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Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)
00:44:38
An interview with Laurie Parsons
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The New Books Network.
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Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
You're listening to New Books in Geography, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm your host for today, Stentor Danielson from the Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment at Slippery Rock University Today I'll be talking to Laurie Parsons, author of Carbon How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown, published this year by Manchester University Press. Dr. Parsons, welcome to the show.
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Laurie Parsons
Hello. Great to be here.
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Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
To start off, why don't you tell our listeners a bit about your background and how you came to write this book?
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Laurie Parsons
Yes, thanks very much. So I am an academic based in London at Royal Holloway University of London. But my story of writing this book really goes back a long, a lot longer than that. This is a book which brings together learnings and stories and findings from back through 15 years of work, particularly, but not exclusively in Cambodia, where I spent many years living and working on and off since about 2008. And since that time in 2008 when I first began to look at environment migration linkages and the way that the environment was linked to labor conditions, I've been fascinated by the intersection of the global economy and the environmental pressures that workers face, especially in the global South. With a country like Cambodia, which is a very export oriented kind of country, you really get a sense of how important the global factory as a repository for the goods made by these kind of countries is to the economy and society of the people. Many of countries like Cambodia, which is by no means unique, is actually extremely typical in many ways. Countries like Cambodia are set up with this exporting role in this global system of production at the center of everything. And so when you begin to look at these environmental issues that we discuss in the book and which are so much on people's minds today as climate change really comes to the forefront of news and policy agendas, it's impossible when you're in the field and talking to people and kind of live in these realities, not to understand that intersection of the global factory, the global productive relations, and those environmental pressures. And yet it's not really, in my view, enough of the global conversation. So what this book is set up to do and what my work has done over the last 15 years is really to center those two issues as a kind of single nexus of inquiry. The idea that we are facing climate change, we're also facing economic development and globalization of our lives. And these two things are mutually entangled processes. And that's, that's really the theme that I'm bringing out in the book. And I hope that helps to develop for many people.
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Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
All right, so to get the basics out of the way, what is carbon colonialism?
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Laurie Parsons
Right. Yes, very good question. So carbon colonialism is a phrase that's been used with increasing regularity in recent years. It's One which has come up in various contexts. For example, one of the most common contexts in recent years has been the practice of carbon offsets. That's where a company that produces a lot of carbon dioxide emissions purchases or purchases credits in an area of carbon negative land, for example, a forest concession. And so in that area, they essentially purchase the carbon negativity of a certain amount of trees, for example, and then use that to offset against the excess carbon that they produce in their factories. And that supposedly creates a kind of carbon neutrality. It's an increasing practice. It's become very profitable in recent years. And that's been called carbon colonialism. It of course refers to the fact that you're taking up land, most prominently in the global south, in order to pay for the excess carbon emissions of predominantly global northern industries or global southern industries which are producing for the global North. Now, this is a very interesting and important area of work. And something, as I said, the term applied to this by no means the only way that that phrase has been employed. So it's also been applied to offsets. So offsets are one of the ways in which this phrase has been deployed, but it's also been used in other ways. For example, carbon outsourcing, which is where the very common practice in the global economy today, which is to produce goods for another country, is essentially used as a way to get carbon off the books of a given nation, particularly wealthier nations like the UK or indeed the us. So that's simply where you have a good that you need, like a T shirt or, for example, an electronic device, and it gets made overseas, as most things these days are in many countries, and then the carbon associated with that device or that good stays in the country of its