Monbiot, G

http://www.monbiot.com/

featured in greedy lying bastards

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AN 2 25

According to the Washington Post, as many as 200,000 federal workers may be fired because of efforts by the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to greatly downsize the United States' federal government. And the criticism of their efforts is coming not only from Democrats, but also, from voices on the right.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania), during a February 17 appearance on MSNBC, slammed Trump and DOGE for carrying out mass government layoffs in a "haphazard" way. And the next morning, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (a Never Trump conservative and ex-GOP congressman) argued that while government "waste" needs to be reduced and the U.S. needs to balance its federal budget, the Trump Administration and DOGE are recklessly jeopardizing "food safety" and "air safety."

The Guardian's George Monbiot also fears that Trump's second term could trigger some type of major crisis.

In a February 18 opinion column, Monbiot lays out a variety of frightening scenarios and offers some tips for surviving a worst-case scenario.

"Though we might find it hard to imagine," Monbiot warns, "we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure…. A financial crisis in the U.S. would immediately become a global crisis."

Monbiot continues, "But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a 'wholesale removal of regulations,' sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilizing the entire U.S. system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone's wellbeing."

The columnist warns that undermining regulatory government agencies could make everything from a pandemic to "future climate disasters" worse.

"As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness," Monbiot explains, "the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into U.S.-wide economic and social crisis. If, or when, another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than COVID-19 — which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the U.S. — it will hit a nation whose defenses have been stood down."

Monbiot urges Americans — as well as residents of the U.K., where The Guardian is published — by doing a lot of networking.

"So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems," the Guardian columnist advises. "Start with this principle: don't face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbors, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without. Yes, we also — and urgently — need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it's beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst."

*George Monbiot's full Guardian column is available at this link.

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guk monbiot jul 2010

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jul/14/monckton-john-abraham

say what you like about Viscount Monckton, he never fails to entertain. His response to the devastating critique of his claims about climate change by the physicist John Abraham is magnificently bonkers.

To give you a flavour of Monckton's reasoning, here are some examples of what he cites as evidence of Abraham acting out of malice:

Abraham pointed out that Monckton "has not written a single peer-reviewed science paper on any topic";

Abraham stated that Lord Monckton "presented a lot of data with no citations or no explanation";

He pointed out that "if you don't tell us where it's from we can't assess the data";

He explained that a graph displayed by Lord Monckton was "almost off by 100%".

These are all straight statements of fact. It is impossible to see how they could be construed as malicious, unless you regard all criticism of your views and credentials as illegitimate.

Throughout these 99 pages,Monckton ducks, dives and, like Ian Plimer, avoids answering Abraham's questions by asking questions of his own:Monckton asks almost 500 of them. As far as I can see, he fails to provide a straight or convincing refutation of any of Abraham's criticisms, and succeeds only in throwing a great deal of dust into the air.

All this is accompanied, like so many of Monckton's responses, with a demand for money (in this case $110,000 to be paid to a charity of Monckton's choice), an apology and retraction and an insistence that Abraham's critique be removed from all public places.

Reading these ravings, I'm struck by two thoughts. The first is how frequently climate change deniers resort to demands for censorship or threats of litigation to try to shut down criticism of their views. Martin Durkin has done it, Richard North has done it, Monckton has done it many times before. They claim to want a debate, but as soon as it turns against them they try to stifle it by intimidating their opponents. To me it suggests that these people can give it out, but they can't take it.

The second thought is as follows: is this the man who was invited to testify before Congress? Who has become deputy leader of the UK Independence party? Who has been cited all over the internet as having proved that manmade climate change isn't happening?

One of the characteristics of the foot-soldiers of climate change denial seems to be their startling inability to spot a wrong 'un. As well as publishing a long series of falsehoods about climate change, Monckton has falsely claimed to be a member of the House of Lords (although you can read his explanation here); falsely claimed to be a Nobel laureate; falsely claimed to have won the Falklands war (by suggesting to Margaret Thatcher that the SAS introduce a mild bacillus into the water supply in Port Stanley); maintained that he has invented a cure for HIV, multiple sclerosis, influenza and other diseases; and grossly exaggerated his role in shaping Margaret Thatcher's views. Yet none of this seems to have discouraged his disciples one jot.

There's a pattern here too. Those who insist that sea levels are not actually rising, for example, often cite the work of Nils-Axel Morner, who maintains that his work in the Maldives proves that it's all a false alarm. Our old friend Christopher Booker claimed that Morner "knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world", that he "has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe" and that his findings demonstrate that "all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story."

Morner's work in fact consists of indirect measurements in just a few locations, which reveal the sum total of zilch about recent changes in sea level and have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.But the interesting thing, which connects this to the Monckton issue, is that Morner has also made a series of wild claims about other matters. He maintains that he possesses paranormal abilities to find water and metal using a dowsing rod. He also insists that he has discovered "the Hong Kong of the [ancient] Greeks" in Sweden. Working with a homeopath called Bob Lind, Morner inflicted unauthorised damage on an Iron Age cemetery in order to try to prove his thesis.

Similarly, Peter Taylor's claims that the planet is in fact cooling down have been given prominence by the Daily Express and other outlets, though they are unfounded in science.His book Chill has been a hit in the denier community. Taylor has also claimed to have uncovered toxic dumping by venturing into the astral realms. He has speculated that a Masonic conspiracy was tuning into his thoughts, and had sent a "kook, a ninja freak, some throwback from past lives" to kill him. He has also maintained that plutonium may "possess healing powers**, borne of Plutonic dimension, a preparation for rebirth, an awakener to higher consciousness".

As these examples suggest, those who lead the movement which claims that manmade climate change isn't happening often seem to entertain a number of other irrational beliefs.

In May, New Scientist interviewed the social psychologist Seth Kalichman, who has studied HIV denialist groups. He found that the leaders of these groups "display all the features of paranoid personality disorder".

These features include an intolerance of criticism and an inflated sense of their own importance. They succumb to what psychologists call "suspicious thinking".

The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality, which is why arguing with them gets you nowhere … All people fit the world into their own sense of reality, but the suspicious person distorts reality with uncommon rigidity.

I'm no psychologist, but the wide range of crazy beliefs the gurus of climate change denial entertain suggests that something of the kind that Kalichman identifies is likely to be at play. The question which bugs me is this: why, when it seems so obvious that men like Monckton, Morner and Taylor have serious issues with reality, are so many people prepared to follow them?

www.monbiot.com

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bali 2007 cop 13 10 yrs after kyoto

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/dec/17/comment.world

george m

16 dec

We've been suckered again by the US. So far the Bali deal is worse than Kyoto

George Monbiot

America will keep on wrecking climate talks as long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system

after 11 days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political deal is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session."

