THE DIRECTOR IS THE COMMANDER, Anna Broinowski

THE DIRECTOR IS THE COMMANDER

ANNA BROINOWSKI

Viking, 2015, 324 pages

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

In Pyongyang in 2012, wedged in a car between her North Korean Workers Party minders on a sweaty, 40 degree, trip to meet the Stalinist north’s leading film directors, actors and composers, the Sydney film-maker, Anna Broinowski, takes a surreptitious spritz of perfume, to the delight of her foreign film crew who spy the label ‘Kim’ on the bottle of cologne - ‘you have a perfume named after the Dear Leader!’.

If only they knew, writes Broinowski in The Director is the Commander, that the ‘Kim’ in the label refers to the Kim Kardashian from the West’s “trashy celebrity culture” and not to North Korea’s harsh rulers (Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and the current Kim Jong Un), they wouldn’t be laughing at all.

Broinowski is the only Western film-maker ever granted total access to the North Korean film industry which has “built one of the most successful propaganda machines on earth”.  The visit resulted from a spontaneous career decision by the employment-strapped, “between projects”, freelance documentary director who had “spent her twenties steeped in Marx and Billy Bragg” and was now campaigning against a polluting coal-seam-gas (CSG) mine in her local public park in suburban Erskineville.

An ABC producer had given Broinowski a smuggled copy of Kim Jong Il’s cinema manifesto, The Cinema and Directing, and Broinowski had an inspiration.  The Hollywood-loving Kim Jong Il, she notes, had himself made 1,400 films which were, she says, “funny – in a bad way” because of their melodramatic acting, jerky camera moves, didactic dialogue and out-of-sync dubbed sound as their North Korean casts would randomly swell into song and deliver turgid, ten-minute death speeches extolling the greatness of Kim. 

Could the techniques of the North Korean propaganda films, “whose very oddness gave them a unique appeal”, be harnessed to attract viewers to a non-conventional documentary and help stop the local CSG mine, Broinowski wonders?

Such a film might also help break off a chink or two from the wall of Western derision and hostility that surrounds all things North Korean.  Broinowski has no illusions about the human rights abuses, rigid conformity and cult of personality that pervade North Korea where even inadvertent failure to parrot the regime’s ridiculous slogans could brand someone an ‘ideological criminal’ and invite a (sometimes one-way) ticket to a ‘re-education’ gulag.

North Korea’s reputation is grim enough without being supplemented by the fabrications that Western propaganda routinely forges, says Broinowski, but is there some place between the regime’s giant propaganda façade and the West’s “beyond evil” view of North Korea where brainwashed automatons live in abject misery and eat grass to survive?

She finds some aspects of North Korean reality not unappealing - “capitalism has been turned off” and with it the visual and aural noise of cars, advertisements, plastic bags, video games, fast food, leaf-blowers and crystal meth addicts slumped in pools of their own vomit.  “This would never happen in Pyongyang” becomes her “new righteous mantra” as she ruefully reflects on such urban blights when back in Sydney.

This somewhat flippant upside, however, is spoiled by the sense of menace Broinowski experiences in the North Korean background – the constant surveillance, the censorship of what she can and can’t film, and the anonymous ‘Man in Black’ taking notes in the corner whenever Broinowski meets her North Korean colleagues for interviews and discussion of her anti-CSG mini-film, The Gardener.

She takes hope, however, from the occupational camaraderie between the Australian and North Korean film crews, and from the joking, profanity, flirting and friendliness that escapes from beneath the routinely sunny propaganda monologues delivered by her well-rehearsed interviewees.  This reinforces Broinowski’s aim to “humanise the North Koreans … and make the case for cultural diplomacy over military threats and sanctions”.

Her documentary, premiered in 2013, “reproduces the key tropes of the North Korean propaganda movie in the middle of Sydney – a suffering working class heroine, people randomly bursting into song, sentimental nature metaphors, two chaste star-crossed lovers and an evil capitalist who comes to a sticky end”.  Contained in a longer critical documentary (Aim High In Creation!) about the making of The Gardener, Broinowski hopes it will be more art than a crude parody of the North Korean movie house-style.

