WSJ Sells Lithium Neocolonialism as Climate Necessity
TEDDY OSTROW
The Wall Street Journal (8/10/22) underexposes its photos of a lithium mine in Chile—the way corporate media traditionally indicate a socialist dystopia.
True to its name, the Wall Street Journal never fails to lay bare its corporate sympathies. In a recent feature headlined “The Place With the Most Lithium is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution” (8/10/22), the Journal warps anti-neoliberal and Indigenous resistance to ecological destruction and resource plundering into pesky obstacles to green capitalist innovation.
The story is one of corporate tragedy: The so-called “Lithium Triangle,” a region that covers parts of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, is flush with the white metal that is integral to electric vehicle (EV) and battery production. But EV companies don’t have the full access they want, as Indigenous groups and leftist governments resist these foreign multinationals from taking the spoils and harming the environment while they do it.
‘A major bottleneck’
Thea Riofrancos (Logic, 12/7/19) critiques “‘green extractivism’: the subordination of human rights and ecosystems to endless extraction in the name of ‘solving’ climate change.”
Reporter Ryan Dube deserves credit for quoting one Indigenous leader and one environmentalist about their concerns with lithium production in the region. These South American Indigenous populations reside in what climate justice groups have termed sacrifice zones, or what Thea Riofrancos (Logic, 12/7/19) has called the “extractive frontiers of the energy transition.” Lithium production in places like Chile’s Salar de Atacama induce water shortages, threatening the environment’s biodiversity and the livelihoods of those surrounding the salt flats—and often in breach of Indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation and consent.
But these quotations and brief descriptions are eclipsed by pro-production voices, and language describing their resistance as “setbacks,” or a “challenge” to the “battery makers [who] desperately need” the lithium. We are told that the resistance is “stifling” production. That production has “suffered” as leftist governments seek “greater control over the mineral and a bigger share of profits.”
The muted treatment of Indigenous and environmental groups’ concerns works to reduce the “Lithium Triangle” to just that—its lithium. Indeed, the article warns that the entire South American continent could become “a major bottleneck” for the EV industry.
According to the Journal, the collection of countries that compose this “Saudi Arabia of lithium” are not equipped to reap their own land’s valuable resources. The article quotes Benjamin Gedan, acting director of the Latin American program at the US government-funded Wilson Center think tank (who FAIR—4/30/19—noted in 2019 expressed support for regime change in Venezuela):
Latin America specializes in killing golden geese, and one of the quickest ways to do so is through resource nationalism…. This boom could very quickly turn to bust if bad policies are brought forward.
This narrative is as patronizing as it is old. European colonists justified their genocidal conquest of the American continents by claiming Indigenous peoples weren’t properly using the lands they were living on. Today, EV companies and sympathetic analysts claim entitlement to South America’s lithium reserves because its emergent leftist governments won’t cede control of the resource to Western capital interests.
Evo Morales (Jacobin, 10/7/20): “The coup was directed against us and for our natural resources, for lithium.”
The latest corporate worry is on Chile’s election last year of leftist President Gabriel Boric, who seeks to create a state lithium company to compete with private corporations. The country’s proposed rewrite of its dictatorship-era constitution (FAIR.org, 8/1/22) also has multinationals biting their nails, as it would expand Indigenous and environmental rights over mining.
Indeed, the Chilean popular uprisings in 2019 that prompted the country’s ongoing reforms were in part driven by the inequality and harm caused by the nation’s two private lithium producers—one of which has been run by the billionaire son-in-law of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet (Bloomberg, 6/23/22).
But Gedan and the Journal crown Bolivia, the country with the largest proportion of Indigenous people in South America, as the “ultimate cautionary tale” for resource nationalism. The article notes Bolivia’s lackluster lithium production since its former president Evo Morales nationalized the industry in 2008, with hopes to eventually make the country a battery and EV manufacturer itself.
Missing from the history lesson were the barriers Morales’ socialist government faced as a Global South country subjected to economic underdevelopment as a commodity exporter for richer nations. Most recently, that included the right-wing, US-backed coup of Morales’ government in 2019 (FAIR.org, 11/15/19), which—though contested—some believe was driven by multinational corporations who opposed his administration’s lithium production policies (Jacobin, 10/7/20). In any case, the coup illustrated the ruthlessness with which the US rejects Latin American governments that dare question Western control over their political and economic systems.
The Journal’s Dube also seemed to forget that the Morales government’s nationalization of hydrocarbons played a key role in the country cutting poverty by 42% and extreme poverty by 60% (CEPR, 10/17/19), among other internationally praised achievements. Indeed, Morales’ plans for an EV and battery industry in the country was a means to break its dependency on its highly successful state hydrocarbon sector.
Revolution for whom?
Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano
Most curiously missing, however, is critical discussion of the so-called “electric-vehicle revolution” the headline warns South America is “blowing.” A revolution for what? Electric vehicles for whom?
The piece fails to describe the alleged importance of EVs in mitigating the climate crisis. The word “climate” isn’t even used once. While lithium mining will be critical to putting the brakes on the climate catastrophe, it is debatable whether a revolution of individual electric cars will be our savior—rather than, say, a more equitable and much less resource-consumptive expansion of public transportation (Jacobin, 6/10/22).
But perhaps the absence of climate context is truer to the motives of EV companies’ race for Latin America’s golden geese, wrecking environments and lives in the process: corporate profits.
Emergent leftist governments in South America are resisting Western corporations’ meddling because they know that the communities most directly impacted by lithium mining won’t be the ones driving the Teslas at the end of the supply chain. The “revolution” was never for Latin America.
Western multinationals and their boosters at the Journal may long for a return to the “open veins of Latin America,” as Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano described the region’s outflowing plunder by colonial and neocolonial powers. They may view violating Indigenous rights and destroying ecosystems as the costs of doing business.
But the Indigenous groups and anti-neoliberal movements fighting to keep those veins closed—or open on their own terms—are not the obstacles. The Wall Street Journal shouldn’t frame them as such.
https://fair.org/home/wsj-sells-lithium ... necessity/
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Will the Manchin Climate Bill reduce climate pollution?
Originally published: Food & Water Watch on August 10, 2022 by Jim Walsh and Peter Hart (more by Food & Water Watch) | (Posted Aug 25, 2022)
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) takes aim at a lot of things over the next decade–everything from prescription drug prices to corporate tax rates. For climate advocates, the headlining claim is this: the IRA would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 42%.
But that target isn’t actually in the bill. In fact, there are no emissions targets in the bill at all. Instead, this legislation relies on carrots (money to nudge private markets in the right direction) over sticks (actual mandates to reduce pollution).
So where does that 42% number come from? And is that reduction actually likely?
Several models claim to predict the IRA’s outcomes, but the one getting the most attention is from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project. Its model estimates that, without any new legislation, emissions will fall about 27% from 2005 highs. With the IRA, according to the model, emissions could fall about 42%.
But the model relies on some suspect reductions. For example, that 42% would need an astonishing turnaround for so-called carbon capture technologies. And it forecasts a massive increase in the deployment of clean energy–as well as tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles with requirements that no maker can meet yet.
The Analysis Makes A Bad Bet On Carbon Capture
The REPEAT analysis acknowledges that carbon capture is currently responsible for almost no emissions reductions. However, it projects that emissions reductions from carbon capture will reach 50 megatons of carbon by 2024–mostly from coal plants–and 200 million tons per year by 2030.
There’s no explanation for this miraculous growth, but the analysis nonetheless suggests there will be “6 gigawatts of carbon capture retrofits at existing coal-fired power plants and 18 gigawatts of gas power plants with carbon capture installed by 2030.” These assumptions would require $17 billion in carbon capture tax credits in 2030 alone. That is far more than the $3.2 billion total 2022-2031 expenditure the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Overall, the analysis assumes that carbon capture would deliver “roughly one-sixth to one-fifth” of total emissions cuts. This is an unfathomable improvement for an industry that has failed to deliver emissions reductions after decades of research and billions in funding.
The analysis also leaves its assumptions unclear on the actual emissions reductions of carbon capture technology. While the industry claims it can capture 90% of emissions, real-world analyses of full lifecycle emissions put that figure closer to 39%, at best. And captured CO2 is almost entirely used for more oil drilling, eliminating any supposed climate benefits.
Counting On Cars That Might Not Exist
The analysis also pins emissions reductions on changes to existing tax credits for electric vehicles. But there are serious questions about this policy. Several reports have already noted that there are currently no EVs that will meet the IRA’s requirements. The bill mandates that tax credits can only go to EVs with battery and mineral components sourced from the U.S. or favored trading partners.
The supply chains to make these cars don’t even exist yet, but the model assumes they will. It seems logical to think a more generous tax credit would increase EV purchases. However, real-world limitations could significantly limit projected emissions reductions.
The Model Misses Fossil Fuels And Frontline Communities
The REPEAT analysis also assumes continued growth in fossil fuels; gas-fired power and coal stay strong in the energy mix. This is particularly concerning for communities near fossil fuel infrastructure. They’ll see more pollution from facilities receiving subsidies under the IRA. This is more than just wasting money on dirty infrastructure–it could increase pollution under the guise of climate action.
The fossil fuel industry is also pushing for a massive expansion of fossil fuel exports, which the REPEAT modeling acknowledges. Yet, it doesn’t account for those greenhouse gas emissions in its 42% claims.