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11 - I mean to say, December 11 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the...Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore...The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore's team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then the Americans did something worse: they destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy "hot air" from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore's scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren't producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low-carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don't. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world cursed and stamped its foot. But his intransigence affected only the US. Gore's team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the American delegation is not the only thing that hasn't changed. After the Kyoto protocol was agreed, the then British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced: "This is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions." Ten years later, the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that "this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever, all the world's nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change." Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases, the US demanded terms that appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore's proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. American negotiators have pulled the same trick twice, and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Gore's trading scams, the clean development mechanism. Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Although Gore does a better job of governing now he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but American politics had made it impossible. In July 1997, the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones. Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading. But even when he succeeded, he announced that "we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate". Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the US act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media - particularly in the US - in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it. I won't bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday, there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after "Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity" and "Florida store sells 'Santa Hates You' T-shirt".

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies that stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m. The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on Bush, but they also gave Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don't believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don't have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-democrats/

monbiot build social movement

https://theecologist.org/2020/feb/03/invisible-ideology-trashing-our-planet

audio of talk] interviews

If you get into debt buying your child branded trainers, if you fear redundancy, if you suffer anxiety about the future of the planet and you blame yourself for all of these things then you are showing symptoms of drowning in the “insidious” and “sinister” ideology of neoliberalism.

The escalating environmental and social crises that confront us - climate breakdown, collapse in biodiversity, the threat of war - are all failures of a worldview that puts profit making, the markets and economic growth ahead of human happiness. This is the George Monbiot prognosis.

The journalist and campaigner spoke at athree-hour special event at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London on Tuesday, 11 February 2020 under the title The Invisible Ideology Trashing Our Planet. A YouTube video from Love It TV with audio and photographs from the night has been released today (see below).

Intersectionality

The invisible ideology referred to is neoliberalism. But when I caught up with Monbiot at his home in Oxford this week he had already extended the scope of his speech to include capitalism and consumerism. This is the unholy trinity: capitalism is the father, consumerism the son and neoliberalism is the wholly ghost.

Neoliberalism is difficult to define. But in general terms, it is a school of thought within economics that asserts that free market capitalist is the best mechanism for making decisions in our modern, complex societies. The state should not intervene. This means fewer regulations, from banking to food. It means not providing health and social care. It means cutting taxes. Neoliberalism dominates the thinking of the world’s leaders, at a time when it undermines the efficacy of the state to deal with climate breakdown.

I ask Monbiot what neoliberalism means for climate advocacy and campaigning, and in particular whether it is relevant to contemporary discussions and debates taking place within Extinction Rebellion (XR). He hesitates, not wanting to “abuse” his position as Britain’s most influential environment journalist to sway the climate direct action movement. But I press him for an answer.

“As I see it, XR tried very hard to remain a single issue movement and to say, ‘we are not taking a justice position, we are not going to take a political position, we just want people to respect the science and introduce the policies that are in accordance with the science’. I understand that, because they wanted to reach as many people as possible.

“But there is obviously a tension between that and the intersectionality that our many issues demand and the necessity to understand the political context in which we operate and the political change required in order for us to operate.

Hegemonic

“I do not think we need to flinch from the fact that to take effective action on climate breakdown requires a change of leadership, a change in government, it requires political change and it very much requires ideological change. We fool ourselves if we think we can change the policies without attending to the political framing in which these policies are discussed."

He adds: “These have to be political campaigns as well as environmental campaigns. There is a lot of recognition [within XR] about where the constraints have been and lots of intelligent people having great conversations about how it evolves. It cheers me to see so many interesting discussions happening.”

So, I ask, does XR need to be anti-neoliberal?

“Obviously, if anything XR wants to happen is to happen, then we have to overthrow neoliberal ideology. The idea of government being so activist that it is going to transform our whole economy and go to zero carbon by 2025, and change our political system, even acknowledge the importance of a political system in making decisions, all that is directly counter to neoliberalism. If a political scientist was to analyse XR’s three demands and its charter they would say, this is a profoundly anti-neoliberal programme’.”

I asked whether neoliberalism also presents a challenge in terms of the XR proposal to have a citizens’ assembly with members chosen through sortition (which is similar to the way we select members of a jury in the criminal justice system). If neoliberalism is hegemonic, is all pervasive, then even the great British public will be trapped within its assumptions. Monbiot points out that the civil service will also be immersed in, and will have an interest in upholding, neoliberal ideology.

Capitalism

“I have never been in favour of a pure sortition system,” Monbiot responds. “What it does is give tremendous power to the civil service, because the civil service are the permanent officials who understand how the system works, who have a long term stake in that system, whereas the people who are chosen by sortition haven’t. T[he citizens] are not trying to get in at the next election - they will not have a long term political programme. That makes the bureaucracy tremendously and dangerously powerful. A mixed system - in the widest possible sense - has got more to say for it.”

I’m interested in the fact that Monbiot has extended the horizon of his talk from neoliberalism to include capitalism. I want to know whether a non-neoliberal capitalism is now possible. Why did it take Monbiot so long to come to attacking capitalism head on? “There was an element of fear involved.”

“Directly attacking capitalism is blasphemy today. It’s like pronouncing that there is no god in the 19th century. But of course we recognise those who did so as pioneers whose voices were necessary. I suddenly realised that for years I had been talking about variants of capitalism. I had been talking about corporate capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism.

“But then it suddenly struck me that maybe it is not the adjective, but the noun. It makes a difference, the form of capitalism, but all forms drive us to the same destination, albeit at different rates. So neoliberal capitalism accelerates natural destruction. But Keynsian social democratic capitalism still gets us there, but maybe a little more slowly because it has more regulatory involvement and less inequality.

So John Maynard Keynes, the influential economist who advocated government management of the economy, make a return? Can we stage a tactical retreat? Or has capitalism reached a point where neoliberalism red in tooth and claw is necessary for capitalist profit generation?

Power

“We cannot go back to [Keynes],” Monbiot responds. “It is growth based. The whole point of Keynesian economics is to maintain the rate of growth - not too fast, not too slow - and we know that even a steady rate of growth is progress towards disaster. But also, in its first iteration in the years after the Second World War it was very effectively destroyed, principally by finance capital working out ways to destroy capital controls, foreigh exchange controls.

“The idea that we can relaunch a Keynesian capitalism and not have it destroyed by people who have already destroyed it once, who have not forgotten those lessons, and who are in a much more powerful position to destroy it today….that’s just dreaming. That is magical thinking. You cannot go back in politics, you have constantly to devise new models.”

So Monbiot argues that capitalism now is neoliberal capitalism. Also that XR is by necessity a direct challenge to neoliberalism. The inference - although he does not say this directly - is that XR can only achieve its aims by challenging capitalism itself.