She realises, however, that “the combination of Kim Jong Il and coal seam gas was always going to be a stretch”, and, sharing her doubts, are some of her Sydney anti-CSG activists who were a little perplexed and made uneasy by “linking their cause to a totalitarian regime”, whilst conservative commentators gloated in the opportunity to launch into their own favourite propaganda chorus on the sins of socialism and environmentalism.

Others, however, embraced the documentary for its novelty, surrealism, humour and emotional warmth - and for its excellence as political cinema.  All these virtues are reinforced by Broinowski’s book, with its irresistibly bright and breezy tone, and its challenging probe into the nature of propaganda, both totalitarian-state and liberal-capitalist.

NEVER ENOUGH: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by MICHAEL D'ANTONIO

NEVER ENOUGH: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success

MICHAEL D’ANTONIO

St. Martin’s Press, 2015, 389 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

What will America and the world be getting from ‘President Donald Trump’ if such a frightful prospect comes to pass in 2016?  Michael D’Antonio’s biography of the Republican Party’s front-running Presidential candidate gives us some clues - denial of global warming, vaccination, marriage equality and abortion; insults and worse for religious and ethnic minorities, and for women and the disabled; and a turbo-charged American imperial power.

 

The winner, on the other hand, would be big business, Trump’s true religion.  The business mogul’s early training was one of honing a Social Darwinist survival of the most aggressive (Trump thrived during his disciplinarian schooling at a military academy) combined with the pampering that only true family riches can provide (the rain-marred trials of young Donald’s paper round would be relieved by completing it in his father’s chauffeured limousine).

 

Trump likes to dismiss those born into wealth as members of ‘the lucky sperm club’ but he glosses over his own origins in one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, which made its fortune, not through honest, hard work, but through buying real estate cheap and selling it dear, from the 19^th century Gold Rush to New York in early century boom-time and 1930s Depression.

 

A family fortune of around $100 million assisted Trump’s emergence as a high-end property developer in Manhattan in the late 1970s, as did another family inheritance - the financial cultivation of politicians and government bureaucrats to secure favourable contracts, construction permits, zoning approvals and tax concessions.

 

The Trump brand expanded to every enterprise he owned (skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, airlines, beauty pageants, golf resorts, football teams, ‘universities’) and those he licensed to use the Trump brand (board games, credit cards, mattresses, deodorants, chocolate bars, neckties, steaks, cologne).  Trump’s gold-glittering name adorned the ostentatious symbols of his personal wealth - his 300 metre yacht, his $10 million helicopter, his $100 million private jet.

 

Not every business venture was a success, but because Trump’s loans were in the billions rather than thousands, he had power over the banks and other lenders who could not afford to see Trump fail.  Unlike ordinary American borrowers who were ruined by the banks if they defaulted, Trump’s creditors advanced him new loans and let his assets alone.

 

Trump made his pile through hard-headed, Trump-friendly deals.  These were driven by Trump’s insatiable greed, massive self-belief and a firm faith in the bankability of notoriety.  Trump begins each day with a sheaf of papers covering all his press mentions, positive or negative, judging their value to his brand not by their content but by their total weight.

 

With Trump, publicity is all.  Three previous Presidential electoral feints were all designed to promote his self-help/get-rich books or his reality television show, ‘The Apprentice’, a brutal ode to competitive capitalism.  Trump’s current tilt at President is motivated by the lure of becoming CEO of America, the missing political Godhead so far in Trump’s deities of “wealth, fame and power”. 

 

The political currency of Trump’s campaign, says D’Antonio, is that of a populist ‘anti-politician’, stoking public outrage against minorities whilst lambasting ‘elites’ such as the White House ‘Establishment’ and big money political donors who pay too little tax.  This resonates loudly enough with Trump’s power base – aggrieved, economically-struggling, white, southern males - to drown out their concerns about Trump’s serial lying, refusal to apologise and evasiveness on policy detail.