production, rather than moving to the country where that good is ultimately used. So that's called carbon outsourcing. It's one of the key ways in which carbon gets kind of distributed around the global economy. If someone say unfairly, and that's been called carbon colonialism as well. And then of course, you'd have other ways, such as the carbon capture and storage, which is the kind of. Which is simply the idea that you can suck the carbon out of the air and kind of post hoc deal with the amount of excess carbon around the planet. This has been called carbon colonialism purely for the fact that it legitimates the idea of the kind of carbon relations that we are embedded in, and that this in fact forces us not to confront the system which has evolved around the production of these gases, but rather legitimate, allows it to persist. There's all kinds of other ways in which it's been used have been used domestically. For example, the ways of urban sustainability of large tracts of rural land in order to facilitate the carbon cost of very carbon intensive industry in urban areas. It's also been used to describe the way in which swithin crackdowns, that's slash and burn agriculture, which is very traditional and in some mines, quite sustainable. In parts of the Amazon, for example, ways in which a lot of carbon legislation has been used to crack down on those traditional communities rather than being used to tackle bigger industries. It's also been used not just in relation to carbon, but also pollution. There's a very good book called Pollution is Colonialism last year, called by Max Boiron, who highlighted the way in which pollution thresholds, for example, thresholds of the acceptable amount of plastic in a river or being ejected into the sea or in a particular area of water. This, she says, is colonial in the sense that it is something that legitimates pollution, even if the local communities might not agree that that is something that is acceptable. For example, it's a legitimate level of pollution, even if you can pick it out of the gills of fish. So we've got six examples, amongst others, really, of the ways in which this term carbon colonialism has been used in recent years. One of the things that this book tries to do is to bring all of those together and say these are not separate processes. These are not disconnected, discrete ways of looking at these problems. They're not separate problems. Actually, what we're looking at here is an increasing awareness of the ways in which our global economy has ultimately led us to this point. The relations of production around the world which structure environmental degradation and environmental risk. So this book is really an attempt to bring all of that together to make sense of these various historical and economic inequalities which shape the distribution of environmental risk around the world today. Okay.
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Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
And given that kind of, you know, big picture structural viewpoint that you've got going on here, I imagine our listeners probably have an idea where you're going to come down on this. A common question of whether individual consumer behavior is an important strategy for dealing with climate change and other big environmental problems.
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Laurie Parsons
Yeah, well, that's a very important point you raise. It's really important, and especially because it's where so many people who have genuinely laudable and active attitudes towards dealing with environmental problems place their efforts. They direct the majority of their efforts towards this idea of tackling environmental breakdown through sustainable consumption. And actually the reason for that is that it's the dominant paradigm in our society today. What do we do about environmental breakdown? What do we do about climate change? We have to consume our way out of it. If we all just do that little bit more, if we all just think that little bit more carefully when we come to fill our shopping baskets, the idea is that we can ultimately address these crises as they shape our world today. And despite its dominance, and despite my genuine reticence to completely torpedo this idea because so much effort by good people goes into it, I really think ultimately this is a red herring which does a lot more harm than good. This is, of course, a controversial thing to say because there are many hugely environmentally conscious and concerned people who absolutely hold up sustainable consumption as vital to our climate, our climate efforts. Nonetheless, the key thing that makes me ultimately skeptical of the power of consumers to tackle the issues that we face in our climate, our global economy of climate breakdown, is the lack of visibility that consumers ultimately have over the origins of the products that they consume. We live today in a world in which green credentials, green claims, sustainability claims are not just common, they're absolutely ubiquitous. You can barely buy a product which doesn't make some kind of claim about its sustainable credentials. So in the first instance, you have a kind of retail level difficulty in actually differentiating between, you know, what is a genuine green claim, what is something which is just paying lip service. And because of that difference in differentiating, ultimately there's very little economic incentive for most companies to