Why We Fight, page 6
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The Greens and the ecological lobby always play the petroleum card, which is the most polluting! They have, for example, succeeded in stopping all nuclear construction in Germany, Sweden, and Italy.[81] These nuclear power sources have been replaced by gas or fuel-powered electrical generators, which are extremely polluting. The ‘energy savings’, demagogically promised by the Greens, was limited to emissions. A second example: the Greens — in this case, the catastrophic Madame Voynet[82] — succeeded in shutting down the Rhine-Rhône canal, allegedly because of its negative effect on the scenery. The result: freight costs between the Rhine and Rhône basins have increased 4 percent annually, as has the pollution caused by the trucking replacing it. Similarly, the Greens have never raised a finger against the development of unnecessary highways (such as the Paris-Troyes A3 or the Rouen-Tours A28, which are always empty). In contrast, they protested against the high-speed train lines (TGV)[83] between Marseilles and Valence . . . Never have the Greens shown even the least support for ‘rail-piggybacks’ (trucks on trains). Petroleum-based electricity and transport are what these impostors support in practice.
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It’s quite possible that the Greens and the ecological lobby have ‘rolled over’ for the oil companies and the American interests to which they are closely linked. For the United States, ally of the Muslim oil producers, has a vested interest in Europe’s abandonment of nuclear power.
The world petroleum lobby is threatened by nuclear power, as well as electricity-powered transport. 80 percent of the petroleum industry is controlled by Anglo-American companies. And let’s not forget the British oilfields in the North Sea . . . Another thing: American support for the Muslim Chechens, like that of Europe’s pro-American Left, has been partly motivated by its desire to control the pipelines linked to the Caspian Sea oilfields. Similarly, the principal producers of natural gas (Algeria, Indonesia, and Central Asia) are Muslim countries. Oil-gas production is largely in the hands of American-Muslim interests. Nuclear-generated electricity in Europe would be an economic catastrophe for them. So much for the environment. And this with the blessing of the pseudo-ecologists, who have probably been bought off.
Their anti-nuclear aggressiveness may also have something to do with their globalist vision of the economy, which again serves American interests at Europe’s expense. Petroleum implies dependence on foreign sources, while nuclear energy relies on small quantities of easily available uranium (of which Russia has vast supplies). The idea of European energy independence is incompatible with such interests. Besides, to deprive Europe of competence in nuclear civil engineering would deprive her (especially France) . . . of the ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, and thus deprive her of an independent deterrent. This is part of both American and Muslim geopolitics. In many other areas as well, ecologists, Trotskyists, the Pentagon, and Islam wage the same struggle against Europe.
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What disturbs our neo-Leftist ecologists is the objective power (military and economic) and independence that nuclear power offers Europe, as well as its technological implications. There’s a distinct logic to the Left’s struggle: weaken the European devil, censure her traditions and ancestral memories, defuse her technological and military power, smother her independence, corrupt her mores, and destroy her ethnic germen through immigration. Its anti-nuclear and pro-petroleum stances are but part of a concerted, multifaceted strategy to destroy the identity and continuity of European civilisation. The Left’s environmental concerns and defence of public health are simply crude, oily pretexts.
What serious counter-propositions can be made against these anti-nuclear impostors? Energy production has two principal applications today: electricity and transport.
What energy types are presently available to produce electricity?
1. Classic coal, oil, and gas-based power plants, which are largely dependent on foreign suppliers and cause massive pollution (atmospheric emissions, oil spills, etc.).
2. ‘White oil’, that is, dams, of which there aren’t many and which flood large natural areas — like the present scandalous dam at Guiana,[84] against which the ecologists uttered not a word.
3. Tidal power plants, like the one in Rance (Brittany), the sole such plant in the world,[85] are not just a rarity, but create great, problematic accumulations of silt.
4. Geothermal energy, which is very costly to produce.
5. Energy from solar panels, whose output is slight.
6. Solar ovens (or cookers), which are dependent on the weather.
7. Wind farms, which require large areas and produce a mere fraction of the energy that comes from a nuclear plant.
8. Aquatic (or hydroelectric) energy, produced by turbines in rivers with strong currents, have generally low outputs and are limited by a lack of appropriate sites.
For transportation, there are the following energy sources:
1. Polluting internal combustion engines.
2. Electric motors which pollute very little or not at all.
We can’t get away from internal combustion engines (in planes, ships, diesel locomotives, etc.), but they can be limited, though this has never been seriously tried. Everything has happened as if, lacking research or serious investment, alternative petroleum-based transportation, especially in relation to automobiles, has been systematically discouraged, despite the evident problems this has created.
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It’s not a matter of succumbing to the dogma of ‘all nuclear’, in the way we succumbed to the dogma of ‘all oil’. Every form of energy production has its disadvantages, but nuclear for the moment offers the fewest. These are:
1. In case of war or terrorism, electricity production concentrated in a small number of ultra-powerful plants is vulnerable.
