ON OCTOBER 8, 2018 twin disasters were announced on opposite sides of the world:

• In Brazil, as votes were counted from the first round of presidential elections, Jair Bolsonaro won 46% of the vote — enough to make it clear he would probably cruise to a second-round victory three weeks later.

• In Incheon, South Korea, the Inter­govern­mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revealed the findings of its special report: limiting global warming to 1.5° C “would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” within the current generation.(1)

It was a banner moment for pessimism of the intellect; the years we will need to struggle against right-wing nationalism, defeat its reactionary climate policies, and adopt a sane approach are years we don’t have. These two disasters create a feedback loop with each other over time, each making the other more impossible to solve.(2)

As climate change fuels real and imagined social emergencies, in the absence of a mass-based politics of solidarity, fear-based calls to secure resources for one community against the needs of others resonate with many people. Of course, centrist half measures such as the Paris accords were never grounds for much hope — even if the politics of the world that created them hadn’t been thrown off course by the rise of right-wing nationalism.

Bolsonaro has directly targeted the Amazon rainforest and indigenous communities who live there. Shortly after taking office, he signed an executive order transferring the regulation of indigenous reserves to the agriculture ministry, which is controlled by agribusiness interests, though this move later suffered a setback in Congress. Encouraged by his election, illegal logging and land-grabs by gangs of thugs have risen, particularly in districts that voted for him, along with attacks on indigenous communities.

Members of Bolsonaro’s government have moved to open farming and mining rights to non-indigenous people, arguing that this will allow indigenous people to reap an economic benefit from their land. One top adviser, General Augusto Heleno Pereira, rejected the idea that the Amazon is a World Heritage site, calling for development and arguing that it “should be dealt with by Brazil for the benefit of Brazil.”(3)

It would be difficult to find a clearer example of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” where public and natural resources are expropriated, using extra-economic and sometimes extra-legal means, in order to facilitate further exploitation.(4)

Harvey argues that legal, regularized exploitation of workers’ labor is only one of the dynamics of how capital is accumulated, and that the ongoing processes of capitalism also rely on what Marx considered “primitive accumulation,” accumulation of capital through such means as privatization of public goods, military and paramilitary appropriation, and theft.

Harvey uses this concept primarily to analyze dynamics of neoliberal policy such as privatization and financialization, but it seems equally applicable to the legal and extralegal seizures of natural resources by various private interests (usually with strong connections to elements within national governments) in the face of climate crisis.

Resource Pillage Meets Climate Denial

Around the world, Bolsonaro’s explicit agenda to pillage the world’s natural resources, and ensure the survival and wealth of “us” vs. “them” in relation to climate change, is not an outlier but a salvo as the nationalist, far right’s approach to climate change transforms along with the planet.

Traditionally, climate change activists demanded that the world wake up to the reality of climate change, while climate change denialists stuck their heads in the sand. Big oil companies and industrial polluters that used to drag their heels or promote climate change denialism today have embraced the language of mitigating environmental harm and pricing it under capitalism, while denialism has become the refuge of open revanchists like Donald Trump.

Even for them, however, denialism has become a message for a niche audience — red meat to fire up the base, while behind their backs they direct a pillaging form of accumulation. For many leading social groups that are leaning in the direction of neo-fascism or right-wing nationalism, facing the reality of climate change is less about stopping it and more about jockeying for political and economic power, safeguarding control of resources and seizing more.

The imperative of “economic development” and establishing control of resources as a way of arguing about climate is coming more into the open as human-triggered climate change has accelerated.

For example, just a few weeks before the IPCC report was released, the Trump administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a report based on a scenario that global temperatures would rise a staggering 4° C (more than seven degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100,(5) The rationale here was supporting Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards.

The NHTSA realized that limiting the damage of climate change to 1.5° C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society — and concluded, well, since obviously that’s not going to happen, we might as well go ahead and keep burning fossil fuels, as the overall portion of that rise caused by relatively lax U.S. fuel efficiency standards would be small.

Similarly in May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that melting sea ice in the Arctic represented not a crisis but an opportunity for trade between Asia and the West, provided that Western countries act assertively with respect to competing territorial claims with rivals such as Russia and China.(6)

Vying for a prize for the agency determined to push this to the farthest extreme, the Department of Energy has started referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world.”(7)

Conflicting Reactionary Extremisms

Far-right responses to the reality of climate change vary, of course, between nationalist heads of state and online extremists of various stripes. On the genocidal fringes of the far alt-right, eco-fascism is an emergent trend. It burst into the real world with the Christchurch shootings in March 2019. The shooter’s manifesto identified himself as an “ethno-nationalist, eco-fascist.”

While environmental radicals and even eco-terrorists have most often been motivated by ideologies that derive from the left, eco-fascism imports ideas from deep ecology into a white nationalist value system.

Eco-fascists have developed an anti-immigrant form of “lifeboat ethics” which holds that races of people should stay in their traditional homelands, that society should adopt a vegan, preindustial way of life, and that in the face of environmental collapse, some people should be allowed to die.

“What to do,” asks Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola, a favorite theorist of eco-fascists, “when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”(8)

It isn’t hard to point out obvious inconsistencies in this argument, for example when white nationalists claim some kind of natural dominion over colonized lands such as Australia or New Zealand. The point here is taking these ideas seriously not as a value system that must be answered, but rather as an ideological symptom.

While even the farthest right of parliamentary parties would reject mass shootings, the prevalence of increasingly virulent forms of anti-immigrant rhetoric within mainstream political discourse across Europe, North America and Australia have allowed fetid corners of the internet to gather confidence and take action in the world. They have taken inspiration both from less overtly political mass shooters in the United States and from media-savvy, ultra-violent terrorists such as ISIS. Eco-fascism and “lite” forms of an ecologically aware, white nationalist right may solidify their niche in far right subcultures.(9)

Social Stress Multiplier

Effects of climate change have already contributed to the social stressors that have driven large numbers of migrants and refugees from their homes. A drought in Syria from 2007-2010 exacerbated rural poverty and migration to urban centers, contributing to the factors that drove the 2011 uprising, and eventually, of course with a host of other factors, civil war and a refugee crisis.(10)

Droughts in Central America have made life harder in an already impoverished region. Bangladesh is expected to be hit hard by climate change, suffering from severe flooding, and the area of Cox’s Bazaar, where Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are living, may be especially vulnerable.

India expects changes to its monsoon season. Rising temperatures and water scarcity in Kashmir could contribute to India-Pakistan tensions.(11)

North Africa is expected to get dryer and hotter. Crises in Darfur, Nigeria and Somalia have been exacerbated by drought and food shortages. An interdisciplinary group of scholars suggested in 2009 that climate change could contribute to a more than 50% rise in armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa.(12)

It would be a mistake to rest the blame for particular conflicts largely on climate change when a host of political and economic factors which are more easily within short- to medium-term human control are also critical. However, looking at the global picture, it is clear that, barring structural changes to society, we should expect more rather than fewer of these human crises in years to come.