 

The ascent to economic and political stardom of Trump, the self-styled “people’s billionaire”, began four decades ago, says D’Antonio, at exactly the moment when working class and corporate income differentials began to diverge exponentially and when collective trade union responses to this escalating inequality receded.  Only if individuals aspired to be like Donald Trump, and if the ‘undeserving’ were delegitimised, could you find success.

 

D’Antonio’s penchant (apart from being besotted with the mechanics of business deals) is for psychological analysis, diagnosing Trump’s obsession with himself as ‘narcissistic personality disorder’.  The real pathology, however, is the environment which fosters the Trumps of the world - the economic system of winner-take-all capitalism which rewards the privileged, greedy and ruthlessly competitive.  Donald Trump is truly the poster-child for the 1%, for whom too much is, indeed, never enough.

BORN TO RULE: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull by PADDY MANNING

BORN TO RULE: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull

PADDY MANNING

Melbourne University Press, 2015, 442 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, likes to downplay his image as a privileged, wealthy silver-tail by touting his time as a flat-dwelling young boy from a broken family (his mother abandoned the family when Turnbull was only nine) but his upbringing was not all that humble, writes the business journalist, Paddy Manning, in his biography of the former investment banker.

 

Head prefect at the elitist and pricey Sydney Grammar, law graduate from Sydney University and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Turnbull’s remarkably soft hard times ended with his property-dealing father’s death in 1982 when the 27-year-old Turnbull, the sole beneficiary of a multi-million dollar estate, inherited well north of $2 million.

 

This kitty provided a hefty leg-up for Turnbull’s stellar wealth accumulation.  As a lawyer and political journalist, he had come to the attention of Australia’s fifth richest man, the media mogul, Kerry Packer, who took Turnbull on as his chief legal counsel.  Surrounded by money and wanting his own pile, Turnbull used $50 million from Packer and one of his corporate mates to make his private mint through merchant banking.  Million dollar corporate advisory fees and commercial investments funded Turnbull’s six-figure salary and seven-figure share dividends from his bank.

 

The Prime Minister is now valued at $200 million, helped in part by investments squirrelled away in the Cayman Islands tax haven where the ability to defer tax on capital gains effectively reduces, in real terms, the cost of that tax over time.

 

Turnbull’s political career has not been quite as straightforward as his monetary one, with Turnbull playing both centre-right and centre-left over the years.  Although joining the Liberal Party in 1973 (before leaving it a decade later after unsuccessful pre-selection bids), Turnbull had disagreed, for example, with the 1975 constitutional coup against the Whitlam Labor Government, writing that the Fraser Liberal Opposition was behaving like ‘political fascists’ in their haste to block supply and cajole the Governor-General (‘this unelected ribbon-cutter’) to sack Whitlam under the ‘reserve powers’ of the (monarchist) Constitution.

 

As late as the 1990s, Turnbull made and fielded offers to join the Labor Party, which had fewer rabid monarchists and other knuckle-dragging reactionaries, before rejoining the Liberal Party in 2000 as the natural political home for the super-rich.

 

The Liberal Party was also where an easier path to personal power could be bought by a seriously-cashed-up Prime Ministerial aspirant.  In “the biggest branch stack since Federation”, writes Manning, Turnbull took on the sitting incumbent in 2004 for pre-selection as the Liberal candidate for Sydney’s plush eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth, with ring-ins by both candidates swelling the local branch membership to half the party’s total national membership.  Turnbull’s two hundred expatriate Harvard University members helped, as did $600,000 of his own money, in Turnbull becoming, as some rudely said, the ‘Member for Net Worth’.

 

With Turnbull now Prime Minister, the Liberals hope to have found their more suave, more saleable, leader than their brand-damaging predecessor, Tony Abbott, with his overt austerity program and Royalist, religious and far-right hang-ups.  Turnbull, the high-wealth, ‘small–L’, Liberal, wraps the Party’s core economic neo-liberalism and market fundamentalism in the more palatable packaging of social liberalism (marriage equality and the like).

