[News] Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe; Socialism Can Avert Disaster
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Thu Sep 1 11:19:48 EDT 2022
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*Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe; Socialism Can Avert
Disaster. The Thirty-Fifth Newsletter (2022)*
George Bahgoury (Egypt), /Untitled/, 2015.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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In November 2022, most member states of the United Nations (UN) will
gather in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm El Sheikh for the annual UN
Climate Change Conference. This is the 27^th conference of the parties
to assess the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, commonly
referred to as COP 27. The international environmental treaty was
established in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, with the first conference held in
Berlin in 1995; the agreements were extended in the Kyoto Protocol of
2005 and supplemented by the Paris Agreement of 2015. No more needs to
be said of the climate catastrophe, which threatens mass species
extinction. The move away from carbon-based fuel has been stalled by
three main impediments:
1. Right-wing forces which deny the existence of climate change.
2. Sections of the energy industry which have a vested interest in the
continuation of carbon-based fuel.
3. Western countries’ refusal to admit that they remain principally
responsible for the problem and to commit to repaying their climate
debt by financing the energy transition in developing countries
whose wealth they continue to siphon off.
In public debates over the climate catastrophe, there is barely any
reference to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and the treaty that noted
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‘The global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible
cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and
appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but
differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their
social and economic conditions’. The phrase ‘common but differentiated
responsibilities’ is an acknowledgement of the fact that while the
problem of climate change is common to all countries and none are immune
to its deleterious impact, the responsibility of countries is not
identical. Some countries – which have benefited from colonialism and
carbon fuel for centuries – have a greater responsibility for the
transition to a decarbonised energy system.
Roger Mortimer (Aotearoa/New Zealand), /Whariwharangi/, 2019.
The scholarship on the matter is clear: Western countries have benefited
inordinately from both colonialism and carbon fuel to attain their level
of development. The data
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from the Global Carbon Project, which was headed by the US Department of
Energy’s now defunct Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre, shows
that the United States has been far and away the largest producer of
carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. By itself, the United States has
emitted more CO_2 than the entire European Union, twice as much as
China, and eight times more than India. The main carbon emitters were
all colonial powers, namely the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia,
which, despite consisting of roughly one tenth of the global population,
have together accounted for more than half of cumulative global
emissions. From the 18^th century on, these countries have not only
dispensed the bulk of the carbon in the atmosphere, but they continue to
exceed their share of the global carbon budget.
Carbon-fuelled capitalism, enriched by the wealth stolen through
colonialism, has enabled the countries of Europe and North America to
enhance the well-being of their populations and attain their relatively
advanced level of development. The extreme inequalities between the
standard of living for the average European (748 million people) and the
average Indian (1.4 billion people) is seven times greater than it was a
century ago. Though the reliance by China, India, and other developing
countries on carbon, particularly coal, has risen to a high level, their
per capita emissions continue to remain far below those of the United
States, whose per capita emissions are close to twice that of China’s
and eight times more than India’s. The lack of acknowledgment of climate
imperialism leads to a failure to properly resource the Green Climate
Fund
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which was created in 2010 at COP 16 with the aim of helping developing
countries ‘leapfrog’ carbon-fuelled social development.
At the global level, debates on how to address the climate crisis
frequently revolve around various forms of a Green New Deal (GND), such
as the European Green Deal, the North American GND, and the Global GND,
which are promoted by nation states, international organisations, and
different sections of environmental movements. In order to better
understand and strengthen this discussion, the Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, gathered leading
eco-socialist scholars to reflect on the different GNDs and the
possibilities to realise a genuine transformation to stave off the
climate catastrophe. That discussion – with José Seoane (Argentina),
Thea Riofrancos (United States), and Sabrina Fernandes (Brazil) – is now
available in notebook no. 3 (August 2022), /The Socioenvironmental
Crisis in Times of the Pandemic: Discussing a Green New Deal/
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These three scholars argue that capitalism cannot solve the climate
crisis since capitalism is the principal cause of the crisis. One
hundred of the world’s largest corporations are responsible
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for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gases (largely carbon dioxide
and methane); these corporations, led by the carbon energy industry, are
not prepared to accelerate the energy transition, despite the
technological capacity to generate
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eighteen times the global electricity demand by wind power alone.