Over both the short and the long term, a feedback loop starts to emerge between the politics of immigration and refugee crises on the one hand, and the crisis of the rise of far-right nationalist and neo-fascist politics on the other.

For example, Donald Trump’s border crisis was, during his campaign and the first two years of his presidency, more rhetoric than reality. When Trump took office, apprehension of undocumented people crossing the border had declined for years, and there was a net outflow of immigrants returning to their home countries during and after the economic crisis of 2007-09.

In the 2010s, economic and political crises in Central America have worsened, fueled by U.S. foreign policy, drought, and political impasses. In a short-term example of the feedback loop, Trump turned his attention from the travel ban to the border, ratcheting up threats to build a wall and separating families.

Word started to spread in some Central American communities that if you were considering joining a caravan, now was the time — before Trump was successful in closing the border completely. All this has contributed to a dramatic spike in undocumented border crossings, though levels are still well below pre-2008 levels.(13)

In much of Europe, the feedback loop between climate change, both the real presence and the specter of migrants and refugees, and far right politics is already quite open, although the form of this varies widely across the continent. Brexit was driven in part by xenophobia, although this was directed partly against Eastern Europeans coming for economic opportunities as well as European Union refugee policies.

Italy’s Matteo Salvini has risen to prominence in Italy, eclipsing his more environmentally friendly coalition partners of the Five Star Movement, by emphasizing hard-line and often dramatic anti-migrant policies.

In France, the National Front has staked a claim to being the strongest single party, even if the political mainstream can still unite to deny it real governing power. The crisis that led to the Yellow Vests movement shows how technocratic plans to mitigate the harms of climate change by increasing the cost of living for working- and middle-class people may face protest and popular rejection.

In Denmark the nativist Danish People’s Party faded in the polls as mainstream parties embraced xenophobia. The Social Democrats won a resounding victory in June, stealing the right’s thunder by endorsing anti-migrant policies.(14)

In Greece, Golden Dawn activists regularly engage in physical attacks against migrants. Meanwhile, migrant support and solidarity work have become a key component of the work of the activist left as hopes of any kind of parliamentary or mass action solution to Greece’s economic woes have faded.

Hungary’s Victor Orbán has finally gotten a bit of international legitimacy with a visit to the Oval Office, and Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party rails against immigration even though Poland has seen very few migrants or refugees.

Anti-federal government ranchers and rural business interests in the western United States and Australia associated with the “sovereign citizen” movement have been among the staunchest holdouts of climate change denialism. The underlying issue here mirrors Brazil: a battle over the use of public lands, whether they should be managed in the public interest or submitted to “Wise Use” by private interests.(15)

The logic of freeing up public lands for drilling or grazing — in the face of competing demands to leave fossil fuels in the ground, fight climate change and drought, and respect indigenous sovereignty — reflects the same logic of accumulation by dispossession: establishing control of resources by any means necessary, up to and including the use of extralegal militias.

Climate Change Gentrification

The politics of expropriation and exploitation of land and natural resources and strict border regimes, in the face of climate change and the specter of migrants, fit as an archetype with the ascendant far right around the world. However, they do not always take this form; they can take the genteel, liberal form of “climate change gentrification” as well.

Real estate prices have doubled in Miami’s Little Haiti as residents with sea-level homes sought to escape rising waters.(16) Flagstaff, Arizona has seen an influx of people escaping rising temperatures in Phoenix.

As wildfires in California threaten to become a way of life in wealthy areas like Malibu, and insurance companies charge astronomical rates or refuse to subsidize rebuilding yet again, many residents will decide to relocate to “gem in the rough” neighborhoods farther from the forests, with the real estate industry eager to facilitate.

This raises the question of how liberalism and much of the left respond to the rise of right-wing nationalism, neo-fascism, and climate catastrophe. At its worst, there can be a tendency to isolate ourselves in silos of partly rhetorical or cultural resistance without realizing that we have limited ourselves to an enclave.

The easy targets here are policies such as banning straws as a way to address climate change, but it goes much further. The notion of ethical consumption as “voting with your dollars” for “things you can control” can be related to the logic of the enclave if it stays as it is and does not open onto a systemic understanding.

Liberal cities in California like San Francisco and Santa Cruz have become gentrified to the point that they may lack an objective basis for the progressive politics they have long symbolized. If a border relies on agencies such as ICE and the border patrol, and secessionist land holdings rely on a militia, the enclave relies similarly on the police.

There becomes a tacit understanding: you can have your free speech, your rich cultural world, your ethnic and gender diversity, and your oppositional politics within the enclave, but policing is going to maintain a fundamental economic and racial order. Thus in some ways the liberal enclave can be objectively on the side of “fortress Europe” barring its doors to migrants or areas controlled by western U.S. secessionist militias.

The mainstream and organized radical left has mostly ignored these changes in rhetoric and practice by the far right and right-wing nationalist leaders. At times, it seems like we are still fighting a battle of ideas against yesterday’s climate change denialism. Relatedly, outmoded ideas about how “climate change effects all of us” sometimes get repackaged as new ideas in the environmental movement.

For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, a historian who writes on subaltern studies and ecology, argues that even though the impact of climate change will be experienced differently by rich and poor, climate change transcends the class dimension of Marxism, because, “Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged.”(17)

This may be true in the sense that the children of today’s wealthy and middle-class people will inherit a world that is biologically impoverished compared to the world of their grandparents, but it misses the ideological aspect of the environmental crisis. It also did not see how fraught the “lifeboat” metaphor would become.

Even if lifeboats won’t work well, in the end, fascist logic would dictate beating someone else over the head to ensure you have a lifeboat. This lifeboat logic extends to some proposed technological “fixes” for climate change which are less about making the world a better place and more about creating a post-human future in which a wealthy few can escape a doomed planet.

Some, hopefully many wealthy and middle-class people may essentially become class traitors and push for a better world for everyone, but the path of least resistance will be for them to embrace the looting of remaining environmental resources, using the borders of nation-states and enclaves, whether urban or rural, to keep out the rabble.

Climate crisis does not transcend the class element; it exacerbates it, stokes the neo-fascist element of it, and makes the alternatives of ecosocialism or ecobarbarism incredibly stark. The neo-fascist impulse is accelerationist with respect to climate change even as it promulgates fantasies of restoring control and making the nation-state great again.

Confronting the Death Wish

Rei Terada pointed out that dealing with the politics of looting and border violence “needs a language for how fascism engages people’s death wishes that most politics doesn’t have.”(18)

One can catch a glimpse even in the most quotidian rhetoric. “Make America Great Again” is often traced to its Reagan-era origins, but one striking difference was Reagan’s capacity to project an infectious optimism to his supporters.

