The Crisis: it’s ecosocialism or fascism

Written by Isabella Pojuner and first published at The Beaver

The environmental crisis is huge – the biggest crisis humanity will see. It’s bigger than both World Wars and the Cold War combined. And it will cause the biggest changes to our political and economic systems. The UN Secretary-General Guterres has announced at COP24 that “We face a direct existential threat. If we do not change course by 2020, we risk runaway climate change.” That is a loaded statement, but he’s being realistic: the time we have to revolutionise our political systems in the way they approach environmental issues, specifically consumerism, distribution of environmental protections and new energy solutions, declines by the day. This year increased global fossil carbon dioxide emissions, expected to be between 1.8%–3.7%, will exceed the rate of 1.6% in 2017.

Capitalism is responsible for the accelerating of development of production that makes the majority of societies prosper today. Without it, our world would be unrecognisable. But it would be a world without intensive carbon pollution, a reliance on unsustainable energy, and millions of preventable deaths annually. It would be a world where we haven’t waited 50 years (and realistically, more) to halt destructive consumption patterns. With it still dominating our political, economic and social systems, our consumptive trajectory will almost certainly surpass the resources our Earth can provide. The biodiversity within our ecosystem will be horrifyingly affected. We are literally at the beginning of the first extinction event within the lifetime of the human race.

This shouldn’t be a political issue: it should be bipartisan, with all political actors moving towards action. But it is political, it does divide, and the first barrier to finding an effective solution is politics. With political debates and systems around the world edging towards either end of the traditional political framework, we’re not in a place to unite around one issue. We’re focusing on short-term political issues at best, and at worst, on fabricated debates. Most political systems are geared toward making short-term decisions and policies.

But the ultimate long-term issue is the environment we reside in, depend on, and are inextricably connected to – no matter how convincing you find Elon Musk’s galactic fantasy. The environment is massively complex, and understanding it is enormously challenging. However disproportionate their media presence may be, out there exist actual experts in climate science, outnumbering climate ‘sceptics’ or deniers dramatically. 97% of them agree that anthropogenically caused climate change has begun and will have drastic effects on the biosphere (all life on earth) and atmosphere, and requires political action and economic reform. Climate deniers are backed by dark money, not peer-reviewed research. Dark money is simply special interests with an stake in profiting from further consumption of finite, highly damaging natural resources.

Ecosocialism is one way of changing our economic system to prioritise the environment. In turn, it means the prioritisation of life on Earth; not the super-rich, not consumption rights, not the ideology that humans must rule land and resources for profit.

But we are heading towards fascism, and even ecofascism. The thoroughly disproven theory that population control is the solution to the crisis is Western-centred and shifts blame upon the Global South, the least responsible; but is still supported by arguably the most famous and well-loved environmentalist of our time:David Attenborough. How can we rationally deal with such an immense issue, especially in the age of populism, when the characters we admire just aren’t doing the majority of humans justice?

In the last couple of weeks, the ‘liberal’ President Obama asked the public to attribute America’s status as the world’s biggest oil producer to his work – in the same breath as stating his pride for the 2015 Paris Agreement. It is absurd and contradictory to simultaneously advocate for oil extraction, whose only justification is capital, and advocate for international climate action. We are at a tipping point. But he did. No US President has done nearly enough required for the environment, and yet our ‘best’ hope has miserably failed.

Fossil fuel companies such as Exxon-Mobil have been proved aware of the effects of their corporate strategy for decades. We’re talking 40 years. They literally built higher platforms for oil extraction to avoid damage from sea level rise. They’ve been profiting despite their deliberate destruction of our planet, they will continue to do so without regulation: which has failed under capitalism. The former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, Rex Tillerson, was made Secretary of State in the Trump administration. And yet the costs to governments of their own making will last for at least hundreds of years, far beyond a few presidential terms. A system which has allowed this, which continues to, and will not adequately punish these people, is not our optimal economic system. Even if ecosocialism isn’t, it is on every level, ideologically and practically, the most effective solution.

The Kardashians were financially able to hire private firefighters to protect their property during the recent California wildfires. With the number of global billionaires only increasing, and no signs of the wealth gap growth rate slowing down or reversing, we must assume that privatisation of essential natural disaster defences will be our future.