Sustainability, a word that has been emptied of its content in much
public discourse, is not profitable for these corporations. A social
renewable energy project, for example, would not produce vast profits
for the fossil fuel companies. Interest from certain capitalist firms in
the GND is substantially motivated by their desire to secure public
funds to engineer new private monopolies for the same capitalist class
that owns those large corporations that pollute the world. But, as
Riofrancos explains in the notebook, ‘“Green capitalism” purports to
mitigate the symptoms of capitalism – global warming, the mass
extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems – without
transforming the model of accumulation and consumption that caused the
climate crisis in the first place. It is a “techno-fix”: the fantasy of
changing everything without changing anything’.
Gonzalo Ribero (Bolivia), /Ancestor/, 2016.
The mainstream discussion of GND emerges, as Seoane points out, from
initiatives such as the 1989 Pearce report /Blueprint for a Green
Economy/, which was prepared for the UK government and proposed the use
of public funds to produce new technologies for private companies as a
solution to the cascading crises in Western economies. The concept of
the ‘green economy’ was not to green the economy, but to use the idea of
environmentalism to revitalise capitalism. In 2009, during the world
financial crisis, Edward Barbier, a co-author of the Pearce Report,
wrote a new report
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for the UN Environment Programme titled /Global Green New Deal/, which
repackaged the ‘green economy’ ideas as the ‘green new deal’. This new
report once more argued for public funds to stabilise turbulence in the
capitalist system.
Our notebook emerges from a different genealogy, one that is rooted in
the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother
Earth
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(2010) and the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the
Defence of Life
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(2015), both held in Tiquipaya, Bolivia and then developed in gatherings
such as the Alternative World Water Forum
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(2018), the People’s Summit (2017), and the People’s Nature Forum
(2020). At the heart of this approach, which grew out of the popular
struggles in Latin America, are the concepts /buen vivir/ and /teko
porã/ (‘living well’). Rather than simply saving capitalism, which is
the concern of the GND argument, the point of our notebook is to think
about changing the way we organise society, in other words, to advance
our thinking about building a new system. Building these ideas,
Fernandes says, must involve the trade unions (many of which are
concerned about job loss in the transition from carbon to renewables)
and peasant unions (many of which are gripped by the fact that land
concentration destroys nature and creates social inequality).
Klay Kassem (Egypt), /The Mermaid Wedding/, 2021.
We must change the system, as Fernandes argues, ‘but the political
conditions today are not conducive to this. The right wing is strong in
many countries, as is the denial of climate science’. Therefore,
rapidly, the people’s movements must put a decarbonisation agenda on the
table. Four goals lie before us:
1. *Degrowth for Western countries. *With less than 5% of the world’s
population, the United States consumes a third of the world’s paper,
a quarter of the world’s oil, nearly a quarter of the world’s coal,
and a quarter of its aluminium. The Sierra Club says
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that US per capita consumption ‘of energy, metals, minerals, forest
products, fish, grains, meat and even fresh water dwarfs that of
people living in the developing world’. Western countries need to
cut back on their overall consumption, scaling back, as Jason Hickel
notes
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the ‘unnecessary and destructive ones’ (such as the fossil fuel and
arms industries, the production of McMansions and private jets, the
manner of industrial beef production, and the entire business
philosophy of planned obsolescence).
2. *Socialise the key sector of energy generation.* End subsidies to
the fossil fuel industry and build a public energy sector that is
rooted in a decarbonised energy system.
3. *Fund the **Global Climate Action Agenda*
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Ensure that Western countries fulfil their historic responsibilities
in supporting the Green Climate Fund, which will be used to finance
the just transition in the Global South in particular.
4. *Enhance the public sector.* Build more infrastructure for social
rather than private consumption, such as more high-speed rail and
electric buses, to decrease the use of private cars. Countries of
the Global South will have to build their own economies, including
by exploiting their resources. The issue here is not entirely
whether to exploit these resources but whether they can be extracted
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for social and national development and not merely for the
accumulation of capital. /Buen vivir/ – living well – means to
transcend hunger and poverty, illiteracy and ill-health, which will
be developed by the public sector.
No climate policy can be universal. Those who devour the world’s
resources must reduce their consumption. Two billion people have no
access
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to clean water, while half the world’s population does not have access
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to adequate health care. Their social development must be guaranteed,
but this development must be built on a sustainable, socialist foundation.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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