If you were one of the others of Reagan’s America, it was vomitous, but it was a story about America’s role in the world and “free-market” capitalism that supporters could cheer without irony.

In contrast, Trump’s “we’ll win so much you get tired of winning” has an edge of the heroic “Lost Cause” rhetoric of irredentism. It’s impossible to return to the “glory days” of 1950s USA, whether one takes this to be about Keynesianism and secure jobs or a “gentlemanly” form of white supremacy and respect for traditional gender hierarchies.

The consciousness of Trump supporters may be willfully ignorant about some things, but it is not naive; it is in fact world-weary at least among the alt-right and the broader millennial and Generation X milieu from which the alt-right is drawn.

These Trump supporters don’t think we can really go back. They want someone to fight for them (the perceived “we” of whiteness and traditional gender/family values); and they want someone to see their enemies suffer. It may be horrible to watch the world burn, but they embrace what they find thrilling in the prospect.

To return to a rather tired phrase, engaging the battle of ecosocialism or ecobarbarism will require escaping the logic and the limits of the enclave. Fighting for an ecologically just future can no longer be seen as an alternative to immediate environmental justice struggles.

The view that climate change can provide a common cause for humanity needs to be understood as a form of idealism, which may be useful for galvanizing class traitors but will stand in the face of a scramble to accumulate control over land and resources. Environmental justice is the class-driven, racialized here-and-now of climate struggle.

Standing Rock was perhaps the inaugural political struggle of this era. The Lakota Sioux Tribe and environmentalists from all over the country converged in a political fight that symbolized the close of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump era.

Around the world, young people have gone on strike from classes to call for radical action to confront the climate crisis. Today’s fights such as the Green New Deal must be seen not as a legislative package that would be sufficient to solve or mitigate the harms of climate change within a capitalist framework, but as a transitional demand in the old sense, linking the present impossibility of full climate and social justice with a program for much more fundamental changes which allow for the possibility of solidaristic life on a damaged planet.

From Against the Current

References

Adghirni, Samy. “Brazil Tells the World: The Amazon Rainforest Is Ours, Not Yours.” Bloomberg.Com, May 10, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-10/amazon-rainforest-is-ours-and-not-yours-brazil-tells-the-world.

Benson, Thor. “In Los Angeles, Climate-Change Gentrification Is Already Happening,” February 25, 2019, sec. science. https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-la-climate-change-gentrification-is-already-happening.

Burke, M. B., E. Miguel, S. Satyanath, J. A. Dykema, and D. B. Lobell. “Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 49 (December 8, 2009): 20670-74.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (January 2009): 197-222.

Eilperin, Juliet, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney. “Trump Administration Sees a 7-Degree Rise in Global Temperatures by 2100.” Washington Post, September 28, 2018.

Flores, Adolfo. “Here’s Why A Record Number Of Families Are Actually Showing Up At The Border.” BuzzFeed News, May 8, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/border-record-families-asylum-central-america-cbp.

Hall, Melanie. “Water Wars: Are India and Pakistan Heading for Climate Change-Induced Conflict? | DW | 25.01.2019.” DW.COM, January 25, 2019. https://www.dw.com/en/water-wars-are-india-and-pakistan-heading-for-climate-change-induced-conflict/a-47203933.

Hansler, Jennifer. “Pompeo: Melting Sea Ice Presents ‘New Opportunities for Trade.’” CNN, May 7, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/politics/pompeo-sea-ice-arctic-council/index.html.

haque, umair. “How Capitalism Torched the Planet and Left It a Smoking Fascist Greenhouse.” Eudaimonia and Co, October 10, 2018. https://eand.co/how-capitalism-torched-the-planet-and-left-it-a-smoking-fascist-greenhouse-fe687e99f070.

Harvey, David. “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register, 2004.

Huq, Efadul, and Henry Mochida. “The Rise of Environmental Fascism and the Securitization of Climate Change,” March 30, 2018. https://doi.org/10.21428/6cb11bd5.

Kelley, Colin P., Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir. “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 11 (March 17, 2015): 3241-46.

O’Neil, Luke. “US Energy Department Rebrands Fossil Fuels as ‘Molecules of Freedom.’” The Guardian, May 29, 2019, sec. Business.

Orange, Richard. “Mette Frederiksen: The Anti-Immigration Left Leader Set to Win Power in Denmark.” The Guardian, May 11, 2019, sec. World news.

Phillips, Ari. “There Will Be Blood: What Ammon Bundy’s Fight Has to Do with the Future of U.S. Energy.” Project Earth, January 15, 2016.

“Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments — IPCC,” October 8, 2018. https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/.

Wilson, Jason. “Eco-Fascism Is Undergoing a Revival in the Fetid Culture of the Extreme Right | Jason Wilson.” The Guardian, March 19, 2019, sec. World news.

Notes

1. “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments — IPCC.”
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2. haque, “How Capitalism Torched the Planet and Left It a Smoking Fascist Greenhouse.”
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3. Adghirni, “Brazil Tells the World.”
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4. Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism.”
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5. Eilperin, Dennis, and Mooney, “Trump Administration Sees a 7-Degree Rise in Global Temperatures by 2100.”
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6. Hansler, “Pompeo: Melting Sea Ice Presents ‘New Opportunities for Trade.’”
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7. O’Neil, “US Energy Department Rebrands Fossil Fuels as ‘Molecules of Freedom.’”
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8. Wilson, “Eco-Fascism Is Undergoing a Revival in the Fetid Culture of the Extreme Right | Jason Wilson.”
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9. Huq and Mochida, “The Rise of Environmental Fascism and the Securitization of Climate Change.”
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10. Kelley et al., “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought.”
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11. Hall, “Water Wars.”
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12. Burke et al., “Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa.”
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13. Flores, “Here’s Why A Record Number Of Families Are Actually Showing Up At The Border.”
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14. Orange, “Mette Frederiksen.”
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15. Phillips, “There Will Be Blood.”
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16. Benson, “In Los Angeles, Climate-Change Gentrification Is Already Happening.”
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17. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.”
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18. Facebook comment, in conversation with the author, 29 September 2018.
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July-August 2019, ATC 201

Source: The Guardian

Momentum launches a new campaign to bankrupt climate change and stop Barclays bank funding the fossil fuel industry.

We all know that the impact of climate change is felt unequally, depending on where you live, how wealthy you are and how easily you can shield yourself from its effects. Less widely known, however, is that responsibility for the crisis is unequal too. In recent years we have been sold a lie: that ordinary people are to blame for the climate crisis. It’s our spending and our consumption habits that have created the mess we’re in, we are told, not the bankers, oil companies and a rich elite.

