A Gift of The God

David Lammy may think that Azerbaijan “liberated” what he is pleased to call Nagorno-Karabakh, but having destroyed, in Artsakh, one of the oldest Christian civilisations in the world, Azerbaijan is the main supplier of oil and gas to those who were actively trying to destroy the oldest of all, including the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, burning down churches and spitting on priests as a matter of religious obligation. In turn, Israel arms Azerbaijan to the teeth. As does Russia.

Yet even President Ilham Aliyev is not all bad. He has opened COP29 by denouncing the hypocrisy of the Western governments, NGOs and media whose countries bought his country’s oil and gas while hectoring it and him for taking those products to market. He called those resources “a gift of the God”. The God. Al-lāh. In the West, we hear shockingly little about the specifically Islamic perspective on these matters. Allah is also the name for God in the everyday usage of Arabic-speaking Christians, but we never hear about them, either. Not even when Palestine and Lebanon are both under attack, and not even when one of the effects of that has been to swing Michigan in the election of a President of the United States. Such nescience can only be intentional.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985.

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. Let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all he rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

Say it again, let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. West Cumbria Mining does not appear to have withdrawn its planning application, and it ought not to do so. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

President Aliyev is presumably as unsurprised, and yet as delighted, as I am at the news about Uranus and its five largest moons. If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. Yet space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect. Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.