The Long Ecological Revolution

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Ecological Economics
Volume 179, January 2021, 106832

Methodological and Ideological Options
A Green New Deal without growth?
Author links open overlay panelRiccardoMastiniaGiorgosKallisabJasonHickelc
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106832Get rights and content
Highlights
•
The Green New Deal and degrowth represent two distinct narratives and visions for rapid decarbonisation.

•
Green New Deal and degrowth proposals have synergies and tensions.

•
The Green New Deal does not have to stimulate GDP growth or depend on it for financing.

•
Degrowth policies could be incorporated into a ‘Green New Deal without growth’.


Abstract
The IPCC warns that in order to keep global warming under 1.5°, global emissions must be cut to zero by 2050. Policymakers and scholars debate how best to decarbonise the energy system, and what socio-economic changes might be necessary. Here we review the strengths, weaknesses, and synergies of two prominent climate change mitigation narratives: the Green New Deal and degrowth. Green New Deal advocates propose a plan to coordinate and finance a large-scale overhaul of the energy system. Some see economic growth as crucial to financing this transition, and claim that the Green New Deal will further stimulate growth. By contrast, proponents of degrowth maintain that growth makes it more difficult to accomplish emissions reductions, and argue for reducing the scale of energy use to enable a rapid energy transition. The two narratives converge on the importance of public investments for financing the energy transition, industrial policies to lead the decarbonisation of the economy, socializing the energy sector to allow longer investment horizons, and expanding the welfare state to increase social protection. We conclude that despite important tensions, there is room for synthesizing Green New Deal and degrowth-minded approaches into a ‘Green New Deal without growth’.

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Keywords
Green new dealDegrowthDecarbonisationGreen growthEcological economicsPolitical ecology
1. Introduction
The IPCC SR15 report (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2018) estimates that in order to have a 50% to 66% chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 °C, global emissions need to be reduced to around half their present level by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. The report concludes that countries must urgently come up with concrete plans for rapid emissions reductions.

In this paper we compare two master narratives on climate change mitigation that represent a break with traditional market-based environmental policy: the Green New Deal (GND) and degrowth. Both have gained visibility in academia in recent years, with the GND becoming commonplace in public debate. The idea of a GND has been discussed since 2007, but recently a coalition of grassroots environmental groups, progressive politicians, and policy think tanks in the United States has advanced a new formulation, inspired by FDR's New Deal, that led to House Resolution 109 (presented to the US Congress in February 2019). In the wake of these events, climate justice movements in Europe have also started embracing the GND platform. Degrowth in comparison is a (relatively new) field of academic research and advocacy, mobilized by grassroots movements as a framework for articulating social and environmental justice demands (Demaria et al., 2013). Our premise here is that instead of seeing the GND and degrowth as antagonistic and trying to prove which one is right and which wrong (e.g. Pollin, 2018), it is more constructive to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each in order to identify possible synergies, while recognizing tensions.

A main source of friction between the two narratives is the question of economic growth. Some GND advocates maintain that investments in renewable energy will grow related activities, have spillover effects, and stimulate the economy (Pollin, 2018). Economic growth will then increase the revenues available for clean energy investment and accelerate its deployment.

The degrowth argument holds instead that the slower the rate of economic growth, the easier it is to achieve emissions reductions. This is because the rate of change of carbon emissions is equal to the rate of change of output multiplied by the rate of change of carbon intensity. Relying on GDP growth to finance the deployment of renewable energy means increasing total energy demand, which makes emissions reductions more difficult to achieve.

Section 2 analyses the genesis and evolution of the GND and argues that its recent formulation marks a break from previous iterations, something that has received less attention than it should by ecological economists. Section 3 outlines the degrowth position in relation to climate breakdown and mitigation, responding to critiques, including by economist Robert Pollin (2018), that degrowth has little to offer to these questions. Section 4 focuses on the question of growth in more detail and argues in favour of the degrowth diagnosis, but claims that degrowth could be compatible, under certain conditions, with a GND. Section 5 compares the two approaches, and identifies elements of synergy and tension, while exploring what a ‘GND without growth’ could look like.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0919319615

I have no idea as to whether repurposing the volume of economic activity current will provide human need. Perhaps, the flagrant waste of capitalism made inevitable by it's weird and twisted primary purpose will suffice. But what if not?

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Climate Change: Industrial Slowdown Has Not Curbed CO2 Rise


A man passes the environment object showing a possible prolonged heat downtown due to climate changes in Riga, Latvia, 30 October 2020. | Photo: EFE/EPA/ Tom Kalnins

Published 23 November 2020 (13 hours 45 minutes ago)

The WMO latest report explains that contrary to expectations, "the industrial slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has not curbed record levels of greenhouse gases which are trapping heat in the atmosphere, increasing temperatures and driving more extreme weather, ice melt, sea-level rise and ocean acidification."


The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned on Monday that greenhouse gas emissions spiked in 2019 and continue to rise in 2020.

The WMO latest report explains that contrary to expectations, "the industrial slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has not curbed record levels of greenhouse gases which are trapping heat in the atmosphere, increasing temperatures and driving more extreme weather, ice melt, sea-level rise and ocean acidification."

The organization notices that although the lockdown has cut emissions of many pollutants gases, including carbon dioxide, the overall impact over CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is not more significant than the "year to year fluctuations in the carbon cycle and the high natural variability in carbon sinks like vegetation."


Moreover, the WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas pointed out that “Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and the ocean for even longer. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer, and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now. But there weren’t 7.7 billion inhabitants."

The alarming data indicates that although daily CO2 emissions were reduced by 17 percent worldwide because of the lockdowns, CO2 will continue to increase although "at a slightly reduced pace."

The WMO highlights that these findings demonstrate the necessity of "a sustained flattening of the curve" through net-zero emissions policies and renewable energy expansion.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cli ... -0021.html

So much for that silver lining.

Not to worry, Our Savior the Anti-Trump has decreed that the horse-faced eminence gross, John Kerry, is to be Climate Change Czar, signifying a total disregard for life on Earth. Ain't normalcy grand?

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Agroecology Means Popular Resistance at MST’s Marielle Vive Camp
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 26, 2020
Daniel Lamir


Footage of the Marielle Vive camp, highlighting its mandala garden – Julio Matos

There are about 700 families in transition threatened by real estate speculation

For more than two years, around 700 families from the Landless Rural Workers Movement(MST) have been transforming the idle setting of the old Eldorado Ranch, in the Valinhos municipality of the state of São Paulo, into land producing healthy, agro-ecological foods. The Marielle Vive camp was created in April 14th, 2018, a month after the murder of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco, and her driver Anderson Gomes.

Marielle Vive was also founded to exalt the life of one of its residents, bricklayer Luís Ferreira da Costa. He was brutally murdered on July 18th, 2019, while participating in a peaceful protest demanding access to water. The crime is part of a larger context of violence reported by the families in the camp, which is surrounded by luxury condominiums. The murderer of Seu Luís, Leo Luiz Ribeiro, awaits trial a free man, living near the crime scene.

From mourning, to struggling to survive, Marielle Vive faces even more challenges to maintain its existence. The 130-hectare plot of land, which today is being revived through agro-ecological principles, is in danger of being taken over by real estate speculators. Starting next year, a court order may force the eviction of the families residing there.

On the other hand, the encampment demonstrates, day by day, the strength of its project to become a legal settlement and guarantee the peoples’ right to land, as well as aid in environmental preservation and the reduction of social and economic inequalities in the region. An example is the collective mandala garden, which has 1000 square meters, as explained by Tassi Barreto, a member of the MST.

“It [the mandala garden] is fundamental for our internal organizational processes, and also for demonstrating what we want with this land through the establishment of a settlement. It contributes from the point of view of internal training, both in the aspect of agroecology, but also in the process of collective work experience, of cooperative work. And it is also a demonstration of what can be produced in this area of the ranch, which sits abandoned and at the mercy of speculative real estate capital”, analyzes Tassi.

In addition to the mandala garden, the collective kitchen provides all meals from the camp’s very first day. The garden’s own production supplies the produce that is prepared daily. The work of less than three years has already recovered springs and implemented new food alternatives among the camped families. In addition to this, surplus production is donated to other families and hospitals in the region.

The feeling of belonging in the camp feeds the dreams and proposals that will enbale conquests beyond the approximately 700 families already ther. Suely Moreira, better known as Suely da Produção, is a resident of Marielle Vive. She mentions that the territory functions as a great school of agro-ecological knowledge, in partnership with organizations such as educational institutions and social movements. The defense of life is one of their political banners, and also practiced daily between people.

“Preserving the environment, learning to look at nature as our source of energy and healthy food for our little ones. This is what we are practicing here at the camp. We are learning a lot, and this is our way, I see no other way. Agroecology is a life principle”, explains Suely.

On November 2nd, 2019, the Luís Ferreira Popular School was inaugurated on site. In addition, various activities are carried out to reaffirm the union between the struggle for agrarian reform and agroecology within the camp.

Families intend to take another step towards further exercising their rights on the territory. The project to build a shed next to the community garden is in progress. The work will be done following the principles of bio-construction, an ancient technical technique, practiced by several peoples, utilizing easily accessible materials that are harmonious with nature. Furthermore, the technique follows a philosophy of environmental responsibility.

For all this to happen, Marielle Vive needs financial resources and has opened a crowdfunding campaign. The online drive intends to raise funds for the construction of a new shed, and for educational efforts into bio-construction techniques. The fundraiser and the bamboo bio-construction course are being organized by the MST, with the help of biologist and activist for causes that directly affect traditionalist peoples – Bianca Almeida – and permaculturist, bio-constructor and educator – Adriano Barbosa.

Edited by Geisa Marques

Translated by Ítalo Piva

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2020/11/ ... vive-camp/

I salute these people for their very progressive effort but I fear the worst for them. Like Syndicalists efforts we cannot expect to be 'left alone' in bringing about a new world. When encompassed by capitalism the only solution is to fight it, there is no other solution, they will not go quietly.

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XV Theses on the
Ecological Crisis and the Pandemia
Michael Löwy

XV Theses on the Ecological Crisis and the Pandemia

Abstract: The ecological crisis - of which the Covid 19 pandemia is one
of the symptoms - is already the most important social and political
question of the 21st century, and will become even more so in the coming
months and years. The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be
decided in the coming decades. There is no solution to the ecological
crisis within the framework of capitalism, a system entirely devoted to
productivism, consumerism, the ferocious struggle for ‘market shares’,
to capital accumulation and maximizing profits. Its intrinsically perverse
logic inevitably leads to the break down of the ecological equilibrium and
the destruction of the ecosystems.

I.The COVID-19 pandemia is, according to the best specialists, a result
of the invasion of the natural environment by modern agriculture, and the
marketing of savage animal species. It is one of the multiple aspects of
the ecological crisis, on a world scale. Globalisation, with the massive
transport of individuals and commodities around the planet, produced the
rapid expansion of the virus.

