How many hours should we work?

Speaking of working less, there was a recent report that suggested that people would have to cut their working hours down to nine hours a week in order to reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid catastrophe. I don’t see how the tories or the rich can complain, after all the old saying goes: if work is so great, why don’t the rich do it?

article here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/22/working-fewer-hours-could-help-tackle-climate-crisis-study

If people did only work a few hours a week, a few things follow fairly ineluctably i think:

• there would have to be UBI (universal basic income) and it would have to be at a reasonable level
• if you have UBI, you have to control immigration very tightly otherwise the state finances become unworkable – governments *can* ‘print’ money, but not without the rest of system absorbing that money, otherwise you do get hyper-inflation and a collapse in your balance of payments (but that might happen anyway in britain, see below). this need for balance is true of any economic or physical system, no matter what your political or economic colours – inputs and outputs must roughly balance in the mid to long term. this of course is the essence of the whole CO2 problem – there are not enough sinks (trees, vegetation etc) to absorb the source (cars, planes, power plants, concrete production, cows, etc). cutting down ever more trees globally is one that would have to stop and be reversed – no sign of that as the west demands ever more palm oil and the amazon rain forest and many others are cut down for cattle purposes
• UBI strongly suggest that a system like MMT (modern monetary theory) will be needed
• virtually the whole economy would have to be utterly different, especially the housing market, which is a dysfunctional disaster. in fact it would be barely be a market at all and be more like a public service which would concentrate instead on making sure humans had a decent roof over their heads and not at the price of all other life-forms (except for cats, dogs, rats, cows and cockroaches, who do very nicely out of humans and their wasteful habits).
• people would have to find something active to do with their time otherwise almost everyone will become life-threateningly obese and the crumbling NHS will collapse to a third world state (even as it increasingly sucks staff out of the third world)
• all well-off humans (even the poor ones in the rich so-called developed economies) will have to change their way of life so that they consume much less. this will destroy the profit margins of all the privatised public services, such as energy and water, since the population will need to be urged to consume as little of them as possible
• the semi-privatised and over medicalised NHS will also need to go back into public hands for the same economic reason and concentrate on trying keep people healthy instead of patching them up for decades into their dotage.
• public transport will need to be publicly owned so that those who live in ‘unprofitable’ places – ie the countryside, can still have good mobility without continual reliance on private cars. autonomous vehicles and flexible autonomous buses will help. these are clearly both possible now.
• the NHS and just about every other major public service (except public transport) will need to be redesigned to incentivise less consumption
• jet flights will have to be massively curtailed. global tourism is a doomed business. it is also a very environmentally destructive in so many other ways.
• the shipping industry will need to stop burning bunker C – the horrible dirty crap left over from cracking petrol and (slightly less dirty) diesel.    
• humans will need to eat less meat so that the meat industry can become helpful to the natural world instead of its mortal enemy. humans are omnivores and unless we genetically modify human DNA i cannot see that changing.
• over-population and overshoot will have to become political acceptable concepts worthy of discussion – followed pretty quickly by meaningful action. the usual rubbish about just educating the women in poor countries will have to be ditched in favour of recognising some deeper and rather uncomfortable truths.
• there is more, but it is sunday, and apparently the day of rest (though not for us). i won’t touch on the negative effect that religion plays in global warming and the destruction of the planet, but suffice it say that those religions that are hostile to family planning are definitely part of the problem. oops, that’s most of them!

If all this sounds ludicrously unlikely to come to pass voluntarily (and it does to me), and meanwhile the science goes on proving more and more correct, as it largely seems to with each passing day now, then the recent report (by an australian think tank believe it or not) that said that civilisation might collapse by 2050, may even be too optimistic!
article here:  https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html

Once again I ask: is it more acceptable to say that consumerism is destroying the planet rather than capitalism? It’s just semantics as the two are at the very least totally codependent and arguably interchangeable terms. however, words can be important – think of weasel phrases like ‘tax relief’ and how GW Bush (or rather the right-wing, neoliberal think-tanks that did his thinking and deciding for him) got the world to say climate change (more emollient and potentially beneficial in some places) instead of global warming (more scary). green orgs are now suggesting we keep the CC letters but use the word catastrophe instead of change. I think that does get the idea over rather more accurately, though Russia definitely might have something to gain from climate change if Siberia becomes warm (again).

Of course, words used in semantic games can be Trojan horses: mostly in the wrong way (‘pro-life’ supporters favour the death penalty [usually for blacks and Mexicans], murder doctors doing abortions on rape victims, support the NRA, and won’t don’t anything to help babies after they are born), but sometimes Trojan-horse words can be used in a good way. So I suggest that a very small step towards the kind of change we need would be helped by utilising these two phrases whenever possible:

1. “consumerism is destroying the planet” (the C suite will soon realise that consumerism is standing in for their beloved capitalism)
2. “climate catastrophe” instead of “climate change”. the young in particular need to internalise this message as they are the ones who will be dealing with mess, not the old people who caused it. the more they realise that they have been shafted and their futures stolen from them, the better their own life chances will be. i am working on film story that encapsulates this.

It’s not just the young though, the more people in general, especially old people, that change their minds about the current economic system and vote accordingly, the higher the chances of averting catastrophe. it would be much better if this were not about left and right, but it seems to be. one should not forget that the left was very slow to understand green issues, but has now found an accommodation with such issues. the right, for the most part, is still actively fighting against recognising that the issues even exist, let alone doing anything about it. for this we have to thank a few stunningly wealthy people in america.  

I will also say that it may help if the major political parties in both north america and Europe were broken up (along with the banks, auditing companies and big tech!!) that might produce some better leaders (from a broader range of society and working environments) such that a wider range of people could vote for without having to put a peg on their noses. that includes the leader of the labour party (whom I helped become leader), btw, who I think should now stand aside and let someone more appealing to ordinary people take over. he has not stood the test of time well, imo, especially over Brexit, though there are voices saying that is hedge-sitting approach won labour the Peterborough by-election. Well, it didn’t work very well two weeks ago and Peterborough is not, I hope, representative of the whole of the UK, though it probably is in line with most of the north, much of the east coast, and rural England in general. Goodness, all that leaves is London and the university towns!