No Planet B - Part Five
or, The History of the World Backwards
July 2006
1904: Congo
In Matadi, Bakuba chief Twa Mwe opens an indigenous Congolese conference in the Belgian colony by quoting words first uttered in Britian 100 years before:
TWA MWE: We don’t want to be ruled from Brussels, but all our laws are made in Brussels. We don’t mind trading with Europe but we don’t want to be part of Europe. Under the European Working Time Directive if not enough rubber is collected your village is burnt down and hostages taken until the quota - measured in kilograms, I need hardly add - is achieved. More Brussels madness!
MUSIC: KERRANG! guitar and drums
SONG: ‘A SONG FOR EUROPE’
ROB: [over intro] This one’s called ‘A Song For Europe’.
LIGHTS: OTT HEAVY METAL/GLAM ROCK MEGA-GIG. COLOUR SHIFTS FROM VERSE TO CHORUS
I'm the reason why people like you gotta die,
Do not try and leave town.
European cities are the finest in the world
Because we burnt all the other ones down.
We did the Seven Years' War,
We did the Thirty Years' War.
Ooh that was fun we agreed,
Let's do it all once more.
Ooh, but what to call the next one
Nobody was quite sure,
'Til a voice at the back of the hall called out:
Let's do the Hundred Years' War!
I do not like you. You do not like me.
Ain't it pleasing that we both agree.
We are Europeans,
The original barbarians,
But we're good for cake, canals and cheese.
If you want to come to our country,
Sorry but we've got no room.
Need the space to build a museum
To house all we took from you.
We did the Seven Years' War,
We did the Thirty Years' War.
Ooh that was fun we agreed,
Let's do the Hundred Years' War!
I do not like you. You do not like me.
Ain't it pleasing that we both agree.
We are Europeans,
The original barbarians,
But we're good for cake, canals and cheese.
We are Europeans,
The original barbarians,
But we're good for cake, canals and
Sausage, glue and shopping malls,
Rubber tyre and butter mountains,
Syphilis and lager-beer and cheese!
1859, ‘No More Oil’ Ceremony, Titusville, Pennsylvania.
An open-air ceremony is held at the capping of the world’s last ever oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Colonel Edwin L Drake, its discoverer, gives a speech before turning the valve shut on the Hydrocarbon Age.
COLONEL DRAKE: [Medicine Show style]
One-hundred and fifty years ago when environmental scientists first told us that if our species were to survive into the nineteenth century, then the verdant meadows of Greenland and the slushbelts at the poles would have to be frozen over, and that to do this we would have to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by an order of magnitude which would involve nothing less than massive social change massive social change, it quickly became clear to the peoples of the world (if not yet the governments, who we then discovered had no economic or political plan B, but were stuck in their belief of infinite economic growth) that we would need to change everything, the shape of our cities, our agriculture, our working week, abolish supermarkets, rescind corporate charters worldwide and implement The People’s No Planet B Just Transition Fiscal Gizmo. Well, they said it couldn’t be done... but we did it!
Let us now congratulate ourselves for having achieved this soft landing. Climate stabilization has been socially managed so that the transition from an oil-based society, has dovetailed perfectly with the ecological imperative to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Yes, we have been helped by Technology Collapse, which declining ability to pump oil since the Peak Oil year of 2006, but above all we must thank - and I invite you all now to raise the last 500 plastic beakers in the world - in a toast to the People’s No Planet B Just Transition Gizmo!
SONG: THERE’S NO PLANET B
Deep-sea divers in Bay Of Bengal
Found the Lost City Of Atlantis.
The Mayor emptied lobsters from his hat and said
‘Folks round here call it Bangladesh.
We placed a small classified in the Dhaka Times
And hoped the world would see,
Time Team one day
Dig up the runway
The Future jump out and shout:
‘There’s no Planet B.’
Niger Delta never knows night
Gas flares burning bright as the sun
Flaring all the day-time, flaring all the night-time,
Flaring and a-roaring the whole year long.
Nightingales when matchsticks in their eyes snap
Fall from the trees
Still singing with their last breath
A song that’s called
There’s no Planet B
No more national grid,
No more elevators,
Gonna build things small.
Tall buildings are in the past now
Small is beautiful.
If you need green beans from Kenya
You will have a long walk!
Fresh pineapple on my table
- Only,
In El Salvador.
If I wanna go for a holiday
To a colony of France,
Two weeks in le Port au Prince
- Means
Ten years at the mast!
No more national grid,
No more elevators,
Gonna build things small.
Tall buildings are in the past now
Swing that wrecking ball.
Ghobi Desert dust clouds
Blew into Tiannenmen Square
Left a rush-hour terracotta army
Coughing up and choking on the air.
Wen and Hu say this will be
The Chinese century
Where and how?
We ain’t got a venue:
There’s no Planet B.
HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE: The People’s No Planet B Just Transition Gizmo was a financial mechanism invented to make it profitable for Third World countries not to pump their oil nor log their rainforests. The People’s No Planet B Just Transition Gizmo worked like this...
Third World governments securitize oil wells and rainforests by issuing 50 year gilts discounted to half the net present value of total reserves. The bonds are issued at 0.38% interest. This means governments now only have to log a sustainable 4.38% of the annual timber yield or pump 4.38% of oil production per annum to pay the bond holders. That figure of 4.38% is the standard interest rate on 50-year gilts plus inflation of 4%. I think it’s important for a show not just to criticize but to offer practical solutions.
INTERVAL