make genuine efforts to really kind of tackle the roots of the environmental problems shaped by the production of their products. It's equally profitable to just look like you're doing, you're doing something about your environmental impact. And often one of the classic ways in which this is done in terms of greenwashing practice is the most basic way imaginable. That literally means just coloring your product green. You put a few flowers in the background. The clever thing about this is that now of course, you have good deal of environmental legislation, much more than when greenwashing first emerged in the 1960s. And you also have green lobbies who will take on, take on companies which have made obviously incorrect claims. So actually sort of alluding to environmental sustainability is one of the most profitable ways that companies can get the kind of green dollar out of consumers without actually having to really do very much at all. So you have this huge issue just on the most basic kind of upfront level, as a consumer really genuinely distinguish between products that are truly attempting to decarbonize, for example, their Supply chain. And those which are just saying they're doing a little bit about it, they're kind of claiming 1% reduction, one part. Now that's hard enough, but you could say, okay, so maybe we can get really good consumer guide, we can get really good kind of accreditations and you know, consumers can just do that a little bit more to research everything they buy. Okay, and this is a lot of, this is something that a lot of people say and that's fair enough. Then the problem is that's only surface level problem tumors encounter CD are not fundamental to the problem of sustainable consumption is the issue of being able to understand what genuinely goes on in that supply chain. And the reason that's more fundamental is because often even companies themselves don't know. We're used to seeing this idea of a supply chain as this clean, simple diagram has certain stages of production and transport. And each of those stages complies with certain regulations which are put in place by the lead brand. But in practice, and it's the practice that I deal with because I spent so long in one of these produced countries in Cambodia in particular, but also places like Bangladesh for example, in practice, production just doesn't look like that. It's not this kind of clean green Woodson standard, modern decarbonizing system. In reality, these factories aren't owned by the brand. The brand takes minimal responsibility for them. They're simply partner factories, which means that the brand will give them a list of things to comply with. They'll be very infrequently inspected, if they're inspected at all. The factory says they're doing these things. In reality, it's a question of don't ask, don't tell. A lot of the time when you consider that this isn't just a question of one factory in one country, but a whole supply chain stretches across multiple countries, often multiple continents, before that good finally gets to you. The capacity to have a genuine, meaningful oversight. That means on the ground oversight. So when they're actually looking at what is going on while these things are being made, that's incredibly difficult to achieve. It's really something that is beyond the capacity of any consumer, beyond even the capacity of most researchers. So this vast well of uncertainty around production, which is very rarely acknowledged as one of the key reasons that fundamentally undermines sustainable consumption in its current guise. And then the problem is that this uncertainty is not really a problem for brands, really a problem for the producers of goods. In fact, it's the opposite. It's extremely lucrative. It's a Lot better if there's this kind of black hole around production because ultimately harder to find these kind of issues if everybody's dealing with sort of black hole, if everybody's got a certain mutual culpability. And it's kind of very complicated global factory. And to give you an example of this, the the garment industry dealt with a kind of scandal which arose around four years ago in Xinjiang around the use of forced labor in the production of cotton in China, which is the world's biggest cotton. As a result of that scandal, many brands declared an unwillingness or a desire to divest from change it in cotton. But nevertheless, few years later, most of them had simply abandoned those budgets. And as the designer scalam applied, for example, it's almost impossible to genuinely divest because the supply chains are so opaque, they're so complex, they're so long simply don't know where everything has come from. A lot of countries, especially like China, they become something like a black box. It's very difficult to look into even if you want to. So faced with this hugely complex, hugely obscure global economy, my view is that consumers simply don't have the information at the moment to make genuine ethical purchases, that their efforts really are better spent elsewhere.
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Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
So your analysis here, you're making this sort of global analysis, but you've also got it grounded in the Cambodian case study that you mentioned earlier. So could you talk a little bit about what you were researching in Cambodia and how that illustrates some of the ideas that you've talked about in your last couple answers here?