French president Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax, which sparked the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement into life, exemplified this approach. The tax attacked the rural working poor – ordinary people are being pitted against planet.

But there is another way. The truth is that the crises we face – economic, social and ecological – are the fault of an economic system that serves the few, not the majority. The rich have become richer, while austerity has hollowed out Britain, and the ecosystems sustaining life have been devastated.

At the pinnacle of this system stands the fossil fuel industry. A report last year showed that just 100 companies have been responsible for over 70% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1988. The fossil fuel industry has wrecked the planet, while enacting violence and devastation across the global south. They brought about this crisis, and they should be the ones to pay for it.

But fossil fuel companies aren’t the only ones to blame here. These companies are only able to finance their mines and oilfields with the help of banks. And believe it or not, these banks are increasing their financing for fossil fuel companies. A decade ago they crashed the economy; now they’re crashing the planet.

According to the Banking on Climate Change report, the worst offender in Europe is Barclays. Since the Paris agreement was signed at the end of 2015, Barclays has funded the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $85bn, from fracking and coal here in Britain to the Dakota Access pipeline in North America. In each case this funding has been integral to fossil fuel companies undertaking ecocidal projects, sometimes forcefully, against the wishes of local communities.

If we can pressure Barclays into stopping its fossil fuel finance, we will throw a spanner in the workings of a capitalist machine intent on extracting profit by any means, even at the expense of the planet. That’s why today, Momentum members around the country are launching a new campaign to bankrupt climate change and stop Barclays funding the fossil fuel industry. With over 40 creative direct actions planned at Barclays branches on the first day of the campaign alone, we will put huge political pressure on the bank to end its key role in financing climate chaos.

In doing so, we are drawing on a rich history of protest. In the 1980s British students campaigned for Barclays to withdraw from apartheid South Africa – and won. More recently French campaigners successfully pressured banks into stopping funding coal projects. And just last month, renters’ unions across the UK, including Acorn, forced NatWest to drop a policy discriminating against welfare claimants.

Our campaign can succeed too, especially in the context of an upsurge in climate activism. From the inspiring youth climate strikes, to the push for structural change by the Sunrise Movement in the US and Labour for a Green New Deal in the UK, people across the world are demanding not just the decarbonisation of our economies, but the transformation of the very basis of our societies too.

Ordinary people will no longer accept the many being punished for the crimes of the few who caused the climate crisis. Instead, we’re pointing the finger squarely at the oil barons, the fossil fuel executives, and the corporate elites – and demanding something better.

Seema Syeda is an author and Momentum activist. See also her recent article Christchurch, Islamophobia, and the rise of the far-right. On 2nd April 2019, she is speaking at a London public meeting titled Islamophobia, Brexit & Creeping Fascism. Details…

Seema Syeda is co-author of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it, published by Public Reading Rooms March 2019

How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself in the early 21st century? How do we break fascism, before it breaks us, and open the road to an alternative future and a world transformed?

Read More…

Source: Counterfire

We either allow the corrupt, polluting and exploiting ruling elite to destroy the planet. Or we get organised and prove that another way is possible.

David Attenborough gave a very powerful speech to the COP24 conference recently, highlighting climate breakdown and the mass extinctions that we face on a global scale if the ‘decision makers’ do not act immediately to reverse global emissions. For once, the BBC ran this topic as a headline story and ran it for an entire day. Yet, with their backdrop of the Polish coal mining industry, the media coverage was complicit to say the least with the fossil fuel industry by the very way in which they framed the story.

I don’t doubt Attenborough’s commitment to this issue for one minute but when the BBC tried to torpedo his arguments by challenging him on his solutions for the Polish coal miners, their families and the effect that losing the Polish coal industry would have on their livelihoods, his answer was along the lines of “things change” and “workers will have to adapt”. Yet if he was politically aware, he would have known the arguments and could have reeled off all the positive alternatives to coal. He could have talked about green jobs, disruptive technologies, disinvestment, and the huge opportunities the green economy will offer coal miners, in terms of high skilled, well paid and secure jobs.

This is the problem with trying to leave politics out of analysing climate change. Climate breakdown is the most pressing political issue of our time, it is simply ludicrous to not recognise that and not to campaign directly on those terms.

I’ve also heard recently of some Extinction Rebellion activists saying that the campaign should be “non-political”. This may be a minority view within the campaign, I’m not sure. It certainly is fair to say that they have hit the ground running and their direct action including blocking bridges has brought significant media attention. They have sent a strong message to the polluters and the political class that they mean business. There is doubtless more to come from XR. However, as with any campaign, we need to identify the root cause of the problem in order to tackle it.

The problem is capitalism

It is no coincidence that the fossil fuel industry has been allowed to lead us into the situation we now face. Oil barons of a hundred years ago were firmly rooted inside governments and were allowed to dictate the way in which our energy sector has developed. Extraction of fossil fuels was favoured over the development of renewable technologies for as long as those in power could get away with it – why? Because renewable energy doesn’t make as much profit. Just think what a hundred years of technological advances in renewables would have bought us had they not steered us down their dirty route for profits.

While it is encouraging that the ‘climate agenda’ has finally hit the mainstream, the Paris Accord and the recent COP24 meeting don’t go anywhere near far enough to scratch the surface of the monumental task we have in front of us, let alone address it. Evidence shows that we will reach the tipping point of catastrophic, runaway climate breakdown in a matter of years – this is very serious. This video from Leo Murray of the 10:10 Climate campaign shows exactly what we are facing if we hit that tipping point.

One rather glaring issue in relation to sea level rises is also often overlooked. Fukushima remains in a very fragile state and still holds the potential to cause a global extinction event. The authorities simply don’t know how to deal with the crippled reactor. There are 454 nuclear power stations around the world, usually located in coastal locations. If sea levels rise by just a few meters this could cause many reactors to go into uncontrollable meltdown. Any climate change event which prevented staff from being able to get to work to operate these power stations for more than a week could have exactly the same effect. Nuclear power stations (54 are currently being constructed despite the huge threat they would pose to life if any of these scenarios ever play out). Their construction is in no small part due to the fact that they also produce plutonium for the nuclear arms industry.

All this is because we are now fully entrenched into a global culture of exploitation of the world’s resources. The last forty years of neoliberalism has utterly compounded this. Capitalism relies on the exploitation of the workers, ownership of land and control of the means of production. Simply put, this means exploitation of people and exploitation of our land in the name of profit.

It is politics and the politicians in the back pockets of the super-wealthy who have allowed this all to happen.

If we are apathetic and take no part in the political agendas which influence every aspect of our surroundings, then we ignore for instance, that the metals and minerals found in our smartphones have largely been torn from the ground in Africa. Where corporations with scant regard for environmental protections or employee safety, exploit the workers and force them into terrible working conditions. We ignore that they fund and arm militias and armies to murder and brutally quash legitimate protest.

