Ruth rap

Flip flop.
Good cop /
bad cop.
Yoon strop,
then photo op
with handy prop.

Smiley face /
serious face:
two faced
without grace,
she sets the pace
in the tight race
for second place,

and her appeal
on the newsreel?
She keeps it real
with nerves of steel
and a square deal
for those who feel
they've had enough
of indy guff
from those nat scruffs.

She may talk tough
but it's all bluff,
kettles and pots
tied up in knots,
about the most black,
if they're not Scots
who hear her thoughts
and take the flack.
Then she back tracks.
If she can spot
who call the shots
for whom she's got
the white hot hots,
then she flip flops
to suit their plots,
the starts and stops,
the contradictions,
gross derelictions,
the lies and fictions
of tory politicians.

Her maledictions
without conviction
are reserved for us,
we damn treasonous,
superfluous, rebellious,
ungrateful Jocks,
to throw up road blocks
and stop the clocks
and claim the orthodox
is a paradox.

This Hypocrisaurus Rex
keeps cheeky chippy Jocks
in check with toxic bollocks.
You don't need specs
to see through this act.
Just check the facts,
the decks they've stacked,
the dice they've loaded,
to indefinitely protract
a Union that's outmoded,
and to forcibly enact
a Brexit we don't back,
and that's the end
of this Ruth rap.

Anamnesis

Is memory like knowing things?
Plato thought this was impossible
because it is not enough to learn,
you must check it against a register
of what there is to know,
to expect the unexpected.
It's like arriving at some random destination,
some isolated hotel in the middle of a desert,
to find you already have a reservation,
made in your name by some shadow self,
or like digging a random hole to discover
a treasure map that marks its own location.
Is memory the same? Is it a kind of knowledge
of what we have not yet forgotten,
subject to the shadow of that paradox,
because how do we know what we have forgotten
without remembering it? 
Is it a similar sort of discovery?
Are all memories therefore incomplete,
unfinished journeys, aimless peregrinations,
across an endless, featureless wasteland,
their significance never truly understood
beyond the stories, works in progress, 
with which we weave them together
and hold them in common,
no more or less than travellers' tales
told around a camp fire
built where our paths cross,
to shed a little light and warmth,
shared, and raised against the darkness
through which must embark alone once more
once the story so far has been told,
to discover where we are going next,
making new maps as we go
to cast upon the next camp fire,
because the flames are the only edge
to which our feet can take us? 

Cuff links

There was an election today.
I wore my special voting cuff links,
the small round black ones,
suitable to wear with formal evening attire,
because elections here are black tie affairs,
and voting is very formal and prestigious,
an elegant evening reception. "Why hello,"
I remark to my neighbour, "aren't the booths
and their various accoutrements appointed
in the most delightful manner this year?"
There is a real sense of democratic occasion,
a promenade of civic pride: "democracy
- the most exclusive club in town,
except everyone's invited". You get
a complimentary prosecco after you cast your vote.
Hors d'oeuvre are provided in the gym hall,
where tea is served in bone china cups and saucers,
and sipped, pinkies out, between pleasantries.
People are wearing silk scarves and satin lapels.
And oh! Everyone is so polite! The civility!
"I voted Nazi, what about you?"
"Oh, it's communist for me, all the way."
"You rogue." And eventually
the conversation turns to the weather.

I thought my heart was a mirror

I thought my heart was a lens.
I saw the world the way it looked
after it had passed through it,
and maybe my heart is a lens,
but now I know
that's not what the world looks like,
not really, and see at last
my fears and grief and aching needs
the way they might seem to others
in all the pain and joy and confusion
I previously overlooked.

I thought my heart was a mirror
and looked upon the world in it,
and maybe my heart is a mirror,
but now I know
that's not what the world looks like,
not really, and see at last
cracks begin to radiate through
this oppressive monolith
in whose shadow I once crouched
as though it was the world entire.

In amnesiam

The parade passes the monument:
they acknowledge the heroes,
lay down the memorial wreathes,
and after a decent interval
the crowds quietly disperse.

I linger for a while
among the cut flowers
and in death's dark bower
one steel grey November day
think on those they forget,
remember those never remembered,
think about their inglorious guilt,
their egregious acts and omissions,
cowardice, desertion, open atrocities
or moments of private hesitation precipitating worse 

which they could have prevented, had they acted,

when fear or weakness or exhaustion
stole them from our high regard.

Their ghosts wait for us in oblivion
where we will join them eventually
once our own victories wilt,
and borders for which we fought
are redrawn or abolished or forgotten,
and whatever cause we won that day
is finally lost to obscurity.