Interestingly, Monbiot defines not just neoliberalism but also capitalism and consumerism as ideologies in his talk.Neoliberalism is defended as a practice, or as the contemporary paradigms in economics. But it also understood by many as an ideology. Calling capitalism and consumerism ideologies is novel, or at least unusual.

“Part of the insidious power of these ideologies is that they are the water in which we swim - the plastic soup in which we swim. They are everywhere. They affect our decision making every day, they affect the way we see ourselves.

Collective

"They are difficult to see not because they are so small but because they are so big. We are immersed in these incredibly powerful ideologies. The most powerful ideologies never announce themselves as ideologies, they are not recognised as ideologies. That is where their power lies. Our first step is to recognise them as ideologies.”

So the question arises: can we ever escape ideology? Karl Marx, the philosopher communist, believed that through a rational, logical, analysis of the economy and of society he had punched through “bourgeois” or capitalist ruling class ideology and glimpsed momentarily a non-ideological reality. But if we argue that we are not ideological, that we are free entirely of any illusions, is this not proof positive that we are so deeply immersed that we cannot even see the edges of our own delusion?

“I don’t think you can be [ideologically free]. We’re so governed by our social environment, and our social environment will always be saturated by ideology. To be ideology free would be to become an island, you would have to be completely isolated from all other human beings - and even then you would probably create your own ideology. You often hear people stand up and say, ‘I have no ideology’. And that is just self deception.”

Monbiot presents a compelling argument. We have come to the end of the interview. I take one last sip of tea. We say our goodbyes. And I am back out on the street. The cold air is refreshing. I think about the fact that I am even now contained entirely within ideology, neoliberal ideology.

I am willing to believe that we will never escape ideology - a grand narrative that explains who we are, where we are, what we are. If this is the case, we as individuals and as a collective humanity must choose our ideology wisely.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. A feature based on this George Monbiot interview - focused on neoliberalism as the ideology of disconnection - featured in the May/June issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot

George Joshua Richard Monbiot (/:{ˈmɒnbioʊ:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}:/ *MON-bee-oh*; born 27 January 1963) is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism.^[2] He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000), Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013) and Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis (2017).^[3] He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.^[4]

Early life[

George Monbiot grew up in Henley-on-Thames in South Oxfordshire, England, in a house next to Peppard Common.^[5] Politics was at the heart of family life – his father, Sir Raymond Geoffrey Monbiot, CBE,^[6] is a businessman who headed the Conservative Party's trade and industry forum,^[4] while his mother, Rosalie – the elder daughter of Conservative MP Roger Gresham Cooke^[7] – was a Conservative councillor who led South Oxfordshire District Council for a decade.^[8] His uncle, Canon Hereward Cooke, was the Liberal Democrat deputy leader of Norwich City Council between 2002 and 2006.^[9]

Monbiot was educated at a preparatory boarding school between 1971 and 1976. He did not enjoy his time there, later believing that boarding school destroys one's imagination. He was then educated at Stowe School, a public school in Stowe, Buckinghamshire.^[10][11] He won an open scholarship toBrasenose College, Oxford.^[12] He stated that his "political awakening" was prompted by reading Bettina Ehrlich's book, Paolo and Panetto, while at his prep school,^[13][14] and that he regretted attending Oxford, stating that his time there was unhappy and he did not fit in with Brasenose's culture.^[15]

Career[

Working as an investigative journalist, he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil, and East Africa. His activities led to his being made persona non grata in seven countries^[16] and being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia.^[17] In these places, he was also shot at,^[18] beaten up by military police,^[18] shipwrecked^[18] and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets.^[19] He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.^[20]After graduating with a degree in zoology, Monbiot joined the BBC Natural History Unit as a radio producer, making natural history and environmental programmes. He transferred to the BBC's World Service, where he worked briefly as a current affairs producer and presenter, before leaving to research and write his first book.

He joined the British roads protest movement and was often called to give press interviews; as a result he was denounced as a "media tart"^[21] by groups such as Green Anarchist and Class War. He was attacked by security guards, who allegedly drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle metatarsal bone. His injuries left him in hospital.^[22] Sir Crispin Tickell, a former United Nations diplomat, who was then Warden at Green College, Oxford, made the young protester a Visiting Fellow.^[23]

In November 2012, he apologised to Lord McAlpine for his "stupidity and thoughtlessness" in implying, in a tweet, that the Tory peer was a paedophile.^[24][25][26]

In 2014, Monbiot wrote an article on the theme of loneliness.^[27] This led to a collaboration with musician Ewan McLennan. Together they released an album "Breaking the Spell of Loneliness" in October 2016 followed by a tour of the UK.^[28][29] Folk Radio described it as "an enthralling album" where "Each song is a short, eloquent and thought provoking essay on the destruction of our humanity and how it can be regained".^[30]

Monbiot narrated the video How Wolves Change Rivers^[31] which was based on his TED talk of 2013^[32] on the restoration of ecosystems and landscape (rewilding) when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park.^[31]

Activism:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Climate change[

Attempted arrest of John Bolton:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:Monbiot believes that drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat global warming.^[33]

Monbiot made an unsuccessful attempt to carry out a citizen's arrest of John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, when the latter attended the Hay Festival to give a talk on international relations in May 2008. Monbiot argued that Bolton was one of the instigators of the Iraq War, of which Monbiot was an opponent.^[34]

Political parties:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In January 2004, Monbiot and Salma Yaqoob co-founded the Respect – The Unity Coalition (later formally the Respect Party) which grew out of the Stop the War Coalition.^[35] He resigned from the group the following February when Respect failed to reach agreement with the Green Party not to stand candidates in the same constituencies in the forthcoming 2004 European Parliamentary election.^[36]

In an interview with the British political blog Third Estate in September 2009, Monbiot expressed his support for the policies of Plaid Cymru, saying "I have finally found the party that I feel very comfortable with. That's not to say I feel uncomfortable with the Green Party, on the whole I support it, but I feel even more comfortable with Plaid."^[37]

In April 2010, he was a signatory to an open letter of support for the Liberal Democrats, published in The Guardian.^[38] Prior to the 2015 UK general election, he was one of several public figures who endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of the Green Party's Caroline Lucas.^[39] In August 2015, Monbiot endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.^[40] In April 2017, he announced his intention to vote for the Labour Party in the 2017 general election.^[41][42][43]

Published works:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot's first book was Poisoned Arrows (1989), which is about what he called the "devastating effects" of the partially World Bank-funded transmigration program on the peoples and tribes of West Papua, a nation annexed by Indonesia. It was followed by Amazon Watershed (1991), which documented expulsions of Brazilian peasant farmers from their land and followed them thousands of miles across the forest to the territory of the Yanomami Indians, and showed how timber sold in Britain was being stolen from indigenous and biological reserves in Brazil. His third book, No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania (1994), documented the seizure of land and cattle from nomadic people in Kenya and the Tanzania, by—among other forces—game parks and safari tourism.