To ignore politics is to ignore the plastics which are allowed to be sold in our shops and which then end up in our rivers and seas. It is to ignore the child worker whose slave labour for the polluting factory makes our socks and our clothes. The better we begin to understand how all the pieces of this vast political jigsaw fit together, the better equipped we are to begin to create our own jigsaw in order to build the type of world that we all want to see. Namely; a world that won’t be destroyed by the inherent and hardwired greed of capitalism.

Governments around the world, especially our own, are locked into a toxic three-way embrace with the corporations and the arms industry. We see with our governments making laws that benefit the super rich and multinational corporations such as with off-shore tax havens, to such a degree that in Britain tax avoiding companies actually ‘advise’ the government and HMRC on tax law. The revolving door for politicians like Osborne who first grease the wheels for the tax avoiders while in government and then take up seats on the boards of these same banks and companies. It’s the same story for the polluters and fracking companies. They even do both jobs at once while writing the laws that regulate… themselves!  100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions and they’re given carte blanche.

So what can we do about it?

One thing that is clear is that the climate chaos will not be solved by individual lifestyle choices. The problem is systemic and so the only solution can be a radical transformation of society. Not only do I think that time has come for us to be openly making this case but I think we need to seriously ramp up our rhetoric on this point.

With global inequality increasing exponentially, neoliberalism is being further exposed each day for what it really is. There are growing calls on both sides of the Atlantic for a ‘Green New Deal’ which encompasses the symbiotic nature of the fight against climate destruction and inequality. The two have to go hand in hand; the alternative is for the ruling class to co-opt the idea of green reforms to further entrench neoliberalism. As Macron recently discovered with his attempt to introduce a regressive fuel tax, such reforms are not only unfair and don’t solve impending climate chaos, but they will never have popular support.

Jeremy Corbyn’s policy proposals which include investing in green technology, defence diversification that would move jobs from the arms trade to green industries and a commitment to massively reducing carbon emissions by turning to renewable energy resources, show that radical transformation of the economy which reverses neoliberalism and mitigates the destruction of our planet is possible – and on the cards.

While such reforms aren’t the ultimate solution to halting climate disaster, they would be a big step in the transition towards a ‘Resource Based economy’ style model. A Resource Based economy means that the finite resources of the planet are treated as the ‘common heritage of all’ and these resources are used sustainably. The fundamental premise of this type of model is that firstly, we only have one planet. And secondly, we have almost eight billion people on this planet who all have an equal right to food, water, housing, health and education.

Technology and automation would not be used as a mechanism to drive down wages as they currently are, but instead to free up people’s time to study, spend more time with family or contribute to society in other ways.

None of this is going to be easy, but the choice is stark: we either allow the corrupt, polluting and exploiting ruling elite to destroy the planet around us, while they prepare to fly off to their mountain bunkers as total ecosystem breakdown engulfs the rest of us. Or we get organised and prove that another way is possible where people and planet do come first.

Source: Medium

A handful of people have made themselves fabulously wealthy, and keeping the money flowing is more important to them than all of our lives.

I feel a bit like I’m trapped on a spaceship, and I’ve become the prey of a rampaging alien that had no business being there in the first place. Someone else’s hubris cornered me here with something that’s trying to kill me.

Only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the greenhouse emissions that are driving global climate change. 100. That isn’t a very large number. You’d think that with the climatic conditions required for our species to survive hanging in the balance, dealing with these 100 culprits would be the top priority of the governments they should answer to. That’s not the case though — their money funds too many political campaigns. Somehow, the responsibility to alleviate the effects of climate change has been shifted to us individuals. When 100 corporate entities account for 71% of the problem, admonishing us all to take public transportation more and use less hot water when we shower isn’t a sensible solution.

The way we live our lives, and, more importantly, the way we aspire to live our lives is going to have change drastically over a relatively short period of time. Scientists estimate that we have only until 2030 to limit the future rise in temperature by 1.5 degrees, after which point, it will be nearly impossible to stop climate change. 1.5. Another small number that dwarfs everything else. Superstorms, extended droughts, raging wildfires, catastrophic flooding. Conditions that seem apocalyptic are already becoming relatively common place. Things will get worse.

In 2016, when Hurricane Matthew strengthened to a Category 5 storm as it bore down towards Jamaica, I watched in horror and hoped with all my might that it would turn away from my island. It did. The storm moved east. I hoped it would split the difference between Jamaica and Haiti. It didn’t, and the already battered nation of Haiti took a direct hit. In 2017, when I saw Maria dwarf Puerto Rico as the storm devoured the island, I felt sick. Before the pictures and news began to circulate, I knew it had been utterly catastrophic, and I expected a bungling Katrina-reminiscent response. The cruelty of the neglect didn’t surprise me, but it disgusted me. That’s going to happen more often as these events multiply: the victims who have lost everything will be left to their own devices. The multitude, not the 100, is being asked to bear the cost of climate change.

We were warned. That’s what’s so infuriating about all this. Recalcitrant selfishness is why we’re here. A handful of people have made themselves fabulously wealthy, and keeping the money flowing is more important to them than all of our lives. They’re willing to destroy the entire planet to line their pockets. They knew. They knew what the consequences would be, and they did it anyway. For money.

I took a science policy class in graduate school, and I remember clearly the class where one of my classmates piped up to argue when the professor said the science on climate change was settled. A silent, cringing groan rippled through the class as we realized, “Oh, no. He’s one of them…” It’s nearly always the same kind of person: Usually a White guy. Conservative. Overestimates his intelligence by quite a wide margin. Arrogant. Uncreative. Thinks contrariness is a replacement for a personality. Believes being beholden to corporations as opposed to a representative government is freedom. These traits make them quite easy to dupe if you know how to massage their egos and appeal to their genteel White supremacy while you frame your evidence-free arguments. The fossil fuel industry has their number, and they’ve bought the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The result: They’re arguing vociferously to create conditions that will lead to a mass extinction event to own the libs.

The corruption of the 100 reaches even further, though. Plenty of liberal politicians are taking their money too. As a result, it’s been virtually impossible to gather the political will required to tackle climate change in a genuinely meaningful manner. What is an international emergency has been debated and downplayed and denied so much that it’s no wonder that people who don’t pay too much attention to the news don’t understand what all the fuss is about.

Those of us who know what’s happening are trapped in this horror movie with housemates who are actively limiting our ability to fight the monster that is picking us off. We’re approaching the point of no return, and we have to answer the question: What are we prepared to do to survive?

For decades they got away with it. By the time we finally woke up to what they were doing – and what we’d been doing – it was too late.

We knighted them. Gave them tv shows and limitless power. Our politicians courted them. We made them president.

