Cassandra Voices

Tag: Cassandra Voices environment

  • The Carbon Tax Scapegoat

    We are regularly presented with press releases from government departments that express empathy for those struggling to make ends meet while facing exorbitant day-to-day living costs—not least among them the price of petrol, diesel, and home heating fuel. Yet, in the next breath, government bureaucracies issue statements justifying the ‘need’ to raise Carbon Taxes so that we can ‘do our bit’ for the environment and society. These contradictory messages serve only to exacerbate the hardship felt by those who, day in and day out, live under the weight of economic and political pressure.

    We regularly hear about problems and disasters attributed to climate change. There are, we are told, endless challenges stemming from this phenomenon—and as responsible citizens, we must be willing to pay the price for its effects.

    As of May 2025, nearly 50% of the price of petrol and diesel at the pump is made up of various taxes, with the Carbon Tax accounting for almost 10%. It is worth remembering that motorists are paying VAT not only on the fuel but also on the tax applied to the fuel. Those using natural gas to heat their homes are paying close to €130 a year in Carbon Tax, while those using home-heating oil are paying €63.50 per tonne of CO₂ emitted in the same tax. With all these sources of Carbon Tax, the State’s revenue from this ‘green initiative’ reached €1 billion for the first time in 2024.

    Unravelling the Hysteria

    The seemingly endless chorus of climate change consequences can leave one feeling helpless, subservient to an invisible, unquestionable force beyond comprehension.

    But just as the old saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, perhaps understanding the burden of the consequences of this unchallengeable doctrine begins with asking the most basic questions.

    Are the repeated justifications for never-ending increases in Carbon Tax truly the result of the general population’s failure to make sufficient sacrifices to combat climate change, or could they stem from other factors—politically inconvenient ones—that are more easily scapegoated as climate issues? Climate change has become a topic so shielded from scrutiny that questioning anything presented as its direct result is rare, for fear of being labeled a climate change denier.

    Just as Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984, began to question the scapegoating ritual of the “Two Minutes Hate”, a daily exercise designed to convince citizens that society’s problems stemmed from disloyal citizens rather than a deeply flawed system, we, too, might benefit from stepping back. Perhaps some of our societal and economic struggles are rooted in deeper, overlooked issues that are being ignored or glossed over due to the incessant rhetoric of climate change effects, paradigm blindness and groupthink.

    Take, for example, the recent introduction of water usage restrictions in areas of Ireland that experience some of the wettest spring months in Europe. Just recently, a hosepipe ban was announced for Mullingar in Co. Westmeath, Milford in Co. Donegal, and Kells-Oldcastle in Co. Meath, set to last for six weeks due to yet another climate change-attributable factor. The official stated reason?

    “Below average rainfall over the last seven months.”

    According to the Uisce Éireann website:

    “Climate change is leading to more frequent and intense weather events, such as flooding and dry spells. This impacts our water resources, which can mean we need to put restrictions in place.”

    And who must pay the price for this catastrophe? Why, each and every one of us, of course—as good comrade citizens, all for the common good!

    But is the need for the hosepipe ban—and the accompanying Carbon Taxes supposedly meant to remedy the ‘harms done by carbon’, truly the result of the general population’s ‘carbon greed’? Or is it, at least in part, a form of scapegoating used to avoid answering some rather politically awkward questions?

    Let’s, without venturing down the well-worn road of climate change denial, consider an alternative to the familiar mantra that supposedly justifies yet another increase in Carbon Tax to solve yet another ‘climate problem’.

    Since its foundation in 2013 as a state-owned water utility company, Uisce Éireann has promised to revitalise Ireland’s water infrastructure. Despite having a multi-billion euro budget, the utility has faced significant criticism for massive overspending and making unrealistic claims about fixing leaking pipes and upgrading infrastructure—largely due to its lack of transparency, particularly regarding how funds are allocated for operational costs and repairs.

    Considering the lavish funding allocated to this company—€16.9 billion from 2025 to 2029, including €10.3 billion for infrastructure and €6.6 billion for operating costs, one might reasonably expect that leaking pipes and inefficiencies would no longer be an issue. Yet, even in the month of May, water shortages persist even in some of the wettest areas of Europe raising serious questions about where this investment is going.

    Multi-million euro contracts are regularly awarded by Uisce Éireann as part of a massive overhaul of Ireland’s long-neglected water infrastructure. However, there is little to no scrutiny or transparency when it comes to assessing value for money or the efficiency of the work carried out. When water shortages do occur, it becomes all too easy to deflect the hard questions by reinforcing the idea in the public’s mind that the fault lies not with the state, but with the ever-looming spectre of climate change.