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Laurie Parsons
Yeah, so I worked in most industries, most of the sectors in Cambodia, in particular bricks and construction and garments. So Cambodia is a typical, what's known as a cupmate trim country within the global economy. That means that it's an intermediary producer. It doesn't have cotton fields, it doesn't produce raw materials. It simply puts them together in factories and then ships them off to the final destination. The UK is one of the biggest consumers of Cambodian goods. The US is also very big in the eu so ammonia produces vast volumes of garments and apparel or for investment markets, particularly the global north. As I said, us, UK and EU being major. And it's very important to the Cambodian economy. There's around 600 or so licensed export factories in Cambodia and there's about just under a million workers out of a population of only about 16 or so million. So this is hugely important for Cambodian, for Cambodian economy. Almost all of the brands that produce in Cambodia, because it has in recent years had a reputation as a ethical industry, tend to make claims around their sustainability, both in human terms and in environmental terms. For example, almost every brand that produces in Cambodian factories, as they do in almost any factory around the world, makes claims around zero deforestation and make claims around decarbonization yet zero carbon and also zero waste and landfill. So a lot of the work that I've done in recent years has really been exploring what this really looks like on paper or rather in practice, what are we actually seeing, what are these factories actually doing. And two examples, you know, in relation to those two claims of zero deforestation and zero waste landfill are particularly stark. Of course always found that on, in a recent study a couple of years ago was that there is an entire garment dump on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where the majority of the garment industry in Cambodia is located, which is specifically and only dedicated to the garment industry. There's a whole waste removal company which has dozens of trucks, all of which are slow, are only shipping waste, garment waste out of these factories which are themselves for exports, almost every one of which the brand producing those goods makes these claims about zero waste to landfill. And you can walk through this huge dump picking up labels by Nike, by Adidas, by Humor, by ms, by Pool and Bear, Walmart, George Tube, all of these brands, they all have their sustainability claim, they all say no way to landfill. And you can literally walk over a landfill picking out their labels from, from the ground. And in fact, this isn't even the secret, it's not even an open secret. This is, this is an area of land, it's huge. It's not going to any walls, you can just drive onto it. It's actually closed now to move to a bigger site to give you an idea of how hard this is being cracked down on. But this is not a secret to anybody apart from potentially brand head offices, probably not in practice, but really UK or rather Western consumers, final end stage consumers and people who don't know about this, people in the local community know about it, people in the industry know about it. It's not a secret. And yet that kind of lucrative obscurity allows these things to persist in being said. So that's the waste side. But then even on the production side you've got huge broken promises in a very ostentatious way. So of course, zero deforestation is a part of almost every brand's claims about what they, about the conditions in which their goods are made. And rightly so, particularly in a country like Cambodia, which has suffered huge amounts of deforestation in recent years. Cambodia has lost. In the first 10 years of the new millennium, Cambodia lost about a quarter of all of its primary rainforest cover, which was a huge amount. Almost all of that wealth being shipped abroad being capitalized on by other countries. But forest wood is also used not just for luxury purposes, but also for productive purposes. And this is something that has been sort of going around the rumor mill for a number of years. I first heard about this idea of garment industry using forest wood back in about 2013 when a journalist mentioned it to me. I didn't know that stage, quite understand what it would be used for, on what scale. I saw a grainy photo of a truck with forest going into a. It wasn't for another seven years when I finally started to look into this in depth and found actually the issue that's being addressed here is that electricity is in many parts of the global south, is in Cambodia, extremely expensive. So when factories need to do something that's energy intensive, particularly ironing for example, because you've got to boil a lot of water, then it's extremely expensive to just use the grid. Now at that time, the grid actually disburred factories from using their own solar panels to produce their own energy. There are regulations of slightly nuisance on that, but they're still not great. But at the time, factories couldn't do it without paying that back to the grid. Essentially they're paying even more that factory back and then buying back their own electricity. So what they did as a way to get around that was to use huge amounts of everyday forest wood, stack it up in huge quantities and use it in burners and boilers in order to produce the steam they needed to iron the clothes that they were producing. Now this was particularly centered on certain factories which became large scale ironing deck. And what we did in 2021 was to get a, to grow, to fly over one of these factories and to understand, just get a scale of the size of this is almost impossible without seeing fixtures. It's thousands and thousands of tons of forest wood which is of course, illegal to harvest, being kept in a large depository behind this factory, being used in vast quantities every day. Huge trucks come every day in order to replenish this huge amount of forest wood which is used to produce, or rather to iron, the goods which are being sent off to global northern countries, which of course, carry all of those claims around. Zero deforestation to this day. What we found when we took this account across the entire industry was that on average, about 30% of factories burn forest wood. Across the industry as a whole, that's about 200 factories or so, and 15% or so used or burned their own fabric. Again, hugely common, intensive practice, which is largely denied by most brands in general. So the reality. This isn't just a few bad apples, it's the reality of production. And again, I absolutely don't want to demonize Cambodia. As I said, in many respects, Cambodia is a very typical intermediary producer. This is simply the reality of production in the global South. It's out of jurisdiction and out of minds in many respects. The fact that it's so difficult to get genuine oversight into this really protects Browns from what genuinely goes on in the production process overseas. Yeah.