The key solution to the environmental crisis is not just a shift in consumer psychology or ending climate apathy. For instance, 94% of the French population believe anthropogenic effects have at least partially caused the Crisis and 74% believe it will have “bad” consequences, but there were still riots against the carbon tax. Why? Because while taxes on the French people have been increasing, public services have been deteriorating. The solution to the crisis is not attacking working people, pressured by class-imposed shame and economic stresses. It is, as the yellow jackets say themselves, a consensual shift in the economic system.

In times of crisis, we choose decay or progress. Our societies will unequivocally not look the same in 20 years time. Let’s plot the future, since climate models will not suffice for the political changes necessary. Our political systems are not edging towards neoliberalism, compassionate conservatism or centrism: it is Bolsanaro in Brazil, or Ocasio-Cortez’s progressive movement and Green New Deal in the US. Ecosocialism is the only ideology that would ensure equal distribution of protections, alongside a drastic but necessary shift in our economy that could actually alleviate climatic damage.

There are no true market solutions to ecological collapse. The market has been instrumental in its development. The solution is economic change, a re-prioritisation, and if that does not occur, the default is still the Crisis, mismanaged by fascist ideology. I invite anyone to respond on how it is ‘logical’ that capitalism will get us out of the mess it began.

Ocasio-Cortez, despite her perceived political necessity to continue with green capitalist tropes, said: “This is going to be the Great Society, the moonshot”. Our hope that we can adapt, thrive and overcome should even surpass that. Take a breath. Search Google Images for Earthrise: the first photograph of the Earth ever taken, on the 24th of December 1968. 50 years ago. If we did that, we can do this.

Emmanuel Macron & the Yellow Vests Protests: A Lesson in How Not to Mitigate Climate Change

Written by Andreas Malm and first published at Europe Solidaires Sans Frontieres

Capitalist climate governance has always relied on pseudo-reforms that leave the richest free to accumulate capital, while dumping taxes on working people to nudge them in the ’right direction’. But as the protests of the gilets jaunes show, many working people no longer accept the moralising terms of capitalist approaches to climate change. In this article, Andreas Malm argues that if we really want to save this Planet, we must pursue a different kind of climate politics, one that could learn a great deal from the methods and tactics of the gilets jaunes.

If anyone needed another lesson in how not to mitigate climate change, they can thank Emmanuel Macron. Scrap taxes on the richest, then slap higher taxes on fuels: one more way of shooting oneself in the foot while claiming to be walking into a greener future. Capitalist climate governance has, of course, excelled in this kind of half-illusory, half-destructive pseudo-reforms for the past two decades.

Somehow, it always makes sure any actual burdens end up on the shoulders of the poor: convert agricultural land to biofuels and drive up food prices; offset luxury emissions by growing forests in Uganda, or some other far-off place, where the farmers must first be evicted; tell ordinary consumers in Western countries that they bear the responsibility for the excess of CO2 and have to choose better (usually more expensive) alternatives; or, as the last magic bullet, plan for geoengineering schemes destined to lay millions of already vulnerable lives to waste while saving business-as-usual for some time more.

Now Macron is the last hero of capitalist climate governance. Self-styled guardian of the Paris agreement, he has cultivated an aura as the one remaining world leader who keeps his eye on the prize of lower emissions. But he is coming too late, for the kind of governance he so loves proved itself bankrupt long ago. It took the gilets jaunes to shake him out of the illusion (at least for now): one cannot combat climate change by leaving the richest even freer to accumulate capital and then dump a tax on working people to nudge them, of all classes, in the right direction. That has never worked. It never will.

Unfortunately, the illusion is still alive in the bourgeois mainstream of the environmental movement: green lobbyists assembled at COP24 greeted Macron’s decision to suspend the fuel tax with ‘dismay’. ‘If France is putting a brake on the carbon tax, it puts a brake on energy transition and sends a very bad signal’, said Pierre Cannet, head of climate and energy policy at WWF France (although it seems the organisation – mimicking Macron, as it were – later realised its mistake and sent out a press release taking a distance from the tax).

But as Maxime Combes of Attac France explains in a splendid piece [1], the tax would never have precipitated something like an ‘energy transition’. It would not have converted the French car fleet to cloudlessness. Its only real effect would have been felt in the wallets of the most cash-strapped consumers who cannot afford to ditch their old cars.