    At the implementation of the Government’s Climate Action Plan in 2019, the people of Ireland were told:

    “Climate disruption is already having diverse and wide ranging impacts on Ireland’s environment, society, economic and natural resources. The Climate Action Plan sets out an ambitious course of action over the coming years to address this issue”.

    This same plan told the burden carriers

    “For most areas of environmental damage, a key problem is that those inflicting the damage do not pay the cost of the damage they inflict. This is the rationale for charging a carbon price for carbon emissions which reflects the growing damage that they are inflicting. This serves to discourage emissions and to make carbon abatement more profitable.“

    The Flaccid Fourth Estate

    Ireland’s media, one would assume, should challenge the government on its climate policies should there ever be any possibility of it dodging responsibility. But alas, as history has proven time and time again—especially with the specific example of the Irish Banking Inquiry of 2011 into the causes and impact of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and the housing market crash of 2008. it has been clearly shown that Ireland’s established media has repeatedly failed to question the sustainability of government policy, lacked investigative reporting, and played a role in normalizing risk to the general populace. The established media in Ireland, therefore, simply does not criticise government policy in any meaningful way.

    Let’s take a step back and analyse the broader picture. If, by chance, the water shortages in Ireland are at least partly due to operational inefficiencies of a multi-billion-euro state company responsible for ensuring there are no shortages, perhaps many other problems regularly used to justify a crippling carbon tax are also, at least in part, the result of systemic issues within government operations and not solely the fault of climate change.

    If this is the case, wouldn’t it make a lot more economic and political sense to reform the system rather than continue to tax the burdened?

    Of course, one can argue that taxes are essential for the government to fund the functioning of the country, and that point is not being disputed here. However, when additional taxes are introduced in the name of improving society, while transparency, accountability, and efficiency in government spending and state operations continue to decline, and the number of exposed instances of public fund wastage continues to rise, this does little to benefit either society or the economy.

    Is it not time to press the pause button on the ever-increasing rates of ‘green’ taxes on the people of Ireland and to begin a thorough investigation into how public money is spent on projects—from the Irish Water scandal, with millions wasted on the setup of this monolith, to the National Children’s Hospital cost overruns, making it the most expensive hospital in the world, to the bicycle shed in Dáil Éireann, and so on and so on?

    The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
    ― George Orwell, 1984

  • We Must Begin with the Land

    Review: We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation through Social Ecology by Stephen E. Hunt (Zer0 books, 2025)

    Environmentalists find themselves in the paradoxical situation of living in a golden age of radical ecological thinking – even as our global economic system blasts through one climactic tipping-point after another, more or less guaranteeing the extinction of planetary life as we know it at present. A rich field of research and intellectual inquiry has sprung up from between the fault-lines of the emerging climate crisis, along with concomitant movements centred (among other aims) on food sovereignty, habitat protection, the democratization of land holdings, and anti-extractivist resistance. Joining in this spirit of stewardship and challenge, Stephen E. Hunt has produced a prospectus for what might be described as eco-socialist change, in an attempt to measure and mitigate “the profound reengineering of life on Earth” that capitalist food systems have wrought. In place of monopolistic land-hoarding and ever-expanding “agri-business” – which trace their roots to the era of settler colonialism – he makes the case for a not-for-profit, “circular economy”, based on the principle that “nutritious food” is “an essential human need.”

    If Hunt draws inspiration from “utopian” ideas – the notion, say, that local commoning could provide a vital food source for significant numbers of people in the U.K. (where he lives), in place of the corporate or commodified provisions they currently rely on – he is nothing if not clear-eyed about the scale and extremity of the climate catastrophe predicted to engulf our already warming world. The vitality of his analysis might be said to stem from its symbiotic pairing of transformative hopes with a deep-running awareness of natural necessities. It is simply not possible, he states, to reach or maintain “ecological integrity within planetary boundaries” without simultaneously “addressing profound social problems embedded in deep history.” Far from being inevitable, he argues in a similar vein, famine is “primarily a social problem that demands solutions founded on social justice.”

