(Published online in the Mail &Guardian :http://m.mg.co.za/article/2014-12-17-the-climate-is-ripe-for-social-change)
In a surprising departure
from the corporate controlled narrative on climate change, the New York Times (30/11/2014), during the
build up to the recent UN-COP20 climate summit in Lima, Peru, ran a front-page
story in which climate experts warn:
that it now may be impossible to
prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the
tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of
drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers,
rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s
population and economy.
The surprising coverage by
the New York Times went on to suggest a rising rate of emissions
has left us with two future possibilities: an unpleasant world of climate crisis, chaos and disruption or
a world with a global deal that ensures the planet is habitable. Either way the
future we are facing is grim. However, for climate justice activists gathered
in the people’ s space and on the streets in Lima, two decades of failing to
reach a global deal required a different approach: a bold rejection of the
pro-market and false solutions of the UN COP process such as carbon trading,
the Clean Development Mechanism, finance solutions that fail to acknowledge the
climate debt of rich northern nations and the commodification of forest land
(through the infamous REDD+ scheme). At
the same time, activists have called for urgent action to advance
transformative alternatives for system change as part of the people-driven just
transition. The position of ‘no to false solutions but system change now’ has
to be explained to appreciate why this is the necessary way forward to secure
human and non-human life.
In 2000, Paul Crutzen, a
Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist, introduced the term the ‘Anthropocene
Age’. Through this concept he has theorised an unprecendented human effect on our planet’s life systems,
equal in force and impact to a great geological event. However, Crutzen’s
notion of the human as a geological force, in the Anthropocene, fails to
appreciate how power works in class-based capitalist societies. Put simply,
Crutzen has failed to appreciate it is not humans in general but capital that
is the real geological force destroying planetary life. Capital through its
organisation of production, distribution, consumption and social life, driven
by the need to make short term profits, has overshot planetary limits,
undermined natural cycles and threatens human beings with extinction in the
context of climate change. Capital in this context has become a geological
force capable of ending human and non-human life. It is wired into a systemic
logic of eco-cide and is incapable of solving the climate crisis.
Moreover, over the past
three decades of transnational techno-financial capitalism our world moves at a
dizzying speed. Social life, history and change have dramatically sped up. This
includes the super speeds of nano-technologies, fast food and hyper-mobile
globalised financial flows. At the heart of this is an addiction to growth,
premised on the assumption of unlimited accumulation. In this context
capitalist modernity, with its mastery of science and technology, has convinced
capital that it is the conqueror of nature as well as its master. As a master
it seeks to reduce nature to being a commodity, while ending an alternative
conception of nature: nature as a
commons. Thus, this commodifying illusion, informs the market based techno-fixes
of capital, like carbon trading, which operate with the idea of no limits to
capital. Yet the world is facing finite resources,
over-consumption by a few and widespread pollution of rivers, land, forests,
oceans and the biosphere. Hence with capital prevailing over the UN climate
process we are heading for the fast death of our future.
Finally, with the current
trajectory of an increasing rate of carbon emissions, carbon concentration (over 400 ppm) and a
rapidly heating planet, climate justice movements are thinking hard about
securing our common future. In this regard they seek to counter two possible
futures we face. First, in various Pentagon research reports, well documented
by Christian Parenti in his book Tropic of Chaos, the Pentagon envisages a
world of climate induced chaos. In this context, it seeks to use its awesome
military power to discipline such zones of chaos while protecting ‘life boat
America’. This is the ultimate fascist solution. Second, a view of our future
argued by Rebecca Sonlit in her book A
Paradise Built in Hell, recognises a pattern of human purpose and civic
virtue, coming to the fore in the context of disasters like the great San
Francisco earthquake and hurricane Katrina. Her book assumes the Manichean make
up of human nature, with its disposition for evil and good, but she documents a
pattern in which altruism and mutual aid manifests in the context of disasters.
While such a view celebrates the human spirit as a means to confront the
adversity of the future, and is generally a progressive response, it tends to
work with an implicit fatalism and comes short in terms of grappling with the
agency required for system change now.
Instead, and I would
argue, a system change perspective is grounded in appreciating that the pattern
of history informing our future derives from the 20th century.
Essentially, the 20th century was marked by a contest between two
sets of social forces, championing contrary principles: on one side social
forces championing ‘competition’, and on the other, social forces championing ‘solidarity’.
It is this pattern of struggle and its understanding of human nature, as
socially determined, that best equips us to confront and secure the future now.
It is this perspective that also enables us to champion system change
alternatives in the present.
An important example in
this regard is the rights of nature alternative. Its power as a transformative
alternative was demonstrated in Lima, through a sitting of the International Tribunal in Defence of the
Rights of Nature. The tribunal brought forth an incredible creativity by
activists to demonstrate the power of this alternative. Factual testimony,
rhetorical inventiveness, valorising culture and evoking lost histories became
crucial activist strategies before the tribunal to expose how capital is
destroying rain forests, ancestoral lands, water systems and communities, as it
scrambles for fossil fuels and minerals, through predatory extractivism.
Fracking in the United States, now standing
at 800 000 gas and oil wells, stood out as the source of ‘fraccidents’
like earthquakes, pollution of water resources and a second wave of genocidal violence against native Americans.
Beyond testimony, activist voices also highlighted how the rights of nature
were an effective transformative discourse, providing a recourse to challenge
such destructive practices, if enshrined in national laws or sub-national
regulations. In seven states in the US, fracking is now banned. In short, the
rights of nature alternative places a limit on capital’s avaricious pillaging.
In addition to the rights
of nature, other alternatives such as food sovereignty, solidarity economy,
rights based carbon budgets, climate jobs, socially owned renewables,
affordable mass public transport are all adding up to a counter-paradigm to
capitalist modernity, redefining a relationship between humans and nature and
advancing a logic of systemic change. As part of the just transition such
alternatives seek a society based on solidarity to sustain all forms of life.
In South Africa the time for the just transition has arrived so we can all
survive climate change. As a response to the climate crisis it affords us an
opportunity to address the failings of South Africa’s transition to democracy: inequality, unemployment,
hunger, white privilege, ecological destruction and dispossession. It affords
us an opportunity to build a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it,
black and white, such that the wealthy pay the price for this achievement and
we realise Nelson Mandela’s dream.
While the ANC state has a
declaratory commitment to green growth, green jobs and even a notion of the ‘just
transition’ in the National Development Plan, this is merely empty policy speak
and an add-on to carbon markets, renewed extractivism (including fracking),
fossil fuel energy sources, nuclear, corporate controlled renewables, export-led
agriculture and de-industrialisation
of transport and renewables
manufacturing. Essentially the ANC state has surrendered to market centred green
neoliberalism and the logic of eco-cide.
Hence it has shown itself incapable of leading a deep and transformative just
transition. Instead, such a transition has to be led from below by forces like
the NUMSA-led United Front, the emerging Food Sovereignty Alliance, the
Solidarity Economy Movement, community-mining networks and rural movements.
Such forces need to champion a ‘Peoples CODESA’ on the climate crisis and the
just transition, before it is to late.
Author: Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a Wits University academic and an
activist. This article draws on a talk
he was invited to give at a parallel event to the UN-COP20 summit on ‘Systemic
Alternatives and Power’.
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