By Garry Glass
Paris of late 2015 will be remembered for two historically significant world events.
The terror attacks of November 13th were a watershed moment for the European security apparatus and have already led to the escalation of western intervention in the Middle East.
In the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks the UN climate negotiations seek to inaugurate a top-down framework for Earth System Governance. A deal at the COP21 will only benefit corporations and the capital class. It will sanction the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure and continued fossil energy concessions.
The French authorities have seized the opportunity of heightened security to silence the voices of dissent that deviate from the official narrative that puts capital and state at the centre of solving the climate crisis.
Climate activists have already been confronted by significant police repression; demonstrations have been banned and those who have turned out on the streets have been subject to tear gas and mass arrest. Anti-capitalists have been accused by the media of attempting to hijack what was billed as an environmental demonstration. However many of those on the ground see Climate Justice as an explicitly Anti-Capitalist movement that links resistance to colonialism, militarisation and environmental destruction to the climate problematic. Climate change and global conflict are both seen as the direct result of Capital’s addiction to fossil energy.
It’s not just burning carbon that needs abolished but the oppression and exploitation inherent to class society. As such the radical voices for climate justice refuse to be silenced.
Under these extraordinary circumstances is pertinent to consider the relationships between capitalism, carbon and the military industrial complex in order to situate the climate negotiations within their wider geopolitical context. Climate change does not exist in a vacuum, it is multifaceted and we find it entangled within the nexus of other international concerns. A radical climate justice framework helps us to understand the linkages and act in solidarity across multiple areas of struggle.
Capitalism is the root cause of the climate crisis.
There is broad agreement that the generation of energy by the combustion of fossil carbon must become an obsolete technology during the 21st century in order to avoid dangerous climate change.
However the failure of efforts to agree a legally binding treaty between nation states to avoid the high emissions scenarios has been breathtaking.
To some, climate change represents an indictment to the very idea of modern industrial capitalism, while to others it represents an opportunity to overcome its ecological contradictions and create a new round of accumulation.
Movements for climate justice struggle to resist the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits associated with burning fossil fuels.
Generally rich people consume more energy and have a higher carbon footprint. This is the case within any country and globally. Energy consumption benefits the user whilst the negative impacts of pollution are borne by those most vulnerable to global environmental change.
Fossil fuels are cost externalizers par excellence, as a result our class society is committed to climate catastrophe.
Every tonne of carbon emitted becomes more costly as it uses up a bigger proportion of what atmospheric carrying capacity remains, yet these increasing costs continue to be distributed unequally.
Class society is structurally committed to exporting this alienation of climate injustice. The material benefits of industrialism have been concentrated in the global North. The impending costs of climatic change will be most felt by those in the global South, those least responsible for historical emissions. Climate injustice inflicts further injury after centuries of colonial oppression.
The global class system determines and is determined by the nature of our economic activity. Under capitalism fossil fuel dependency gets written into an infrastructural landscape that operates to wreck the global ecosystem. Climate injustice is a contradiction of capitalism which is exported upon the ‘wretched of the earth’.
In a world of such profound inequality it is absurd to blame all of humanity equally for the profligacy of its more excessive members. It is not some abstract humanity but specific humans which as a class have wrecked the climate, the term ‘anthropogenic climate change’ is almost victim blaming.
Managing the climate crisis legitimates state and capital and provides the rationale for experiments in social control much in the same way as the apparent need for deficit reduction has created a post-political consensus around austerity.
The problem is treated like an empirical fact and technocratic solutions are prescribed that reproduce capitalism. Only a radical climate justice politics can open the space for critique that moves beyond the carbon reductionist, liberal environmentalism that demonstrably failed to analyse what would be needed to confront this catastrophe. The ecological contradictions of Capital are now evident at a global scale. Climate justice must become central to the general historical struggle against capitalism.
Attempts at climate change mitigation which only focus on carbon dioxide concentrations attempt to normalise the class inequality at the heart of this crisis, seeking instead post-political solutions which are designed to maintain and reproduce the current order of ownership. If the institution of private property is maintained the climate insecurity resulting from industrial capitalism will threaten the lives of even the most resilient communities.