The model also doesn’t account for the “side deal” that secured the support of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, which calls for fast-tracking major new energy projects. Right now, we can’t calculate how that agreement might work, but it explicitly aims to build new sources of pollution more quickly.
All of this–as well as the IRA’s unconscionable provisions on new drilling on public lands—will take a serious toll on communities near polluting facilities, and will lock us into continued climate emissions.
It Doesn’t Capture Leaking Methane
The IRA’s only provision that directly addresses oil and gas industry emissions is a fee on methane leaks. Under the bill, the fee would rise to $1,500 per ton in 2026. But negotiations with Senator Manchin substantially weakened this provision. Now, it won’t apply to the majority of the industry.
While that is not part of the REPEAT analysis, we note that they rely on a 100-year timeframe to calculate the CO2 equivalence of methane (instead of 20 years). This is misleading because so much of methane’s climate impact comes in the near-term.
Moreover, the analysis uses outdated assumptions from the EPA that significantly underestimate methane leakage and the impacts of gas on warming in general.
There’s A Difference Between Models And Reality
There are also fundamental questions about the type of forecasting used in the REPEAT analysis. How well do these models predict the future? What assumptions do they make?
On that count, the report includes caveats that readers might miss. “Optimization modeling used in this work assumes rational economic behavior from all actors,” the authors write. They add that “these results indicate what decisions make good economic sense for consumers and businesses to make… whether or not actors make such decisions in the real world depends on many factors we are unable to model.”
Energy industry actors don’t make rational decisions based on costs, consumer benefits or the public good. For instance, clean renewable power is cheap and abundant, yet utilities embrace fossil fuels. That’s in part because they profit from existing infrastructure that poisons communities and the climate.
Additionally, the REPEAT modeling doesn’t calculate increases in water and air pollution that will come from carbon capture, hydrogen and other fossil fuel infrastructure likely under the IRA. Increases in harmful emissions other than carbon dioxide and methane will inevitably result from more fracking, pipelines and fossil fuel power plants, too. The burden will fall on disadvantaged communities. Models don’t show these impacts, but they’re real nonetheless.
https://mronline.org/2022/08/25/will-th ... pollution/
Blaming China and other developing countries for climate change ‘is simply racist’
Originally published: China Environment News on August 22, 2022 by China Environment News (more by China Environment News) (Posted Aug 25, 2022)
In response to our article posted on another Facebook environmental site commenting on how China leads the world in green energy, a US reader from New York in the USA commented:
It may, but China is still the biggest CO2 emitter by far.
This sort of snide response needs to be called out for what its is–Western supremacist bigotry.
China Environment Net responded to the author as follows:
So you are saying there are too many Chinese, as that is the ONLY reason for such a “loaded” comment? Given that each Chinese citizen produces ONLY ONE THIRD of the CO2 produced by each US American, Canadian and Australian separately, and the EU countries are not too far behind, the logical thing to do is immediately cut rich Western countries CO2 output first (and probably the West’s standard of living), and in the next year or two! Any other approach is inequitable, irrational and, well simply racist.
[This is especially so] Given that 70% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere and oceans was sourced from the West. Privileged Western “environmentalists” seem to want the global south/developing world to remain poor while the 15% of the global population in the West continue their extravagant life style uninterrupted???
The party is over, especially for the USA. Time to come to grips with facts-the attached from The Lancet is helpful to see past the anti-China hate rants spewing out of Washington.
The Lancet article explains a method for quantifying national responsibility for damages related to climate change by looking at national contributions to cumulative CO2 emissions in excess of the planetary boundary of 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This approach is based in the principle of equal per capita access to atmospheric commons and calculates national fair shares of a safe global carbon budget consistent with the planetary boundary of 350 ppm (as per IPCC recommendations).
These fair shares are then subtracted from countries’ actual historical emissions (i.e. territorial emissions from 1850 to 1969, and consumption-based emissions from 1970 to 2015) to determine the extent to which each country has overshot or undershot its fair share. Through this approach, each country’s share of responsibility for global emissions in excess of the planetary boundary can be calculated.
A summary of the study’s findings show:
# the USA was responsible for 40% of excess global CO2 emissions;
# the European Union+UK (EU-28) was responsible for 29% of excess global CO2 emissions
# the industrialised countries (i.e. those classified by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as Annex I nations were responsible for 90% of excess emissions global CO2 emissions;
# the Global North ( i.e. USA, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan) was responsible for 92% of excess emissions global CO2 emissions;
