https://socialistaction.org/2019/01/10/climate-activists-debate-how-to-reach-zero-emissions-in-time/
Climate activists debate how to reach zero emissions in time
/ 14 hours ago
jan. 2019 climate boy (loretta florance - abc)
Climate protest in Melbourne, Australia, in 2015 (Loretta Florance / ABC)
By CHRISTINE MARIE
In early December, the Global Carbon Project published statistics
showing that global emissions of CO2 rose 2% in 2018 to a record high.
As Sean Sweeney and John Trent from Trade Unionists for Energy Democracy
summarized in a Dec. 31 article, “When ‘Green’ Doesn’t ‘Grow,’ “ the
market-focused approach to climate protection that governments around
the world have been half-heartedly pursuing has left humanity in a
situation in which there is no real decline of fossil fuel production
and use.
Emissions will fail to peak—as science deems necessary—in 2020, and
government subsidies to private investors to create renewables have
produced far too little. The gap, Sweeney and Trent argue, between what
science says must happen and what is actually happening grows wider
every day.
A special 2018 report, “Global Warming by 1.5 ℃” by the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that any hope of
limiting warming to a level that might prevent catastrophic changes to
our environment would require unprecedented shifts in land use, energy
production, industrial output, building, transportation, and the
organization of city life.
COP24, the most recent climate summit of global elites, which took place
in Katowice, Poland, last month, agreed upon no measures truly capable
of tackling this emergency. According to the climate justice lecturer
Nadja Charaby, the U.S. and Russia, with the help of Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait, managed to prevent even a symbolic acknowledgement of the truths
of the IPCC report.
In addition, the human rights plans developed at the previous Paris
climate summit, planks that call for funding to the poorest nations,
have become bargaining chips in a lose-lose game.
The industrialized nations have pledged to begin contributing an
inadequate $100 billion a year to the economically victimized nations
most severely impacted by climate change in 2020 but are delaying talks
on a necessary increase in this kind of funding (“COP24: No Response to
the Crisis,” Dec. 24, 2018).
With scientists producing almost daily reports on the unexpected speed
at which glaciers are melting, species nearing extinction, the oceans
acidifying, and feed-back loops kicking in, the clear refusal of global
elites at Katowice to agree to stop fossil-fuel production and use has
kicked into high gear the climate movement discussion about what to do next.
The introduction of an outline for governmental action by the new
Democratic Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has become a focal
point for debates about what the movement should be fighting for. Her
proposal, the so-called Green New Deal, has popularized the notion that
the necessary emergency transition to the goal of 100% renewable energy
by 2030 and a just transition for workers, can (1) only be successfully
carried out by the federal government and (2) that public financing will
be key to its success.
The mainstreaming of these key ideas, once only talked about in a small
wing of the environmental movement, has stimulated and given confidence
to new layers of activists. The movement discussion now includes
critiquing the specific and limited GND proposal put out by Ocasio-Cortez.
First to challenge the ambiguity of the GND proposals to end fossil fuel
production was Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water Watch. In “The Lessons
from a Burning Paris,” she argued, “Any Green New Deal that includes
carbon pricing isn’t green, isn’t new, and isn’t much of a deal.”
Regressive carbon taxes or fee and dividend schemes don’t work; they
only penalize the working class. The real path to getting rid of fossil
fuels, she said, is simple. It means a moratorium on new fossil fuel
extraction and infrastructure.
Activists from global climate justice groups, the Green Party, and the
peace movement noted the failure of the GND to even mention the
Pentagon, which is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil
fuels and the largest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Wars for fossil fuel resources are soon to become intertwined with wars
to keep climate refugees out of the richest nations. The billions
flowing to the Pentagon are an obvious source for funding an emergency
transition. Posing warming as a “security issue,” as does Ocasio-Cortez,
opens the door for terrifying elite solutions to the economic
disruptions and mass migrations that climate change is producing.
One of the goals in the GND that has sparked the most disapproval is
“making “green” technology, industry, expertise, products, and services
a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the
undisputed international leader in helping other countries transition to
completely greenhouse gas neutral economies and bringing about a global
Green New Deal.” That is, Ocasio-Cortez is proposing a solution in which
U.S. corporations produce unspecified types of technology and make a
profit selling them to the less developed world. This goal makes all the
passages in the GND that are ambiguous about the means of achieving the
transition look ominous. To what degree is the public financing in the
GND going to go to give incentives to private industry rather than using
the money to efficiently and directly carry out the emergency transition?
The very title of the project, “Green New Deal,” suggests that this is
the course imagined. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite the
mythology, was designed to prop up, not replace, the private banks and
industrial enterprises that were responsible for the Great Depression.
Very few incursions against capital ever took place and the aid to
unemployed workers was actually quite stingy. (See: “The Real Deal on
the ‘New Deal,’” Socialist Action, December 2005,
https://socialistaction.org/2005/12/03/the-real-deal-on-the-new-deal/).
Trade Unionists for Energy Democracy has proven that public private
partnerships have failed to achieve climate goals even in the energy
industry. Only public ownership and democratic control of the entire
energy system can begin to give us the power to transition quickly and
completely enough. In truth, given that equally dramatic changes in
agriculture, transportation, and most industry will be necessary to
truly achieve carbon neutral emissions in the next twelve years, an
unambiguous drive to push beyond the prerogatives of capital must be the
orientation of the climate justice movement.
This points to the most fundamental weakness of the Ocasio-Cortez Green
New Deal project. John Qua, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, a
youth group carrying out direct action in support of the Green New Deal,
has explained clearly that current promotion of the GND and the
mobilizations directed at getting legislators to sign on, are designed
to lay the groundwork for the campaigns of progressive candidates in the
2020 elections.
The practical activity proposed by the Sunrise Movement to other climate
activists is calling legislators. Later, these same activists will be
asked to campaign for Democratic candidates. The whole project is
designed to convince activists that their energy should be directed
toward preparing for the coming elections. Dramatic social change on the
scale required to save humanity and the planet however, has never come
through electoral activity. The abolition of slavery and other dramatic
social transformations have only come through mass independent
mobilizations independent of the big business political parties.
That this will be true in the face of climate emergency should be clear
by looking at the record of the Obama presidency. According to Carol
Dansereau, author of “Climate and the Infernal Blue Wave” (Nov. 13,
2018), under the supposedly climate friendly Obama regime, government
facilitated the biggest increase in oil production in U.S. history,
dramatically expanded natural gas production, avidly promoted fracking,
expanded pipeline construction by 20%, opened up more than 75% of U.S.
potential oil resources offshore, allowed coal leases that are
equivalent to 200 new coal-fired plants, and increased U.S. oil exports
by 1000 percent.
The reforms of the Roosevelt New Deal that actually benefited working
people, including the implementation of Social Security, were only put
in place because millions of workers and farmers undertook militant
action in industry, against landlords, and for social services and aid.
Today, we are not only faced with an impending economic downturn but
with a serious threat to the planet and human life itself. The
Democratic Party has never taken on private profiteers in the manner
needed today. The only way forward is the construction of a massive
movement—reliant only on ourselves.
We must use the power of labor, the power of community organization, and
create new institutions in which the movement can strategize to defeat
the most powerful economic interests that have ever existed. Let’s take
the discussion stimulated by the Green New Deal into these as yet
uncharted waters now.
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January 10, 2019 in Environment. Tags: climate
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