Global environmental governance presents the new system of resource exploitation and allocation under capital. Alongside efforts at policy harmonisation such as TTIP, the Paris accords will be a major step in implementing a global governance architecture that was inaugurated under the auspices of Agenda 21. In no way must a deal at Paris be considered a success for climate justice. It is an anti-democratic process replete with greenwashing that serves only to legitimise the power of corporate fascism.
The Earth in a Vacuum?
The world is a different place since the leaders of the industrialised nations failed to make any significant progress towards agreement on legally binding emissions cuts at the COP15 in 2009.
We have seen the Arab spring rise then give way to religious fanatics and military dictatorships. Syria and Libya have been destabilised by the west. Russia has been subject to isolation over its actions in the Crimea.The sovereign debt crisis of Europe’s periphery nations has fomented social unrest.
US shale has seen a prodigious rise in production leading to a collapse of the global oil price with wide reaching geopolitical implications such as the diminishing power of OPEC.
The continuation of western hegemony and the domination of state and capital mean that the planet is committed to irreparable damage under a high emissions scenario.
Developed northern nations who are better adapted to climatic instability will have a strategic advantage in a warmer world. Committing the world to a state of environmental crisis empowers those in the business of crisis management.
Maintenance of a military industrial complex is essential for the capability to engage in armed conflict to appropriate remaining oil reserves. Militarisation of key energy infrastructure is used to subordinate populations.
Entire ways of life are decimated by the genocidal imposition of industrial modernity as climate change undermines traditional livelihoods.
Ecosystems which are not seen as an asset to capital are lost whilst those that are, are commodified and privatised as part of a global land grab.
Women’s rights and dignities are undermined as they bare the greater burden of the hardships of living in a warmer more unstable world.
Workers continue to be alienated from a system of production which undermines the ecological integrity of communities.
Peasant farmers continue to have their rights to land and dignity attacked over land grabbing and their resilience undermined by more intense floods and droughts.
Indigenous peoples treaty rights are disregarded in the desperate search for extreme energy on their lands.
Public health is put at risk by an epidemic of climate related preventable diseases.
Fenceline communities exercising their democratic right to resist fossil fuel development are repressed by police working with big energy companies and private interests.
In the UK public services are under attack whilst the bailed out banks profiteer from fossil fuel investment.
Borders are becoming militarised as millions of people are forced to flee wars over strategic energy resources, millions more are becoming refugees because of climatic disasters.
Whole populations have insecure access to water, food and energy yet remain in service to a system which would deliver an over abundance of these resources to the rich of the world.
The consequences of western geostrategy have spilled onto the streets of Paris bringing the tragedies that happen every day around the world closer to the European consciousness. Both the reactionary forces of Daesh and the state terror of empire erode democracy. This war for the geostrategic control over fossil energy can in no way be considered separate from the ecological devastation brought by our commitment to industrial scale combustion. When the peoples of earth should be going zero carbon our labour and resources are squandered propping up the military industrial complex and its hegemonic order. At home we see islamophobia, the end of civil liberties, migration control, austerity and the sense that we are running out of time.
America consumes a quarter of the world’s oil but the majority of oil consumed globally is purchased using US dollars which must pass through the Federal Reserve. This demand for dollars to buy oil inflates the greenback’s value propping up the cheap credit in the US economy and therefore the whole global financial system. This ‘exorbitant privilege’ underwrites the expansion of an imperial system which would otherwise be in decline.
The Federal Reserve which controls Congress stands to lose a great deal if there is a shift away from the petrodollar financing system. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were deposed from power because they traded oil in Euros and Gold threatening the Dollar as reserve currency status, this regional conflict and instability gave birth to ISIS.
It is the same people who deliberate on the future contours of the world order which many expect to intervene in the climate catastrophe. Despite all the usual rhetoric about saving the planet the war machine is on the move.
Abandoning oil would almost certainly lead to the collapse of the petrodollar system. Our economy is reliant on fossil energy but we also have a class system, financial institutions and a military industrial complex which are structurally dependent on maintaining business as usual. That is why at COP 21 petrodollar hegemony is America’s hard red line and why the ‘war on terror’ is considered an emergency but climate catastrophe is not.