 

As Manning relates, there is a “Good Malcolm” - clever, charming and urbane, the charity donor, the mild social liberal.  There is also a “Bad Malcolm” - arrogant, domineering, capable of black rages and verbal and physical aggression, the believer that charity begins at home (claiming taxpayer-funded travel allowance for staying in the family-owned, $800,000 Canberra house when parliament is sitting).

 

When it comes to the class war, however, there is only the one Malcolm, the corporate Malcolm.  As Manning writes, “there is nothing in Turnbull’s professional experience, or his rarefied social circle, that has prepared him to understand the problems faced by millions of ordinary workers”.

 

According to elementary political science, the role of the Liberal Party of Australia is to represent, protect and enhance corporate class interests.  Long before the Republic campaigner hypocritically pledged ‘true allegiance to Her Majesty’ at his ceremonial swearing-in as Prime Minister, Turnbull had pledged life-long loyalty to Australian capitalism.

 

The political trick for Turnbull is to gain buy-in to the Liberal Party’s narrow class role from those who don’t inherit millions, live in mansions or invest in tax havens.  The Abbott clunker may been traded in for the smoother Turnbull model but the class interests represented, and opposed, by both leaders remain the same.

FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten's Path to Power DAVID MARR

FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten’s Path to Power

DAVID MARR
Quarterly Essay No. 59, Black Inc., 2015

Review by Phil Shannon

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish that man would go away…….

This old and highly serviceable piece of doggerel seems almost custom-made for Australian Labor Party leader, Bill Shorten.  Even the usually perceptive journalist, David Marr, in his latest political profile for Quarterly Essay, is defeated by the indistinct and bland Shorten who, in public opinion polls, trails behind ‘Someone Else’ as preferred leader of the Labor Opposition.

Personable and capable, but not memorable, is the assessment, says Marr, of Shorten’s  time at the wealthy Catholic Xavier College, which specialises in processing Melbourne’s future judges and surgeons but which took on the working class grandson of union men.  An effective factional engineer, but politically uninspiring, was Shorten’s hallmark at Monash University in the early 1980s as a “star of the Labor Right” in the ALP Club.

Subsequent factional powerplays by this “tough backroom fighter” were the means to fulfilling Shorten’s undisguised personal ambition – first as National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, then as Leader of the Opposition (a Labor Caucus choice, with 86 of those parliamentarians having as much say as 30,000 rank-and-file party members), and finally with the Prime Ministership in his sights.

Marr does not think Shorten will get the top job.  Personally congenial, and not without a certain small-room persuasiveness (“his best work is done face to face”), Shorten lacks the qualities to move a nation.  He is numbingly wooden and formulaic as a public agitator.  He is personally and politically close to big business - his first marriage was to a wealthy Liberal blue-blood, whilst Business Review Weekly once declared that Shorten (Master of Business Administration, Melbourne Uni) would make a fine corporate chief executive.  He is uncritically pro-US and conventional on national security and defence (Shorten was a member of the University Regiment at Monash).

He robotically intones the hollowed-out stock ALP brand identifiers of “jobs, education and health” but, says Marr, “he stands for nothing brave”.  He has no galvanising political philosophy.  He is distrusted in his own party and within the electorate as a “plotter who brought down two ALP leaders to clear his own way to power”, a “shape-shifter” always accompanied by “so many new best friends” in his self-advancement crusade.  These negatives were not debilitating whilst Shorten was pitted against the hard-right Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, but his substance is now exposed to more scrutiny following Abbott’s replacement (which post-dates Marr’s essay).

The electorate, says Marr, finds Shorten “hard to read”.  So does Marr.  Shorten slips through the fingers of Marr, who, in desperation for biographical material, resorts to an analysis of Shorten’s mirthless ‘zingers’.  Marr’s difficulties are partly due to Shorten’s sheer vapidness but also because of Marr’s failure to situate Shorten as a symptom of Labor’s fundamental political bankruptcy.