2. There is the problem of storing radioactive waste for very long periods, though if careful precautions are taken (such as storing at great depths), the risks of radiation are minimised.
3. There’s also the risk of accident or the escape of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. In the fifty years that nuclear plants have operated, there has, however, been only one such failure, Chernobyl, whose negative effects on public health were qualitatively less than the colossal emissions of carcinogenic gases produced by petroleum energy or by oil spills on the high seas. Nuclear energy can be mastered and improved, but not oil energy.
Here are several proposals for an energy strategy and a transport policy aimed at the dual goal of causing the least pollution and ensuring Europe’s energy independence and autarky.
For electrical production, the basis should be nuclear, a policy which doesn’t presently exist in France. A new type of Franco-German plant, still in the planning, will reduce electric costs by a quarter. The Greens are doing their best to torpedo the project. At the same time, supplemental sources need to be developed to provide for local, decentralised use in order to diminish the fragility of ‘star networks’.[86] These might include wind farms and river and sea turbines. The general rule should probably be to avoid gas, coal, or oil-based plants.
In respect to transport:
1. Systematise the use of electric-diesel engines, or better, GPL/electric engines (which pollute very little) and more thermal fuels made from vegetable oils.
2. Impose a policy of ‘piggybacking’, as in Switzerland and Austria, where trucks are mounted on trains.
3. Extend the network of high-speed trains (TGV) throughout Europe, with numerous connecting links, to alleviate the massive inconveniences of continental air traffic.
4. Develop a systematic policy for rail and canal freight.
5. Use wind energy (wind turbines or semi-rigid sails) in commercial shipping, which would permit a 40 percent reduction in fuel consumption.
6. Invest in the new German blimp technologies as a means to transport freight.
With an eye to larger strategic policy concerns, it would also be useful to invest in ‘second-generation nuclear power’ — that is, in nuclear fusion rather than fission (where atoms are joined, not split), for the theoretical basis of fusion is already known and with it there’s no risk of radiation (since its combustibles can be any metal, instead of uranium). Oil lobbies, however, have everywhere, especially at Brussels, tried to limit research and investment in new energy and transport technologies. It’s in their interest to maintain Nineteenth-century fossil fuel energies.
A little common sense: acid rain that kills forests, miners who die from black lung, oil slicks that ravage coasts, cathedrals and historic monuments that are blackened and eroded by auto exhaust, respiratory illnesses and cancers caused by carbon or sulphur emissions, European dependence on American-Muslim oil suppliers and interests — all these things, it might be argued, pose a far greater threat than the alleged dangers of nuclear power.
The Imposture of the ‘New Economy’
Everyone talks about the ‘new economy’ — that is, the economy based on multimedia telecommunications and information services provided by the Internet, which have supposedly ushered in a second Golden Age. This magical talk, with its euphoric sensibility, simply reiterates the old progressive, scientistic illusions. In fact, it’s just another neo-liberal imposture, whose modernist hegemony is presently coming to an end. For the ‘new economy’ may well culminate in disaster . . .
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The Internet and the ‘new technologies’ are no ‘revolution’, but a simple evolution and, undoubtedly, one of great fragility. Founded on the globalisation of trade, techno-science, and the instantaneity of information, the ‘new economy’ is actually more than a century old.
Online sales, for instance, are only an improvement of the older forms of mail order sales introduced around 1850, and correspond to no structural change. Similarly, not the Internet, nor multimedia cell phones, TV networks, smart cards, the general ‘informationisation’ of society, or genetic engineering represent a fundamental structural change, but are, rather, the ‘elaboration’ of already existing things. For none of these so-called new technologies are comparable to the real upheavals, the real techno-economic metamorphoses, that occurred between 1860 and 1960 — and completely revolutionised life and society — with internal combustion engines, electricity, the telephone, the telegraph, the radio (far more revolutionary than television), the railroad, the airplane, penicillin, antibiotics, etc. The new technologies are behind us! There has been no fundamental innovation since 1960: computers have only been reconceived, and made faster and cheaper than what already existed. In contrast, the automobile, antibiotics, telecommunication, and air travel were authentic revolutions making possible things that had previously been impossible.
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Another reason not to succumb to the siren songs of the ‘new economy’, which has supposedly brought an end to crises, is that just the opposite risks happening.
The economist Frédérique Leroux, who has criticised the presently fashionable mirages of the ‘new economy’, writes, ‘The dominant thought of market economists lacks all the breath of inspiration. Yoked to the prevailing conformities, they have abandoned every critical perspective . . . Their linear projections are now the stuff of all reference . . . We are rapidly approaching the zero degree of economic thought’.