Nonetheless, cars must indeed urgently be taken off our roads – so how do we make sure that happens? Through, for a start, massive expansion of public transportation in urban as well as rural areas, mass diffusion of alternative modes of transportation (electrical bicycles, car pools with electrified vehicles), prohibition of fossil-fuelled private cars in cities, re-zoning of economic activities to put an end to sprawl, swift electrification of residual necessary automobility – in short: public investment and public planning on the scale and at the intensity commensurate to the climate emergency. It would help if the car industry, in France as elsewhere, were ordered to shift production to the stuff needed in this transition, much like American auto plants were converted to the churning out of tanks in World War II.

All of this would have to demand the sacrifice of neither the jobs nor the living standards of working people, but could improve both, while most certainly clipping the wings of the ultra-rich. Now Macron doesn’t exactly look like the leader who contemplates such a package when going to bed at night.

The president of the rich would rather compensate for their sins by having others carry the cross until they stumble. But the time has passed when measures of this sort could even be imagined to make a difference for the climate: the time is over when the capitalist class can be left in peace. Any progress towards the goal of averting utter climate breakdown now rather requires that its palaces be overrun and stormed.

And here is a second, more productive lesson of the past weeks: this is how we can fight. Any progress on the climate front will happen through struggle, as in blocking traffic, walking out of schools, seizing central streets, attacking the most environmentally damaging of all forms of consumption – the conspicuous luxury orgies of the rich – and why not: burning cars. Since neither Macron nor any other leader of a capitalist state is prepared to do what has to be done, those states will have to be forced to do it, by precisely the kind of bottom-up power the yellow vests have so effectively paraded.

And there are, of course, climate movements that act in this spirit, notably Ende Gelände, which in late October sent some 6,000 activists (including a good contingent of French) towards the railway tracks that carry lignite, or brown coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, from the mines to the power-plants in the heartland of German industry. Here, the chimneys produce both a perpetual cloud of CO2 and handsome profits to their private owners.

Not so much when the activists of Ende Gelände blocked the tracks and physically prevented the conveyance of the coal, to ratchet up the pressure on Angela Merkel – Macron’s predecessor as the guardian angel of capitalist climate governance – to close the mines once and for all. Self-organised, unlicensed by the police, dressed not in yellow but in white uniforms, Ende Gelände has not quite reached the mass depth or insurrectionary pitch of the gilets jaunes: all the more reason to learn.

Conversely, one of the slogans sprayed on the walls of central Paris last Saturday read ‘the climate crisis is a war against the poor.’ But one could wish for a more pervasive climate militancy among the yellow vests. This is precisely the kind of convergence des luttes that is needed, and that looks like it might be in the cards for the upcoming fourth act.

If the convergence materialises this Saturday or not, one lesson can already be inferred: if more people than the French had a culture of resistance and knew how to fight, we might have been somewhere else than on this terribly hot planet. 

The enemy is not the climate; it’s capitalism

Written by Michael Gasser and first published at Santa Cruz Ecological Justice

In a new article in the New Republic, 350.org founder Bill McKibben, probably the world’s most influential climate activist, argues that World War III has begun and that the enemy is climate change.

He goes on to say that we are losing the war, that we should learn from the experience of World War II, that by retooling industry as we did then we can win the war. In making this case, he is largely adopting the position that has been promoted since 2014 by The Climate Mobilization (TCM). A few days after McKibben’s article appeared, TCM’s co-founder Ezra Silk published an extensive “Victory Plan”, which outlines the steps needed to “restore a safe and stable climate”, “reverse ecological overshoot”, and “halt the 6th mass extinction”.

Before going on to say what I think is wrong with McKibben’s and TCM’s position, I want to make it clear that there is much that is certainly right about it. Above all, they recognize the seriousness of the crisis, the fact that many people who are aware of climate change under-estimate the seriousness, and the need for drastic action to solve the crisis.