Our temporary triumphs
were good while they lasted,
but we must take our place
beside the monsters and the cannibals
in the shadows at last.

I think about the unknown and dismembered:
unremarkable, unremembered boys without posterity,
silently removed in pieces from the field,
without the utterance of a single word, then or now,
whose anonymous body parts my imagination reassembles
as cowards and traitors, to stumble and crawl
through my muddy mind in disorder.

Have I lived a good life?
Have I been a good man?

The answer rides a butterfly through this cemetery,
rises out of reach, flies along barbed wire borders
where ricochets sing, through wastelands
where every lost cause is still contested
and the mouth of no cannon can announce
on whose side of the border
it finally settles.

Four nil

The look of joy on a boy's face:
he's seven years old, perhaps eight,
transcendent, high up on his dad's shoulders,
held aloft in a crowd of people older then him,
the night his team answered three goals scored
in the first leg with the second leg's four.
He's high so that he can see over their heads,
and he sees past the crowd's riotous ecstasy,
past the players celebrating on the pitch,
past the final reached against the odds,
past all of it, all the way to the memory
of one night, at Anfield, with his dad.

"Are we the bad guys?"

Some of you may remember the Mitchell and Webb sketch in which two German SS soldiers in the Second World War on the Eastern Front, awaiting a Red Army assault, pause during the triumphalist rhetoric with which they are bolstering their morale, to reflect more deeply on the situation in which they find themselves. "Are we the baddies?" they ask. 

Well, we are currently engaged in a war, and we are unequivocally the bad guys. The full impact of global warming is not manifested in surface air temperatures because 90% of the warming is absorbed by the oceans. The energy absorbed by the oceans, as indicated by the rate of increase in sea temperatures over the last 150 years, is equivalent to the detonation of 1.5 Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs a second (in fact the figure rises if you calculate it over a shorter, more recent time period). That's over a megaton of yield every minute. The largest nuclear detonation ever was the Tsar Bomb. We're dropping the equivalent of about 40 of them every day due to climate change. 

People in the '50s were anxious about a Third World War starting by accident. It turns out we have been accidentally waging it ourselves the entire time without even realising it, except our chosen enemy has not been the Soviet Union, but our shared home, the planet Earth itself.

If there were no oceans to absorb all this energy, much of the Earth would already have been reduced to a barren wasteland by us, with average air surface temperatures over 20 Celsius degrees higher than they currently are, and large areas of the Earth completely uninhabitable.

We have been spared this post-apocalyptic scenario - so far - only by the remarkable good fortune of having such extensive bodies of water on our planet and the fact that the specific heat capacity of water, relating the amount of heat it can absorb to the consequent rise in temperature, is unusually high. We have in effect done the equivalent of subjecting the Earth to a sustained thermonuclear bombardment over a number of decades, and the vast majority of the damage has been absorbed by the oceans.

So, although we sometimes describe the urgency with which we must address the climate emergency in terms of going on a "war footing" (I have done so myself in my article "banking on the energy transition"), and although that sort of rhetoric is possibly legitimate in terms of motivating people to take urgent action, which we must, we should probably be talking in terms of making peace rather than war, given we are already at war. 

We are involved in a war we cannot win. Wars are fought between men to gain access to resources and opportunities. But humanity, uniquely among animals, has already occupied each available habitat the planet has to offer. Humanity already has every possible opportunity to exploit them, and is able to consume any and all resources as soon the proliferating requirements of our constantly advancing technology identify them as such. There is nowhere left to which we can export our economic crises, no wars and conquests that we can embark upon that can postpone any longer the processes of social collapse precipitated by the decay of value represented by unsustainable economic activities (as I describe in "the wealth of nations"), and no unspoiled paradises left which we can pillage and ruin to try to offset the imbalances introduced by the devastation of our own ecosystems. There is nowhere left to run to escape the consequences of our actions.   

We must make peace with nature, because in destroying nature we destroy ourselves. We need to learn to live with nature. By behaving like colonists and conquerors we have turned ourselves into refugees. Our manifest destiny has turned into the hand of fate. Not just plants and animals and habitats and ecosystems, but we too are collateral damage in this war we fight ultimately on ourselves. 

And a peace treaty with the planet is urgent because we are on the brink of unleashing the ultimate, decisive weapon, in this war we cannot win: methanocalypse, an irreversible feedback mechanism, as discussed in my article.

