Monday, December 30, 2013

A Happy New Year – But only if we work on it

A hearty welcome to 2014 to all of our readers! The new year is traditionally a time for reflection and looking both forward and backwards. We look back on the events and changes of the past year and evaluate the positives and negatives. And we look forward to the next twelve months and express our hopes, aims, and goals for the year.




2013 was a difficult year in many parts of the world. Many western countries have governments which are insisting on 'austerity' measures that will supposedly solve the ongoing problems of the financial crisis, but which are actually leading to a society increasingly divided between rich corporations and poor, unemployed citizens. Conflicts like those in Syria and Egypt seem to be intractable, with round of round of attacks and reprisals. And the exploitation of natural resources and the relentless drive for profit rather than environmental protection and human survival continues apace.

The coming year, then, needs to see a reversal in many of these trends – and the sooner the better. Society needs to be made fairer, and the poorest citizens need much greater attention from governments to ensure they can get back on their feet. Currently, too many people are losing too much on a regular basis – their livelihoods, their loved ones, their land, their dignity – and this continual impoverishment can only eventually lead to anger and chaos.

So what do we at NRGLab and the Ana Shell Fund hope to see in 2014? What will we be working to achieve for the next twelve months? One of our primary goals is to see the extraction of fossil fuels – so damaging to communities and destructive to the environment – replaced by a focus on renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Our research and development on these topics has come on in leaps and bounds this year, and we will continue to push forward as time goes on.

We hope to see a dramatic change in priorities for governments everywhere, with a vast reduction in two of the most problematic uses of taxpayer money. Too much is being spent on conflict – both in the sense of civil conflicts like those mentioned above, but also through western intervention and the continued low-level wars being waged by the US and its allies in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan. And too much money is given in corporate subsidies – to engineering firms that make warplanes, agricultural companies that are trying to capture the food chain, security companies opening private prisons, and many more. Instead, this money should be diverted to social uses like employment schemes and healthcare, and put into new scientific and technological research that can help make human lives easier, more efficient, and more flourishing.


And we need to see a change in mindset in 2014, away from one which focuses on profit above all, and which categorizes people as 'winners' or 'losers' in the game of life depending on their net worth or the number of things they own. Instead, we should be valuing more traditional concepts like cooperation, fairness, and equality – many of today's corporate chiefs and conservative politicians will tell you that these values are not part of 'human nature', but this is simply wrong. Cooperation and mutual aid are as old as the human spirit itself, and can be seen in many of the family and community values that we support. Rediscovering these values is perhaps the most vital thing we can do to improve our own lives and the lives of others. So perhaps, in the year to come, our personal resolutions should be to ask ourselves at all times what we can be doing to promote cooperation and to help our fellow humans, no matter what race, gender, age, or class they happen to be. And with that, I wish you a happy new year and hope you'll join us for the journey.



NRGLab, Ana Shell Fund, financial crisis, environmental protection, fossil fuels, renewable energy, new year

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

A festive feeling with Gross National Happiness

Today is the 2nd day of Christmas, and much of the world will be taking a well-deserved break to be with their families and friends – and we wish a merry Christmas to any of our readers. Since it’s a day for positivity and good feelings, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about something hopeful, rather than focusing on one of the (many) problems the world is facing for once. I thought I’d take a look at a concept which has cheerfulness in its very name – Gross National Happiness.