We ignored their shallowness, their lies, their bullying, their petty relentless greed. We were fascinated by them. Some of us practically worshipped them.

When they bought newspapers and tv channels, we lapped up everything they said. We blamed the poor – a parasitic burden, we were told. We blamed foreigners and migrants – usurpers and intruders.

Whatever the Greens, Trumps, Murdochs and Bransons wanted, we wanted that too.

If they didn’t want to pay taxes, we bent over ourselves to let them get away with it. If they wanted to take control of our hospitals, our schools, our railways, our water, we let them. If they decided that ‘austerity’ was necessary- for us not them – we accepted it.

If they didn’t want to do anything about climate change & decided they wanted to cancel any attempts to prevent it & hack down some more rain forest, we let them. They knew best.

If they lied & fleeced people we didn’t care. It showed that they were tough predators

If they bullied and abused the women they worked with we didn’t care about that either. It showed that they were real men. The kind of alpha males that we wanted to be. If they were racist, what of it? They enabled us to be racist too. They were our fantasy friends.

When we looked for role models or sources of inspiration, we didn’t look for scientists, writers, nurses, doctors & all the millions of people who quietly and unselfishly perform little acts of kindness everyday, we looked for the Greens and Trumps – the men with the Midas touch.

Our politicians grovelled before them. We dreamed of becoming their apprentices. We watched them soar.

For decades they got away with it. By the time we finally woke up to what they were doing – and what we’d been doing – it was too fucking late.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: IQS Directory

Whether or not the Earth’s inhabitants in 2018 see significant climate changes in their lifetimes, the goal now must be to preserve the planet for the generations yet to come.

As scientists have been searching for ways to combat both and one source of environmental change keeps coming up: the use of oil and other fossil fuels. Yes, this is a potentially sensitive subject, but we need to discuss it. Here’s what you need to know.

What is climate change?

Climate change happens when a location’s usual weather is altered. This could be a change in rain levels or usual temperatures. Climate change is also a global phenomenon, including changes in global temperatures or where snow falls on the planet. Climate change takes hundreds to millions of years.

In one sense, Earth’s climate changes frequently. There have been times in history when Earth’s climate has been warmer and times when it has been cooler. These eras can last for an era or an eon.

Current climate change scientists say that the Earth’s temperature has gone up about one degree (F) during the last century. Though it doesn’t seem like a big deal, even small changes in global temperatures can cause big changes.

We are seeing evidence of the Earth’s Warming right now, with rising oceans and altered life cycles for certain plant life.

Climate change happens when a location’s usual weather is altered. This could be a change in rain levels or usual temperatures. Climate change is also a global phenomenon, including changes in global temperatures or where snow falls on the planet. Climate change takes hundreds to millions of years.

In one sense, Earth’s climate changes frequently. There have been times in history when Earth’s climate has been warmer and times when it has been cooler. These eras can last for an era or an eon.

Current climate change scientists say that the Earth’s temperature has gone up about one degree (F) during the last century. Though it doesn’t seem like a big deal, even small changes in global temperatures can cause big changes.

We are seeing evidence of the Earth’s Warming right now, with rising oceans and altered life cycles for certain plant life.

Oil companies and the climate change cover-up

In a 1988 Shell report, the company reveals what it knew about climate science, as well as its own role in raising global CO2 emissions.

“The Greenhouse Effect,” was written by members of Shell’s Greenhouse Effect Working Group. The company plainly stated that fossil fuels play a dominant role in driving greenhouse gas emissions, its own products’ contribution to global CO2 emissions, a detailed analysis of potential climate impacts, and a discussion of the potential impacts to the fossil fuel sector itself.

Shell was not only aware of the potential threats posed by climate change, it admitted to its own role in creating global warming through the burning of fossil fuels – like oil. Documents by ExxonMobil, oil trade associations, and utility companies have also written and released reports acknowledging their contributions to climate change.

But the reports of the late 1980s up through the turn of the century were just the tip of a very large iceberg.

The oil industry’s knowledge of climate change goes back to the 1960s, with uncovered documents showing that oil producers were warned of serious worldwide environmental changes more than 55 years ago.

Stanford’s Research Institute offered a report to the American Petroleum Institute (API) in 1968 that warned the growing releases of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere could result in deadly consequences for Earth.

The 1968 Stanford report, uncovered and republished by the Center for International Environmental Law, states: “If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis.”

Thanks to huge increases in CO2 emissions since the late 1960s, the primary culprit of greenhouse effect, global temperatures have risen by 1C over the past century. Scientists estimate that the world’s known fossil fuel reserves, will have to remain in the ground if humans are to avoid the worst ravages of climate change, such as floods, droughts, and barrages from rising seas.

The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) said “hundreds of documents show oil and gas executives met in 1946 to agree that they should fund research into air pollution issues. The subsequent findings were then covered up to protect company profits.”

Holding them to account

A wave of legal challenges currently wash over the gas and oil industry, demanding accountability for climate change. It began after ExxonMobil was outed for having had long recognized the threat burning oil and gas poses to the planet.

After the release of internal Exxon documents, a spotlight on the conduct of the fossil fuel industry emerged in 2015. Investigative journalists wrote stories disclosing that the oil company understood global warming, predicted its consequences, and then spent millions of dollars on a misinformation campaign.

Such evidence was enough to birth a legal demand that included calls for a criminal investigation of Exxon at the federal level. The challenges grew when attorneys general from Massachusetts and New York subpoenaed Exxon for internal climate change-related documents.

The various court cases, strengthened by science, have the potential to alter the way the world thinks about energy production and climate change. The legal actions highlight moving away from fossil fuels and moving toward renewable, sustainable energy.

In fact, in California, where lawsuits seek billions of dollars to pay for climate change mitigation measures, such as sea walls, the gas and oil companies tried to move the cases to federal courts, where the nuisance suits were less likely to succeed. The California lawsuits have been happening since summer of 2017:

• July 17, 2017: San Mateo County, Marin County and Imperial Beach file separate lawsuits in California Superior Court seeking damages from 37 fossil fuel companies
• Sept. 19, 2017: San Francisco and Oakland file lawsuits in California Superior Court seeking damages from five fossil fuel companies over sea level rise
• Dec. 20, 2017: Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz County file lawsuits in California Superior Court against 29 fossil fuel companies, seeking compensation for climate change-related damage.
• Jan. 22, 2018: City of Richmond files lawsuit in California Superior Court against 29 fossil fuel companies.
• March 16, 2018: Federal judge rules some of the cases should be tried in state court, creating a conflict with another judge who ruled similar cases belong in federal court.
• March 21, 2018: Federal judge overseeing the San Francisco and Oakland cases hosts a climate change tutorial for the court.
• June 25, 2018: Federal judge dismisses the San Francisco and Oakland cases, saying the dangers of climate change are “very real” but that the issue should be solved by Congress.