The problem is that what they are arguing for is not nearly drastic enough. This is because their “war” is against nature, and as such it ultimately relies on technological fixes, rather than challenges to the political and economic system. McKibben rests much of his case on the well-known work of Stanford University engineer Mark Z. Jacobson and his colleagues, who have argued that renewable technologies could replace those based on fossil fuels in the United States within decades. While Jacobson has his critics, his work is undeniably important. What his work shows — and he himself agrees — is that the main obstacles to solving the crisis are not technological but rather political and economic. The question is who controls the technology.

If this is so, then we must look for the enemy elsewhere. In what must be the best-known of all books written on the climate crisis and its causes, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, author Naomi Klein spells it out pretty clearly. The enemy (of the climate and hence of us) is capitalism. Although Klein does not go into much detail about what she actually means by “capitalism”, a number of ecosocialist writers have filled this gap. For an excellent overview, suitable for those who know little about the science of climate change and/or little about capitalism, see David Klein and Stephanie McMillan’s  Capitalism and Climate Change: the Science and Politics of Global Warming. A common theme in this work and others, especially Richard Smith’s Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Daniel Tanuro’s Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work, is that capitalism, by its very nature, is completely incompatible with a just and sustainable future. If capitalism has a “solution” for the climate crisis, one can only imagine a dystopian world where elites survive in isolated islands of livability, protected from the masses of climate refugees on the outside.

---

McKibben and TCM look to the mobilization that took place in the US during World War II as a model for how the US should now respond to climate change. Much as the US declared war on fascism then, they say it should declare war on climate change today. Silk believes that “America is capable of leading the world in this mobilization”.

As McKibben discusses (though in somewhat different terms), there was a division in the US ruling class in the years before the US entered the war, with some preferring to stay out of the European and East Asian conflicts, and others, including President Roosevelt, eager to be involved. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gave Roosevelt the excuse he needed to pursue war on both fronts. McKibben also discusses the remarkable process by which US industry was retooled to support the war effort.

The ultimate result, of course, was the victory of the US and its allies.

But let’s not forget another outcome of the war effort: the ascendancy of the US to its unchallenged position as the dominant power in the world. Far from weakening the reigning political and economic system, Roosevelt strengthened it immeasurably. This was certainly no accident. Another outcome of the war was the greatly increased power of the US military, both within the US and the world.

If it is the political and economic system that is the problem, then we should not be seeking inspiration in a top-down campaign that served to strengthen that system, leaving it in a position to further devastate the environment and giving us the crisis we face today. Nor should we expect the leaders of the movement that is called for now to be wealthy politicians like FDR and his corporate allies. One only has to look at the outcomes of the annual UN Conference of the Parties meetings to see how hopelessly ineffectual the world’s economic and political leaders have been in addressing the climate crisis.

As Naomi Klein and others have shown, the ecological crisis coincides with other forms of oppression that are integral to capitalism, and those that are the most oppressed by this system are also those most likely to suffer the effects of climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. If World War III has already begun, then it is a war being fought mainly by these people, those in the Unist’ot’en camp in British Columbia defending their land against pipelines and natural gas; those in northern Greece struggling to keep gold mines out of their territory; those in Andhra Pradesh, India, battling the companies trying to create coal-fired power plants on their land; those in South Chicago who have fought to keep pet coke storage facilities out of their neighborhood.  It is these people and their allies elsewhere that should inspire us in the “war” that lies ahead, not politicians and “enlightened” capitalists.

History offers us many examples of people rising up against unjust systems — institutionalized racism, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism itself — sometimes in armed struggle, sometimes non-violently. History also teaches us that change does not necessarily happen in a linear fashion; crises can create the conditions for very rapid change. In other words, there is actually hope for the sort of revolution that is needed, a revolution that at a minimum will result in democratic control of the economy and a massive redistribution of income on a world-wide scale.

---

Silk is to be commended for his detailed and extremely useful discussion of the steps that would need to be taken under a full-scale climate mobilization. More than perhaps any other document, his Victory Plan shows the extent of what must be done. But Silk does not tell us how all of this could actually be accomplished within the existing political system. This is beyond the scope of his project: “speculation about the limits of ‘political acceptability’ in the neoliberal era should be left to historians, sociologists, and politicians”.