II. The ecological crisis is already the most important social and political
question of the 21st century, and will become even more so in the coming
months and years. The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be
decided in the coming decades. Calculations by certain scientists as to
scenarios for the year 2100 aren’t very useful for two reasons: 1) scientific:
considering all the feedback effects impossible to calculate, it is very risky
to make projections over a century; 2) political: at the end of the century,
all of us, our children and grandchildren will be gone, so who cares?

III. As the IPCC explains, if the average temperature exceeds the preindustrial periods by 1.5°, there is a risk of setting off an irreversible
climate change process 1. The ecological crisis involves several facets,
with hazardous consequences, but the climate question is doubtless the
most dramatic threat. What would the consequences of this be? Just a
few examples: the multiplication of megafires such as in Australia; the
disappearance of rivers and the desertification of land areas, melting
and dislocation of polar ice and raising the sea level, which could reach
dozens of meters. Yet, at two meters vast regions of Bangladesh, India,
and Thailand, as well as the major cities of human civilisation – Hong
Kong, Calcutta, Venice, Amsterdam, Shanghai, London, New York, Rio –
will have disappeared beneath the sea. How high can the temperature
go? At what temperature will human life on this planet be threatened? No
one has an answer to these questions.

IV. These are risks of a catastrophe unprecedented in human history.
One would have to go back to the Pliocene, some millions of years ago,
to find climate conditions similar to what could become reality in the
future, due to climate change. Most geologists consider that we have
entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, when conditions on
the planet have been modified by human action? What action? Climate
change began with the 18th Century Industrial Revolution, but it is after
1945, with neoliberal globalisation, that it took a qualitative leap. In other
words, modern capitalist industrial civilisation is responsible for the
accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus of global heating.

V. The capitalist system’s responsibility in the imminent catastrophe
is widely recognised. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si, without
uttering the word ‘capitalism’ spoke out against a structurally perverse
system of commercial and property relations based exclusively on the
‘principle of profit maximization’ as responsible both for social injustice
and destruction of our Common House, Nature. A slogan universally
chanted the world over in ecological demonstrations is ‘Change the
System, not the Climate!’The attitude shown by the main representatives
of this system, advocates of business as usual – billionaires, bankers,
‘experts’, oligarchs, politicians – can be summed up by the phrase
attributed to Louis XV: ‘After me, the deluge’.

VI. The systemic nature of the problem is cruelly illustrated by
governments’ behaviour. All, (with very rare exceptions) acting in the
service of capital accumulation, multinationals, the fossil oligarchy,
general commodification and free trade. Some of them – Donald Trump,
Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison (Australia) – are openly ecocidal and
climate deniers. The other, ‘reasonable’ ones, set the tone at the annual
COP (Conference of the Parties or Circuses Organised Periodically?)
meetings, which feature vague ‘green’ rhetoric and total inertia. The most
successful was COP 21, in Paris, which concluded with solemn promises
from all governments taking part to reduce emissions – not kept, except
by a few Pacific islands. Scientists calculate that even if they had been
kept, the temperature would still rise up to 3.3° higher...

VII. ‘Green capitalism’, ‘carbon markets’, ‘compensation mechanisms,
and other manipulations of the so-called ‘sustainable market economy’
have proven perfectly useless, while ‘greening’ goes on and on,
emissions are skyrocketing and catastrophe gets closer and closer. There
is no solution to the ecological crisis within the framework of capitalism,
a system entirely devoted to productivism, consumerism, the ferocious
struggle for ‘market shares’, to capital accumulation and maximizing
profits. Its intrinsically perverse logic inevitably leads to the break down
of the ecological equilibrium and the destruction of the ecosystems.

VIII. During the COVID-19 pandemia, there has been a significant
decrease in production and transport of commodities. This reduced
the carbon emissions, but only on a very limited scale. As soon as the
epidemia is under control – thanks to the discovery of a vaccine – there
will be an immediate return to “business as usual”. There should be no
illusion that after the COVID-19 crisis “everything will be changed” and
there will be no return to the previous situation.

IX. The only effective alternatives, capable of avoiding catastrophe, are
radical alternatives. ‘Radical’ means attacking the root of the evil. If the
capitalist system is at the root, we need anti-system alternatives, i.e.,
anti-capitalist ones, such as eco-socialism, an ecological socialism up
to the challenges of the 21st century. Other radical alternatives such as
eco-feminism, social ecology (Murray Bookchin), André Gorz’s political
ecology, or degrowth have much in common with eco-socialism: relations
of reciprocal influence have developed in recent years.

X. What is socialism? For many Marxists, it is transformation of the
relationships of production – by the collective appropriation of the means
of production – to allow the free development of productive forces. Ecosocialism lays claim to Marx, but explicitly breaks with this approach
and with the productivist and anti-ecological model of the so-called
“really existing socialism” of Stalinist inspiration. Of course, collective
ownership is indispensible, but the productive forces themselves must
also be transformed: a) by changing their energy sources (renewables
instead of fossil fuels); b) by reducing global energy consumption; c) by
reducing production of goods (‘degrowth’), and by eliminating useless
activities (advertising) and harmful ones (pesticides, weapons of war,
etc.); d) by putting a stop to planned obsolescence. Eco-socialism also
involves transformation, after a process of democrastic discussion, of
consumption models, transport forms, urbanism and ‘ways of life.’ In
short, it is much more than a change of property forms: it is a civilisational
change, based on values of solidarity, democracy, equaliberty, and
respect for nature. Eco-socialist civilisation breaks with productivism
and consumerism, in favour of shorter working time, thus more free
time devoted to social, political, recreational, artistic, erotic, and other
activities. Marx referred to this goal by the term ‘realm of freedom’.

XI. To achieve the transition towards eco-socialism, democratic planning
is required, guided by two criteria: meeting actual needs, and respect for
the ecological balance of the planet. The people themselves – once the
onslaught of advertising and the consumption obsession created by the
capitalist market are eliminated – will decide, democratically, what their
real needs are. Eco-socialism is a wager on the democratic rationality of
the popular classes.

XII. This requires a real social revolution. To carry out the ecosocialist
project, partial reforms will not suffice. How can such a revolution be
defined? We could refer to a note by Walter Benjamin, on the margins of
his theses On the concept of history (1940): ‘Marx said that revolutions
are the locomotive of world history. But things might work out otherwise.
It is possible that revolutions are the act by which humans travelling in
the train pull the emergency brakes’. Translation in 21st century terms: we
are all passengers on a suicidal train, which is named Modern Industrial
Capitalist Civilisation. This train is running towards a catastrophic abyss:
climate change. Revolutionary action aims to halt it – before it is too late.

XIII. Eco-socialism is at once a project for the future and a strategy
for the struggle here and now. There is no question of waiting for
‘the conditions to be ripe’. It is necessary to provoke convergence
between social and ecological struggles and fight the most destructive
initiatives by powers in the service of capital. This is what Naomi Klein
called Blockadia. Within mobilisations of this type, an anti-capitalist
consciousness and interest in eco-socialism can emerge during
struggles. Proposals such as the Green New Deal are part of this
struggle, in their radical forms, which require effectively renouncing fossil
energies – but not in those limited to recycling ‘green capitalism’.

XIV. Who is the subject in this struggle? The workerist/industrialist
dogmatism of the previous century is no longer current. The forces
now at the forefront of the confrontation are youth, women, Indigenous
people, and peasants. Women are very present in the formidable youth
uprising launched by Greta Thunberg’s call – one of the great sources
of hope for the future. As the eco-feminists explain to us, this massive
women’s participation in the mobilisations comes from the fact that they
are the first victims of the system’s damage to the environment. Unions
are beginning here and there to also get involved. This is important,
because, in the final analysis, we can’t overcome the system without the
active participation of urban and rural workers, who make up the majority
of the population. The first condition, in each movement, is associating
ecological goals (closing coal mines or oil wells, or coal-fired power
stations, etc.) with guaranteed employment for the workers involved.

XV. Do we have any chance of winning this battle, before it is too late?
Unlike the so-called ‘collapsologists’ who clamorously proclaim that
catastrophe is inevitable and that any resistance is futile, we think the
future is open. There is no guarantee that this future will be eco-socialist:
this is the object of a wager in the Pascalian sense, in which we commit
all our forces, in a ‘labour for uncertainty’. But as Bertolt Brecht said, with
grand and simple wisdom: “Those who fight may lose. Those who don’t
fight have already lost.”

XV Theses on the Ecological Crisis and the Pandemia

http://www.crisiscritique.org/uploads/2 ... wy.pdf?v=1

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UN climate report calls out global elite as cause of the crisis
Tina LandisDecember 11, 2020 236 4 minutes read
Download PDF flyer

The UN Emissions Gap Report released on Dec. 9, shows how far off the mark we are for averting complete climate catastrophe. Current global emissions reduction policies have us on track for 3.5 C warming by 2100, which would be catastrophic for life on Earth. An average increase of 1.5 C globally is the line that must not be crossed — with current temperatures at an average of nearly 1 C warming.

The report takes a surprisingly class perspective by pointing out that the one percent richest people on the planet are responsible for emissions equal to that of the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population. This group would need to reduce its carbon footprint 30 fold just to meet the Paris Agreement commitments.

Hottest year on record

2020 will likely be the hottest year on record following the record breaking hot decade of the 2010s. With unprecedented monsoon rains, wildfires, hurricanes and tropical cyclones, we are witnessing the unraveling of life on Earth as we know it. And let’s not forget the pandemic, which is the result of the changing climate and human encroachment on wildlands, with official reports of nearly 70 million globally contracting the virus and more than a million dead.

Arctic ice loss has accelerated so much that scientists are predicting that a new Arctic climate is emerging — moving from one of snow and ice to one of open water and rain. Similarly, scientists are alarmed by the rapid deterioration of the Antarctica ice sheet. Ice loss triggers a positive feedback loop as open water and land absorb more heat, unlike ice and snow that reflect the sun’s rays — meaning ice loss creates more warming, which accelerates more ice loss, and so on.

A 2015 consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions study of the San Francisco Bay Area — home of Big Tech and the highest concentration of billionaires on the planet — confirms the UN assertion and shows that the areas where the super rich live have by far the highest share of emissions. The study looked at the life-cycle GHG emissions of all products used and consumed within the Bay Area — from production, shipping, use and disposal of those products. This is key in order to assign the appropriate responsibility for emissions, and in turn the crisis that humanity is facing. Instead of pointing the finger at the poorer countries where U.S. corporations have outsourced production to, or poor communities within wealthier nations, tying the emissions back to the source of the highest consumption rates shows a more accurate picture of who truly holds more responsibility for the problem.

Individual behavior change not the solution

The corporate media frames solutions as one of individual behavior change, which really takes the blame off the producers and puts it onto individual lifestyle choices — in essence a mass marketing campaign for “green” products and electric vehicles. This gives the illusion that if we all just fly less, recycle more, and go vegan, the crisis will be averted. While having more environmentally-conscious practices is good, the majority of the population that is just struggling to survive often doesn’t have access to “green” options. This scapegoating of the individual diverts attention away from the true culprit, the capitalist system itself — just 100 companies responsible for 71 percent of emissions since 1988.