    If Hunt often focuses on the practicalities of ecological action – how to grow wholesome food, and nurture communal practices, in a durable way – he nevertheless situates his proposals within an internationalist horizon. His book draws as much on the lessons of the Kurdish revolutionaries in Rojava, say, or the grassroots agricultural labourers comprising La Via Campesina, as on the experience of local campaigners in Bristol, his home. We Must Begin with the Land is anything but parochial. In fact, by arguing for the radicalism of community gardening, foraging, the conversion of waste grounds into allotments, and the like, Hunt may find himself in the vanguard of progressive thinking. Some commentators – not without reason – have attempted to hitch the cause of ecological adaptation exclusively to the wagon of the nation-state, essentially envisaging climate adaptation as a matter of enlightened technocratic adjustments from on high. Hunt’s contrasting emphasis is on the importance of localised, grassroots environmentalism, with an anti-capitalistic edge – aligning him politically with the late Grace Lee Boggs, for example, whose campaigns for community-led ecological regeneration in Detroit offered a new model of labour agitation in that industrialised city.

    Hunt also invokes the “social ecology” of Murray Bookchin, a multi-faceted philosophy that advances a critique of “the historic turn towards hierarchy and patriarchy” within radical movements – often hampered, ironically, by rigid structures and internal power imbalances – as well as a diagnosis of the “statism” and “capitalism” that define wider social structures, particularly in the global north. By re-examining our conceptions of urban and rural, of agricultural production and consumption, Hunt observes (via Bookchin), reformers can “ensure that human and ecological well-being are at the heart of democratic initiatives”, bringing the grand ideals of socialist transformation down to earth – and into an actionable zone inhabited by actual communities. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, he recalls (perhaps with a tinge of nostalgic over-statement), the occupiers’ “self-managed food provision” merged into something of an improvised welfare service. The movement exposed the degree of social isolation in the twenty-first century’s metropolitan centres. One of the chief benefits of communal eating is to help to address alienation.

    Such schemes, of course, are driven as much by physiology as by psychological or socio-econonmic factors. Our ability not only to think beyond the present infrastructre of a capitalistic economy, but physically to survive, is directly connected to the attitudes we hold and the measures we take regarding food and the land it grows from. It was hunger, after all, and not just a spirit of experimentation and progressivism, that inspired the rebellious denizens of Kronstadt to cultivate the waste grounds of their city in 1921 – instituting a “horticultural commune”, according to the historian Voline, that the Bolsheviks, intent on centralization, were zealous in repressing, even after the famous mass of striking sailors there had been executed or dispersed. Then as now, democracy and ecology may be thought of as connected strands of any authentically revolutionary endeavour. As Kristin Ross has written:

    Land and the way it is worked is the most important factor in an alternative ecological society. Capital’s real war is against subsistence, because subsistence means a qualitatively different economy; it means people actually living differently, according to a different conception of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation.

    Such issues take on a palpable urgency in the age of climate change, as extreme weather events merge with the predicted decimation of habitats and food-chains. Whether or not we realise it, how we feed ourselves (and learn to live with one another) is a crucial question for communities everywhere – a question likely to turn into an existential dilemma if left unanswered. In Hunt’s words,

    as the food crisis worsens, it will be increasingly necessary to make productive use of urban or “peri-urban” land for local self-provisioning… it is wise to activate urban gardening as a collective form of commoning that transcends the atomisation of communities into clusters of individuals.

    Noting the explosion of factory farming and other for-profit models of meat production globally, he wonders: “Can the straight trajectory of relentless economic growth be bent into the spiralling plenty of truly regenerative production?” For readers in Ireland, these speculations hold special resonance. A nation-wide campaign centred on community-organised green spaces and vegetable allotments – such as Hunt envisions – could serve as an original, effective response to the expanding epidemic of dereliction afflicting Irish towns and cities (itself in part a symptom of the housing and cost-of-living crises that have caused concomitantly high levels of emigration and homelessness). As to the issue of food sovereignty, despite inspiring efforts by networks such as Talamh Beo to implement sustainable models of “agro-ecology” across the country, successive Irish governments seem to have remained in thrall to a meat (and dairy) industry operating on a commercial model hostile to workers’ rights and favouring large-scale operations that are emissions-intensive. Meanwhile, the goal of reaching even the minimum requirements for decarbonising our farming practices seems as illusory as it’s ever been. A dramatic re-set in local and national policy is needed – and soon.

    Among other things, there is arguably a risk of hubris in a progressive politics that centres its aims and actions solely on the state and its traditional organs of power. As Hunt suggests, in an era of drastic ecological and economic ruptures, a consumerist society that simultaneously “does not know how to feed and dress itself”, that destroys abundant eco-systems to make way for industrial-scale farming and vast monocultures, can hardly be taken as the sanest or safest of socio-environmental paradigms. We must begin with the land, he declares – and re-build our agricultural economy from the grassroots up. The change we need starts here and now.