Whilst Marr delves into the grungy workings under the hood of the Labor machine, he doesn’t address just where Labor is headed or why.  For whether Shorten, the master factional mechanic, or any of the nominally ‘Left’, ‘Right’ or ‘Centre’ drivers is at the wheel, the Labor jalopy sputters along the same road to nowhere, dispensing, at best, modest, piecemeal and utterly inadequate reform whilst dedicated to its larger goal of maintaining the wealth and power of the corporate class.

Nevertheless, Marr is spot on in his observation that Shorten “has no radical designs, no great plans for reform” and “represents nil challenge to capitalism”.  The same, however, applies for Labor as a broader political entity.  The party might be running on (Mr.) Empty at the moment but even when tanked up, the party’s business-friendly and pro-capitalist political design makes it a complete lemon.

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH: The Life of Tom Keneally
STEPHANY EVANS STEGGALL
Nero, 2015, 408 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In 1960, the trainee priest, Thomas Keneally, abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney’s North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than Medieval Latin.  His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Dr. Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing, which was both Keneally’s attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the ‘madness and melancholia’ of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him from six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its ‘anti-human moral code’.

The son of Irish grandparents, Keneally topped the state in English in 1951, his secondary school aptitude for the written word only reviving after his abortive religious vocational training.  He found a popular audience because of his powers of characterisation, wit and story-telling, and for his focus, through the vehicle of the historical novel, on the great moral choices faced by humanity.

Keneally’s academic critics were less universally won over, debating whether the ‘fibro’ boy from the western suburbs was a legitimate contender for the national literary pantheon.  Their doubts were not without some foundation as Keneally, with a mortgage and a young family to provide for, adopted a self-imposed income-generating regime of an annual novel (he has so far notched up 33 published novels in 49 years) which has sometimes been at the expense of patient textual polishing.

Keneally’s financial pressures significantly abated thanks to Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg, who turned Keneally’s Booker-winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, into a memorable, and lucrative, film (Schindler’s List) about the real-life German industrialist and conflicted Nazi-collaborator, Oskar Schindler, who saved over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories in the eye of the Holocaust.

Keneally, who has always aimed to live to write, no longer needs to write to live.  In 2015, he was able to request that the $50,000 prize money that came with an Australia Council’s Lifetime Award be given instead to a mid-career writer but he continues to write at Stakhanovite pace because that is who he is.

Politically, Keneally is a moderate, centre-left social democrat.  He is a member of the Australian Labor Party and is interested in but has spurned Marxism for being a “theological” belief system, a Cold War legacy of his Catholic anti-communism which saw his early stories depict Australian communism as brutal, full of fear, deception and alcoholic Leninist wife-beaters.

A republican (Keneally was the first Chair of the Australian Republican Movement in 1990), he has refused a Royal-granted Commander of the British Empire title but, as an Australian nationalist, has accepted a locally-ordained Order of Australia. 

Keneally has, however, an undimmed commitment to social justice.  His novel on the anti-Semitic genocide illustrates Keneally’s dedication to social justice.  He regarded the Holocaust as the most extreme example of ‘race or group hate’, all targets of which (Indigenous Australians, refugees) he has outspokenly stood up for.

Unfortunately, the origins and trajectory of Keneally’s political and social values, and how they inform his novels, are underdeveloped by Steggall whose biography is heavily skewed towards the how rather than the why of Keneally’s art.  There is a rather pedestrian parade of the agents, contracts, advances, royalties and other sinews of the book publishing industry, vital matters to the working writer from Homebush, but which are so much commercial gristle crowding out the more literary meat in Steggall’s biographical dish.

Nevertheless, Steggall is able to demonstrate that Keneally (whose bulging literary locker sometimes sacrifices quality to quantity) “approaches greatness” and well-deserves his artistic stature.  For an absorbing story fluently-told, Keneally usually delivers, as he does for his resilient conviction that, in a world darkened and saddened by far too much tragedy, even the most flawed can find a certain moral heroism.

DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics

DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics
LARRY WRITER
Allen&Unwin, 2015, 338 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

There were none so brave in the Australian team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 as Werner Seelenbinder, a wrestler, was in Germany’s team, says Larry Writer in Dangerous Games, his history of the 1936 Australian Olympians.  Seelenbinder was a communist, one who had miraculously slipped through the Nazi net, who planned to protest Nazism on the world stage, right in front of Hitler (the Games’ official patron), from the victory podium should he win a medal.  He finished in fourth place, however, narrowly missing his chance.  During the war, Seelenbinder joined an underground anti-Nazi resistance group which aimed to infiltrate and destroy the Nazi Party from within.  He was discovered, tortured and beheaded.

To the Australian athletes, however, the Olympics was their once-in-a-lifetime dream and they would not let reality interfere.  Reality like the first Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen (only 35 kilometres north of Berlin), opening just one month before the Games, or German troops being despatched to support General Franco in Spain just two weeks before the Opening Ceremony.  Or reality like Nazi Germany’s massive re-armament, and racial persecution and discrimination including the banning of German Jews from the Olympics.

‘I put my blinkers on’, recalled one Australian athlete, adding that ‘we allowed ourselves to be used as Nazi propaganda pawns’.  ‘Of course we knew’ about fascist outrages, said another, but the Australian athletes preferred not to act on their knowledge as they rejected international calls for a boycott of the Nazi Olympics and rebuffed the messages smuggled into the Athletes’ Village by anti-Nazi groups pleading for the athletes to protest fascism.

The only Australian competitor to withdraw, fearing what may happen to him as a Jew in Nazi Germany, was the boxer, Harry Cohen, a decision made easier for him by, or prompting (he was never entirely clear), his move to turn professional.

With athlete backing, and the support of Australian politicians who saw fascism as a political prophylactic against socialism, the Berlin Olympics went on to become a propaganda showpiece for the Nazi regime.  Hitler, who had reluctantly inherited the 1931-awarded Games from Germany’s pre-fascist social-democratic government, was cool on sports generally, and the Olympics in particular, calling them a ‘Jewish-nigger-fest’, but he had come to embrace them.

They would allow a demonstration of ‘Aryan supremacy’ on the sports field, primed by the ‘shamateurism’ of under-the-table regime, corporate and private funding of Germany’s ‘amateur’ athletes.  They would facilitate the Nazi regime’s deception of  their foreign critics through suspending overt displays of anti-Semitism (temporarily removing signs such as ‘Dogs and Jews not allowed here’), keeping convict and camp labour out of sight, and reprieving prostitution, gay bars and American jazz for the visitors.  The Games would offer the prospect of uniting, or intimidating, the German population through swastika-saturated nationalism and patriotic pageantry.

The Australian team did not disrupt their Nazi hosts’ plans, their one act of defiance being to refuse to comply with their Nazi attaché’s strong suggestion that they give the straight-arm Nazi salute to Hitler during the national teams’ parade at the Opening Ceremony.  The Nazi salute was one endorsement too far of Nazism for the Australian athletes who had become unsettled by the martial atmosphere surrounding the Games, the nightly war games and the menace of Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs.

For some athletes after the Games, their unease solidified into disillusionment with the Olympics altogether for their rampant nationalism, crass commercialism and intrinsic politicisation.  The swimmer, Evelyn de Lacy, boycotted the official dinner for pre-war Olympians at New South Wales Parliament House during the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Larry Writer unfortunately doesn’t live up to his surname.  His book grinds along largely in orthodox sports journalism gear whilst his industrious emphasis on the athletic narrative relegates the political drama, and, more pointedly, the political and moral failure of Australian athletics, to a subordinate marring of the plucky Australian sporting legend.  Clutching at the old lie that ‘sport is above politics’, Australia’s ‘apolitical’ 1936 Olympians wound up as green-and-gold propaganda performers in the Nazi darkness.

ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE Tim Flannery

ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
TIM FLANNERY
Text Publishing, 2015, 245 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

The Australian scientist, Tim Flannery, became fascinated with proposals to extract excess CO₂ from the atmosphere and oceans when the billionaire aeronautics carbon-polluter, Richard Branson, in response to Flannery’s first book on climate change (The Weather Makers), invited Flannery to be a judge on Branson’s £25 million Virgin Earth Challenge prize for methods of carbon withdrawal and storage.

Amongst the entrants, writes Flannery in his latest book, Atmosphere of Hope, he found a dozen which could become “indispensable tools for our survival”.  He calls these the ‘Third Way’ of tackling global warming, superior to adaptation (living with the global pathologies of a warmed world) and safer than geo-engineering to reflect solar radiation back into space (a dangerous ‘cure’ potentially worse than the disease).

Flannery believes that some climate engineering techniques are more acceptable because they simply accelerate natural processes of atmospheric and hydrological carbon management.  Using photosynthesis to grow, for example, vegetation dines on CO₂  and stores the waste carbon as plant matter but this process is only 1% efficient.  We can force nature to do better, believes Flannery, by dramatically boosting the pace of the natural carbon cycle and storing the extracted carbon in biological (forest, seaweed, biochar) form or in synthetic products, or by sequestering it through deep or frigid (South Pole) burial.

‘Third Way’ techniques range from the unobjectionable (afforestation and wetlands reclamation) to the more problematic such as ocean fertilisation, chemically-enhanced weathering of rocks, production of carbon-negative cement and plastics, and carbon capture which is not designed simply to prolong the life of fossil fuels.

Flannery is excited by the technical possibilities and challenges of his ‘Third Way’ carbon-suckers, and his desperate desire to resurrect a habitable world is genuinely passionate, but his ‘Third Way’ project is unconvincing and, in the end, self-defeating.

To be fair to Flannery, he does temper his enthusiasm with an acknowledgement of the problems that beset ‘Third Way’ climate salvation (scientific complexity, environmental risk, intimidating cost, problems of scale, decades-long lead-times, etc.) but he argues that these issues necessitate embarking on the ‘Third Way’ now to overcome such difficulties in time to avoid climate catastrophe.

This approach, however, detracts attention and resources from the urgency for economic and political campaigning to tackle global warming and its fossil fuel industry culprits now.  Although Flannery argues that ‘Third Way’ de-carbonisation must not be used as an excuse for the failure to cut fossil fuel emissions, his Pollyanna view of a capitalism-friendly techno-fix to bypass political failure on climate change is most likely to contribute to the global warming inertia of business-as-usual, no matter how bad the climate gets.

Human ingenuity, coupled with market mechanisms such as carbon pricing and trading, Flannery believes, will triumph through technological innovation propelling market economics to a greener future by making renewable energy cheaper and fossil fuels (and uranium) more expensive to energy capitalists.  This plan to skirt the major roadblock of the economic power and political influence of fossil fuel interests through science, green entrepreneurship and the market is doomed to be, at best, too gradual and ineffectual, or, at worst, counter-productive.

By not scaring the sacrosanct GDP horses, by not challenging the capitalist god of economic growth, Flannery obscures the link between global warming and the capitalist economic system that has given rise to it, a link which, as Naomi Klein has argued, is grasped by smokestack-hugging political conservatives better than most, and which underlies their climate denialism and their fierce and extremely well-funded resistance.

Flannery’s ‘Third Way’ is the grand, and risky, illusion of geo-engineering, albeit shorn of its dangerously wilder fantasies, that will keep capitalism humming all the way up to environmental Armageddon.  The ‘Third Way’ is predicated on the inviolability of economic growth with its imperative of making more profits by selling more stuff to more people.  Flannery’s future of low-carbon, ‘Third Way’ cement and plastics and electric cars would colonise ever more of the biosphere in a victory for the capitalist growth principle over a liveable planet.