What is to be done: reversing climate change

It is reasonable to hold oil giants like Exxon and Shell responsible for driving climate change. But, what can the world do to reverse the damage? American scientists have been involved in a concentrated effort to determine how quickly our current technology can be deployed to slow and stop global warming.

The researchers looked deep into the specifics of converting from fossil fuels to clean energy. Numbers show that about four-tenths of one percent of America’s landmass could produce renewable, solar energy. But to make that work, we would need to build the factories necessary to churn out thousands of acres worth of solar panels, as well as wind turbines and electric cars and buses.

It’s important to remember that global mobilization to rout climate change would provide a host of economic and social benefits. Deaths from air pollution would be greatly reduced and there would be safer, better-paying employment for energy workers.

In America, a widespread campaign has stymied Arctic drilling and banned fracking in key states. Cities and counties are building more bike paths. Legislators and lobbyists are proposing several ideas, including a carbon tax, a worldwide fracking ban, mandating that federal agencies get their power from green sources, and a prohibition against mining or drilling on public lands.

Should these initiatives be implemented, major fossil fuel companies face the risk that large parts of their reserves will be worthless, leaving BHP Billiton, Anglo American, and Exxaro’s coal reserves in the ground and BP, Lukoil, ExxonMobil, Gazprom and Chevron’s huge gas and oil reserves untapped.

If the nations of the world honor their pledge to fight climate change, the prospects are dreariest for coal, the mother of all polluting fossil fuels. Eighty-two percent of the global supply would have to stay underground.

For gas, 50% of global reserves would have to remain unburned. Geographical variations mean that colossal gas producers in Russia and the Middle East must leave huge quantities underground, while the US and Europe can use more than 90% of their reserves in place of coal.

And while the politicians and policy makers bicker about the solutions for the future, progress had been made in several areas: cutting ozone-damaging chemicals and increasing energy from renewable sources – but these are small steps.

Nevertheless, in the past 25 years, according to the UK’s Independent:

• The amount of fresh water available per head of population worldwide has reduced by 26%.
• The number of ocean “dead zones” – places where little can live because of pollution and oxygen starvation – has increased by 75%.
• Nearly 300 million acres of forest have been lost, mostly to make way for agricultural land.
• Global carbon emissions and average temperatures have shown continued significant increases.
• Human population has risen by 35%.
• Collectively the number of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish in the world has fallen by 29%.

The evidence is overwhelming. The burning of oil and other fossil fuels have had a significant impact on the environment. And while oil and coal companies have made efforts to encourage development of cleaner, renewable energies, they still rely on their mainstay products. Whether or not those inhabiting the Earth in 2018 see significant climate changes in their lifetimes, the goal now must be to preserve the planet for the generations yet to come.

This article by Anna Kučírková was originally published on IQS Directory

JOIN TOGETHER FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE MARCH

Source: Left Unity |18 November 2018

Underlying this is the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands.

Donald Trump chimed in on the line propagated by Fox News for weeks. It’s because of bad forest management by California, a state that’s – by American standards – liberal and anti-Trump. Fox even claimed it was because the people running California were ‘socialists’(!).

In the world of Instagram thing are even more serious – Actor Gerald Butler and singers Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke have had their houses burned down. Luxury houses on the Malibu beachfront have been destroyed. Trump’s response has been criticised by Katy Perry, Leonardo di Caprio and Neil Young. Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and Kanye West have had to be evacuated (can this disaster get any worse?).

When Trump says in his brief tweets that it’s because of poor forest management he is forgetting that 60% of California forest is under federal management. Bad forest management is not the underlying cause. Leonardo di Caprio said it was because of climate change. That’s part of the story, but not the whole issue.

Fires in the California forests and chaparral (shrubland) are regular natural events. Because of global warming they are becoming more regular, and more likely outside of the hottest times of the year. Chaparral has a high-intensity regime, ‘meaning when a fire burns, it burns everything, frequently leaving behind an ashen landscape.’ (1)

According to Ben Engel:

‘Climate change contributes to the growing destruction from California wildfires. Hot, dry weather conditions that help carry fires for thousands of acres are often present nearly year-round now. The state’s urban sprawl and encroachment into formerly undeveloped land is the real catalyst, though, said former Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District chief Kurt Henke.’ (2)

Mike Davis (3), one of the most articulate and insightful socialist writers we have today, has made similar points many times, blaming what he calls ‘real estate capitalism’. In October 2017, a year before the current diesters, he said:

‘Although the explosive development of this firestorm complex caught county and municipal officials off guard, fire alarms had been going off for months. Two years ago [ie in 2015 – ed], at the height of California’s worst drought in five hundred years, the Valley Fire, ignited by faulty wiring in a hot tub, burned 76,000 acres and destroyed 1350 homes in Lake, northern Sonoma, and Napa counties. Last winter’s [2016] record precipitation, meanwhile, did not so much bust the drought as prepare its second and more dangerous reincarnation. The spring’s unforgettable profusion of wildflowers and verdant grasses was punctually followed by a scorching summer that culminated in September with pavement-melting temperatures of 41ºC in San Francisco and 43ºC on the coast at Santa Cruz. Luxuriant green vegetation quickly turned into parched brown fire-starter.’

‘The final ingredient in this “perfect fire” scenario – as in past fire catastrophes in Northern California – was the arrival of the hot, dry offshore winds, with gusts between 50 and 70 mph, that scourge the California coast every year in the weeks before Halloween, sometimes continuing into December. The Diablos are the Bay Area’s upscale version of Southern California’s autumn mini-hurricanes, the Santa Anas. In October 1991, they turned a small grass fire near the Caldecott Tunnel in the Oakland Hills into an inferno that killed 25 people and destroyed almost 4000 homes and apartments.’

Underlying this is real estate capitalism, ‘the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands’. Moreover:

‘This is the deadly conceit behind mainstream environmental politics in California: you say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands. Land use patterns in California have long been insane but, with negligible opposition, they reproduce themselves like a flesh-eating virus. After the Tunnel Fire in Oakland and the 2003 and 2007 firestorms in San Diego County, paradise was quickly restored; in fact, the replacement homes were larger and grander than the originals. The East Bay implemented some sensible reforms but in rural San Diego County, the Republican majority voted down a modest tax increase to hire more firefighters. The learning curve has a negative slope.

‘I’ve found that the easiest way to explain California fire politics to students or visitors from the other blue coast is to take them to see the small community of Carveacre in the rugged mountains east of San Diego. After less than a mile, a narrow paved road splays into rutted dirt tracks leading to thirty or forty impressive homes. The attractions are obvious: families with broods can afford large homes as well as dirt bikes, horses, dogs, and the occasional emu or llama. At night, stars twinkle that haven’t been visible in San Diego, 35 miles away, for almost a century. The vistas are magnificent and the mild winters usually mantle the mountain chaparral with a magical coating of light snow.