Criticising those who think the Internet and start-ups have inaugurated a new era without recession and cycles, she notes, ‘The new economy — about which we know little to the degree it designates new technologies or new modes of economic functioning (perpetual growth without inflation or boom-bust cycles) — accounts for everything because it allows everyone to speak with an expert’s enthusiasm about something which no one has bothered to understand’. The new economy is simply a term that refers to no actual reality, it’s a pseudo-concept, one of neo-liberalism’s ideological ruses. ‘The new economy is simply an expression used to justify our renunciation of all effort to economically conceptualise it, preferring non-reflection. It is the marketing standard of those who have opted for compliance out of ignorance, convenience, laziness, or hazard.’ [87]
Like Francis Fukuyama,[88] with his idea of the ‘end of history’ (following Communism’s fall and the belief that a world unified on the basis of a universalistic liberalism will be a world freed of political conflict), the apostles of the new economy want us to believe that we’ve entered a marvellous new era of perpetual growth, without crisis or recession.
Thanks to the Internet, start-ups, data processing, globalisation, etc., it’s imagined that the economy has freed itself of crises. But this is a religious — a redemptive — vision of the economy. The ‘economic cycle’ is alive and well, for the economy is human, purely psychological, and not something simply ‘technological’. After the euphoria comes the inevitable panic and despair.
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A number of factors suggest that we’re actually living through the end of a cycle of false growth and entering a period of economic catastrophe that may well be worse than that of 1929, because the world economy is now more fragile, more globalised, and more speculative than ever before. It’s the logic of a house of cards. We haven’t entered a completely new era, as neo-liberalism’s sorcerer’s apprentices claim. Previously, in the 1920s, it was also believed that the new technologies (automobiles, radio, airplanes, telephones, electricity, etc.) had ushered in an age immune to crisis and recession. And we know how that ended . . . Today, with computers and the new economy, we’ve succumbed to a similar belief in miracles.
Toward a Planetary Economic Crisis?
The present ‘growth’ is actually quite superficial and will prove to be ephemeral for the following reasons, all of which suggests the possibility of a general collapse:
1. The fragility of a stock market economy. The present world economy is founded, even more than the economy of the 1920s, on the speculative frenzy of transnational stock markets, a totally unreal world: the Dow Jones, Nikkei, or CAC 40[89] direct the economy toward ultra-short-term considerations and day-to-day speculative spirals (generating immediate profits, panics, and sudden euphoria), while any notion of political economy is abandoned and long-term realities neglected.
With the slightest bad news, speculative investment, the motor of the new economy, risks collapsing. We’ve already had a warning shot with the ‘Asian crisis’ of the 1990s.[90] Frédérique Leroux writes, ‘With the intrusion of the smallest grain of sand into the gears, the virtual mechanism comes to an immediate halt.’ It’s like the ‘butterfly effect’ in weather: the most minor event can provoke an investors’ panic. A speculative world economy is nothing but a giant with feet of clay. ‘Given the ephemeral nature of its economic nirvana, the tiniest changes turn an ‘irrational exuberance’ into an anorexic depression . . . We’ve reached that critical point in the long economic cycle today where the stock market, this jittery entity to which we have abandoned ourselves, has taken over the economy.’
Growth, fundamental to the economy, has completely escaped government or public control. It’s now at the mercy of those euphoric or depressive moods particular to speculation. It’s significant that Europe (unlike the United States) no longer has a monetary policy, a first in her history. Based entirely on speculation, the so-called ‘new economy’ is simply an aggravation of financial economics, speeded up by digital technologies.
2. The exponential growth of world debt, public and private. All the countries of the world, rich and poor alike, are in deficit and there’s talk of annulling Third World debt. Who is going to pay the bill? The world economy resembles an enterprise on the verge of bankruptcy, but one always supported by some virtualist banker. The bulletin of the brokerage firm Prigest, hardly anti-capitalist, noted in July 2000, ‘Private debt is rising at a frenzied rate. It has become a circular transmission belt, linking rising stocks and economic activity. And it’s making the system increasingly fragile, however much it gives the impression of increased growth.’ The bulletin also speaks of the new economy’s irrational exuberance as it glides along the chasm. An economy based on debt (a monetarist dogma) — and not on labour or non-market considerations (demographic, ecological, energy, etc.) — is bound to be short-lived.
3. The demographic ageing of Europe and other advanced industrial countries, compounded by economic and immigration burdens. For the moment, we can bear these blows, but it won’t last. The paucity of active workers, pension obligations, and health costs will, beginning in 2005-2010, gravely aggravate Europe’s economic burdens. Productivity gains and advanced technologies (a favourite remedy) will then cease covering the costs of the changing demographic situation. Far from compensating for the decline of an active native workforce, Europe’s colonising immigration will present her with the problems that come with unskilled workers and massive welfare payments. Immigrants, moreover, are going to become increasingly more expensive (in terms of insecurity, criminality, and urban policy).[91] The economic collapse of Europe, the world’s foremost economic power, will bring down the United States and the other advanced economies.
4. Contempt for ecological limits. The extensive pollution caused by the planetary development of mass industrial economies (nowhere resisted by the ecological impostors bought off by the oil barons) is already starting to take its toll, which keeps rising in the form of catastrophic climate changes, exhausted fishing reserves, desertification, diminished fresh water supplies, destroyed forests, and the depletion of sea phytoplankton responsible for renewing the Earth’s oxygen, etc.