# by contrast, most countries in the Global South (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China.
https://mronline.org/2022/08/25/blaming ... ly-racist/
Imperialism is the arsonist: Marxism’s contribution to ecological literatures and struggles
Originally published: Abstrakt on 2021 by Derek Walls (more by Abstrakt) | (Posted Aug 23, 2022)
Marxism’s contributions to ecological literature and struggles is a rich and contradictory field of discussion. Marxism in diverse ways has fed into environmental struggles and broader ecological politics. Broadly, I would argue that there has been a deepening appreciation of the ecological themes in the work of Marx and Engels in recent decades. Most significantly, and recently, there has been a shift towards debates around Eco-Leninism, with several different attempts to read the climate crisis through the insights of Lenin. However, specifically Green Party politics, in some states, has seen a movement of former Marxist-Leninists towards a revisionist understanding of politics, with revolutionary objectives being discarded. The way that Marxism’s contribution to ecological literatures and struggles has played out is also internationally diverse, my understanding is strongest when it comes to West European examples but the growth of militant environmental movements across the globe must be acknowledged.
One starting point is the example of the German Green Party. I heard an interesting story; I cannot comment as to whether it is true! An intern worked for a prominent elected German Green Party politician, I forget whether the politician sat in the Bundestag, the European Parliament or a Lander (regional parliament). The intern had been asked to go to the politician’s home while he was away on political business. Watering the plants, the intern was surprised to find a huge, in fact life size, poster of the Great Helmsman himself Chairman Mao, on the wall.
This anecdote has a serious side and illustrates a number of ways in which Marxism has informed ecological literatures and struggles. Most empirically and least significantly the German Greens can be seen as partly a product of anti-revisionist politics. It is also interesting to note how ecological movements and struggles have acted as a movement from Red to Green, a movement from Marxist-Leninist commitment to centre-ground revisionist reform politics. It also reminds us to examine in an open way a range of key Marxists, including Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Luxemburg in terms of their attitudes to nature.
Marx’s Ecology
A variety of academics and green political writers argued bluntly that Marxism had little to contribute to ecological struggles. Marx and Engels were defined as Prometheans concerned to use nature as an instrument to promote human progress. Communism was based in Marx’s work on rapid industrialisation with little thought for the consequences for the environment. Thus green or ecological political ideology provided a break from existing ideologies. Jonathon Porritt, a leading member of the British Ecology Party made such claims in Seeing Green in the early 1980s, arguing bluntly that communism and capitalism were two facets of a wider anti-ecological ideology,
dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialist ethic as the best means of meeting people’s needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. From a viewpoint of narrow scientific rationalism, both insist that the planet is there to be conquered, that big is self-evidently beautiful, and that what cannot be measured is of no importance. (Porritt, 1984: 44)
In turn the environmental record of socialist countries such the USSR was seen as both environmentally destructive and entirely consistent with such a Marxist anti-ecology based on the foundation of classic texts by Marx and Engels (Cole, 1993).
An alternative approach from the editors the academic journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) was to emphasise that Marx’s work is vital to ecological politics. This was based on an understanding that capitalism drives environmental destruction and thus green political economy inevitably demanded an articulation with anti-capitalism, if it was to provide a realistic chance of overcoming ecological problems. James O’ Connor developed this approach with his description of the ecological contradictions of capitalism, arguing that capitalism tended to degrade its possibility of existence by destroying nature. Without nature, capitalism could not survive, but the continued drive for accumulation, exploitation and profit tended to destroy nature (O’Connor, 1988). In turn, Joel Kovel, also associated with CNS, argued that economic growth tended to degrade the environment and that economic growth is functional to capitalism. In his book title The Enemy of Nature, he found the answer in capitalism. Kovel noted the distinction between ‘use values’ and ‘exchange values’, discussed by Marx in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, was essential to creating an ecologically sustainable society. Thus by making goods to last longer and providing communal products for use, human prosperity could grow without the waste of capitalism. However, like Porritt and other green critics of Marx, Kovel argued that while Marx provided a necessary analysis to capitalism, Marxism was resistant to ecological themes,
Forged at the moment of industrialization, its [i.e. socialism’s] transformative impulse tended to remain within the terms of the industrialized domination of nature. Thus it continued to manifest the technological optimism of the industrial world-view, and its associated logic of productivism — all of which feed into the mania for growth. The belief in unlimited technical progress has been beaten back in certain quarters by a host of disasters, from nuclear waste to resistant bacteria, but these setbacks barely touch the core of socialist optimism, that its historical mission is to perfect the industrial system and not overcome it. The productivist logic is grounded in a view of nature that regards the natural world […] from the standpoint of its utility as a force of production. It is at that point that socialism all-too-often shares with capitalism a reduction of nature to resources — and, consequently, a sluggishness in recognizing ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. (Kovel, 2007: 229)
Such perspectives from Kovel and O’Connor might be linked politically to the birth of popularisation of the term ecosocialism. Existing socialism and communism were anti-ecological, key texts might advocate a disregard for nature, so while socialism and/or communism were essential to ecological struggles, they need a prefix ‘eco’ to be distinguished from existing anti-ecological left alternatives.