In 2000, he published Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. The book examines the role of corporate power in the United Kingdom, on both local and national levels, and argues that corporate involvement in politics is a serious threat to democracy. Subjects discussed in the book include the building of the Skye Bridge, corporate involvement in the National Health Service, the role of business in university research, and the conditions which influence the granting of planning permission.

His fifth book, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, was published in 2003. The book is an attempt to set out a positive manifesto for change for the global justice movement. Monbiot criticises anarchism and Marxism, arguing that any possible solution to the world's inequalities must be rooted in a democratic parliamentary system.^[44]

Monbiot's next book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published in 2006, focused on the issue of climate change.

Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding was published in 2013, and focuses on the concept of rewilding the planet.^[45] In the book, Monbiot attacks sheep farming as "a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to have noticed."^[46] He particularly looks at sheep farming in Wales. The book received favourable reviews in The Spectator^[47] and The Daily Telegraph.^[46] It won the Society of Biology Book Award for general biology in 2014.^[48]

Monbiot's weekly column for The Guardian has covered a variety of issues, concentrating on political philosophy in relation to ecological and social problems, particularly in the United Kingdom.^[49]

Personal life[

Monbiot has lived in Oxford for many years, but for a few years from 2007, lived in a low emissions house in the mid-Wales market town of Machynlleth, originally with his then-wife, writer and campaigner Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and their daughter.^[50] Because his new partner lives in Oxford, Monbiot returned by 2012.^[51] The couple's daughter, Monbiot's second, was born in early 2012.^[52] In December 2017, Monbiot was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he had surgery in March 2018.^[53][54]

Honours:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In 1995, Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement.^[55] He was a finalist in the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize^[56] with his screenplay The Norwegian, and won a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award.^[57] In November 2007, his book Heat was awarded the Premio Mazotti, an Italian book prize, but he was denied the money given with the prize because he chose not to travel to Venice to collect it in person, arguing that it was not a good enough reason to justify flying. In 2017, he was a recipient of the SEAL Environmental Journalism Award for his work at The Guardian.^[58]

smoking gun memo(s?)

Denial Industry - Global Policy Forumwww.globalpolicy.org › component › content › article

Sep 19, 2006 - By George Monbiot ... They set back action on climate change by a decade. ... It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris. ... By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a ... such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology".

https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/212/45267.html

By George Monbiot

:{Guardian[guk lx]

September 19, 2006}:

For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon's involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco. In the first of three extracts from his new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre and shocking new story.

ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".

Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.

By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.

This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.

But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth.

The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.

The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."

It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.

Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."

But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change.

All this is now well known to climate scientists and environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.

In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a 500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking. It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers. In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to ETS."

Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal documents and post them on the internet.

Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell, Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."

To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."

So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight "overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones.APCO proposed to set up "a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."

APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and "prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's costs. By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". IN GLB HE SUGGESTS THIS WAS TO MAKE IT HARDER TO EXPOSE TASSC? EFFORT AS A TOBACCO FRONT, THUS OTHER ISSUES IN MIX] APCO would engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".

By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC".The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages."

The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was: "Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front group for it? "A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various groups and corporations across the country."

There are clear similarities between the language used and the approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the "grassroots".[--> secret sci?]

But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition" created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.

TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning manmade global warming, have pointed me there.

The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO- Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998 reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end of 2005.

He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours' work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address: the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute isThomas Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the payments to TASSC.

Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.

TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people. Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz, the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would speak to "40-60 regulators".

The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer.He has spent the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..."

Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.

I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations. Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations, the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I realise that they have simply transferred their skills.

While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.

This is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by Allen Lane.

More Information on Social and Economic Policy

More Information on the Environment

More General Analysis on Transnational Corporations

More Information on Transnational Corporations

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/13/uk_election_boris_johnson_jeremy_corbyn

on DN corbyn loss, no brakes as in US Congress and constit, so monarch powers?! as problems are revealed, go for racist scapgoating

the British Conservative Party has won a decisive majority in Thursday’s general election, winning seats in Labour Party strongholds and paving the way for Britain’s exit from the European Union by January 31. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is projected to have 364 seats in the House of Commons compared to Labour’s 203 seats. That would give the Conservatives about a 75-seat majority, the largest since Margaret Thatcher’s landslide in the 1987 election. Johnson’s message throughout the campaign was focused on “getting Brexit done,” reflecting public exhaustion with the issue that has paralyzed British politics ever since the 2016 referendum. His win comes despite his long record of racist and anti-Muslim statements, as well as accusations of sexual harassment. Following the election, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn announced he will resign as party leader, though he will continue to sit as an MP. The Labour membership grew dramatically during Corbyn’s tenure, with the party adopting radical policies focused on ending austerity, reinvesting in the National Health Service and promoting social justice. We get response from George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian and author of “Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis,” and Priya Gopal, university lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book “Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent"

Comment: How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx: Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats.(Guardian Comment and Debate Pages)

George Monbiot

The Guardian (London, England), March 6, 2012, p.32

Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a... rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around.

out of the wreckage

checked out at ucsc 9/18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1-9zg0cgN0

George Monbiot: How to Really Take Back Control

***

3/18

George Monbiot speaking at Falmouth University.

www.truthfal.com 60 min climate # 3 vs soil loss, mesh w/ economic crisis cf piketty wealth vs capital, stuff no one made) enterprise to rentier economy) --> pol crisis [neo-lib till busted, so no name, all just natural): our relationships ar transationl, treat all soc as a corp, naturl winners and losers (virtue), any interferenc is illigitaimate, eg taxes. not imperonal but very personal (oligarchs). anti-deoc, shrink state, politics can't help ppl, so they ignore it, turn to anti-poltics, symbols and sensations, come and belong to us, you will be the elect and can crush the losers; authoritarian everywhere; hatred of kindness, resurg of fascism (pol and econ criss reinforce each other)

just a failure of imagination, see the cracks:

pol party or leadrs don't run world or make change, stories do (keynsian social doc vs neo-libr); RMN all keynsian now) BC triangulation?