The concept was first developed in the Himalayan nation of Bhutan – a little mountain kingdom wedged in between India and China. Bhutanese society is strongly Buddhist, and also very communal. The Bhutanese have been farmers and monks for most of their existence, and have abundant supplies of water and land to suit the needs of their small population. Generally speaking, they live a happy life. However, by modern western standards, they are extremely poor – they don’t manufacture consumer goods, they don’t have big suburban houses with two cars in the garage, there is no stock market or financial district in the capital, Thimpu. By gross domestic product (GDP), the usual measurement of progress in the modern world, the Bhutanese are doing terribly. Yet they seem to be fairly happy and content.
The idea of Gross National Happiness, or GNH, is that money is not the only relevant yardstick for measuring progress and success among societies. Instead, we can measure other attributes that make people feel like they have fulfilling lives – physical health, mental health, job satisfaction, environmental health, and levels of community interaction. If a country has a high GDP, but its people are stressed out, hate their job, and never talk to their friends or neighbours, how successful is it really? Equally, if a country has a low GDP, but the people are fit and live long, enjoy their work, and spend their days and evenings with their loved ones, are they really that poor?
This is a concept which does not have to remain unique to Bhutan. With some tweaks to account for our different ways of life, GNH could easily be imported to the rest of Asia and the other continents. Some links have already begun to be made – the ‘degrowth’ movement, which has its strongest roots in France, has argued that GDP should be replaced with GNH as a key indicator, and in the UK the New Economics Foundation has devised its own happiness ranking called the ‘happy planet index’.
Of course, GNH isn’t perfect, and won’t solve all of our problems – it’s only designed to measure levels of happiness, after all, not actively change them. To improve our ‘happiness score’, serious political and economic action will need to be taken to introduce a more fair and just society with greater levels of equality and more focus on community and family values rather than commercialism, individualism, and industry. But it does provide us with some hope that the future will not just be measured by profit forecasts and budget spreadsheets. And it allows us to see that even those who seem to be the losers in our economic system may have something to offer – while they might not be as monetarily successful as the CEOs and bankers, they might just be happier in their own way. And that thought should give us some holiday cheer. Merry Christmas everyone!

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Friday, December 20, 2013

A very Cold War in Ukraine

As the winter cold settles in over Kiev, the protests and counter-protests in Ukraine continue. One side of the country wants to move closer to European Union integration, the other side wants to be closer to the old master, Russia. The protests are becoming increasingly volatile, as pro-Russian protesters from the east have arrived in Kiev to counter those who favor the EU – while the EU supporters insist the pro-Russia people are paid agents. The country, it seems, is split down the middle.
Photo credit: www.scmp.com
And Ukraine isn’t the only one. The post-Soviet period in Eastern Europe has seen a lot of similar social movements – between those who look to the possibilities in the west, and those who think back to the more secure days behind the Iron Curtain. Even in Germany, the most prosperous of all the European nations, there is a divide between the west and the east, with many of the easterners wondering whether things have really improved that much. We see divided societies like this around the world, and not just because of Communist/capitalist splits either – Thailand is in a perpetual low-level state of civil conflict, and the UK and US are becoming divided between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, those who have prospered in lean times and those who haven’t.
I find myself wondering whether these simple divisions are really all that meaningful. We are constantly presented with two options – in the case of Ukraine, the options are move towards and eventually join the EU, or move towards and eventually become a virtual protectorate of Russia. Those in Ukraine argue along these lines, and those of us in the rest of the world who take an interest in the topic tend to do the same. But I think we miss something by framing the debate so narrowly – maybe neither of these options are the best for Ukraine.
On the one hand, reliance on Russia would provide Ukraine with a lot of natural resources at cheaper rates – particularly oil and gas, which Russia has an abundance of. This might seem like a very good idea to some of the people currently shivering in the squares of Kiev, but it’s not so good an idea for Ukraine to get dependent on an obsolete system of fossil fuels that is damaging to the environment and will take money away from the development of alternatives. On the other hand, joining the EU used to be a signal of prosperity and security, of joining a club of nations that were on the right track towards a modern future – but the last couple of years have seen things change drastically. The Eastern European members who have joined the EU have seen few benefits from it, and a financial crisis has started to spread across the continent. Being part of the EU has seen many people in places like Greece and Portugal lose everything.
So perhaps rather than following either of these paths, Ukraine has an ideal opportunity to find a ‘third way’ – something that isn’t the bureaucratic, pro-corporate mismanagement of the European Union, but is also distant from the corruption and exploitation of natural resources of Russia. Instead, Ukraine should aim to be a beacon on an increasingly troubled continent – a country which prioritizes care for its environment; care for its elderly, sick, and unemployed; and care for its neighbours. A country which has an internationalist vision of a more just society that focuses its energy on people rather than corporations, and on the poor just as much as the rich. If a vision like that emerges from the protests, it will be a bright light in the dark of the Ukrainian winter.