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Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
And in addition to the garment industry, you also looked at brick making, which I found really interesting because that was an economic sector that I haven't known much about. So can you say a little bit about brick making and how it connects to carbon colonialism?
- [26:49]
Laurie Parsons
Yes. So brick, the brick sector, is an area that I've worked in for about the last seven years or so now. It's a fascinating sector because it's very variegated around the world in terms of, you know, kilns look different. They're all built in different ways. The arrangements are often different in the ways that the economy of these kilns works. But almost invariably, wherever you go, it's extremely difficult work, it's extremely poorly paid, and it's one of the last things that people choose to do if they have any choice at all. It has extremely high levels of debt bondage ubiquitously around the world. And it has extremely high levels of child labor as well, which often goes along with that as many families into debt. So when I first got into this industry in Cambodia, which is relatively small in global towns, it's got about a population of about 10,000 people working in brick kilns at about 400 and just under 500 brick kilns operating currently in the country. And these brick kilns don't export, but they do fuel the vast bad food. And in Urban expansion, which has happened in Cambodia in recent years, there's been a huge urban boom, primarily as a result of land speculation and property speculation by external foreign investors, in particular from China, for example, in Korea, but also by very wealthy domestic investors who see this as a way to get reliably rapid returns and also potentially to clean some money which may not have come from the best possible sources. Now, what's really notable about this industry, the dark side of it, is that this is just even compared to a country which has had such a difficult history and in which many people struggle, the brick industry really does stand out for the conditions in which workers work. To go with that 10,000 population that I mentioned, around 4,000 are children. Now, not all of them work because this is a family organized industry, as in, families tend to go all together, and that means many come even if they don't work. That 4,000 includes babies, for example, who live in the kilns, don't necessarily work. A significant proportion of those 4,000 almost certainly do work at least some of the time. However, and we depend on different evidence of 600 working. So at least 600, about 6% of the industry as a whole are child laborers. Believe it's a lot higher than that in terms of the number of children that work some of the time. Of course, that's internationally and nationally illegal. It's extremely dangerous work. It's extremely difficult work. But what people, what draws people into the industry and what keeps them there is this issue of debt. Debt bondage is hugely prevalent in the brick industry in Cambodia, as it is globally. So what happens in many cases is that brickworkers are former farmers who find themselves unable to farm or at least find themselves going into debt as a result of farming. Of course, Cambodia has a huge debt problem in many countries in the global south now, partly as a result of changing environmental conditions which make it very difficult for farmers to get a return from their investment in their agricultural efforts. And so when they find these farmers that they're unable to keep up with their debt repayments, and the people are knocking on the door every day, and there's no way to declare bankruptcy of default, and almost the equivalent of bankruptcy for many communities, Cambodia was to go into industry, go to the brick guild owner, and you say, borrow my debt, pay off my debts. I'll work for you until I've paid off those debts. So that's the arrangement. People essentially bond themselves into the brick industry. Problem is the reality of life in the brick industry. It's almost impossible to make any money to really pay off any debt. So almost invariably those debts increase and then they increase with ever greater regularity. And the health impacts of working in the industry mean greater medical bills that have to be funded by further loans from homeowner in the industry. People get trapped for years and years on end in this industry. The vast majority of people are debt bonded, as I've said, a significant proportion of them are children. The work is extremely difficult and dangerous. It's led in a number of cases to workers losing Dems as a result of these chains of talk to people under the age of 16. There was one 12 year old girl who bust arm in the key on it's not that uncommon and it's extremely dangerous as I say, even for people who don't have these kind of catastrophic injuries. The long term impacts of working with very low wages, poor food, very high levels of energy intake, but also in very high temperatures because these kilns are extremely hot and it is of course one of the hottest countries in the world anyway in Cambodia during the hot season, working in these incredibly high temperatures and in a very hot and humid environment, it's just very bad for your body. And as a result of that, levels of sudden Death in the 40s, 50s, 60s are very high. But the lethal industry, really, really poor quality of work and working on exposing that and attempting to find a different way to produce bricks to fuel Cambodia's building boom has been a large part of my work more recently. One