15 min version of 4 pts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SxP4PANr4

https://www.amazon.com/Out-Wreckage-New-Politics-Crisis/dp/1786632888

15 min trailer overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SxP4PANr4

eynes --> neo-liberal story (rewarmed keynes won't work b/c planet limited, consumerism not answer to stim economy)

natural inclination to cooperate; ~ neolib competition is pinacle; restore commons, community manage sustainably, provide livelihoods for those invested in it;

"owners" extract rent from ppl and land; plutocracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOYcL5JZys4 9/13/17 2 hr?

divide

https://www.amazon.com/Feral-Rewilding-Land-Human-Life/dp/022632527X/

https://www.amazon.com/How-Did-Into-This-Mess/dp/1786630788/

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature Paperback – April 25, 2017

by George Monbiot (Author)

===

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-20-2017/

systemic, eco-topia

http://www.monbiot.com/2017/08/01/out-of-the-wreckage-2/

Out of the Wreckage

1st August 2017

A New Politics for an Age of Crisis

By George Monbiot. Published by Verso Books.

What does the good life—and the good society—look like in the twenty-first century?

A toxic ideology rules the world – of extreme competition and individualism. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better world.

George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how we can build on these findings to create a new politics: a ‘politics of belonging’. Both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganized from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society.

===

4/16 gardUK

:{Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951,Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative'

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed –often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

Naomi Kleindocumented that neoliberals advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted. Photograph: Anya Chibis for the Guardian

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all phone services and soon became the world’s richest man. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Slogans, symbols and sensation … Donald Trump. Photograph: Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

***

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

The left has produced no new framework of economic thought for 80 years. This is why the zombie walks

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

• George Monbiot’s How Did We Get into This Mess

:{==

George Joshua Richard Monbiot (/:{ˈmɒnbioʊ:(style="border-bottom-width:1px;border-bottom-style:dotted"):}:/ **:{mon:(style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase"):}:**-bee-oh; born 27 January 1963) is a British writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013). He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a peaceful campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.^[2] In January 2010, Monbiot founded the ArrestBlair.org website which offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of former British prime minister Tony Blair for alleged crimes against peace.^[3]

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Early life:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

George Monbiot was born in St Mary's, Paddington, a public hospital situated in what was then the Metropolitan Borough of Paddington. The birth was registered in the Metropolitan Borough of Kensington. He grew up in Henley-on-Thames in South Oxfordshire, England, in a house next to Peppard Common.^[4] Politics was at the heart of family life—his father, Raymond Geoffrey Monbiot, is a businessman who headed the Conservative Party's trade and industry forum,^[2] while his mother, Rosalie—the elder daughter of Conservative MP Roger Gresham Cooke^[5]—was a Conservative councillor who led South Oxford district council for a decade.^[6] His uncle, Canon Hereward Cooke, was the Liberal Democrat deputy leader of Norwich City Council between 2002 and 2006.^[7] Monbiot was educated at Stowe School inBuckinghamshire, an independent school, and won an Open Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford.^[8]

Career:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

:{:{

Working as an}: investigative journalist, he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil, and East Africa. His activities led to his being madepersona non grata in seven countries^[10] and being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia.^[11] In these places, he was also shot at,^[12] beaten up by military police,^[12] shipwrecked^[12] and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets.^[13] He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.^[14]After graduating in Zoology, he joined the BBC Natural History Unit as a radio producer, making natural history and environmental programmes. He transferred to the BBC's World Service, where he worked briefly as a current affairs producer and presenter, before leaving to research and write his first book.^[9]}:

In Britain, he joined the roads protest movement and was often called to give press interviews; as a result he was denounced as a "media tart"^[15] by groups such as Green Anarchist and Class War. He was attacked by security guards, who allegedly drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle metatarsal bone. His injuries left him in hospital. Sir Crispin Tickell, a former British diplomat at the United Nations, who was then Warden at Green College, Oxford, made the young protester a fellow, so that he had an office to organise his campaign from.^[16] He was an active member of the Pure Genius!! campaign and co-founded The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over Britain. Its first high profile success was in 1997, when it occupied thirteen acres (five hectares) of prime real estate on the river in London on which owners, beverages multinational Diageo, intended to build a superstore. The protesters defeated Diageo in court, built an "eco-village," and held on to the land for six months.^[17]

Among his best-known articles are his critique of David Bellamy's climate science,^[18] his description of an encounter with a police torturer in Brazil,^[19] his attack on libertarian interpretations of genetics,^[20] his discussion of the ethics of outsourcing,^[21] and his attack on the politics of Bob Geldof and Bono.^[22]

In January 2011, Monbiot took the unusual step of publishing an account of his assets.^[23] In the interests of transparency, Monbiot explained that he earned £77,400 a year, gross, from publishing contracts and rents, and urged other journalists to follow suit.^[24]

He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), Oxford Brookes (planning), and East London (environmental science).^[citation ^needed]

Monbiot lived in Oxford for many years, but in 2007 moved with his then-wife, writer and campaigner Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and daughter to a low emissions housein the mid-Wales market town of Machynlleth.^[25] Monbiot's second daughter was born in the spring of 2012.^[26] Because his new partner lives in Oxford, Monbiot had returned there by 2013.^[27]

In November 2012, he apologised to Lord McAlpine for his "stupidity and thoughtlessness" in implying, in a tweet, that the Tory peer was a paedophile.^[28][29][30] In March 2013, Monbiot announced on his blog the details of a settlement reached with Lord McAlpine's representatives. Monbiot agreed "to carry out, over the next three years, work on behalf of three charities of my choice whose value amounts to £25,000," which he described as an "unprecedented settlement".^[31]

Activism:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Climate change:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot believes that drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat global warming.^[32] Monbiot has written that climate change is the "moral question of the 21st century" and that there is an urgent need for a number of emergency actions he believes will stop climate change, including: setting targets ongreenhouse emissions using the latest science; issuing every citizen with a 'personal carbon ration'; new building regulations with houses built to German passivhausstandards; banning incandescent light bulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights, and other inefficient technologies and wasteful applications; constructing large offshorewind farms; replacing the national gas grid with a hydrogen pipe network; a new national coach network to make journeys using public transport faster than using a car; all petrol stations to supply leasable electric car batteries with stations equipped with a crane service to replace depleted batteries; scrap road-building and road-widening programmes, redirecting their budgets to tackle climate change; reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; closing down all out-of-town superstores and replacing them with warehouses and a delivery system.^[33]

Monbiot says the campaign against climate change is 'unlike almost all the public protests' that came before it:

It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.^[34]

Monbiot also thinks that economic recession can be a good thing for the planet: "Is it not time to recognise that we have reached the promised land, and should seek to stay there? Why would we want to leave this place in order to explore the blackened waste of consumer frenzy followed by ecological collapse? Surely the rational policy for the governments of the rich world is now to keep growth rates as close to zero as possible?"^[35][36] While he does recognize that recession can cause hardship, he points out that economic growth can cause hardship as well. For example, the increase in sales of jet skis would count as economic growth, but they would also cause hardships such as water pollution and noise pollution.^[36]

Monbiot purchased a used diesel Renault Clio after moving to Machynlleth in 2007.^[37] He has travelled through Canada and the United States, campaigning on climate change and promoting his book. He contends that this travel was justifiable as it sought to boost the case for much greater carbon cuts there.^[38][39]

He is the patron of the UK student campaign network People & Planet^[40] and appears in the film The Age of Stupid in animated form, in which he says "The very fact that the crisis is taking place within our generation, it's happening right now, means that we are tremendously powerful people. So this position of despair and 'I can't do anything' and 'there's no point' is completely illogical, it's exactly the opposite".^[41][42]

Monbiot attended the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen.