The choice in the end is simple. Can we win this fight

1. within the system — by changing the Democratic Party, by hoping to elect “leaders” who will guide us through another mobilization, by expecting “America” to save the world again, by relying on corporate-controlled technology
2. or only by changing the system — by participating in existing struggles for social justice, by building class consciousness as well as climate consciousness, by enlisting technology in the service of justice, by creating a world-wide network of grassroots movements and a planned global response that radically transforms existing governments, by ultimately taking on capitalism itself, the system that is behind it all?

Naomi Klein Interview: Climate Change “Not Just About Things Getting Hotter…It’s About Things Getting Meaner”

Interviewed by Michael Winship and first published at Common Dreams

In a wide-ranging conversation, the journalist and climate activist discusses the recent Paris climate accords, the politics of global warming, climate change denial and environmental justice.

A week and a half ago, just as a blizzard was barreling up the East Coast, I traveled to my hometown, Canandaigua, NY, and before a standing-room-only audience of more than 400 at Finger Lakes Community College, had a conversation with author and climate activist Naomi Klein.

Our talk was part of the George M. Ewing Forum, named in honor of the late editor and publisher of our local newspaper. He was a worldly and informed man, dedicated to good talk and a lively exchange of ideas. The forum brings to town a variety of speakers each year, some of them from the area, others not.

The Finger Lakes region is a beautiful part of the country. As has often been said, it runs on water, and as I grew up, there was an increasing realization that what we have is an invaluable natural resource we could be in danger of losing. Over the years, the threats have grown ever more complex with greater hazards revealed as pollution and development have encroached on the landscape. As a result, much of our audience was composed of environmentalists and concerned citizens, including a contingent from We Are Seneca Lake, the grassroots campaign fighting against the use of crumbling salt mines under the hillsides to store fracked natural gas and liquefied petroleum gases. (One of its leaders is biologist, mother and Moyers & Company guest Sandra Steingraber.)

The conversation with Naomi Klein was billed as “Capitalism vs. The Climate: Reflections on the 2015 UN Climate Conference,” and while we certainly spoke a great deal about that recent climate agreement in Paris, our talk ranged more widely as we discussed her life and work, politics, the continuing right-wing denial of global warming, and the climate justice movement.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She’s a member of the board of directors for 350.org, the global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Among many other honors, in 2015 she received The Izzy Award – named after the great writer and editor IF Stone — celebrating outstanding achievement in independent journalism and media.

Klein’s most recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Literary Awards in the nonfiction category. A documentary based on the book, directed by Avi Lewis, was released last fall.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I began with the most basic question:

This changes everything — how?

Naomi Klein: So the ‘this’ in This Changes Everything is climate change. And the argument that I make in the book is that we find ourselves in this moment where there are no non-radical options left before us. Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don’t change course, if we don’t change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world. And that is what climate scientists are telling us when they say business as usual leads to three to four degrees Celsius of warming. That’s the road we are on. We can get off that road, but we’re now so far along it, we’ve put off the crucial policies for so long, that now we can’t do it gradually. We have to swerve, right? And swerving requires such a radical departure from the kind of political and economic system we have right now that we pretty much have to change everything.

We have to change the kind of free trade deals we sign. We would have to change the absolutely central role of frenetic consumption in our culture. We would have to change the role of money in politics and our political system. We would have to change our attitude towards regulating corporations. We would have to change our guiding ideology.

You know, since the 1980s we’ve been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible and then all good things will flow from that. And that is what justifies privatization, deregulation, cuts to corporate taxes offset by cuts to public services — all of this is incompatible with what we need to do in the face of the climate crisis. We need to invest massively in the public sphere to have a renewable energy system, to have good public transit and rail. That money needs to come from somewhere, so it’s going to have to come from the people who have the money.

And I actually believe it’s deeper than that, that it’s about changing the paradigm of a culture that is based on separateness from nature, that is based on the idea that we can dominate nature, that we are the boss, that we are in charge. Climate change challenges all of that. It says, you know, all this time that you’ve been living in this bubble apart from nature, that has been fueled by a substance that all the while has been accumulating in the atmosphere, and you told yourself you were the boss, you told yourself you could have a one-way relationship with the natural world, but now comes the response:

“You thought you were in charge? Think again.” And we can either mourn our status as boss of the world and see it as some cosmic demotion — which is why I think the extreme right is so freaked out by climate change that they have to deny it. It isn’t just that it is a threat to their profits. It’s a threat to a whole worldview that says you have dominion over all things, and that’s extremely threatening.