I would argue that we have seen a sharp break from such perspectives, since the publication of US sociologist John Bellamy Foster’s book Marx’s Ecology. Foster argues, convincingly to my mind, that ecology is core to Marx and Engels’ project (Foster, 2000). Indeed an examination of Marx and Engels’ texts suggests an overwhelming concern with environmental issues. In turn their philosophy based on relationships derived from Hegel and perhaps Spinoza, is akin to ecology defined as a science of relationships. For example, in Capital vol 3 Marx notes,
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]. (Marx, 1959 [1894]: 530)
Discussion of such seemingly contemporary themes of deforestation, pollution and food additives can be found in Capital.
Engels also focussed on ecological questions,
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. […] Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws. (Engels, 1972)
Marx and Engels’ sustained meditations on the sciences including biology, brought them to consider environmental issues. The exploitation of labour was to them also allied to environmental threats to health and safety. Engels’s Condition of the English Working Classlooked at how a poor work place environment contributed to the degradation of workers.
John Bellamy Foster argues that ecological considerations were central to Marx’s construction of historical materialism. In turn, Marx’s notion of a metabolic rift between humanity and the rest of nature, has been used by Foster to conceptualise ecological crisis. Healing the rift is the answer to problems such as climate change, to the extent that humans master nature, we are mastering an element of ourselves rather than something alien. Thus while Marxists and other socialists might self-criticise their approach to ecological questions, the description of Marx and Engels as anti-environmental thinkers has been exposed as a myth. How, though, have Marxists engaged with green movements, and to what extent have Marx and Engels’ ecological assumptions informed practical struggles? Certainly since the 1970s Marxists have sometimes joined Green or Ecological political parties.
German Greens roots in Maoism
Specifically ecological political parties emerged in the 1970s. Broadly this was a result of the globalisation of environmental problems, reflected in scientific reports such as MIT’s Limits to Growth. The first Ecology Parties were found in the UK and New Zealand/ Aotearoa (Parkin, 1989). These to some extent were conservative institutions without a critique of capitalism or human exploitation. However, the emergence of broader and more radical social movements can be seen as leading a transformation from purely environmental parties to Green Parties. The anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons movements during the 1970s and 1980s helped create green political parties, the most significant being the German Green Party. The German Greens originated partly from the activism of anti-revisionists to seek a new source of intervention (Hülsberg, 1988: 51-53).
I am not sure if there was a distinct reason for anti-revisionists to get involved with the German Greens. It seems more that this was part of a general engagement of the German left. The story of the German Greens has been told many times: briefly, those on the left, involved in social movements, joined a platform to fight elections. Those who had been involved in the student movement, and some sympathetic to the Baader-Meinhof gang, joined environmentalists. At first the Greens were, in the words of an early leader figure Petra Kelly, ‘the anti-party party’ (Emerson, 2011: 55). Given the openness of the German electoral system, co-option was perhaps close to inevitable. Greens were elected on radical platforms but eventually joined coalition regional governments with the SPD, and the party over the decades has moved broadly to the centre right.
A number of prominent German Green politicians, for example, Ralf Fücks, a former mayor of Bremen; and Winfried Kretschmann, Minister-President Baden-Württemberg were originally active in Kommunistischer Bund West Deutschland. Perhaps the largest Maoist political party in what was at the time West Germany it took a decision to join the Greens en masse in 1982. Other anti-revisionists joined the Greens along with those closer to autonomist networks such as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Kühn, 2005).
The relationship of green parties and ecological movements to Marxism has demonstrated contradictory tendencies. One has been a move from a more conservative environmentalism to great radicalism and commitment. For example, the British Ecology Party was founded by members of the right wing Conservative Party, however while Marxism has never been strong in the organisation’s history, it has broadly moved to the left (Wall, 1994). Typically in one recent leadership contest hustings, all the candidates insisted that they opposed capitalism (Jarvis, 2021). On the other hand, in the words of the East German eco-Marxist Rudolf Bahro, there has been a shift From Red to Green (Bahro, 1984). The German Greens are perhaps the best known example, as briefly discussed, but there are many others. For example, the Green Left in Holland are now a standard European Green Party, like the Germans, in the political centre, but they were created originally out of the dissolution of four Dutch left wing political parties including the Communist Party (Voerman, 2006: 80). This trend isn’t of course restricted to Greens, one thinks of the movement of the Dutch Socialist Party from Marxism to fairly standard social democracy. And as we know from Lenin, most socialist parties of Europe at the start of the first world war including the SPD ditched communism and supported their contending nation states. Certainly the German members of anti-revisionist organisations who joined the Greens have generally moved dramatically from Mao and Hoxha to accommodation with the Christian Democrats.