What you personally do, doesn’t solve the unsustainability of the production model of capitalism. For instance, the UN report goes on to point out that the dip we have seen in global emissions during the pandemic will not have a positive effect in the long run. The solution goes way beyond driving less for a few months. We need an uprooting of the capitalist production model that is based on the whims of the market rather than sustainable planning.

The very nature of capitalism that allows billionaires to exist by hoarding the wealth created by the exploited working class, is the source of the problem. A system that requires endless growth and ever increasing profits can never be sustainable.

The “one percent” are the ruling class of the world — the ones who truly call the shots — controlling corporations and to a large degree, government policy. These capitalists are always looking for ways to profit off of any situation. Whether an investment is good for humanity and the environment is irrelevant. Making the highest profits possible is the only concern. For instance, Wall Street recently began trading water futures making a basic need for human survival into a cynical betting game. This is a perfect example of “disaster capitalism” and reveals the complete disregard for the survival of our species and a complete disinterest in truly addressing the climate crisis.

We cannot solve this crisis within the trajectory of global imperialism

There are a few relatively simple actions that could be taken that if implemented on a comprehensive scale could lower global temperatures, increase the water table in drought-plagued areas, and increase biodiversity and ecosystem resilience to the changes underway. Restoring forests, wetlands, and grasslands, along with a shift to regenerative agriculture and an end to fossil fuel use, could stem the unraveling of our climate in just decades. Humanity has the tools to save ourselves, but the “one percent” and the system of capitalism that their police, military, courts and prisons protect, is literally driving us off the cliff.

One glaring omission that the UN climate reports and summits never address is the issue of imperialism. How can we lower global emissions when the imperialists — who are the biggest per capita polluters — consistently block any binding commitments at the climate summits, despite pressure from the Global South? How can we globally work together for our survival when the U.S. and their European allies constantly undermine and reduce to rubble any nation that doesn’t bow to their demands?

For instance, Libya, prior to its destruction in 2011 by the US and NATO, had the highest standard of living on the African continent. Libya had nearly completed the “Great Man-Made River,” the world’s largest irrigation system that was greening the desert, and were creating a Pan-African banking system and currency to bring the continent out of indebtedness to the imperialist-controlled IMF and World Bank. That could have meant true independence for African nations and development based on sustainability. But, the imperialists wreaked total destruction upon Libya, cheered on the lynching of its leader, and bombed the irrigation system, creating a failed state that today has open slave markets trading Black Africans.

We cannot solve the global climate crisis within the current trajectory of world imperialism. We must uproot the system of capitalism and move to a socialist system built on cooperation and sharing of resources. The wealth of the “one percent” must be seized to fund an ecological and social revolution and put the power into the hands of the majority to determine what is needed for the benefit of both people and planet.

We need to organize ourselves across borders, get educated on the issues, and build a mass militant people’s movement to realize this goal. The time to act is now, to seize control of the car — of the production system — before the capitalists drive us off the cliff. We have the power to stem the climate crisis and take an evolutionary leap forward to a socialist society that meets all of our needs for an equitable and abundant future.

https://www.liberationnews.org/un-clima ... rationnews

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“We Demand Tomorrow”: Marxist Documentary on the Climate Crisis
January 2, 2021 Editor2 capitalism, Climate Crisis, Ecosocialism, marxism
By David Schwartzman – Dec 30, 2020

We Demand Tomorrow is a newly released video by Patreon, sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/prolekult.



Here is their description:

We Demand Tomorrow is a Marxist documentary looking at the material basis of communism in context of the extinction crises today faced by our species. The film explores the Marxist view of historical development and the historically limited nature of capitalist society both theoretically and concretely through a critique of the economic and environmental crises faced by our species. It then goes on to demonstrate that Marxist communism is a material necessity for our species’ survival, presenting the solutions to extinction in outline.”

Kudos to Patreon for this brilliant production, well worth seeing, with its deep analysis of capitalism though I have some reservations to be noted below. I particularly applaud the presentation of Cuba’s socialist solutions in this current pandemic, in contrast to capitalist Britain, with Cuba being on the cutting edge of global ecosocialism. We Demand Tomorrow should trigger a lot of debate, and be a useful resource for wide-ranging discussion. I agree with the video’s support for a two-stage path out of capitalism. I have long argued that socialism in our epoch must confront the climate/ecological crisis with effective science-based solutions, i.e., be ecosocialism to be a viable alternative to capitalism, and communism in the 21st Century must be solar communism, powered by high efficiency capture of solar radiation guided by this updated definition from Marx’s aphorism: “From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs”, with “each” and “her” referring both to human beings and to nature (ecosystems). Indeed as the video argues, a maximum of decentralized bottom-up social management is a worthy goal for postcapitalist civilization. But given the planetary scale of the climate/ecological crisis, and the immense challenges of a sustainable and just transition, overall democratic planning and coordination on world scale will be needed as well.

First, regarding the video’s prediction of imminent collapse of capitalism, a quote from Andreas Malm’s new book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency (2020) is relevant:

“There is a legitimate joke about Marxists having correctly predicted twelve out the last three capitalist crises” (p.109)

While the resiliency of capitalism to recover from crises in the short term, even from one as deep as the current one, should not be underestimated, the video is correct to point to the uniqueness of this one. Nevertheless, one could consider as Peter Frase did in his book Four Futures (2016) another outcome, besides socialism/communism or rentism, namely exterminism (hierarchy and scarcity), with the latter becoming increasingly plausible with climate catastrophe, as I suggested in my paper Schwartzman (2013), which was updated in the Introduction of Schwartzman and Schwartzman (2019). Our latest assessment was of course made before the current pandemic, but I confront our current crisis in Schwartzman (2020).

More Specifically My Critique Of This Video Is As Follows:

1) The dismissal of the Green New Deal (GND) as another capitalist solution is not helpful. There are many versions of the GND, not only those promoted by “green” capital, but an alternative ecosocialist Global GND. We Demand Tomorrow hasn’t provided a strategic plan which is imperative given the short timeframe left to prevent catastrophic climate change (warming above 1.5 deg C). Here are some thoughts regarding strategy: defeating militarized fossil capital in the first stage of a Global GND is necessary to create a path as an arena for ferocious class struggle necessary for a revolutionary ecosocialist transition ending the rule of capital on our planet.

2) Creation of global 100% wind/solar energy power terminating fossil fuels is necessary and possible without the huge resource extraction claimed in this video, because such a renewable power infrastructure can recycle the existing metals now employed in fossil fuel consumption as well as the material base of the military industrial complex. Demilitarization of the global economy must be the goal of transnational class struggle to make this energy transition happen in time to achieve the 1.5 °C warming target, as well as of course to prevent future wars, even nuclear war.

3) Relying on biological production alone as implied in this video (e.g. mass hemp farming) is a prescription for mass suicide for most of humanity, because it would condemn them to a state of energy poverty even worse than present as well as prevent the creation of the wind/solar power with sufficient capacity necessary for climate adaptation and mitigation, making it virtually impossible to meet the 1.5 °C global warming target. Further, biomass is far from being an adequate energy source to power even the proposed “communist internet”. To be sure, restoration of natural ecosystems and a transition away from industrial agriculture to agroecologies is imperative, but not sufficient for the rapid drawdown of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They must be coupled with industrial scale negative carbon emissions driven by wind/solar power, reacting carbon dioxide and water with subsurface basalt/peridotite.

4) Getting back to the example of Cuba, where people do well with much lower energy consumption than the U.S., it is important to note that in spite of her world standard health and education system, the people of Cuba suffer from energy poverty which translates into a life expectancy virtually tied with the U.S., with the latest CIA data (2017) having Cuba at ranking 52, the U.S. at 54 in the world (source: wikipedia). Cuba falls below the minimum energy consumption per capita required for the highest world standard life expectancy (e.g., Japan is close to the minimum). Of course we know that the imperialist U.S. embargo of Cuba is mainly responsible for this state of energy poverty.

Cited references and for an in-depth discussion of these issues see:

Schwartzman, D. 2013. 4 Scenarios for 2050. Capitalism Nature Socialism 24 (1) 49-53.

Schwartzman, D. 2020. The Global Solar Commons, the Future that is Still Possible: A Guide for 21st Century Activists. Solartutopia.org Press, Free download at: https://www.theearthisnotforsale.org/solarcommons.pdf.

Schwartzman, P., Schwartzman, D. 2019. The Earth is Not for Sale: A Path Out of Fossil Capitalism to the Other World That is Still Possible. Singapore: World Scientific.

This and more on our website: https://www.theearthisnotforsale.org.

https://orinocotribune.com/we-demand-to ... te-crisis/

About the video:

Better than I'd thought it would be. I had been familiar with 'Prolekult' on twitter and had come to consider them somewhat infected with the 'Infantile Disorder'. I must revise my opinion, pretty solid. Note I didn't 'watch' the entire video but I did listen to all of it.(I get bored with video tugging the emotions). Soundtracks which ape tv news are better done without. Mebbe a different narrator...

Not bad shorthand concerning history and theory. My only gripes:

The need for 'greater productivity' is not a given until we establish how much current productivity can be redirected to human need. There's an unbelievable amount of productivity squandered(military, advertising, profits, just off the top of my head) but we won't know except in practice.

The bio-energy/hemp based civilization envisioned seems pretty delusional and out of place, Sure, mebbe, but first things first, revolution!

About the review:

The Green New Deal is a very bad deal for workers and biodiversity, the video has the right of that.

I agree with the reviewer that 100% wind/solar energy is unlikely given current technology to provide all our needs, particularly the large scale applications. Where that energy comes from I don't know but it cannot be fossil fuel. We Must strive for better but first things first....

Fully agree with the third point, you'll not have a democratic revolution by promising people poverty. First things first!

I am not sure that energy consumption relates directly to longevity. Surely something there but I doubt a 1:1 correlation.

[blindpig]

“Too late to be pessimist! Ecosocialism or collapse”
Posted Jan 07, 2021 by Eds.

Originally published: International Viewpoint by Daniel Tanuro, Mats Lucia Bayer (January 1, 2021)
In Gauche Anticapitaliste (Anticapitalist Left) we believe that it is essential to develop an ecological approach in order to be able to analyze the economic, social and political situation in all its complexity.

This is precisely the objective of this interview, which takes up the main topics that Daniel Tanuro addresses in the book, while providing keys for an analysis on the economic situation that opened with the pandemic of COVID-19. These are useful benchmarks that also enable us to think strategically about the different scenarios that are opening up before us. From the analysis of the struggle between the great powers for a lesser dependence on fossil fuels (which can shape their rivalries or push towards convergence between them), to the reminder of the need for every subject of oppression to develop its own ecological reflection, this dialogue with Daniel Tanuro gives us illuminating and pedagogical tools to confront the present social struggles and those that are to come.

This interview was conducted in collaboration with the Anticapitalist Left and the CADTM.