Just after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Bloomberg Business Week published a cover story and the cover said, “It’s global warming, stupid.” And now here we are, the two of us sitting here the day after a massive snowfall on the Atlantic seaboard. What’s that telling you, me and the rest of us to think?

That we’re really stupid? [laughter] I mean I do think that Sandy was a turning point. If you look at the polling around climate change in this country before Sandy, that was kind of the low point in terms of Americans believing that climate change was real and that humans were causing it. And I think that there have been so many messages, you know, whether it’s the California drought and the wildfires or the flooding that we just saw in the American South — it’s just getting harder and harder to deny that there’s something really, really strange going on.

We have a structural problem, because you can simultaneously understand the medium to long-term risks of climate change and also come to the conclusion that it is in your short-term economic interest to invest in oil and gas. Which is why, you know, anybody who tells you that the market is going to fix this on its own is lying to you.

And I’ve always been struck, too, by the military’s embrace of the reality of climate change, that they’ve been warning us for years about this. Because that’s why they’re going to have to fight a lot of the time.

Yeah. And I think that’s becoming clearer and clearer as well because — you know, I have to give credit to John Kerry in terms of the fact that he’s been out front making the connection between the civil war in Syria and climate change, that before the outbreak of civil war, Syria experienced the worst drought in its history and that led to an internal migration of between 1.5 and 2 million people, and when you have that kind of massive internal migration, it exacerbates tension in an already tense place.

In addition to that, beforehand you had the invasion of Iraq, which also had a little something to do with climate change in the sense that it was a war that had maybe a little something to do with oil [laughter], which is one of the substances causing climate change.

You also have the military burning these vast amounts of fossil fuels and yet saying global warming is a danger. But speaking of John Kerry, that brings up [the UN climate summit in] Paris. That was a month and a half ago now. Kerry described it as a victory for the planet. Michael T. Klare had said that Paris should be considered not just a climate summit but a peace conference, perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history. What do you think?

Michael said that before the summit, making the argument that if we don’t do what’s necessary in the face of the climate crisis, if we don’t radically bring down emissions and get to 100 percent renewable energy — which we can do very, very rapidly — if we don’t do that, then we’re going to be facing a world of conflict.

That became particularly relevant because two weeks ahead of the summit were those horrific terrorist attacks in Paris and then the world conversation really shifted, you know, almost as dramatically as after 9/11, where it was just like, okay, we were talking about climate change. That conversation is pretty much over and now we’re going to be talking about security all the time.

I was in Paris for three weeks in this period and it was pretty striking that the summit, even though it was in Paris, even though there were I believe 40,000 people who came to Paris for the summit, it barely made the front page of  Le Monde and Libération except for a couple of days, because the focus was so fervently on security issues.

So, you know, we need to make the connections, and it’s not — to me it’s not about saying this is more important than security, because that’s not a conversation you can win. I mean if people feel immediately threatened, that is going to trump climate change. It’s about showing the connections and saying these are not separate issues. We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.

So in terms of what to make of Paris, the truth is, I think that the deal that those politicians managed to negotiate, there was all this euphoria. I’ve never seen leaders congratulate themselves so fervently. [laughter] It was truly unseemly. “We are awesome!” Yeah. [laughter]

And I have to say that the reporting was far too deferential, far too credulous. There were headlines like, you know, this agreement marks the end of the fossil fuel era. And then a couple weeks ago there was a piece interviewing executives from all the major oil companies about whether they felt that the Paris agreement was going to impact their business model and all of them [who] agreed to talk said not at all. And Exxon said, “We don’t expect it to impact any of our assets” and specifically said, “We don’t believe this will lead to a single stranded asset.” And now, since we know that the fossil fuel companies have five times more carbon in their proven reserves than is compatible with a two-degree temperature target — and what’s in the agreement is that we should actually try to keep it to 1.5 degrees warming Celsius — if they’re saying it’s not going to impact their assets, what they’re saying is, “Look, this is a nonbinding, non-legally binding, non-enforceable agreement and we’re going to continue with business as usual as long as we can.”