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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Extreme extraction

A few weeks ago, during the latest round of international climate negotiations, the Polish delegation (who were hosting the meeting) claimed that climate change might actually be a good thing – particularly because it could melt much of the ice in the so-called northwestern passage between Canada and the Arctic. This, they argued, would make international shipping easier, but would also provide better access to much of the offshore oil that is thought to lie under the Arctic Ocean.



This is obviously a ridiculous position for a nation state to hold, especially one that was supposed to be hosting an international meeting on climate change at the time. However, while Poland's idea was seen as risible, the general idea that we should continue to dig up oil from anywhere that we possibly can holds firm among many people. A large number of countries and companies have no problem with the idea of extracting oil from ever more extreme places.

This is the mindset that has led to the tar sands developments in northern Alberta, Canada. Tar sands are difficult to get out of the ground, and still take a huge amount of processing even once they've been dug up – yet we seem happy to pay the price, as long as we get more oil. It is the mindset that has led companies from Russia and the UK to start drilling in waters in the Arctic Ocean. An oil spill in these regions would be disastrous to local wildlife and incredibly difficult to clean up, but this seems to be of no matter to these corporations – indeed, Russia went as far as arresting 30 people in international waters after they protested against one of the offshore drilling rigs. It seems the power of the state is just as strongly invested as the corporations in the continuation of the oil age.

This is because both the states and the companies desire the continuation of the status quo by any means necessary. They benefit from a society which is hooked on cheap fuel – cheap fuel which supports the production necessary for a consumer society, and helps maintain the dominant position of certain people and certain countries, and the subjection of others. There are a few clear winners from this state of affairs, but there are just as many losers around the world – and I don't just mean the people who will be most affected by the climatic changes caused by burning all those fossil fuels.

The Arctic, and other remote but oil-rich regions like the tar sands area around the Athabasca river in Canada, have people living in them. These people have led simple but dignified lives in these areas for centuries, if not millennia. The Inuit, for example, have built their lives in some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth by following nature's rhythms and catching fish and mammals. This way of life is threatened by oil drilling that will destroy the natural order of ecosystems in the area. Even those of us living more conventional lives lose out from this rush for oil – we pay more and more at the gas pump just to get to and from work, we breathe in more and more pollution from the air around us, and we see more and more government money go on supporting the oil industry rather than providing essential services to people who need them.


This is what NRGLab is struggling against, particularly with our work on alternative energy. We don't believe human civilization should be so reliant on such an outdated form of energy, one which causes such destruction to the environment, and requires such damage to human lifestyles and livelihoods the world over. And we'd love to hear from you if you agree with us, and if you think you have the necessary skills to help fight back.



climate negotiations, Polish delegation, oil spill, Arctic ocean, fossil fuels, oil drilling, NRGLab

Monday, December 16, 2013

In remembrance of Nelson Mandela

Deng Xiaoping, the former President of China, was asked in the 1980s what he thought the impact of the French Revolution had been on world history. He replied “it is too soon to say”. To an extent, the same answer can be given to the question “what is the historical significance of the life of Nelson Mandela?”. As the tributes and eulogies are being written we can say for certain some of the events he inspired and facilitated, but it's really too soon for any of to fully understand the impact this man had and will have on history.

But we can say a few things. We know that he fought for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the unequal – the people with nothing. He fought against unjust and undeserved power, against powerful people who had no qualms about hanging on to their privileges through violence and repression and racism. This is the well-known Nelson Mandela, the version that will be taught in schools and repeated on news broadcasts, and to an extent this is rightly so – for he did all of these things.