Monbiot once expressed deep antipathy to the nuclear industry.^[43] He finally rejected his later neutral position regarding nuclear power in March 2011. Although he "still loathe[s] the liars who run the nuclear industry",^[44] Monbiot now advocates its use, having been convinced of its relative safety by what he considers the limited effects of the 2011 Japan tsunami on nuclear reactors in the region.^[44] Subsequently, he has harshly condemned the anti-nuclear movement, writing that it "has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health ... made [claims] ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong." He singled out Helen Caldicott for, he wrote, making unsourced and inaccurate claims, dismissing contrary evidence as part of a cover-up, and overstating the death toll from the Chernobyl disaster by a factor of more than 140.^[45] In October 2013 Monbiot criticized the selection of a generation III reactor design for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power stationdue to cost as well as for a half century requirement of uranium mining and transuranic waste production; he contrasted this with two generation IV reactor concepts: "ifintegral fast reactors were deployed, the UK's stockpile of nuclear waste could be used to generate enough low-carbon energy to meet all UK demand for 500 years. These reactors would keep recycling the waste until hardly any remained: solving three huge problems – energy supply, nuclear waste and climate change – at once.Thorium reactors use an element that's already extracted in large quantities as an unwanted byproduct of other mining industries. They recycle their own waste, leaving almost nothing behind."^[46] (cf. similar comments by James Hansen)

In 2012, Monbiot claimed that there was more than enough oil for "industry and consumer capitalism" to "deep-fry the lot of us" (citing a report of 110 million barrels per day in 2020.^[47][48]

Debate with Ian Plimer:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot harshly criticised the book Heaven and Earth by climate change skeptic Ian Plimer, saying that "Since its publication in Australia it has been ridiculed for a hilarious series of schoolboy errors, and its fudging and manipulation of the data".^[49] Plimer challenged Monbiot to a public debate on the issues covered in the book. Monbiot agreed on the condition that Plimer first answer a series of written questions for publication on the website of The Guardian, so there would be a factual basis to the discussion.^[50] Plimer refused and Monbiot labeled Plimer a "grandstander" with a "broad yellow streak" who has nowhere answered the accusations of serious errors in his Heaven and Earth book, and accused him of trying to "drown out the precise refutations published by his book's reviewers".^[51] Plimer then reversed his decision, and agreed to answer written questions in return for a live debate.^[52] Monbiot's response on receiving Plimer's contribution was one of disappointment, on the grounds that Plimer's response "so far consists not of answers, but of questions addressed to me."^[53] Monbiot told Plimer that he is not qualified to answer Plimer's questions^[53] (although Gavin Schmidt of NASA did answer them).^[54] On 2 September 2009, Monbiot published another column in The Guardian asking: "Is Ian Plimer ever going to answer my questions?" and suggested that Plimer was evading the questions by using the Chewbacca defence.^[55] A debate was subsequently held on 15 December, while Monbiot was in Copenhagen, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline programme, moderated by Tony Jones.^[56][57]

Attempted arrest of John Bolton:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot made an unsuccessful attempt to carry out a citizen's arrest of John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, when the latter attended the Hay Festival to give a talk on international relations in May 2008. Monbiot argued that Bolton was one of the instigators of the Iraq War, of which Monbiot was an opponent.^[58]

Political parties:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

He was involved initially with the Respect political party, but he broke with the organisation when it chose to run candidates against the Green Party in the 2004 election to the European Parliament.^[59] In an interview with the British political blog Third Estate in September 2009, Monbiot expressed his support for the policies of Plaid Cymru, saying "I have finally found the party that I feel very comfortable with. That’s not to say I feel uncomfortable with the Green Party, on the whole I support it, but I feel even more comfortable with Plaid."^[60]

In April 2010, he was a signatory to an open letter of support for the Liberal Democrats, published in The Guardian.^[61] Prior to the 2015 UK general election, he was one of several public figures who endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of the Green Party's Caroline Lucas.^[62]

Indigenous rights:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot has been associated with the cause of indigenous rights, and has sought to denounce threats to tribal people, at the face of corporate interests.^[63][64] He contributed to the 2009 book We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples,^[65] which explores the culture of peoples around the world, portraying both its diversity and the threats it faces.

Published works:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot's first book was Poisoned Arrows (1989), a work of investigative travel journalism exposing what he calls the "devastating effects" of the partially World Bank-funded transmigration program on the peoples and tribes of Papua and West Papua in Indonesia. It was followed by Amazon Watershed (1991) which documented expulsions of Brazilian peasant farmers from their land and followed them thousands of miles across the forest to the territory of the Yanomami Indians, and showed how timber sold in Britain was being stolen from indigenous and biological reserves in Brazil. His third book, No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania (1994), documented the seizure of land and cattle from nomadic people in Kenya and the Tanzania, by – among other forces – game parks and safari tourism.

In 2000, he published Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. The book examines the role of corporate power within the United Kingdom, on both local and national levels, and argues that corporate involvement in politics is a serious threat to democracy. Subjects discussed in the book include the building of the Skye Bridge, corporate involvement in the National Health Service, the role of business in university research and the conditions which influence the granting of planning permission.

:{

His fifth book, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, was published in 2003. The book is an attempt to set out a positive manifesto for change for the global justice movement. Monbiot criticises anarchism and Marxism, arguing that any possible solution to the world's inequalities must be rooted in a democratic parliamentary system. The four main changes to global governance which Monbiot argues for are a democratically elected world parliament which would pass resolutions on international issues; a democratised United Nations General Assembly to replace the unelected UN Security Council; the proposed International Clearing Union which would automatically discharge trade deficits and prevent the accumulation of debt; and a fair trade organisation which would regulate world tradein a way that protects the economies of poorer countries.^[66]The Age of Consent:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit]

The book also discusses ways in which these ideas may be put into practice. He posits that the United States and Western European states are heavily dependent on the existence of this debt, and that when faced with a choice between releasing the developing world from debt and the collapse of the global economy, their internal economic interests will dictate that they opt for the "soft landing" option. However, Monbiot emphasises that he does not present the manifesto as a "final or definitive" answer to global inequalities but intends that it should open debate and stresses that those who reject it must offer their own solutions. He argues that ultimately the global justice movement "must seek [...] to provide a coherent programme of alternatives to the concentrated power of the dictatorship of vested interests."