‘But Carveacre on a hot, high fire-danger day scares the shit out of me. A mountainside cul-de-sac at the end of a one-lane road with scattered houses surrounded by ripe-to-burn vegetation – the “fuel load” of chaparral in California is calculated in equivalent barrels of crude oil – the place confounds human intelligence. It’s a rustic version of death row. Much as I would like for once to be a bearer of good news rather than an elderly prophet of doom, Carveacre demonstrates the hopelessness of rational planning in a society based on real-estate capitalism. Unnecessarily, our children, and theirs, will continue to face the flames.’

NOTES:

• (1) http://www.californiachaparral.com/fire/firenature.html
• (2) https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article221385910.html
• (3) https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n21/mike-davis/el-diablo-in-wine-country

JOIN TOGETHER FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE MARCH

Source: The Guardian

No one is more ready to defy neoliberal dogma than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a redistributive project to address climate change.

The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.

Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.

And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.

These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.

While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.

The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.

Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.

Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.

At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.

Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”

Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? We are all Thatcher’s children.

Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural problems of an exploitative system – poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency.

Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.

Of course we need people to consume less and innovate low-carbon alternatives – build sustainable farms, invent battery storages, spread zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options for everyone—not just an affluent or intrepid few.

If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.

Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.

The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making a political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines, forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.

None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a redistributive project to address climate change: by publicly retooling the economy, and insisting that corporate oligarchs no longer run amok. The notion that the rich should pay their fair share to fund this transformation was considered laughable by the political and media class. Millions disagreed. Society, long said to be departed, is now back with a vengeance.

So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you happier and healthier. But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate power.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: The Guardian

And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle. In addition to this, with the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.

So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.

It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere. I am no exception to this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward, and the electorate – or at least a sufficiently significant proportion of it – took no more notice of me than any of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice to the rest of the country.

What matters now, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react. Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible mistake.

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.

But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

The consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.

For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.

Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it.

To do that, we need to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations. If we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more than at present.

With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.

We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility.

JOIN TOGETHER FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE MARCH

Source: The Guardian

This is Donald Trump’s promise, in his video message on Monday, in which the US president-elect claimed that unleashing coal and fracking would create “many millions of high-paid jobs”. He will tear down everything to make it come true.

But it won’t come true. Even if we ripped the world to pieces in the search for full employment, leaving no mountain unturned, we would not find it. Instead, we would merely jeopardise the prosperity – and the lives – of people everywhere. However slavishly governments grovel to corporate Luddism, they will not bring the smog economy back.

No one can deny the problem Trump claims to be addressing. The old mining and industrial areas are in crisis throughout the rich world. And we have seen nothing yet. I have just reread the study published by the Oxford Martin School in 2013 on the impacts of computerisation. What jumps out, to put it crudely, is that jobs in the rust belts and rural towns that voted for Trump are at high risk of automation, while the professions of many Hillary Clinton supporters are at low risk.

The jobs most likely to be destroyed are in mining, raw materials, manufacturing, transport and logistics, cargo handling, warehousing and retailing, construction (prefabricated buildings will be assembled by robots in factories), office support, administration and telemarketing. So what, in the areas that voted for Trump, will be left?

Farm jobs have mostly gone already. Service and care work, where hope for some appeared to lie, will be threatened by a further wave of automation, as service robots – commercial and domestic – take over.

Yes, there will be jobs in the green economy: more and better than any that could be revived in the fossil economy. But they won’t be enough to fill the gaps, and many will be in the wrong places for those losing their professions.

At lower risk is work that requires negotiation, persuasion, originality and creativity. The management and business jobs that demand these skills are comparatively safe from automation; so are those of lawyers, teachers, researchers, doctors, journalists, actors and artists. The jobs that demand the highest educational attainment are the least susceptible to computerisation. The divisions tearing America apart will only widen.

Even this bleak analysis does not capture in full the underlying reasons why good, abundant jobs will not return to the places that need them most. As Paul Mason argues in PostCapitalism, the impacts of information technology go way beyond simple automation: they are likely to destroy the very basis of the market economy, and the relationship between work and wages.

And, as the French writer Paul Arbair notes in the most interesting essay I have read this year, beyond a certain level of complexity economies become harder to sustain. There’s a point at which further complexity delivers diminishing returns; society is then overwhelmed by its demands, and breaks down. He argues that the political crisis in western countries suggests we may have reached this point.

Trump has also announced that on his first day in office he will withdraw America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He is right to do so, but for the wrong reasons. Like TTIP and Ceta, the TPP is a fake trade treaty whose primary impact is to extend corporate property rights at the expense of both competition and democracy. But withdrawal will not, as he claims, “bring jobs and industry back to American shores”. The work in Mexico and China that Trump wants to reclaim will evaporate long before it can be repatriated.

As for the high-quality, high-waged working-class jobs he promised, these are never handed down from on high. They are secured through the organisation of labour. But the unions were smashed by Ronald Reagan, and collective bargaining has been suppressed ever since by casualisation and fragmentation. So how is this going to happen? Out of the kindness of Trump’s heart? Kindness, Trump, heart?

But it’s not just Trump. Clinton and Bernie Sanders also made impossible promises to bring back jobs. Half the platform of each party was based on a delusion. The social, environmental and economic crises we face require a complete reappraisal of the way we live and work. The failure by mainstream political parties to produce a new and persuasive economic narrative, which does not rely on sustaining impossible levels of growth and generating illusory jobs, provides a marvellous opening for demagogues everywhere.

Governments across the world are making promises they cannot keep. In the absence of a new vision, their failure to materialise will mean only one thing: something or someone must be found to blame. As people become angrier and more alienated, as the complexity and connectivity of global systems becomes ever harder to manage, as institutions such as the European Union collapse and as climate change renders parts of the world uninhabitable, forcing hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the net of blame will be cast ever wider.

Eventually the anger that cannot be assuaged through policy will be turned outwards, towards other nations. Faced with a choice between hard truths and easy lies, politicians and their supporters in the media will discover that foreign aggression is among the few options for political survival.

I now believe that we will see war between the major powers within my lifetime. Which ones it will involve, and on what apparent cause, remains far from clear. But something that once seemed remote now looks probable.

A complete reframing of economic life is needed not just to suppress the existential risk that climate change presents (a risk marked by a 20°C anomaly reported in the Arctic Ocean while I was writing this article), but other existential threats as well – including war.

Today’s governments, whether they are run by Trump or Obama or May or Merkel, lack the courage and imagination even to open this conversation. It is left to others to conceive of a more plausible vision than trying to magic back the good old days.

The task for all those who love this world and fear for our children is to imagine a different future rather than another past.