However, some of the details of Mandela's life and work will be less repeated in  the media in the coming days, as they reveal a man who was not just the simple anti-racist symbol that western politicians would like him to be. Mandela, like Gandhi, understood that you don't get equality just by asking nicely. There must be the underlying threat that equality, because it is a right, will at some point be taken if it is not freely given. This explains Mandela's leadership of the armed wing of the ANC, one of the most controversial aspects of his life, and the thing that most directly led him to a prison cell on Robben Island. And Mandela knew the power of solidarity among the oppressed, and the way in which working class organization can provide that threat and that promise – he was a lifelong supporter of trade unions.

Another thing that is forgotten by the politicians that are currently celebrating him – their predecessors, the powerful people of the 1970s and 80s, hated Mandela. In the last decade-and-a-half, as an old man who had retired from active political life, he was easy to refer to as an example of how capitalism and liberal democracy can allow some level of justice and equality. But before the changes in the South African regime became inevitable in the early 1990s he was despised and abandoned by western leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – called a communist and a terrorist. Those leaders understood that Mandela posed a challenge to them, and they wanted to keep him down for as long as possible. Today's leaders are largely the same – a modern-day Mandela, championing the poor against the powerful, would no doubt spend a very long time in prison as well.


One final thing that we can definitely say about Nelson Mandela at this point – his life should be seen as an inspiration for future action, not merely as a monument to past achievements. Not everything he did was perfect, and the difficulties he faced in overturning centuries of oppression are evident in the continuing struggles of South Africa today. But ultimately, his vision was one of justice, equality, and fairness – the same things that we are fighting for, in our very different way. We hope you will join us in the journey.




Mandela, Deng Xiaoping, Gandhi, ANC, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, NRGLab, SH-box, violence, repression, racism

Thursday, December 12, 2013

WalMart – the face of inequality in America?

America’s biggest company WalMart has been in the news a lot in the past few days – but perhaps not for the reasons they’d like. First, they blamed a poor sales performance in the last quarter on America’s new healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, claiming that it was forcing people to spend money on their health rather than buying consumer goods from their stores.
A few days later it was revealed that some WalMart stores were holding canned food drives for their own employees – asking staff to donate food for their less fortunate colleagues who couldn’t afford a Thanksgiving dinner.

All of this comes a few weeks after 54 people were arrested outside a Los Angeles WalMart for protesting against the company’s incredibly low wages. The protestors were demanding a minimum wage of $25,000 a year for each employee (for context, that’s around €18,000). Instead, they were met by police, and held overnight in jail unless they could produce $5,000 bail. One protestor told reporters his current wage was only $12,000 a year to look after himself and his two children.
These three stories about one company all touch on one of the biggest issues facing America (and the rest of the world) today: the increasing gap between the economic ‘winners’ at the top of the pile, and the rapidly expanding group of ‘losers’ that hold them up. A WalMart executive never has to worry about healthcare costs or feeding their family – those things cost a fraction of their monthly income. Meanwhile, the work of actually ensuring their employees can live or afford healthcare is passed down to the charity of their own colleagues.
In fact, the ways in which huge corporations like WalMart suck money from the middle and working classes goes even deeper. WalMart’s wages are so low that the majority of its employees have to rely on food stamps and other forms of government assistance to pay their rent, feed their families, and stay healthy. The money for that assistance has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the taxes of ordinary people – essentially, WalMart’s low wages are being subsidised by ordinary people across the country.
How have we ended up in this situation (and this doesn’t just happen in the US, WalMart is simply a highly visible example)? Through a system that focuses on growth and profit at all costs, to the exclusion of the well-being of people. A system which helps the people at the top stay there, at the expense of the rest of us. A system which supports inequality because it’s good for business.
These are issues that concern us greatly at the Territory of ‘Shell’ – instead of the modern gospel of profit and individualism, we aim to promote traditional values of family, friendship and mutual aid, and to replace faceless greed with a constructive new society of equality and fair treatment for all. We rely on independent thinkers and scientists to achieve this, and on our supporters to help spread the word far and wide. We take no funding from corporations. If you think you can help us achieve our goals, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

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