of Wallace were and remain. It is his followers, even to this day, who try to obscure or lie about the actual conviction and try to say it was social Darwinism that was behind the Nazis and their extermination/invasion policies.
The next time an academic tries to convince you that the Human Race is a social construct or that there is such a thing as social Darwinism, remind them that ‘Favoured Races’ in his main title as an accompanying description of ‘Less Favoured Races’-
‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ Charles Darwin, 1859
A less favoured ‘race’ looks like this-
” Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” Charles Darwin, 1871
@Carrickview: The quotes in your post about prevailing celts and saxons were not written by Charles Darwin. You basically took someone else’s writing and attributed Charles Darwin’s name to it. Cutting and Pasting someone’s else’s words and then putting “-Charles Darwin,1877” at the end.
@Carrickview: if you quote Charles Darwin in an online forum in 2023 you’re absolutely a mentalist.
@Diaspora’d:
It is from ‘The Descent of Man’ and the statement was modified by Darwin. There is an online book and chapter V is where you will find the statement in context.
Younger people have enough information to now know that natural selection isn’t about evolution as the biological and geological history of the Earth is written by the fossil record in rock strata where older rock show simpler lifeforms. It is an old research area that was hijacked by natural selection where they tried to imply that black complexion humans were closer biologically to gorillas than the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ -
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” — Charles Darwin (1871) The Descent of Man.
To exterminate a native culture, they first have to be dehumanised and that is what natural selection did. It is how the Nazis proceeded.
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