Gauche Anticapitaliste (Anticapitalist Left): In 2010 you published L’impossible capitalisme vert (Editions la Découverte). What prompted you to write Trop tard pour être pessimiste (Editions Textuel) ten years later? [1]

Daniel Tanuro: There were several factors involved. First, I wanted to emphasize the correctness of the diagnosis made in L’impossible capitalisme vert: there is an irreconcilable antagonism between the dynamics of accumulation inherent in the capitalist mode of production, on the one hand, and the ecological limits of the planet, on the other. This antagonism is blindingly obvious when it comes to the question of the climate: on the one hand, renewable energies are expanding and the IPCC estimates that their technical potential can meet nearly twenty times human needs; on the other hand, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (currently 415 ppm) is unprecedented over three million years and governments are constantly postponing the measures to be taken to avoid a cataclysm. It is not possible to save the climate without a radical reduction in final energy consumption, therefore its consumption in production and transport. This is incompatible with capitalist productivism.

Secondly, I wanted to update the scientific data on the basis, in particular, of the IPCC’s special report on the target of 1.5 degrees of global warming . This update is important to me because my concern is to help disseminate the necessary knowledge to non-convinced people, especially in the working class. This is why Trop tard pour être pessimiste begins, like L’impossible capitalisme vert, with a brief overview of the present disaster and its ecological and social consequences.

Third, I have sometimes been criticized for focusing L’impossible capitalisme vert, primarily on the climate challenge. Trop tard pour être pessimiste broadens the field of enquiry to cover the entire ecological crisis, with particular attention to the destruction of living organisms and species. This enables us to show common lines of force for capitalist policies, for example the very strong kinship between the well-known “carbon compensation” scam and the “biodiversity compensation” scam, which is much less so.

Fourth, L’impossible capitalisme vert, compared social democratic and green party illusions, on the one hand, and pointed to the limits or dangerous tendencies of degrowth, on the other. Trop tard pour être pessimiste goes further. The book reviews several currents of ideas of political ecology (green liberalism, collapsologists, followers of Jacques Ellul, supporters of stationary capitalism, mystical ecology, etc.) and highlights what connects them: a misunderstanding of the mechanism of capital accumulation demonstrated by Karl Marx.

Fifth and most importantly, Trop tard pour être pessimiste also goes further on the strategic level. One-fifth of the book is devoted to the ecosocialist project, the plan of transition and strategies for the convergence of struggles. In this context, special attention is paid to the key question: how can the working class and its organizations be brought to break the productivist compromise with capital?

Having appeared in April of this year, the foreword to Trop tard pour être pessimiste takes up a “hot” analysis of what the pandemic was producing. In particular, you say that the SARS-CoV2 virus confirms the profound distortions that capitalism has caused on biodiversity, facilitating zoonoses. We also see how the pandemic has plunged most societies into health and social crises. Is this pandemic only a “defeat” for the people, or does it also offer opportunities for social movements?

Trop tard pour être pessimiste was written at the end of 2019, but the French publisher offered me the opportunity to write a foreword about the pandemic. It is included in the Italian edition, but not in the Castilian edition, which was released in early March. This is a pity, because the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a clear trend towards an increase in zoonoses (according to the WHO, three quarters of new pathogens present in humans now come from animal species) and because this trend is indeed inseparable from the damage to ecosystems caused in particular by the nexus deforestation-agribusiness-industrial breeding. Since then, the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has published a special report confirming this link and concluding that there will be more zoonotic diseases. According to this report, we have even entered the “era of pandemics”. The epidemic risk is therefore in addition to the four major ecological risks of climate change, falling biodiversity, disruption of the nitrogen cycle and destruction of soils.

Before answering the question about opportunities (and dangers), we must stress the fact that this crisis is a historical event. It is true that the world economy was showing signs of slowing down for several months, but SARS-CoV2 is much more than a trigger for endogenous contradictions in capitalism: it is an autonomous, exogenous, and very powerful agent. Like it or not, government recovery plans must go under the Caudine forks of the virus. In other words, the ecological destruction of capitalism has created a boomerang effect that is coming back to hit capitalism. This is not completely new: we have already experienced local boomerang effects. For example, the extensive wind erosion of the southern plains of the United States during the Dust Bowl in the 1920s and 1930s was due to the decision to cultivate fragile soils that were unsuitable for cereal production. But this is the first time that the phenomenon has manifested itself at the global level with so much violence. It is likely that a vaccine will be developed, but it is not certain that we will find vaccines against all future viruses (we still do not have an AIDS vaccine)… and there is no vaccine against climate change.

It is this exogenous dimension of the crisis that creates new opportunities for social movements. To fully grasp them, I think we need to go beyond the classic question, “who will pay?” The action of the virus highlights the fact that there are not crises – ecological, health, economic, social, food, etc. – that are juxtaposed, but a global crisis, a systemic crisis due to the congenital rapacity of the capitalist mode of production and existence. Through the pandemic, capital reveals quite clearly that it is not a thing but a social relationship of exploitation and that this relationship, as Marx said, “exhausts the only two sources of all wealth – the land and the worker” (including the woman worker). The response must therefore articulate several demands; we cannot limit ourselves to the sphere of the distribution of wealth, we need an overall plan that offers a coherent alternative.

In the face of the pandemic, all governments, even the most reticent (with the exception so far of the Brazilian government), have been forced to adopt a health policy that claims to “take care” of the population. Of course, this claim is hypocritical: the discourse serves to wrap up a class-based health policy – neoliberal, hygienist, authoritarian, racist and macho – that maintains activity in the sphere of value production as a priority. But the contrast between the shock of the pandemic and the reality of health policy creates a “window of opportunity” for social movements. They have the opportunity to return the “taking care” against austerity, inequality, privatization, repression of the racialized, precariousness of work, violence against women, the driving back of migrants, extractivism and deforestation, the meat industry, etc. This is possible, because “taking care” is an attitude that cannot just be cut into slices and must be translated into something concrete. An anti-productive plan is needed to take care of humans and the nature to which they belong.

In my opinion, the systemic origin of the zoonosis and the systemic causes of its spread (globalization of trade, its speed, concentrations of poor people, racialized population, etc.) argue for “taking care” as a new paradigm of social life and society’s relationships with nature. In Marxist terms, it is really a question of arguing for the centrality of the sphere of social reproduction, but in a way that is understood by the greatest number of people. It goes without saying that this centrality requires financial resources, but not only that: it also requires qualitative measures and ethics. In this sense, “taking care” can help in the convergence of struggles. It is a lever of what Gramsci called the battle for hegemony, on a mass scale. Given the deep and persistent ideological disarray, I think it is useful to think further in this direction. For the exogenous and unprecedented nature of the crisis does not open up opportunities only on the left. It dramatically accelerates the rise of neo-fascism, which combines anti-capitalist demagoguery, social Darwinism and an ultraliberal conception of “freedom” as unlimited freedom for the possessors of wealth – or those who project themselves as such – to accumulate infinitely by exploiting, destroying, dominating and eliminating. Demanding that the rich pay for the crisis is not enough to stop this threat.

More generally, in terms of responses to the crisis, it is clear that liberal ecology is now part of the ideological arsenal of many governments and institutions. Nevertheless, few policymakers link the pandemic to the ecological crisis. On the other hand, the announcements of a possible vaccine for the first half of 2021 may have the effect that the pandemic is only a parenthesis in history. What do you think the reasons for this are?

There is indeed a gigantic paradox: while the link between the increase in zoonoses and the ecological crisis is the subject of a very broad scientific consensus, government health policies ignore the consequences to be drawn from this observation. Certainly, the health emergency is there. But it is striking that capitalist think tanks that claim to draw the long-term consequences of the pandemic also remain silent on this point. It does not enter their heads to question the nexus meat industry – deforestation – transgenic soybean cultivation. Yet this nexus, responsible for the increased risk of pandemics, is probably where we reach the point where the situation becomes ecologically unsustainable. Some one hundred million hectares are now devoted to the production of soybeans (of which 70 per cent involve GMOs) to feed livestock (which emits methane). At the current rate of development, 120 billion animals will be slaughtered annually in 2050 (50 times more than in 1960!) and this quantity of livestock would require two planets. The failure to take these realities into account does not fall from the sky. It obviously reflects the “short-termism” of capital. But there is more. The French newspaper Les Echos recently mentioned a quote from Xenophon that is disturbingly topical: “Agriculture is the mother of all the arts: when it is well conducted, all other arts prosper; but when it is neglected, all other arts decline” Les Echos, November 25, 2020). “Badly conducted” capitalist agriculture was historically built on English enclosures, in other words on the expulsion of peasant populations, driven from the land by violence. Marx called this event “the great wrench” of relations between humanity and nature. To tackle the agriculture that was the product of this “great wrench” is to undermine the historical foundations of the entire edifice. So yes, the development of the vaccine will allow the aficionados of the system to reassure themselves, to pretend that the pandemic was just a parenthesis. But their relief may be short-lived. More pandemics will come. And other, more serious disasters continue to grow quietly.

The U.S. election finally led to recognition of Joe Biden as the winner. Biden has shown that he plans to have a policy that would address climate change, which has allowed him to polarize with Trump’s climate denial. Many progressive movements and organizations have shown relief over Trump’s departure. However, it also appears that many of them are preparing a strong opposition to the Biden government. In your previous book, Le moment Trump. Une nouvelle phase dans le capitalisme mondial, you analyze the phenomenon as a fundamental break in the historical consensus within the American political class. Does his defeat mean the end of a political paradigm that denied global warming?

I think that we are witnessing, on climate, a rapid rapprochement between the USA, the European Union and China. Biden’s agenda, the European Commission’s Green Deal and Beijing’s statements converge on the same goal: zero net CO2 emissions by 2050. China is even considering a “zero carbon”, including methane, for 2060. At the same time, and for the first time, the International Energy Agency’s Energy Outlook report incorporates a carbon neutrality scenario in 2050. These developments have been aided by the health crisis. First, because without it, Trump could have been re-elected. But also, because the crisis resulted in a severe blow to the coal (and oil) industry while renewables continued to grow. This is why, in parallel with the debate on the relocation of vital productions, the ruling class is tempted by the advantages of a more flexible electrical system because it is less centralized around very large production units. This debate is accelerating because the point at which renewables become competitive has been reached: according to the IEA, solar energy is now “the cheapest energy in history” (Energy Outlook 2020). Even if countries do not increase their climate targets, the IEA estimates that 80 per cent of new energy investment by 2030 will be in solar energy. I therefore believe that COP26 will indeed lead to an ’enhancement of ambitions’.

We can only rejoice that the chief climate denier Donald Trump is leaving the White House. However, climate denial has not said its last word, especially in the US. For example, Exxon, unlike Shell or BP, maintains its focus exclusively on oil development… Above all, we should not be under any illusions about the US-EU-China climate convergence. Firstly, the targets of the three powers in terms of reducing emissions in 2030 will not allow us to stay below 1.5 degrees of global warming: the EU has set the tone by adopting a target well below the 65 per cent reduction dictated by urgency and respect for “differentiated responsibilities”; in China, CO2 emissions are increasing by 2 per cent per year, 70 per cent of electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants and the government seems to want to postpone the radical reduction in emissions after 2030 (they are talking about 8 per cent per year); Biden is moving towards a reduction in net U.S. emissions of between 38 and 54 per cent compared to 2005. As a reminder, according to the IPCC, the reduction must be 58 per cent globally by 2030 to have a one in two chance of not exceeding 1.5 degrees; for developed countries, this implies at least 65 per cent reduction.

