Professor Ian Angell

Department of Management, LSE, London WC2A 2AE    |    +44 (0)20 7955 7655    |    i.angell@lse.ac.uk

Carbon Footprints on the Road to Tyranny

Amid the dreary blue-grey foulness of 1984, I watch John Hirt as Winston Smith being hauled off to Room 101. Then, in a flash, I am whisked out of my miserable reverie. For once the television’s adverts are welcome. All is vivid colour: joy, laughter, optimism. The future’s bright … the future’s “Orange”. George Orwell’s dystopia recedes. In my reprieve, I try to convince myself that my comfortable existence in today’s Britain could never degenerate into that grimy totalitarian squalor … but I fail!

Try as I may, my paranoia won’t recede. Britain has 4.2 million CCTV cameras – a fifth of the world’s total – some even shout abuse at any passer-by deemed to have acted anti-socially. A national road surveillance system is proposed, expanding the Congestion Charge scheme that photographs and identifies every car entering London. All for the greater good? The reality, unfortunately, is more … fiscal.

Hi-tech identity databases make bureaucracy more efficient, and tax-collection so much easier. It’s not that governments are initially malicious; they’re just control freaks with the best possible utilitarian motives! They are not interested in invading privacy; they care only about the administrative tidiness of body counts. Running a country is so much simpler when citizens are compliant herd animals: namely acquiescent, and well-disposed both to obey orders and to pay taxes; the ideal society of an Animal Farm – the hell of a collectivist heaven.

Their doctrine is that we are all property of the State, or rather of the leaders of the State; and that those leaders can dispose of their property as they see fit. It is the state obtaining money with menaces. All taxation is theft! Government is merely legitimate organized crime. Even the mafia doesn’t charge seventy percent. Seventy percent! That’s the latest estimate of what the average Brit pays over a lifetime.

To protect their tax-take, politicians cleverly mobilise popular fear and guilt. Ancient Rome used the Visigoth threat to extort penal taxes from its citizens. Today terrorism, organized crime, identity fraud are used for the same purpose.

That we elect these slave-masters, makes our democracy slavery none the less. However, falling voter turnout, and a groundswell of popular apathy, points to a growing awareness of that subservience. Politicians were losing their grip, when over the hill to their rescue charged a seventh cavalry of smug übergreen mullahs, virtuous with moral indignation. These ideological thugs vilify anyone 'in denial' who dares question their end-of-the-world scenarios. Everyone must compete to be ‘Greener than thou’. TV news bulletins gratuitously mention Global Warming. Schools are brainwashing infants with Al Gore’s Green Jesuit propaganda: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man". Even the normally secular Church of England has issued sanctimonious ecological commandments to embrace this new faith. The Roman Catholics have even pronounced a Green extension to the Seven Deadly Sins.

Self-righteous recyclists motor miles to fill bottle banks and waste paper bins, blissfully unaware that the local authorities have been surreptitiously dumping it in landfill ever since the bottom fell out of the oversupplied market for waste. “Are you doing your bit for the planet” becomes the inane Orwellian greeting. It’s oh so fashionable to be gratuitously Green. Shoppers flaunt their eco-credentials with Anya Hindmarch’s ‘I am not a plastic bag’: the product of Chinese sweatshops that the checkout girl hands to you in a free Sainsbury’s plastic bag. Free, but not for much longer – I feel a 5p tax coming on.

Meanwhile, the political elite, opportunists all, hijack the Green agenda for its own cynical motives. Not believing their luck, these hypocrites turned Green somersaults at the Kyoto, Rio and Montreal circuses in their bid to regain control. The result? Facing swingeing financial penalties from UK central government over failed recycling quotas and landfill stealth taxes, local authorities are bugging garbage bins to monitor waste. It’s all a precursor to charging for collection, lowering costs, and enforcement by a Garbage Gestapo with £100 on-the-spot fines.

Perversely, increased airport taxes are justified on environmental grounds, while a concurrent "open skies" policy increases the number of polluting long-haul flights. Guilty airlines, oil companies, indeed all Western firms, ever conscious of their ‘image’, respond by projecting themselves hugging trees. They drool over the burgeoning UN-approved market in carbon quotas. Now firms in developing countries that invest in anti-pollution technology are given carbon credits they can sell to polluters in the West. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) – a gas that is fundamental to life on earth; we are a carbon-based life-form after all – has become not only a pollutant, but also the unit for measuring pollution.

Greenhouse gasses are contrasted against a CO₂ base-line: HFC-23 is thousands of times more polluting! Hence, cutting one tonne earns thousands of carbon credits, to be sold to image-sensitive polluters. Arbitrage was inevitable. Companies in China will have been paid over $6 billion in compensation for investing a mere $100 million on reducing emissions. There will be tens of billions of dollars worth of carbon credits – permits to pollute – in circulation. Surprise! Surprise! The Chinese government started charging a 65% tax on this windfall. Meanwhile the British government uses ‘carbon footprints’ to pretend that nuclear power (and radioactive waste) is eco-friendly. Bizarre!

Egged on by the governments apparent Green commitment, Puritanical ‘carbon neutrals’ insist on carbon quotas for everyone. Gaia’s chosen ones already calculate their own individual footprints: a simple (too simple) calculation using personal power consumption and travel details. What next? A carbon tax on every action, every purchase. No more wasteful packaging; all must be generic utilitarian drab. Ban junk mail and free newspapers! Ban all newspapers? Every cloud has a silver lining!

The Word War II poster ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ will reappear. Only guilty Earth-killers drive cars! An end to tourism; an end to commuting? The Olympics, the World Cup, indeed all frivolous carbon-creating events must stop; international tourism likewise. And the dependent jobs? They too must go. Destabilising the global economy is a price worth paying to save the planet!

The ‘carbon’ emission of every individual – including breathing – must be rationed, necessitating a massive surveillance scheme. The technology is already available: radio-frequency identification. We tag pets, so why not brand the citizen herd-animal? With secreted readers, officials will validate a person’s identity anywhere. How long before families with two-plus children are branded eco-criminals? How long before those children report their eco-felon parents to the authorities? How long before Blade Runner euthanasia is made compulsory?

Thus “[t]he victory of the moral ideal is achieved by the same ‘immoral’ means as every other victory: force, lies, slander, injustice” (Nietzsche). While ‘Green Party’ members gorge on ‘deserved entitlements’, the remainder of humanity is intimidated by guilt. Kafkaesque, “[e]very revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy”. Meanwhile, Orwell’s proles, trapped by our Ahnenpasses, are harassed, suppressed, and worse: ‘differential rights’ for ‘differentiated citizens’, identified in a database, and policed by ID cards.

Wake up! We are sleep-walking into servitude, along a road to hell paved with Green intentions.

Ian Angell, London School of Economics