At times these contradictory movements are reflected in the work of a single individual. André Gorz, the French ecological theorist, acted paradoxically to promote a movement from red to green, and conversely from environmentalism to anti-capitalist commitment. Best known for his book Farewell to the Working Class, the former Marxist argued that class conflict was largely redundant and new social movements, including environmentalists, represented a force for potential change (Gorz, 1987). Thus he can be seen as giving textual support to the movement from anti-revisionism into social movements, into Green Parties and within the Greens moving apparently ever to the political right. Conversely his text Ecology as Politics, identified the economic drive to accumulate as the key source of ecological risk. Prefiguring Joel Kovel’s arguments by two decades, he argued that capitalism is the cause of environmental destruction. ‘’This is the nature of consumption in affluent societies; it ensures the growth of capital without increasing either the general level of satisfaction or the number of genuinely useful goods (‘use values’) which people have at any given point in time.’ (Gorz, 1980: 23) Gorz thus, amongst other authors, helped promote an anti-capitalist critique amongst some greens, which pointed back to Marx’s broad analysis of capitalism in Capital vol one.
Green Trotskyism?
One approach has been to argue that while Marx was green, the failure of much 20th century socialism to promote environmentalism could be placed at the door of Stalin and Stalinism. This seems to my mind a superficial approach, blaming an individual rather than engaging in sustained analysis. Equally it is difficult to find an environmental core in the work of Trotsky, who might be seen as Stalin’s main critic. Trotsky typically argued that communism was a project of perhaps rather brutally and crudely mastering nature.
Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. (Trotsky, 1941: 5)
Having said this Trotsky did argue that ‘man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth. In turn there have been some manifestations of environmentally aware Trotskyism. The present Fourth International, from Ernest Mandel’s line, is explicitly ecosocialist in nature. Its various national sections are highly engaged in ecological work. In Britain, Alan Thornett of Socialist Resistance, which is associated with this Fourth International, produced a detailed account of an ecosocialist approach to climate change (Thornett, 2019). Polemics from others in the Fourth International have explicitly criticised Trotsky for failing to address ecological issues, unlike Marx and Engels (Tanuro, 2015)
The existence of numerous Trotskyist internationals can be confusing, although of course this is a feature of other forms of Marxism. It is possible that the Mandelite Fourth International was influenced by Pabloite strands of thought. The Greek Trotskyist Michel Pablo split the Fourth International in the 1960s but his comrades re-joined in the 1990s (Coates, nd). During the 1970s they were strong advocates of what might be seen as an ecosocialist approach. Strongest perhaps in Australia, a leading Pabloite, the physicist Alan Roberts, published The Self-Managing Environment in 1979 (Roberts, 1979). Drawing on both Marx and Freud it criticised the kind of consumer capitalism theorised by Marcuse and other Western Marxists. Roberts’ argument was that a lack of democratic involvement including an absence of workers’ control, led to a frustrated demand for consumer goods. The less we participate and have the ability to shape our life experience, the more we compensate by consuming wasteful goods. The ecological crisis is seen as a product of capitalist growth, growth in consumer capitalism is environmentally destructive. A self-managed socialist society is thus an ecosocialist alternative. Roberts also produced a strong critique of neo-Malthusian environmentalists who blamed ecological problems on over population rather than capitalism. Other chapters in The Self-Managing Environmentcovered the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ arguing that rather than acting as a metaphor for environmental destruction as suggested by the right wing biologist Garrett Hardin, commons had been seized by force and enclosed.
Nick Origlass, a leading Pabloite, engaged in local government ecosocialism, creating his own independent Labour Party in Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney to win local power and challenge toxic waste dumping in his community (Greenland, 1988). Australia also saw the creation of the green ban movement, where trade unionists in the Building Workers Union refused to work on construction projects that damaged the environment (Koffman, 2021).
Another Trotskyist figure passionately involved with ecosocialist politics is the Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco. While Blanco retains fraternal links with the Fourth International, his present politics is closer to that of the Mexican Zapatistas. He publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena and is also an active support of the Rojava Revolution. Originally an agronomy student, he studied in Argentina, he led a peasant uprising in the early 1960s which successfully gained land reform. During his many decades of activism he has become increasingly engaged in ecological and indigenous struggles (Wall, 2018). As I write, he is in his 80s but remains a leading ecosocialist thinker and activist.
Green Cuba
While Socialist states have been criticised on their ecological policies during the 20th century, Cuba has proved a sharp exception. Since the early 1990s, Cuba has pursued policies to drastically reduced climate change emissions and to protect the environment in a variety of ways. The reason for Cuba’s overt and strong turn towards environmental protection is twofold. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Cuba was no longer supplied with cheap oil after 1990. This led to a severe crisis, in the context of a continuing US blockade, resulting in what has been termed the ‘Special Period’. Thus a sharp reduction in the consumption of oil was vital so as to ensure the survival of Cuban society (Plonska and Saramifar, 2019). In turn, and apparently irrespective of this necessity, Fidel Castro became deeply engaged in ecological concerns and debates. At the 1992 UN Rio conference on the international environment he made the case for green policies, noting:
An important biological species – humankind – is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction.