That said, the fact is that there is a very ambitious target in the agreement, [but] no policies to make it a reality, okay? So the agreement says that we pledge to keep temperatures below two degrees and we’ll endeavor to keep them below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Now, we have already increased temperatures to one degree Celsius, okay? So we’re already in the dangerous era of climate change.

But we can’t stop now. It’s just the nature of it. You know, we’ve already locked in impacts. So 1.5 is an extremely ambitious target. We would need to be cutting our emissions by at least 10 percent a year or more in wealthy countries if we were going to take that target seriously. If you add up all the targets that governments brought to Paris — because the way it was structured is, we have a goal, but because we don’t believe in regulation or anything top down — and this is where the ideology comes in — everybody can just go home and voluntarily say what they’re going to do and then we’ll add it all up and hope it works out. And it turns out, no, it doesn’t work out. It adds up to three to four degrees of warming.

Did you feel that the fact that after the terror attacks there was a clamping down on people being able to demonstrate and protest outside the conference, did that have an effect, do you think, on the meetings?

I do think it had an effect, yeah, I do. There was a blanket ban on demonstrations during the summit. The way the government defined it under the state of emergency was “any gathering of more than three people of a political nature was banned.” And this was quite extraordinary. I pointed out that even George Bush and Dick Cheney didn’t ban protests after 9/11. There was not a blanket ban across the board. And that was what the Hollande government did. And it was a very, very fraught situation for France because regional elections happened during the summit and the Front National, which is the sort of fascist party in France, was gaining in the polls and so the summit became this tool for the Hollande government that was supposed to be a fantastic public relations moment for them and they were bound and determined to get that happy picture at the end where everyone’s cheering and going, “You’re awesome.” And they got it. And I do think that if demonstrations had been permitted, there would have been a different kind of debate, in particular around an issue like agriculture.

Because one of the things that was really striking about the summit is that it was the most corporate sponsored UN climate summit that any of us had ever seen. There had been encroaching corporate sponsorship at previous ones but in France you got the nuclear industry, you got the private water industry, which is very, very strong in France, and these huge agribusiness companies that sponsored the summit. And so they were marketing their product as climate solutions, whether it was so-called drought-resistant GMO seeds, or they call it climate-smart agriculture, which is the new way they’re marketing GMOs, or companies like [GDF Suez], water companies seeing water scarcity as a market opportunity for obvious reasons or the huge nuclear power companies marketing nuclear power as a better alternative to renewables.

So they all had a big megaphone inside the summit because they had access, they were sponsoring, they had a whole forum to themselves. We knew that was going to happen but the streets were supposed to be ours. The streets were the social movements, this was where we were going to be presenting our alternatives. And then we were just told, “No. You have to stay — you’re not allowed on the streets. So you can still have your little alternative summit in the middle of nowhere in the suburbs that nobody’s going to go to.” And that’s the way it played out. So I don’t know that it would have changed the agreement, but I think it would have changed people’s understanding of what happened. I think there would have been a million people in the streets of Paris without that ban.

That’s what they were projecting.

And even within the conference center itself, a lot of countries never got to speak.

Oh, it was so tightly controlled.

Because I think that they realized that they didn’t need a consensus, they just needed a majority to get it through.

And it was ugly. There was a moment where it was almost like a test of “will you stand with France? Are you really going to screw France in their moment of need?” It was just ugly. And you’re talking about countries that are fighting for their own survival. They’ve got a lot of skin in this game. So it was a very, very tightly controlled summit. The good thing is that it played out over two weeks — I mean, these are long events — and it was kind of amazing to watch the city get its courage back, because at the beginning of the summit people were really scared and really tentative about being in the streets and really not sure about whether they were being disloyal. But by the end people were ready to take their city back, they were ready to take their streets back, they were ready to defend liberty. This thing in France about liberté, that this is what’s under attack. And the way that we’re going to defend ourselves is that we’re all going to stay home? Or go shopping? As if any of this sounds familiar? [laughter]

But it was particularly striking because it was Christmas shopping season so everything’s lit up and everybody’s shopping. You’re allowed to shop and you’re encouraged to shop and all the Christmas markets are on and all the football matches are on, you just can’t protest. And so at a certain point the Parisians just said, “Screw it, we’re doing it.” And so in the end people did take to the streets again and I felt really lucky to be part of that process of people getting their courage back. And I think it was very important.