Second, the concept of “zero net emissions” is very elastic. In addition to the lack of accountability for international transport emissions, the solutions chosen to make “carbon neutrality” compatible with capitalist productivity are “carbon compensation” through massive tree planting, “negative emission technologies” and nuclear power (including mini-power plants). There is much to be said about these “solutions” of green capitalism. I leave out nuclear power, the dangers of which we know. Trees can be planted, but the possibilities are not endless and increasing for a few decades the organic carbon stored by green plants cannot compensate for the huge decrease in mineral carbon stored in geological layers for millions of years. Moreover, politically, the mechanism of carbon compensation is typically neocolonial, as it mainly implies that land areas of poor countries are suitable to serve as CO2 waste bins for developed countries. As for “negative emission technologies,” it involves mainly the geological capture and sequestration of CO2, which does not have a guarantee of being watertight. It could eventually be implemented to facilitate the phasing out of coal without social damage for miners. But to make it a structural solution to continued burning of fossils for several decades is outright madness. The more we dig into this question, the more we find the antagonism between capitalist productivism and natural limits. An example is capture-sequestration with CO2 mineralization. This technology would ensure a very stable capture, since carbon is transformed into rocks (carbonates). But the extractive groups, De Beers in particular, are throwing themselves at it to mineralize CO2 in their mining waste, thus greening their image and continuing their destruction, while selling emission rights. However, it would take 100 Gt of mining waste – 5 to 50 km3, or a layer of 30 to 300 m by 180 km2 – to mineralize 1Gt of CO2 (one fortieth of annual emissions). Capitalism turns everything into madness, even reasonable solutions.

Thirdly, the US-EU-China climate convergence will obviously not put an end to inter-imperialist rivalries and will constitute a kind of agreement between bandits against the countries of the global South. They will be forced to pay a carbon tax in order to gain access to the markets of the big three. This mechanism will in fact involve a new step in the abolition of the principle of differentiated responsibilities, which the Global South had enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Biden is very clear about these imperialist aspects. He wants to make trade policy a lever to support large U.S. capital in the battle for the “clean technology” market, create a fund to support exports of these technologies, condition the debt relief of the countries of the global South and development assistance to the adoption of climate policies dictated by Washington, etc.

Isn’t this US-EU-China convergence around a more ambitious climate policy, however, a lesser evil compared to Trump and what we have experienced so far?

Catastrophe is obviously a lesser evil compared to cataclysm, but we are already in a catastrophic situation and the policies of the three major economic blocs lead straight to a cataclysm. Governments seek to reassure people that they have finally understood the importance of the climate danger, but their implicit scenario is that of the “temporary overshoot” of 1.5 degrees of warming. However, even assuming that tree plantations and negative emission technologies can cool the globe in the second half of the century, there is a real risk that “temporary overshooting” will be sufficient to lead to a definitive shift towards what scientists have called the “sweating-room” planet. The IPCC places the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet at between 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming and two huge Antarctic glacier massifs are on the brink of disintegrating. Crossing the Greenlandic tipping point could lead to a chain of positive retroactions that would bring the planet back to the Pliocene climate of thirty million years ago. At that time, the ocean level was about 30 metres higher than today. The criminal productivism of capitalism has brought us so close to the abyss that it would take little to make us tumble into it. However, if a tipping point like Greenland is crossed, it is totally illusory to believe that the movement can be reversed with negative emission technologies. I mean this: the great danger is that the climate movement will be put to sleep by the impression that Joe Biden, Xi Jinping and Ursula von der Leyen are partners, even allies, with whom it would be possible, together, to meet the climate challenge, or at least to go a long way. That is not the case. These people are at the service of the productivism that is rushing on renewable energies as it rushed on fossil fuels, without giving up these fuels, in order to accumulate capital on the backs of peoples and nature.

You criticize some of the ideological biases of science, including the IPCC and IBPES reports. Can you say more about that?

This point should be addressed with caution. We must avoid bringing water to the mill of climate-deniers and, more broadly, promoting the rise of the irrational that is now facilitating conspiracy theories. With regard to the IPCC, the reports of Working Group 1 on the science of climate change must be distinguished from those of Working Groups 2 and 3 on adaptation and mitigation. As a reminder, the IPCC does not do research, it only compiles existing research. The WG1 compiles research based on the laws of physics. As long as these laws are not disrupted by a scientific revolution, these reports synthesize the best climate science available. Things are different for the other two WGs, especially for the WG3 on mitigation. In fact, the climate stabilization scenarios that it synthesizes are achieved by introducing hypotheses about the evolution of society into the models of the climate system. The hypotheses are made mainly by economists. In this brotherhood of modellers, neoliberalism reigns undivided. For example, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report states that “climate models assume fully functioning markets and competitive market behaviour”. In other words: outside the market, there is no salvation, the models do not make the assumption of public plans that are outside the laws of profit. It is important to challenge the IPCC on this point. In fact, submission to profit implies submission to the accumulation of capital. As a result, simple solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating unnecessary or harmful production are not being considered. This blind spot of research increases anxiety and encourages tail-ending of the sorcerer’s apprentice solutions of green capitalism. As an example, I quote in Trop tard pour être pessimiste the case of researchers who question the maximum possible reductions in emissions by sector of production and who do not even imagine that we can ban the production of weapons, or transport fewer goods and transport them by trains rather than by trucks.

Nor does the IPBES envisage breaking the rules of the market. On the contrary, it promotes the mechanism known as “biodiversity compensation.” What this consists of is that an extractivist enterprise can operate in an area of great biological wealth if it undertakes to restore destroyed ecosystems elsewhere, which is obviously impossible. Mining and oil groups use this bogus mechanism because resource scarcity leads them to look to national parks and nature reserves rich in minerals or hydrocarbons. It is very positive that the IPBES highlights the key role of indigenous peoples and rural communities in the defence of biodiversity. But, at the same time, it explains the disappearance of species mainly through the growth of “population” and “agriculture” in general, as if all populations and all agriculture had the same destructive impacts. This is clearly at odds with the praise of indigenous peoples and communities. But the IPBES strategy is based mainly on the idea that natural reserves should be strengthened and multiplied as oases of biodiversity. These oases are important, but the main problem today is not there, because biodiversity will not be saved if the oases are separated by the huge deserts of agribusiness. The alternative is agroecology. But, as a result, the question of the population is posed in a different light. Pointing to “the population” in general, the IPBES report suggests that “more population = less biodiversity”. However, agroecology requires much more human labour than does agribusiness. In general, one must ask not only the maximum number of humans that a mode of production can support, but also the minimum number needed for a mode of production. In Trop tard pour être pessimiste, I mention a very illuminating comparison between large- and small-scale fishing. The second is better for the climate (less fuel), better for biodiversity, better for human health, costs the community less and employs twenty times more manpower for the same tonnage of catches for human food. The agribusiness/agroecology comparison gives the same kind of conclusion. The fight for biodiversity is inseparable from the fight against agribusiness, against the meat industry, against industrial fishing and other mechanisms of capitalist predation that the IPBES is careful not to question.

You review other currents which claim to be ecological, ranging from currents supporting the “Green New Deal” to currents belonging to “collapsology”.

Regarding the former, which are mostly situated on the left, they clearly associate their plan with monetary creation. How do you think this is contradictory to an ecosocialist solution?

Regarding the “collapsologist” currents, can they become a platform for far-right currents?

I would not say that the Green New Deal as it is defended by the U.S. left is contradictory to an ecosocialist solution. On the contrary, this Green New Deal (GND) contains two important ideas that ecosocialists fully share: to stop the disaster, we need a plan, and this plan must get us out of both the social and ecological crises. It was in this context that I shared a criticism formulated by the Marxist economist Michael Roberts, about the financing of the Green New Deal through monetary creation: according to Roberts, the state can create money, yes, but the value of the currency is determined by the economy, and therefore by the capitalists who own the economy. If they don’t like the Green New Deal, they won’t invest, the currency will depreciate and the government won’t be able to finance its plan.

Having said that, that is not where we are today. The situation has changed since the publication of Trop tard pour être pessimiste. Bernie Sanders has rallied behind Joe Biden, who surfed on the idea of GND to secure the support of the left: but, although the label has remained the same, the contents of the bottle have changed. Thus, Sanders’s GND provided for the cessation of fracking; Biden has only promised to stop distributing new fracking permits, and to evaluate existing permits on a case-by-case basis. If it is passed by Congress, his programme plans to invest $40 billion a year over 10 years in clean energy and technology, but not to break with the fossil fuel industry. His team includes several people who are financed by oil companies. For example, there is Cedric Richmond, a member of Congress with extensive links to the oil, gas and petrochemical industry in his Louisiana district, which is one of the ten most polluted districts in the United States. The Green New Deal in its Biden version is green capitalism, like that of the European Commission.

As for collapsology, I find it excessive to say globally that it can become a platform for the far right. I am extremely critical of collapsologists because they send a fatalistic message about the inevitability of a “collapse”. Collective struggle and the convergence of struggles are absent from their perspectives. They have no programme to propose, except the creation of small resilient communities that will, they say, be the only forms of society capable of withstanding the great catastrophe that will make half of humanity disappear. Not understanding much about capitalism, collapsologists believe that the poor of the global South will be least affected by “collapse” because they are closer to nature. This is, of course, an absurdity that ignores the capitalist, imperialist and racist relations of domination. Collapsology can drift towards reactionary conceptions that see no other future for humanity than its regression towards an archaic past. Collapsologists are on a slippery slope when they praise ideologues like Jung and Eliade, whose Nazi commitment they seem to ignore, or when they plead for men and women to reconnect with their “archetypes.” Having said that, the collapsologist movement is very diverse. There is a quasi-survivalist component (Yves Cochet), and a mystical component. There is also a libertarian component that believes that “collapse” will sweep away capitalism and leave the field open to self-managed communities. All this is very confused and intertwined. Many young people invested in important struggles against fossil projects say they are close to the collapsologist-libertarian trend. We need to work with them in these struggles, while conducting the strategic debate.

You emphasize in the last part of the book the importance of looking at emerging social movements. In particular, you emphasize the construction of a common subaltern identity from the different subjects, and one where the feminist movement occupies a central place. What are the key elements of this “composition” for you?