With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume two thirds of all metals and three fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air. They have weakened and perforated the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer.” (Castro, 2016)
Cuba has been so successful at introducing environmentally friendly policies that it has regularly been cited as the world’s best example of sustainable development. Agriculture has been partially decarbonised, with a push to grow using organic farming. There has been significant investment in renewable energy including wind turbines. Buses have been promoted as a means of reducing dependence on oil to power cars. In 2019, Cuba topped the Sustainable development index promoting economic activity that was ecologically sustainable (Trinder, 2020).
Indeed the supposedly anti-ecological record of the Soviet Union and other socialist states has recently been challenged in a detailed comparative study (Engel-Di Mauro 2021). While Cuba’s environmental policies are increasingly well know, it is perhaps often forgotten that the Soviet Union in its earliest years was also lauded as an environmental model. Under Lenin, National parks were opened and animal conservation was promoted (Stahnke, 2021). In recent years the notion of eco Leninism has become noted by diverse writers. Andreas Malm the Swedish academic has argued that to overcome the climate crisis we need to return to Lenin. He has argued that the urgency of the climate crisis might mean embracing an approach similar to the war communism of the early years of the Soviet Union (Malm, 2020).
Marxism as a guide to ecological alternatives
So how do we draw this all together, moving from cataloguing various manifestations of ecological Marxism to constructing a political alternative? I have briefly sketched some articulations of Marxism and ecological movements/literatures but this is a vast field and I have left much out. There are four themes I would like, in conclusion, to at least note 1) The commons 2) Working class productivity 3) Anti-imperialism, and finally 4) the role of Leninism in promoting transition.
The commons, a notion of collective ownership, most extensively explored in recent years by the Nobel Prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom is essential to tackling ecological problems (Ostrom 2019). It is also a recurring concept in the work of Marx and Engels. Capitalism is a driver of ecological destruction, the notion of collective ownership of resources in contrast creates the possibility of shared prosperity and sustainability. Marx’s observation that we are not the owners of the Earth and should leave it in a better state for future generations, noted above, is a useful starting point for a green political economy. The Marxist aspiration for a society based upon the ensemble, the collective and creative interaction of all of us, for example, promoted by the British musician and revolutionary Cornelius Cardew is pertinent (Norman, 2019).
Climate change and other severe environmental problems demand working class solutions. The productivity and creativity of workers is vital to ecological alternatives. The often forgotten history of working class environmental politics demands study. I noted above the example of the Australian Green Ban movement in halting environmentally damaging building projects. Workers produce and can produce alternative sustainable futures, the concept of workers’ plans for ecological production is important (Hampton, 2015).
Anti-imperialism is another important dimension. Thomas Sankara (2018) reminds us that imperialism is the arsonist that burns the forests .There are numerous movements that link anti-imperialism with ecological politics, stretching from indigenous social movements in Latin America to the Rojava Revolution. Another useful contribution from Andreas Malm is his insight into how fossil fuels were the historical product of colonial exploitation and capitalist accumulation (Malm, 2016). The Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued that land was at the heart of struggles for autonomy in the face of colonial domination (1971). This is a theme taken up by Max Ajl who argues ‘Eco-socialists have to start from the basic demands of colonised peoples: namely national liberation. The Palestinian liberation struggle is one of the few, but not the only, remaining ‘classical’ national liberation struggles, which aims to break foreign settler control over the land.’ (Hancock, 2021).
In a wide ranging survey of ecology and Leninism, Lenin’s significance to ecological movement can be seen as ranging from an analysis of imperialism to an embrace of base building and dual power strategies (Woody, 2020). Lenin’s strategic analysis might be of value in theorising how to build political organisations that can overcome the ecological crisis (Wall, 2020). Leninism is, out of a number of important Marxist contributions to ecological debates, to my mind potentially the most important. Lenin’s contribution was to investigate how in a specific context we make revolution. There is a growing awareness that capitalism is the key driver of climate change and other ecological ills. Transforming society and transcending capitalism can be seen as essential to human survival, the critical investigation of how we do so can be advanced by an open reading of Lenin’s words and work. Lenin helped make history in a very different world to ours, so his insights cannot be crudely cut and pasted on to contemporary reality but re-reading his texts is vital. The French philosopher Alain Badiou notes that, ‘We must conceive of Marxism as the accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, and the fixation and precision of their target’ (Bostells, 2011: 280). We need precision in tackling an accelerating and many sided ecological crisis, Marxism, read with care and acted upon materially, will guide us.