of the things that I've tried to do is to take that internationally because of course it tends to be seen that that industry is just domestic and it's limited to Cambodia. And that's true in one sense. It's not true in a wider sense, in the sense that international companies are investing in the buildings built with these bricks and we've even traced them directly to these kilns that use bonded and child labor. So that's a certain kind of culpability and a certain kind of responsibility certainly working to highlight legally in a more direct sense, you don't have to bring in the financial aspect to consider the direct impact of imported bricks to places like here in the UK. So the UK is actually the world's number one importer of bricks. Around the world imports about 400 million bricks every year of about 30 plus million. Those come from South Asia, in particular India and Pakistan. The conditions in which are not hugely better than the situation in Cambodia. And again, this has been documented child labor, you've got bonded labor, difficult and dangerous conditions. And there are all kinds of horrors associated with the South Asian brick industry, which is far, far larger than Brody to 800,000 kilometres, millions of workers, all kinds of horrors. For example, the way in which the traditional system of producing the stacks of bricks, the ricks, is to cover them in sand on the top, which keeps the heat in, but also allows what's known as a fireman to walk along the top and to continue to stoke the flames from above. Now, that fireman is completely dependent on that rick, not collapse. If that rick collapsed, then they're instantly falling into 1500 degree heat and they're dead in an instant. And of course, naturally you want the lightest person to do it. That means younger people, often means children doing that job. So hugely difficult industry. And a significant proportion now, millions of bricks being imported from this industry directly to very wealthy countries like the uk. Now, this isn't something that consumers know about. And again, it goes back to my earlier point. It's not something that consumers know about and it's not something that they're supposed to know about. And of course, if you label the bricks that you're buying in the uk, as you know, Dakar best, then people might have questions about this. They might not be that keen on buying them, but they don't label them, they give them nostalgia. English names, Manchester blue, Suffolk Multi Imperial red, for example, to kind of evoke British brick production, when in reality they're coming from South Asia. Very poor production in many cases. One of the many ways in which these kind of great abuses in our global economy are ultimately hidden from consumers. Very difficult to see the impact of the products that we buy.
- [35:33]
Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
Yeah. So then I think that leads to the obvious next question, which is, if we can't consume our way out of carbon colonialism, where should we be putting our efforts and our energy?
- [35:43]
Laurie Parsons
Yes, again, very important question. Well, the simple answer, the bad side. It's not as easy as consuming away. There's not a product that we can buy, there's not a kind of button press to make these problems go away. But solution, though it is messy or perhaps a little unfashionable, is nonetheless extremely necessary. And we piggyback on the fact that the first green shoots of change are beginning to emerge. One of the reasons that the kind of examples that I've given are so prevalent around the world today is that supply chains have been allowed to exist in an almost completely ungoverned way. If we think about the example of the UK and carbon emissions example, you have what's known as scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3 emissions. So scope 1 emissions are the emissions that your own factory, for example, or your own business produces. Scope two are indirect emissions, for example from power generation. And scope three is what happens outside of borders. That's your international supply chain. Scope 1 and 2 emissions are covered by laws. Scope 3 emissions are entirely voluntary. And that's absolutely common, if not ubiquitous around the world, or at least it has been until very, very recently. The fact is, if you're a company, you're very aware of the fact that you're not covered by binding legislation in your international supply chain. And that has contributed to, to a very great extent the situation that we see today. That until very recently has been the case. However, just as of the last few years we've seen the emergence of the first supply chain laws. So one of the first to emerge was that in France, the French supply chain law was heralded as being kind of in reality, it's a little bit like the modern slavery act in the UK and that has a lot of fanfare associated with it, but very few teeth, very few kind of mechanisms to actually check what's happening beyond declarations of companies themselves and very few clear legal avenues for address companies bound to to break their own promises or break standards that have been set. But a far better and more promising law has emerged in Germany in recent years. German supply chain law. Now this actually gives any community around the world affected by a company that trades in Germany or it's based in Germany, anywhere in their supply chain the power to challenge that company in German core is a game changer in terms of the actual ability of communities to meaningfully fight back against these bundled environmental and human abuses in