I start from a triple observation. One: we will not change the mode of production without workers, let alone against them; we must therefore win them to the ecosocialist struggle. Two: the working class, on the whole, is – at best – at the rearguard of this struggle; its main organizations are for growth and recovery through “green capitalism.” Three: the vanguard of ecosocialist struggles is made up of indigenous peoples, peasants (with a key role of Via Campesina), youth, and women, who are on the front lines on all these terrains. These vanguard and rearguard positions do not fall from the sky. Workers are integrated into capital through their labour power, which is purchased, formatted and applied to create or realize surplus value. Their condition is schizophrenic: their historical interest is to end the system, but their daily individual existence depends on the crumbs distributed by this system that mutilates them and mutilates nature. Farmers and indigenous peoples are in another situation: the defence of their daily existence largely coincides with ecological management of their natural environment. Young people escape schizophrenia to some extent (either because they are in school or because they are rejected on to the margins of the system); their situation leads them to protest against the destruction of the planet on which they will live and eventually have children. As for women, the explanation of their primary role is the subject of a debate among feminists. From what I have read, the idea that convinces me the most is that their vanguard position results from the fact that patriarchy assigns them the work of caring for the human body, which makes them more sensitive and lucid about ecological destruction – another example of a boomerang effect, in a way.

From there, I try to outline a strategy for the convergence of struggles. The idea is not at all to seek the greatest common denominator between the movements of the exploited and the oppressed. On the contrary, the idea is to promote, from the vanguard, an upward convergence, by an articulation of struggles, guaranteeing the autonomy of each component in the pursuit of its legitimate demands. The aim is to create a relationship of forces that is conducive to the politicization of issues, thus to the breaking of the capital/labour productivist compromise. Notre-Dame-des-Landes is an instructive example for me because the alliance of zadists, residents and peasants and their fierce struggle made it possible to turn a territorial conflict into a central political issue. All the political and social forces were put in a position where they had to say “yes” or “no” to the construction of the airport. As a result, the terms of the debate have also changed within the trade union movement. The CGT of Vinci, in particular, was encouraged to adopt positions not only from “trade-union” concerns but above all from a broader societal point of view, a political point of view. At the end of an internal debate, and thanks to the action of a trade union left, it took a stand against the project and supported the zadists. I conclude by paraphrasing Che: “creating two, three, many Notre-Dame-des-Landes is the watchword”.

This strategy is obviously at odds with the “neither left nor right, terrestrial” proposed by Bruno Latour. But it also differs from the simplistic vision expressed by the slogan “capitalism destroys the planet, let us destroy capitalism”. Capitalism must be destroyed, of course, and to do that requires a revolution. But we are deluded if we believe that it is only necessary to designate the capitalist enemy so that the struggle of the class “in itself” stops the ecological catastrophe. The key problem today is the recomposition of the class “for itself”. This recomposition can only come from struggles and convergences between struggles, and this process will sometimes be painful, even confrontational. If we look at it from the point of view of ecology, it goes without saying that it necessarily implies the greening of the worldview and the demands of each layer of the exploited or oppressed. It is this process that will make convergence from above possible. Joan Martinez Alier proposed the concept of ecology of the poor. We must continue in this direction, to bring each exploited or oppressed group to make emerge, so to speak, its concrete “ecology” from its concrete conditions. This began with the Yellow Jackets, for example, which converged several times with climate protests (and with demonstrations against violence against women). Potentially, all the exploited have their ecology, because the capitalist-patriarchal-racist way of treating humans as things is not essentially different from the way non-humans are treated as things. It is from this strategic vision, in my opinion, that we must address the tasks of ecosocialist activists.

Translated by International Viewpoint from Gauche Anticapitaliste.

Daniel Tanuro, a certified agriculturalist and eco-socialist environmentalist, writes for “La gauche”, (the monthly of Gauche-Anticapitaliste-SAP, Belgian section of the Fourth International). He is also the author of The Impossibility of Green Capitallism, (Resistance Books, Merlin and IIRE, 2010) and Le moment Trump (Demopolis, 2018).

Mats Lucia Bayer is an activist in Anticapitalistas currently a collaborator of CADTM in Brussels.

https://mronline.org/2021/01/07/too-lat ... -collapse/

"Ecosocialist this, ecosocialist that..."anything but communism. The 'recomposition' is I think inherent in Marxism given the necessary scientific input. Otherwise pretty good.

"Collapsologist", I like it and am too familiar. I had been calling it 'hippie survivalism'.

[blindpig]

<snip>

The “Idealist” Formulation of Ecological Anti-capitalism
This is somewhat removed from the central theme of the book and not a disagreement, merely a comment prompted by Sayre and Löwy’s observations on Naomi Klein. They describe Klein’s This Changes Everything as a “superlative” book, but they also criticize Klein’s tendency to employ idealist formulations about capitalism:

Klein’s way of presenting the forces responsible for disastrous climate change is far from the Marxist approach to capitalism as a mode of production. She often seems to see the culprit as being mainly an ideology—market fundamentalism, free-trade orthodoxy, the extractivist mind-set (19, 25, 63, 86, 443, 459–460)—and the struggle for change as a “battle of world-views.” Of course ideology is important. … But putting the primary emphasis on ideas risks leading to a purely “idealist” view of the process, instead of a systemic “materialist” one. (117)

This is a valid criticism, and I would add that Klein’s tendency here is not accidental. It is both reflective of the current broad environmental movement and appealing to it. It is a movement that, in general, instinctively much prefers idealist to materialist formulations and thinking, partly for class reasons. The idealist formulation is also related to Klein’s, and the movement’s, ambiguity on the question of reform or revolution. If what needs to be changed is basically an “attitude” or “mind-set” rather than a set of material social relations of production, this leaves open the possibility of the required change being achieved without resort to an actual physical revolution. Undoubtedly, Klein’s vagueness on this issue greatly increases her reach, popularity, and influence and thus may even be a conscious strategy. Unfortunately, I think it is also an illusion.

This in turn has a bearing on a wider concern, which is connected to the central argument of Romantic Anti-capitalism. While it is true that the romantic tradition contains many insights that are helpful to incorporate into the movement today, and Sayre and Löwy perform a service by highlighting this, there is also the danger that romanticism and romantic formulations can be used to obscure the hard reality of what will be required to overthrow capitalism, namely proletarian revolution, and this should be guarded against.

https://mronline.org/2021/01/25/capital ... nd-nature/

'Superlative' my ass. How can it be so with such a huge caveat? If you marshal a devastating array of facts but then apply them to a fanciful, unobtainable conclusion you do no one any favors except the enemy.

[blindpig]

Biden’s climate orders: 9 things socialists should know
Tina LandisJanuary 29, 2021 151 4 minutes read

Download PDF flyer: https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... osts/91030

The Biden administration’s recent executive orders on climate action and environmental protections at first glance may inspire hope. Digging deeper, it becomes evident they lack substance.

1. The language in the White House statement takes no strong stand against extractive industries: “The order directs the Secretary of the Interior to pause on entering into new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters to the extent possible …” In other words, they will take a break in issuing new leases for oil and gas wells, if possible. But the “pause” only applies to federal lands where only one quarter of the extraction occurs with the majority taking place on state, private and tribal lands. Plus, it does not revoke leases already issued. Only half of the extraction applications approved between 2014 and 2019 have been used yet, and those applications will still be honored — meaning drilling will continue on federal lands.

2. Biden’s temporary moratorium on Arctic Wildlife Refuge drilling is a far cry from the permanent ban he campaigned on, and even this partial victory is in large part due to the pressure from the conservation movement. A recent lease auction for refuge drilling was a complete flop with only three bids submitted, signaling a hesitancy of corporations to undertake long wait periods and lawsuits that would surely come due to public opposition. Big Oil in reality has lots of easier options to drill in Alaska, a state abundantly pockmarked with oil and gas wells on state and private land.

3. The permit revocation for the Keystone XL pipeline is also a reflection of the strength of the Indigenous-led movement that has fought against it for years. This should be seen as a people’s victory, but what about the other pipelines carrying dirty tar sands crude like Line 3 and Sandpiper? Frontline communities are currently fighting the abandonment of leaking Line 3 and the construction of the replacement Sandpiper pipeline that threatens vital water sources and ecosystems in Minnesota as it transports crude from Canada to Superior, Wisconsin., across several Native reservations.

4. Biden’s reentry into the Paris Agreement, which is a non-binding agreement, will be used as an imperialist propaganda tool against China and other developing nations of the Global South with Biden already stating that he will pressure the so-called big polluters to do their fair share. The U.S. government has never honestly addressed this country’s historic contributions to the problem that far surpass all other countries, nor the fact that the U.S. has by far the largest per capita emissions today — with China coming in 10th. As the White House statement says, “ … the United States will exercise its leadership to promote a significant increase in global ambition.” This means continuing to use imperialist tactics to demonize others for the problem and not truly to make the changes needed at home, although China has by far had the largest investments in wind and solar energy than any other nation for many years.

5. Biden’s plan to shift to a carbon free energy sector by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050 will rely heavily on nuclear, which is not truly renewable and has the third highest lifecycle emissions after scrubbed coal-fired plants and natural gas. The nuclear industry is heavily subsidized and very profitable for a few, while poisoning frontline communities through the entire process from extraction to waste disposal.

6. Biden also plans to greatly expand the electric vehicle market and build “clean energy commercialization.” This means selling more stuff to individuals who can afford it, rather than making a truly sustainable shift in how the system functions. The plan never mentions zero-emission public transit and high-speed rail, which would greatly reduce the need for single-occupancy vehicle ownership and overcome the class divide of who can afford EV’s. But efficient and widespread public transit would hurt the profits of the corporations who prefer to keep selling individuals vehicles that need regular replacement. Studies have shown there are literally not enough rare Earth minerals on the planet needed for the batteries to replace every gas-powered vehicle.

7. The plan also calls for good-paying union jobs in the clean energy sector as well as equity for communities disproportionately impacted by pollution. However, unless Biden plans to fund jobs directly through the federal government, like the New Deal of the 1930’s did, corporations will continue to keep labor costs as low as possible absent a mass workers movement demanding unionization and fair pay. And never before has the EPA — even before Reagan and subsequent administrations weakened its authority — truly addressed the use of poor communities and communities of color as sacrifice zones for big polluters. How do you address this inherent aspect of capitalism that puts corporate profits above people’s lives and the planet without systemic change? How do you make binding federal mandates to protect communities when states’ rights supersede federal — i.e., Cancer Alley is allowed to exist because the state of Louisiana sets its own emissions standards that are lower than the EPA’s.

8. Biden has a long 50+ year career as a reactionary politician serving big business and Wall Street. Support for Big Oil has always been a bipartisan position, one side is just more vocal about it.

9. Executive orders are a far cry from binding legislation and can be overturned easily by the next administration as Biden is now doing with many of Trump’s orders. And considering Pelosi and establishment Democrats’ cynical dismissal of AOC’s Green New Deal — which Biden borrows heavily from — it is unlikely that any significant change will come of this.

These are issues that need to be addressed as we push for follow through on the goals of these executive orders. We cannot go to sleep now that Biden has issued this climate agenda. Progressive change under capitalism only comes through mass sustained people’s struggles that threaten the profits of the corporations. Native communities are on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction and transport; we must stand with those blocking Big Oil from continuing to plunder the planet at the expense of our future. And we need to build a mass anti-capitalist, pro-socialist climate justice movement because socialism is the only mechanism that will once and for all take control away from the billionaire class that is driving us to extinction.

https://www.liberationnews.org/bidens-c ... rationnews

This is a much more realistic assessment of the new regime's 'environmental policy', which largely amounts to a PR campaign, than that promoted by the wanna-be Soc/Dems in Oakland:

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2021/01/28 ... -religion/

That they would regurgitate a liberal meme as a headline speaks volumes:

Marxists must recognize a changed situation: We are not a religion.