The terms of this peace treaty are remarkably simple. We need to install at least ten terawatts of new renewable energy capacity in the next ten years. We need a process of rewilding that requires the planting of at least one trillion trees over a similar timescale. We need electrification and sector coupling to ensure energy generated sustainably by renewables penetrates to all corners of our economies. We need to develop environmental intelligence and an awareness of the consequences of our behaviours. We need to work with instead of against nature. We must be allies instead of antagonists. 

And we need people to understand that this will not cost anything! It will instead release a massive peace dividend. "Every dollar spent in transforming the global energy system provides payoff of at least USD 3 and potentially more than USD 7" (IRENA).

The war we have been waging has not been prosecuted for free. We have simply deferred the costs, which are staggering and are now due if we continue. Assets will become stranded, not because of any decisions we make, not due to any policy positions, but because the environmental consequences of our actions will inevitably be factored into the cost of our assets. The value of assets stranded by environmental degradation dwarves the value of those stranded by tackling it.

The stranding of assets by the environmental consequences of business as usual will precipitate a Minsky moment, when debt can no longer be leveraged, as the value of everything on which it is secured crashes. This is not just any financial bubble. This doesn't just pertain to tulips or dot com properties or the South Seas. This affects things for which you have to buy insurance or which rely on something that is insured for the preservation of their value, which is to say, this affects everything! 

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has remarked that avoiding this requires a "massive reallocation of capital". In order to future-proof your wealth, you must make it work for you in sustainable ways. Perhaps what is required is to make green energy bonds for offshore wind power as attractive as offshore tax havens for investors and fund managers. Additionally, we could innovate by developing financial instruments based around short selling green energy due to its low incremental cost (due to zero fuel costs), to unlock the initial capital expenditure required. Securing these low incremental costs would also drive improvements in project efficiency and reliability. Peace is a win-win scenario in a war in which everyone loses. 

"To meet global climate objectives, the deployment of renewables must increase at least six-fold compared to current government plans" (Francesco La Camera). This corresponds to the figure of roughly ten terawatts in ten years I stated earlier. Globally, installed renewable energy capacity increased by 0.17TW least year to 2.35TW (IRENA).

Clearly a six-fold increase cannot be achieved overnight. If we assume the installation rate of new capacity is ramped up from 0.17TW per annum over a five year period to a rate that will deliver over ten terawatts in a ten year period, it needs to increase by approximately 40% per annum compounded over five years to about 1.8TW per annum by 2025, a ten-fold increase. 

We have been living on borrowed time, and that borrowed time has just run out. We are engaged in an unwinnable war on nature whose costs we can defer no longer. It's time to get real. It's time to work with and not against nature. It's time to make peace, carve out those costs and earn our peace dividend. 

Royal baby

If only penguins were royal babies.
If only whales were royal babies.
If only insects were royal babies.
If only birds were royal babies.
If only we were royal babies.
If only everything as rare
and beautiful and precious and endangered
as a royal baby was a royal baby
If only the Earth was a royal baby.

The ark

God said unto Noah:
"Of every clean beast
thou shalt take to thee by sevens,
the male and his female:
and of beasts that are not clean
by two, the male and his female."

And there went in two and two
unto Noah into the ark,
the male and the female,
as God had commanded.
They went in unto Noah into the ark,
two and two of all flesh,
wherein is the breath of life.

Except this new ark made by man,
this latter day ark of extinctions
which we have prepared for the beasts,
cannot contain the breath of life.

The animals now retreat back to the ark
that saved them once, their numbers dwindling,
all abundance and fruitfulness depleted,
until only two of each remain, walking backwards,
rewinding themselves into the ark,

except this is a new ark, made of steel,
a tin pot ark, not a product of necessity,
an ark that makes its own emergency,
its dimensions not reckoned in cubits
but on balance sheets and annual statements,
an ark of many mansions,
in which each beast may find its place:
an abattoir built on land we cleared of forest
where we once innocently hunted;
a syringe another, to inseminate livestock
in a parody of what they once did two by two
before we divided those we could tame
from those we couldn't, with extinction,

an ark of extinctions that we have made,
not because of any divine command,
not to escape a fate ordained for others,
but to go back and join those others,
to exercise our free will and defy God,
to insult Him by rejecting our salvation,
to soil the rainbow with air pollution
and tell Him we don't care about his promise,
to tell him we are going to go back
to join those who drowned,

we are going to summon the waters ourselves,
from every glacier,
from behind every rampart of ice
raised against the sea in Greenland and Antartica,
we are going to change the climate,
and we will get back into the ark
and go back to perish with the wicked
because God made a mistake saving us,
and it's a mistake we are going to fix.