Heat:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Monbiot's next book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published in 2006, focuses on the issue of climate change. He points out that the public-opinion campaign to cast doubt on the reality of climate change is funded by fossil-fuel companies (primarily Exxon-Mobil), and traces the "network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies" campaigning to discredit climate science to origins in a campaign by tobacco companies to create a facade of science to cast doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and disease.^[67] He argues that a 90 percent reduction in carbon emissions is necessary in developed countries in order to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. He then sets out to demonstrate how such a reduction could be achieved within the United Kingdom, without a significant fall in living standards, through changes in housing, power supply and transport.

Feral:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding was published in 2013, and focuses on the concept of rewilding the planet. Monbiot states "rewilding offers a positive environmentalism. Environmentalists have long known what they are against; now we can explain what we are for."^[68]

In the book, Monbiot attacks sheep farming as "a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to have noticed."^[69]

The book received favourable reviews, including in publications normally hostile to his work, such as The Spectator^[70] and The Daily Telegraph.^[69] It also won theSociety of Biology Book Award for general biology in 2014.^[71]

Bibliography:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Poisoned Arrows: An investigative journey through the forbidden lands of West Papua(1989, Abacus) ISBN 0-7181-3153-3
Amazon Watershed (1991, Abacus) ISBN 0-7181-3428-1
Mahogany Is Murder: Mahogany Extraction from Indian Reserves in Brazil (1992) ISBN 1-85750-160-8
No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania (1994, Picador)ISBN 0-333-60163-7
Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000, Macmillan) ISBN 0-333-90164-9
Anti-capitalism: A Guide to the Movement (2001, Bookmarks) ISBN 1-898876-78-9contributor
Europe Inc.: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power (2003, Pluto Press) foreword by George Monbiot, ISBN 0-7453-2163-1
The Age of Consent (2003, Flamingo) ISBN 0-00-715042-3
Manifesto for a New World Order (2004, The New Press) ISBN 1-56584-908-6
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (September 2006, Allen Lane) ISBN 0-7139-9923-3 U.S. edition (April 2007,South End Press) ISBN 978-0-89608-779-8
Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (March 2008, Atlantic Books)ISBN 978-1-84354-656-6
Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (May 2013, Penguin Books) ISBN 978-1-84614-748-7

Honours:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

He has honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews and the University of Essex, and an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University.^[17]

In 1995, Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement.^[72] He was a finalist in the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize^[73] with his screenplay The Norwegian, and won a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award.^[74] In November 2007 his book Heat was awarded the Premio Mazotti, an Italian book prize, but he was denied the money given with the prize because he refused to travel to Venice to collect it in person, arguing that it was not a good enough reason to justify flying.

References:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "The end of plastic". Costing the Earth. 19 March 2013. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved18 January 2014.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-Fox_2-1) Fox, Genevieve (9 May 1995). "Enter the clean-shaven adventurer hero".The Independent.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ David Thorpe/Cyberium (31 December 2010). "Arrest Blair". Arrest Blair. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
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:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Marriages". The Times. 9 December 1961. p. 10.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1996.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Obituary: Canon Hereward Cooke". The Times. 7 January 2010.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Past Members". UK: Brasenose College, Oxford. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot CV on McSpotlight
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "George Monbiot – short bio.". Penguin Books. Retrieved 26 May 2007.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Hosking, Patrick; Wighton, David (22 June 2003). "In a globalised world of opportunity". London: The Sunday Times (UK). Retrieved 27 May 2007.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-Amazon_Watershed_12-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-Amazon_Watershed_12-2) George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed. Michael Joseph, London
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:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George (1994), No Man's Land: an investigative journey through Kenya and Tanzania
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George (1998). McKay, George, ed. The land is ours Campaign. DiY Culture, Party and Protest in Nineties Britain. p. 181.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Genevieve Fox. Independent. 9 May 1995.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-about-george-monbiot_17-1) About George Monbiot George Monbiot's biography on Monbiot.com Accessed 10 November 2006.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Junk Science". The Guardian. 10 May 2005. Retrieved 9 March 2008.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Hunting the beast"
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Libertarians are the true social parasites"
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "The flight to India"
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Bards of the powerful"
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Another one bites the dust"
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Registry of interests"
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Crewe, Bel (7 September 2008). "Moving house from the city to the country". The Times (London).
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot "Daughter, my generation is squandering your birthright", The Guardian, 16 April 2012
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ David Sexton "Wild ideas: a dream of boars, bears and wolves back in Britain",London Evening Standard, 28 May 2013
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot – Lord McAlpine – An Abject Apology
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Guardian columnist apologises for naming Lord McAlpine on Twitter – Telegraph". The Daily Telegraph (London).
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ [interview on BC Radio 4's World at One, 15 November 2012]
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George. "My Agreement with Lord McAlpine (12 March 2013)". Retrieved 28 July 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, G.; Lynas, M.; Marshall, G.; Juniper, T.; Tindale, S. (2005). "Time to speak up for climate-change science". Nature 434 (7033): 559. doi:10.1038/434559a.PMID 15800596.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Drastic action needed now". The Guardian.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Heat, London, Allen Lane, 2006, p. 215
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Bird, Maryann (10 April 2008). "Debate: is economic recession good for the environment?". chinadialogue. Retrieved 28 July 2008.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-Monbiot_36-1) Monbiot, George (9 October 2007). "Bring on the recession". Monbiot.com. Retrieved 28 July 2008.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Mr Green goes motoring, The Times, 3 June 2007
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot Canada tour 2006, www.monbiot.com November 2006
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot in Vancouver, www.treehugger.com 23 November 2006
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:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-image:url("/maxresdefault.jpg)
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-image:url("/maxresdefault.jpg)
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot "The nuclear winter draws near", The Guardian, 30 March 2000
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-Monbiot2011_44-1) Monbiot, George (21 March 2011). "Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 22 March 2011.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George (4 April 2011). "Evidence Meltdown". The Guardian. Retrieved17 April 2011.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot (21 October 2013). "The farce of the Hinkley C nuclear reactor will haunt Britain for decades". theguardian.com. Retrieved 26 October 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Maugeri, Leonardo. "Oil: The Next Revolution" Discussion Paper 2012-10,Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, June 2012. Retrieved: 13 July 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George. "We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all", The Guardian, 2 July 2012. Retrieved: 13 July 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George. "Spectator recycles climate rubbish published by sceptic. The Guardian. 9 July 2009
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot (August 2009). "Let battle commence! Climate change denialist ready for the fight". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 10 August 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot (July 2009). "Why can't the champion of climate change denial face the music?". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 10 August 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot (August 2009). "Let battle commence!". The Guardian UK(London). Retrieved 6 August 2009.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-monbiot_20090812_53-1) Plimer resorts to attack as the best form of defence, George Monbiot, The Guardian, 12 August 2009
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "RealClimate: Plimer’s homework assignment". www.realclimate.org. Retrieved2 September 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George (2 September 2009). "Still moving Heaven and Earth to get answers from Plimer". guardian.co.uk (London). Retrieved 2 September 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Plimer, Monbiot cross swords in climate debate". abc.net.au. Archived from the original on 22 December 2009. Retrieved 24 December 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Jones, Tony (15 December 2009). "Plimer, Monbiot cross swords in climate debate". Lateline. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 24 February2012.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Adams, Stephen. John Bolton escapes citizen's arrest at Hay Festival, The Daily Telegraph, 28 May 2008.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Monbiot quits Respect over threat to Greens" The Guardian, 17 February 2004. Accessed 10 November 2006
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ An Interview with George Monbiot. "An Interview with George Monbiot". Thethirdestate.net. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Lib Dems are the party of progress". The Guardian. 28 April 2010
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Elgot, Jessica (24 April 2015). "Celebrities sign statement of support for Caroline Lucas – but not the Greens". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 22 July 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Call for napalm bombing of 'savages' wins Survival racism award". Survival International. 26 August 2009. Retrieved 25 November 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ In Bed With the Killers – George Monbiot
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "‘We Are One: a celebration of tribal peoples’ published this autumn". Survival International. 16 October 2009. Retrieved 25 November 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Glossop, Ronald J. (18 November 2010). "The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order – Review". GlobalSolutions.org.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ George Monbiot, "The Denial Industry", (excerpted from Heat); The Guardian 19 September 2006 (accessed 27 October 2010)
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Monbiot, George (27 May 2013). "My manifesto for rewilding the world". May 2013 (London: The Guardian). Retrieved 11 June 2013.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot#cite_ref-telegraphreview_69-1) "Philip Hoare is enchanted by a call for the return of bear, beaver and bison to Britain.". London: The Daily Telegraph. 28 May 2013. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Sam Leith enjoys a vision of Britain where sheep may no longer safely graze". The Spectator. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
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External links:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Wikiquote has quotations related to: George Monbiot