If we do not speak the truth, which is non-negotiable, then we are no better than panderers and co-conspirators in environmental catastrophe.

[blindpig]

Biden-Kerry international climate politricks
Posted Feb 03, 2021 by Patrick Bond

Is U.S. President Joe Biden’s January 27 Executive Order to address ‘climate crisis’ as good as many activists claim, enough to reverse earlier scepticism?

To be sure, it’s great that the word crisis is consistently deployed, not just ‘climate change.’ Applause is due Biden’s commands to halt fossil fuel subsidies and new oil and gas drilling leases on national government lands, and phase out hydrofluorocarbons. There is a welcome promise to instead subsidize new solar, wind, and power transmission projects. Cancelling the nearly-finished Keystone Pipeline extension (from Canada to Nebraska) is praiseworthy, although surely the Dakota Access Pipe Line should be shut, too.

Moreover, a weakened and often climate-unconscious U.S. labor movement did extremely well, with quite a few paragraphs of the Executive Order – e.g. in the box way below – promising well-paying union jobs in a Just Transition. There is an unusual race consciousness, too, as ‘environmental justice’ is invoked to address the discrimination that so often characterizes pollution in the U.S. Much of the Order resonates with Green New Deal demands, so the Sanders-AOC team pulling Biden leftwards can claim some excellent language.

However, caveats and hard-hitting criticisms of the Order were immediately offered by long-standing Climate Justice organizations, e.g.:

Indigenous Environmental Network: “we stand by our principles that such justice on these stolen lands cannot be achieved through market-based solutions, unproven technologies and approaches that do not cut emissions at source. Climate justice is going beyond the status quo and truly confronting systemic inequities and colonialism within our society.”
Food & Water Watch: “Biden’s orders fall well short of what’s needed and must be paired with serious plans to stop our deadly addiction to fossil fuels. We need a White House that is committed to stopping all drilling and fracking, and shutting down any schemes to export fossil fuels.”
These are absolutely valid misgivings, and apply locally and globally. My additional concerns are about how during the 2010s, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy was manipulated by Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry (Secretary of State from 2013-17) and other staff from the Obama-era State Department and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (including former pro-fracking EPA head Gina McCarthy, now Biden’s senior climate advisor). From Copenhagen’s 2009 United Nations Conference of the Parties COP15 to the 2016 Marrakesh COP22 – and especially at Durban COP17 in 2011 and Paris COP21 in 2015 – their corporate neoliberal agenda held sway. This group’s climate-policy imperialism did enormous harm and it’s vital to recall why.

What characterizes Washington’s durable squeeze of UNFCCC policy in that era are eight fatal-flaw silences, which justified climate scientist James Hansen’s critique of Paris as ‘fraud, BS,’ a sentiment also expressed at the time by progressive groups – especially from the Global South, as well as Friends of the Earth International – dedicated to Climate Justice. The Paris Climate Agreement failed to:

adopt sufficiently deep and binding global emissions reduction requirements, fairly distributed (in contrast to voluntary 2015 Nationally Determined Contributions that will cause at minimum 3-degree heating by 2100 – with only vague hopes of ratcheting up ‘ambition’), combined with a make-believe 1.5 degree aspirational target which is simply a talk-left distraction, while walk-right pollution continues unabated;
establish accountability mechanisms including penalties (e.g. ‘border adjustment tax’ climate sanctions);
apply carbon taxation judiciously and democratically (not regressively and top-down, as imposed in France and Ecuador in 2018-19), and dispense with failed carbon trading and offset gimmicks (implicit in most scam-riddled ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon-neutral’ claims, within the resurgent emissions-trading markets);
respect historical ‘polluter-pays’ responsibilities for the ‘climate debt’ to cover ‘loss and damage’ and to compensate for poorer countries’ unused carbon space;
ensure a job-rich Just Transition away from carbon-addicted economies (thus entailing new commitments to localized, labor-intensive production processes that had been eviscerated by neoliberal globalization);
allow poor countries to adopt climate-friendly technology without Intellectual Property restrictions;
convincingly incorporate and cut military, maritime and air-transport sectoral emissions (three areas long considered by imperialist powers as illegitimate for regulation); and
compel fossil fuel owners to cease new exploration (and most current extraction) and simultaneously revalue their ‘unburnable carbon’ as ‘stranded assets’ accordingly (instead of allowing an extremely chaotic global commodity market and unreliable fossil financiers to bear this burden).
Post-Paris degeneracy began with Copenhagen discord
Since 2015, matters have become much worse and a global climate emergency is regularly declared. The Paris Climate Agreement’s slacker authors and irresponsible signatories should be condemned, not relegitimized. And now that we know how international climate do-nothing policy of this sort unfolds, warning lights are now flashing about Biden’s plan. Here are some examples:

Biden:

Responding to the climate crisis will require both significant short-term global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and net-zero global emissions by mid-century or before.

Actually, given what we know about politicians’ propensity to shape-shift, the words ‘net-zero global emissions’ will continue to imply ongoing unsustainable levels of Global-North emissions – but now with even more carbon-offset or emissions-trading gimmickry boiling down to Dr.Strangeloveian ‘false solutions’. Such wording would, in a just world, be replaced by phrases like ‘gross-zero,’ ‘paying our climate debt’ and ‘genuine nature-based sequestration strategies.’

Biden:

In implementing – and building upon – the Paris Agreement’s three overarching objectives (a safe global temperature, increased climate resilience, and financial flows aligned with a pathway toward low greenhouse gas emissions and climate‑resilient development), the United States will exercise its leadership to promote a significant increase in global climate ambition to meet the climate challenge… and alignment of financial flows with the objectives of the Paris Agreement…

These financial flows are, in reality, farcical, in large part because of prior U.S. ‘leadership.’ At the Copenhagen negotiations in December 2009, Kerry’s predecessor as U.S. Secretary of State – Hillary Clinton – had promised $100 billion in annual North funding for poor countries starting in 2020, if the latter supported the Copenhagen Accord. Newsweek called this “a global bribe… political hardball, Hillary style.”

Nasty episodes of spying, phone-tapping, bullying and bribery have characterized U.S. tactics dating to Copenhagen, too, as we know thanks to WikiLeaks State Department Cables and Clinton’s email leaks, and Ed Snowden’s disclosures about National Security Agency bugging inclinations. The integrity of any Washington negotiator residual from that era (or any other) is dubious, to put it mildly.

Nearly all countries did ultimately sign on to Copenhagen, but many did so under coercion. As the main G77-bloc negotiator, Lumumba Di-Aping, explained to a civil society meeting at the COP15, some of his own home continent’s delegations were “either lazy or had been ‘bought off’ by the industrialized nations. He singled out South Africa, saying that some members of that delegation had actively sought to disrupt the unity of the bloc.”

If Washington, Brussels and London represent the primary sites of climate-imperialist power (usually backed by Ottawa, Tokyo, Canberra, Riyadh and other high-carbon capitals), then Pretoria – along with Beijing, Brasilia and Delhi (and Moscow too) – have served as the main climate subimperialists. The leaders of the latter four – South Africa, China, Brazil and India – joined Obama and Clinton in cutting a backroom Copenhagen deal just after Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It represented, Bill McKibben remarked at the time, the U.S. president’s greatest failure:

He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight… He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters… George Bush couldn’t have done this — the reaction would have been too great. Obama has taken the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear.

The Copenhagen Accord takes shape via a secretive U.S.-India-China-Brazil-South Africa session

McKibben was right, because in coming months and years, the Copenhagen signatories and moderate ‘Climate Action’ NGOs whose leaders actually believed Clinton’s bribe promise found themselves conned, just as if they’d shaken hands with Donald Trump. Clinton’s advertised vehicle for the money, the Korea-based Green Climate Fund, last year only funded 37 projects worldwide costing a measly $2.1 billion.

The typical Global North rebuttal is that there’s plenty more climate money available outside that particular fund, such as in development banks allegedly lending to mitigate emissions or assist in adapting or making countries resilient to climate chaos. But a loan is a loan and most must be repaid with interest, so as Timmons Roberts and Romain Weikmans wrote in a Brookings Institute paper in 2016,

three-quarters of the projects counted as helping developing countries adapt to climate change in fact do not stand up to rigorous criteria.

And Trump’s 2017 default on paying into the Green Climate Fund only put the U.S. into what is now merely a $2 billion deficit; that’s how little ambition the negotiators to subsequent UN climate summits possessed, and how unaccountable lying U.S. officials can be.

The Paris pantomime – no substitute for genuine climate policy

When Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, there were diverse calls for punishment – e.g. carbon taxes or other sanctions – against the U.S., from rightwing former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, centre-left economist Joe Stiglitz and climate justice strategist Naomi Klein. But no other Paris proponents had the gumption to do so, confirming that Paris was not worth fighting for, at the cost of offending inter-corporate relations, even in their eyes.

Another confirmation that the deal is a dud came at the end of last month when new voluntary targets updating the Paris emissions-reduction commitments were due, but only 23 countries met the deadline, and by January 27 there were still only 39 according to CarbonTracker, covering only a third of world emissions.

Of those that did, several climate slackers stand out for not having increased their commitment from 2015 levels: Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, Switzerland and Vietnam. And major polluters Canada, India, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Venezuela and the U.S. didn’t even bother to submit new Paris Agreement proposals for emissions cuts.

Another reason Paris is worse than useless is the return of the carbon trading strategy. Biden speaks of “promoting the protection of the Amazon rainforest and other critical ecosystems that serve as global carbon sinks, including through market-based mechanisms.”

But since Kerry pushed this as a U.S. Senator in 2009-10 – as a failed ‘cap and trade‘ law – there has been profound conflict associated with privatising the air and selling the right to pollute. Some of these relate to broad neoliberal theory and policy, as a lecture by Tamra Gilbertson at the University of California/Santa Barbara here shows, and some to recent experiences in ultra-chaotic financial markets, I recently argued at the same conference.

For example, two years ago, more than 100 scientists wrote a letter to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), asking them to reject carbon offsets and trading permits on grounds the existing market-based mechanisms – especially as witnessed in the Amazon – provided minimal compensation, constrained community access to forest resources, and undermined local governance.

A consistent critic of these gimmicks – including CARB’s Tropical Forest Standard – is Amazon Watch, but rather than checking in with these experts, the Biden-Kerry team is committed to the corporate neoliberal agenda, and is not watching how market-based mechanisms actually work in the Amazon or anywhere else.

America First financing = climate-debt denialism

Biden:

The Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of Energy shall work together and with the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the Chief Executive Officer of the DFC, and the heads of other agencies and partners, as appropriate, to identify steps through which the United States can promote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy while simultaneously advancing sustainable development and a green recovery.

Weasel words like ‘identify steps to promote’ would, in a just world, be replaced by ‘veto international financing’ – and indeed where such monies have been committed but not yet fully disbursed, cut them off. And the U.S. must pay reparations where those are required.