global supply chains. It's hugely important, it's only just beginning. But the trajectory is vital and this is something to give people hope. If we think about 2020, number of international supply chain based cases brought in courts worldwide was only 38. In 2021 that number was 193, five times the number of cases increase in just a year. That trajectory will hope and expect will continue to increase. Now why is this important from an individual point of view? Because it makes tangible what previously simply been seen as out of jurisdiction, out of the scope of what a national government can do. Now we have evidence that every national government can begin to regulate the supply chains meaningfully and that we can go a lot further even than that German supply chain. But we make tangible change through politics and through law. So what I call on people to do is to, I Suppose put down their Ethical Consumer Guide, at least for the moment, and instead to turn towards politics, towards local politics and to getting engaged in lobbying for better oversight of supply chains around the world. This is something that people in the global north, many of whom will be the listeners to this, but have the luxury of being able to call upon. It's a huge privilege to be living in a society which have meaningful local political avenues and which extend into national politics. We have the means, even though it's not just something that one person can do, we have the means as a community to work towards improvement in our legislative systems, to demand it as a society. And so what I suggest is to, yes, to put down the Ethical Consumer Guide and pick up the phone to convince people that you know and people that they know in order to build a genuine movement towards supply chain regulation, towards meaningful oversight of the huge global economies which we all. And it's very early days, it's exciting times because the first green shoots have appeared and there is, for the first time in a long time, like the end of the carbon colonialism tunnel.
- [40:51]
Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
All right, I think that's a good hopeful note on which to start moving towards the end of our interview here. So first I wanted to give you an opportunity to give a shout out or a thank you to anyone whose help was important to you as you were writing the book.
- [41:05]
Laurie Parsons
Well, a huge number of people, too many to name really. As I say, this covers about 15 years of work. But one person that I've worked with in Cambodia in particular, Lee Hooch long is an ever present partner in all of these investigations and who is without, without his own expertise, none of this would have been in any. But more broadly, of course, to the hundreds and hundreds of Cambodian who have worked over the years and have been so generous with their time and who have put faith in me to use that information to try to highlight some of the problems that they've raised. And I hope that this book will go some way towards doing that. Hopefully we can begin to achieve something tangible in return for those hugely valuable collaborations.
- [41:53]
Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
And our traditional final question is, what are you working on next?
- [41:59]
Laurie Parsons
Well, primarily, one of the issues that I mentioned just in passing in the course of our conversation was the issue of heat. The fact that these brick workers spend such prolonged periods in extremely high temperatures, both environmentally and in terms of their local industrial conditions, that's not unique to the brick industry. It's actually something that is hugely prevalent in all kinds of lower paid work and under climate change. One of the things that tends not to be fully appreciated is the extent to which heat stress impacts are so fully structured by the inequalities of our global economy. When we think about what happens in a heat wave, we think about what happens when the Mercury reaches over 40 degrees, as it did in London, to absolutely horror of the majority of the country was bizarre moment. You know, London never approaching anything like that in the past. When these kind of things happen, it's not wealthy people in a given society that suffer. And that's especially true in the Global South. It is a finely structured environmental pressure. And understanding how those kind of economic inequalities leave some people far more exposed and others to the rigors of extreme heat is, I think, an extremely important, really key question in terms of human populations on the climate change on the horizon. So understanding that is the work I'm doing right now. And understanding how the worst off in our society are those who have the kind of strongest blowers of the newly strengthened climate is I think, a key question for I hear and one I'm very interested in right now.
- [43:46]
Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
All right, well, that sounds really interesting and maybe we'll have you back on to talk about that if that leads to another book.
- [43:54]
Laurie Parsons
Yeah. All right.
- [43:56]
Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [43:58]
Laurie Parsons
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the great conversation.
- [44:01]
Podcast Host (Stentor Danielson)
This has been a conversation with Laurie Parsons, author of Carbon How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown, published this year by Manchester University Press.
- [44:16]
Laurie Parsons
Foreign.
- [44:22]
New Books Network Announcer
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