:{Monbiot.com – Official website with full archives
Short biography

Column archive at The Guardian
George Monbiot at ZSpace
George Monbiot on Journalisted
Works by or about George Monbiot in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
George Monbiot at DMOZ
"For more wonder, rewild the world," Monbiot's July 2013 TED talk
Nerve – interview with George Monbiot
George Monbiot's interview with The Third Estate, 2009
George Monbiot: UK Inquiry "Toothless" and "Feeble" in Probing Origins of Iraq War – video by Democracy Now!, 2010

Authority control

:{Categories:

Covert operations

The Lobby Watch profiles contain many startling examples of the lengths to which the 'third party' game can be taken, such as:

:{covert PR campaigns portraying industry critics as extremists or even terrorists

see Center For Food and Agricultural Research ,Andura Smetacek , Mary Murphy , Bivings , Jay Byrne and the article Corporate Phantoms

:{manufactured support for industry via fake public protest, fake citizens, and even fake organisations

see Bivings and the article The Fake Parade .}:

'Fake persuaders'

The fake Center For Food and Agricultural Research (CFFAR) shows covert PR at its most insidious. CFFAR sought to portray mainstream environmental organisations as engaging in, or as linked to, violence and 'terrorism'. This message was further disseminated and reinforced through multiple internet postings by what George Monbiot has termed the 'fake persuaders': Andura Smetacek and Mary Murphy . Our research showed Smetacek, Murphy and CFFAR could all be traced back to Monsanto and its Internet PR company Bivings .

'We want to destroy'

CFFAR and Smetacek also used the concerns generated by their smears against organisations like the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy and Greenpeace, to encourage scientists and others to lobby these organisations' funders to stop their financial backing. It is the same tactic as employed by Berman & Co. via ActivistCash.com , and it comes straight out of the CDFE 'handbook'. To quote CDFE's Vice President, Ron Arnold, 'We want to destroy environmentalists by taking away their money and their members.' (New York Times, Dec 19, 1991)

Tactics and semantics

Many of those at the forefront of attacking corporate critics make use not only of Arnold's tactics but his rhetoric. Patrick Moore , a founding member of Greenpeace who went on to become a director of a Wise Use-type pro-logging front group set up by PR firm Burson Marsteller for the Canadian timber industry, talks of environmentalists as 'ultraleftists and extremists' who 'use Gestapo tactics'. He claims issues like logging and the GM debate are influenced by 'pagan beliefs and junk science'. Moore's rhetoric directly echoes Arnold 's earlier attacks on environmentalists as 'eco-fascists' and communists, as well as Arnold's call for a 'holy war against the new pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people'.

http://www.alternet.org/print/environment/if-you-love-nature-and-defend-it-be-prepared-be-called-fascist

Earlier this year, the former energy minister John Hayes described concerns about the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia – which, with their tigers, orangutans and thousands of unique species, are being destroyed to grow biofuels – as "bourgeois views [3]". (Coming from a Tory MP, this was magnificent.) In the Guardian Review on Saturday, Steven Poole took up his call (Comfort of the wild [4], 6 July). Echoing Mao's denunciations of pre-revolutionary Chinese culture, he castigated those of us who write about our love of nature as bourgeois and snobbish, and suggested that our concerns about the spread of exotic invasive animals and plants are a form of crypto-fascism – "the green version of the English Defence League".

Exotic invasive species are a straightforward ecological problem, wearily familiar to anyone trying to protect biodiversity. Some introduced creatures – such as brown hare, little owl, field poppy, corncockle and pheasant's eye in Britain – do no harm to their new homes, and are cherished and defended by nature lovers. Others, such as cane toads [5], mink, rats, rhododendron, kudzu vine or tree-killing fungi, can quickly simplify a complex ecosystem, wiping out many of its endemic animals and plants. They have characteristics (for example, being omnivorous, light-excluding, toxic or inedible to any native carnivore or herbivore) that allow them to tear an ecosystem to shreds. These aren't cultural constructions. They are biological facts.

Monbiot, G

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Early life[

Career[

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Climate change[

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Personal life[

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By George Monbiot

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature Paperback – April 25, 2017

Contents

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