Recall South Africa’s plight: sickly parastatal energy supplier Eskom’s two new coal-fired power plants (4800 MW each, the largest in the world) were given irrational support from Washington in 2010-11, when Biden was Vice President. One drew the World Bank’s largest-ever loan (which the U.S. could have vetoed) and additional funds came for coal-mining equipment from the U.S. Ex-Im Bank, in spite of both climate concerns and widespread (confessed) corruption of the local ruling party by Eskom’s main construction firm, Hitachi. (And then late last year the International Development Finance Corp. promised Eskom more billions to buy 2500MW of dangerous nuclear energy from U.S. firms, in spite of a recent history of corruption in the sector which had contributed to President Jacob Zuma’s ouster in an early-2018 palace coup.)

Biden would be taken seriously if he changed the U.S. ‘denialist’ position on the climate debt. The U.S. negotiating team at the UNFCCC was led by diplomat Todd Stern, who repeatedly violated the ethical core of the original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. That declaration acknowledged both that “The largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries,” and that when it comes to the financial resources required to remedy the crisis,

The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.

But by 2009 in Copenhagen, Stern had spun the combined equity and responsibility mandate upside down: “We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that.”

The ugly-American ultra-polluters’ refusal to pay victims of climate change their due reparations – as would even any garden-variety economist committed to ‘internalizing the externalities’ of imperfect markets using the ‘polluter pays’ principle – was dogmatically maintained by Stern through the 2010s. At the time, U.S. climate damage was estimated at $4 trillion. Stern and other rich-country negotiators insisted that a rider to the Paris Climate Agreement specify that any loss and damage acknowledgement “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation” by the guilty parties – so if you sign Paris, you sign away your rights to demand climate debt payments.

The spirit of financial evasion continues in Biden’s Executive Order, which ignores the need for concrete funding commitments: there is not a single costing of any of his commands. On the one hand, Biden has a Senate Budget Committee chair – Bernie Sanders – who is more progressive than any in modern history, and who will advocate as much climate-related spending (via the ‘reconciliation’ process, requiring 51 votes) as can be accomplished with the bare majority the Democrats have at least until the next Senate elections in late 2022.

On the other hand, not only had Sanders wrung an actual dollar commitment out of his mid-2020 task team negotiations – “Biden’s climate and environmental justice proposal will make a federal investment of $1.7 trillion over the next ten years” – but most of the actual legislation required to cement in climate sanity in the U.S. (and to put down a time-wasting Republican filibuster) requires 60 votes in the Senate.

And in any case, there’s now a fair question that cuts to the heart of financing: can Biden be trusted with such promises – because justifiable fury has emerged in the U.S. working class, that the $2000 Covid-19 survival and stimulus check per adult that Biden promised he would send out when he assumed power last week will actually be only $1400 and will only arrive in March.

U.S. technological and militaristic selfishness

Biden:

[i[The Secretary of Energy, in cooperation with the Secretary of State and the heads of other agencies, as appropriate, shall identify steps through which the United States can intensify international collaborations to drive innovation and deployment of clean energy technologies, which are critical for climate protection.[/i]

Another slow-poke promise to ‘identify steps’ – and what’s the underlying catch here? Typically U.S. corporations add a huge price mark-up on new technologies, through patent licensing, fees and royalties. The traditional demand from Climate Justice activists is to end the monopolistic ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP) protections enjoyed by corporations (whether from West or East, North or South), especially when such claims prevent diffusion of vital public goods – and also where usually there have been generous state subsidies involved.

This simple principle was accepted in fighting AIDS, when in 2001 the World Trade Organisation agreed that IP protection would be relaxed on Big Pharma’s patented medicines; South Africa’s life expectancy rose rapidly from 52 to 65 as a result of publicly-supplied generics.

The next test of this principle is on February 4 when just as urgent a demand – from the global health justice movement as well as the governments of South Africa, India, Kenya and Swaziland – again reaches the WTO Trade Related Intellectual Property System council in Geneva. Activists and even some of these objectionable governments justifiably insist on a waiver from IP restrictions that prevent generic supply of Covid-19 vaccines and treatment, at a time unethical Global North governments like Canada’s have acquired five times more vaccine doses than its citizens require.

Biden:

Agencies that engage in extensive international work shall develop… within 90 days of the date of this order, strategies and implementation plans for integrating climate considerations” – yet even though ‘military installations’ are mentioned, this Order applies “without prejudice to existing requirements regarding assessment of such infrastructure.

But the catch is that existing requirements are negligible, since Paris exempts the military from emissions scrutiny. The Pentagon does understand one thing consistent with U.S. imperialism’s needs, as Biden reminded: the “security implications of climate change (Climate Risk Analysis) that can be incorporated into modeling, simulation, war-gaming, and other analyses.”

The military threat and anti-refugee stance of the ‘deporter-in-chief’ Obama and openly xenophobic Trump regimes are symptoms. But as the Democratic Socialists of America explained the core underlying problem, “John Kerry’s signature climate strategy seems to be selling out the working class to corporate Republicans.” And when the neoliberal, technicist approaches Biden’s team insists upon likely crowd out his promises of Just Transition and Climate Justice, another rightwing backlash and renewed climate-denialist surge will be felt in the U.S. populace.

Rethinking support for both Biden and Paris

Given all this evidence of how the Executive Order falls short, perhaps a rethink is needed. One basic question we’re asking this week in some of the World Social Forum debating about the UNFCCC, is the same one we asked each other when the WSF was founded in 2001, when we were concerned mainly with the World Bank, IMF and WTO as the key vehicles of economic imperialism: “Fix it or nix it.” If the fix-it reform requirements are not properly set out, then the danger is legitimizing a process without applying sufficient pressure to the principals involved.

Without that pressure, the Biden regime will naturally adopt a George H.W. Bush (Rio, 1992) yankee-consumer-imperialism negotiating standpoint, as did Kerry himself last week “Tackling climate change did not mean a diminishment of lifestyle.”

The greatest danger here is the combination of Biden’s neoliberal market-orientation (he hails from his country’s leading bank tax-haven zone, Delaware, after all) with his neocon imperial-military tendencies (the foreign policy appointments are hot off the Military-Industrial Complex revolving door). This mix will make the Biden Administration just as wicked a UNFCCC negotiating partner as was Obama’s team; indeed, Biden’s recycling many of the same people – with the sole apparent exception of a progressive Interior Department leadership nomination, Deb Haaland. That means climate activists in the U.S. should from the outset be as critical as reality demands.

Youth activist Greta Thunberg sent this message to the World Economic Forum on January 26, condemning the elites for:

creating new loopholes, failing to connect the dots, building your so called ‘pledges’ on the cheating tactics that got us into this mess in the first place. If the commitments of lowering all our emissions by 70, 68 or even 55 percent by 2030 actually meant they aim to reduce them by those figures then that would be a great start. But that is unfortunately not the case. And since the level of public awareness continues to be so low our leaders can still get away with almost anything. No one is held accountable. It’s like a game. Whoever is best at packaging and selling their message wins.

Given the prevailing evidence, claims made about Kerry’s new-found ‘humility’ should no longer lull observers into allowing another decade of U.S. sabotaging global climate policy. And that means a totally different perspective is needed on how U.S. and international progressives treat the U.S. re-entry to Paris: with eyes wide open – and protest placards at the ready.

Some of Biden’s most pleasing words

We must listen to science – and act. We must strengthen our clean air and water protections. We must hold polluters accountable for their actions. We must deliver environmental justice in communities all across America. The Federal Government must drive assessment, disclosure, and mitigation of climate pollution and climate-related risks in every sector of our economy, marshaling the creativity, courage, and capital necessary to make our Nation resilient in the face of this threat. Together, we must combat the climate crisis with bold, progressive action that combines the full capacity of the Federal Government with efforts from every corner of our Nation, every level of government, and every sector of our economy…

To secure an equitable economic future, the United States must ensure that environmental and economic justice are key considerations in how we govern. That means investing and building a clean energy economy that creates well‑paying union jobs, turning disadvantaged communities – historically marginalized and overburdened – into healthy, thriving communities, and undertaking robust actions to mitigate climate change while preparing for the impacts of climate change across rural, urban, and Tribal areas. Agencies shall make achieving environmental justice part of their missions by developing programs, policies, and activities to address the disproportionately high and adverse human health, environmental, climate-related and other cumulative impacts on disadvantaged communities, as well as the accompanying economic challenges of such impacts. It is therefore the policy of my Administration to secure environmental justice and spur economic opportunity for disadvantaged communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution and underinvestment in housing, transportation, water and wastewater infrastructure, and health care…

It is the policy of my Administration to put a new generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters. The Federal Government must protect America’s natural treasures, increase reforestation, improve access to recreation, and increase resilience to wildfires and storms, while creating well-paying union jobs for more Americans, including more opportunities for women and people of color in occupations where they are underrepresented. America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners have an important role to play in combating the climate crisis and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by sequestering carbon in soils, grasses, trees, and other vegetation and sourcing sustainable bioproducts and fuels. Coastal communities have an essential role to play in mitigating climate change and strengthening resilience by protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems, such as wetlands, seagrasses, coral and oyster reefs, and mangrove and kelp forests, to protect vulnerable coastlines, sequester carbon, and support biodiversity and fisheries… The plan shall also aim to ensure that the United States retains the union jobs integral to and involved in running and maintaining clean and zero-emission fleets, while spurring the creation of union jobs in the manufacture of those new vehicles…

It is the policy of my Administration to improve air and water quality and to create well-paying union jobs and more opportunities for women and people of color in hard-hit communities, including rural communities, while reducing methane emissions, oil and brine leaks, and other environmental harms from tens of thousands of former mining and well sites. Mining and power plant workers drove the industrial revolution and the economic growth that followed, and have been essential to the growth of the United States. As the Nation shifts to a clean energy economy, Federal leadership is essential to foster economic revitalization of and investment in these communities, ensure the creation of good jobs that provide a choice to join a union, and secure the benefits that have been earned by workers…

Such work should include projects that reduce emissions of toxic substances and greenhouse gases from existing and abandoned infrastructure and that prevent environmental damage that harms communities and poses a risk to public health and safety. Plugging leaks in oil and gas wells and reclaiming abandoned mine land can create well-paying union jobs in coal, oil, and gas communities while restoring natural assets, revitalizing recreation economies, and curbing methane emissions. In addition, such work should include efforts to turn properties idled in these communities, such as brownfields, into new hubs for the growth of our economy. Federal agencies should therefore coordinate investments and other efforts to assist coal, oil and gas, and power plant communities, and achieve substantial reductions of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector as quickly as possible.


About Patrick Bond
Patrick Bond (pbond [at] mail.ngo.za) is professor of political economy at the University of the Western Cape School of Government in Cape Town. He is co-editor (with Ana Garcia) of BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique, published by Pluto (London), Haymarket (Chicago), Jacana (Joburg) and Aakar (Delhi).


https://mronline.org/2021/02/03/biden-k ... olitricks/