Derek Wall teaches political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a former international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, and is active in the Marxist Centre.
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https://mronline.org/2022/08/23/imperia ... struggles/
Fuck Trotsky. As the necessary change can only come through revolution that leaves the Trots with no say or play, they never saw a revolution the did like...
For China heat waves are the ‘new normal’ under climate change
Originally published: Sixth Tone on July 20, 2022 by Liu Zhao (more by Sixth Tone) | (Posted Aug 23, 2022)
For more than a month, much of China has been blanketed by extreme heat. From June 16 to July 9, local governments issued 1,372 high-temperature “code reds,” indicating temperatures are expected to rise above 40 degrees Celsius within 24 hours. Nationally, 71 meteorological stations have reported record highs since the start of June, including many in regions not traditionally associated with high heat. In one blistering stretch, surface temperatures measured by a station in the central province of Henan reached 74.1 degrees Celsius.
The scientific consensus is that the earth is warming. Researchers estimate that global average temperatures have increased by approximately one degree Celsius since the advent of industrialization. Temperatures in China have risen even faster in recent decades. Since 1950, the annual average temperature in China has increased by 0.24 degrees Celsius every 10 years.
Although the damage done by heat waves is not as visible as other side effects of climate change like extreme precipitation or floods, rising temperatures are already causing tens of thousands of deaths in China every year.
Assistant Professor Liu Zhao
To better understand the scale of this challenge, my research team and I reviewed records related to summer heat waves across 31 cities from 1961 to 2020. They point to a simple truth: heat waves are getting longer, stronger, and hotter, with direct consequences for our health.
In the past 60 years, and especially since 2000, heat waves have not only increased in number, they are also being recorded outside the traditional summer months. For example, Guangzhou recorded just three heat wave events in the 1970s, compared to 34 in the 2000s. The time span during which heat waves were reported also widened, from the original late June-to-mid-September window to anytime from mid-May to the end of September. In Shanghai, which logged temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius for three consecutive days last week, the average number of heat wave days has increased from about 7 per year in the 1990s to around 20 per year from 2000 to 2020.
Temperatures measured during heat waves are also climbing. For instance, before 2000, the traditional “furnace” city of Chongqing almost never experienced heat waves with average daily maximum temperatures in excess of 40 degrees Celsius. It has since done so four times, including during one heat wave that lasted more than 10 days.Yet many people in China continue to see high temperatures as more discomforting than deadly. That’s a mistake. A 2020 study published in The Lancet found that heat-related deaths in China had increased fourfold over the past 20 years, reaching 26,800 in 2019. High temperatures can cause heat stroke and hyperthermia, and significantly increase the risk of death from respiratory and circulatory diseases. Sudden short-term changes in temperature are also associated with increased hospitalization rates for cardiovascular disease, heart failure, and strokes.This year, deaths from hyperthermia have already been reported in Zhejiang, Shaanxi, and Sichuan provinces; many of those who died were workers on construction sites and in factories. One construction worker in the northwestern city of Xi’an reportedly worked nine hours in high temperatures before succumbing.The appearance of heat waves earlier in the year poses additional risks, as sudden temperature spikes in late spring and early summer, before people are prepared, can be deadly. Previous studies have shown that more heat wave-related deaths and disease hospitalizations are reported in early summer than in late summer.
Even in the current best-case scenarios, such as achieving the two-degree warming limit set by the Paris Agreement, China could see heat-related mortality more than double. Small differences in temperatures could have momentous consequences. If we halt climate change at 1.5 degrees Celsius, we could prevent more than 27,900 heat-related deaths every year.Conversely, if we fail to reduce emissions as planned, global average temperatures will rise by around 4 degrees Celsius, and heat-related excess mortality is expected to increase from 1.9% in the 2010s to 2.4% in the 2030s, before reaching 5.5% in the 2090s. This poses a particular danger to countries with aging populations like China, as elderly people with pre-existing conditions are among the most vulnerable to high temperatures.Awareness of the risks associated with heat waves has risen in China in recent years, and both central and local governments have improved warning mechanisms, adjusted work rules, and handed out subsidies to those affected, but the country is far from prepared. At the local level, public cooling spaces should be opened in cities to help low-income people, and more attention needs to be paid to the needs of vulnerable groups like delivery drivers, construction workers, and the elderly.More fundamentally, the world needs to adopt stronger climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, such as reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing urban green spaces. For many people, 2090 still seems far in the future, but as the heat waves currently engulfing China and Europe (and the USA) show, the choices we make now will decide, not just the fates of our children, but also our own.
https://mronline.org/2022/08/23/for-chi ... te-change/