We have less than a year now, as of today, of Barack Obama’s administration. What is your assessment of him as an environmental president?

Well, you know, he certainly, in the final year and change in office, he is showing us what leadership looks like. And to me it’s all the more frustrating, in a way, that he didn’t do much more of this starting immediately. What he has done in the last few years shows that there was actually quite a lot of executive power, which people were saying from the beginning. You know, as soon as it was clear, in Copenhagen in 2009, that the Senate was blocking Obama from introducing meaningful climate legislation, the push was for him to use executive authority, use the EPA, use the tool of federal leases, and there was just a refusal to do it. And now we’re seeing it in the final years, but it’s very vulnerable. You know, it’s vulnerable to a next administration. And I’m not just talking about Trump. I’m talking about Hillary Clinton, because [initially] Hillary Clinton was, when it came to the Keystone fight, ready to rubber stamp that pipeline from day one.

So I think he’s doing what needs to be done to be able to say that he’s got a good legacy. But it’s not enough. I always remember the moment after the cap and trade bill fell, after it collapsed, Bill McKibben wrote an article to the environmental movement going, “Look, we tried it your way. We tried the polite lobbying, closed door, not making a fuss, you know, give the guy a chance, let’s compromise route, and it delivered less than nothing. So now we’re going to try something else.

We’re going to try street pressure, outside pressure, civil disobedience. We’re going to try being a royal pain in the neck and see if that gets results.”
I think we waited too long and lost some precious time. Because the thing about climate change is, you know, you hear the clock ticking so loudly, right?

There was a video you did for The Guardian last spring in which you said that sometimes capitalism gives us a gift, and that with the decline in global oil prices, the moment was rife for kicking the fossil fuel industry while it’s down. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Oil has gone from $150 dollars a barrel to below $30 dollars a barrel in a period of 18 months. I mean this is incredible. Nobody predicted this. And, you know, it’s potentially a game changer. But it’s complicated, right? I mean it isn’t just, okay, well, this is going to be good for climate action, because when oil is cheap it encourages people to use oil. It encourages people to buy bigger cars, it encourages people to treat this commodity as if it is cheap, because it is cheap, and not think about the impacts. So we actually need oil to be more expensive. And that’s why this would be an excellent time to introduce a carbon tax.

But this comes back to the sort of central argument I’m trying to put out there, that we are not going to do the things that we need to do unless we engage in a battle of ideas. I don’t know, has anybody read or started reading Jane Mayer’s new book about the Koch brothers, Dark Money? I mean it’s an extraordinary book because it reminds us that we have been living, over the past 40 years, a very planned and concerted campaign to change the ideas that govern our societies. The Koch brothers set out to change the values, to change the core ideas that people believed in.

And there is no progressive equivalent of taking ideas seriously. So we’ve got lots of funding for campaigns for people working on all kinds of different areas but a metanarrative, like the Charles Koch metanarrative — and he’s said it explicitly — is that he is challenging collectivism, he is challenging the idea that when people get together they can do good. And he is putting forward the worldview that we’re all very familiar with that if you free the individual to pursue their self-interest that will actually benefit the majority. So you need to attack everything that is collective, whether it’s labor rights or whether it’s public health care or whether it’s regulatory action. All of this falls under the metanarrative of an attack on collectivism.

So what is the progressive metanarrative? Who funds it? Who is working on changing ideas that can say, “Actually, when we pool our resources, when we work together, we can do more and better than when we only act as individuals.” I don’t think we value that. So here we are in this moment when of course we should be introducing a carbon tax but it’s like almost unthinkable that we could. I mean, tax, we can’t say tax, everyone hates taxes, right?

So we can’t avoid those battles of ideas. We can’t avoid those big discussions about what our values are. Because if we don’t engage in them then we aren’t going to be able to introduce these very simple policy solutions. So yes, okay, the argument I made about the oil price shock is this creates the conditions where we could really change the game but we’re not going to be able to do it if we’re not willing to talk about an aggressive carbon tax. But to me, I think the Koch brothers are so interesting in the sense that it really does show us how much ideological ground we’ve lost. They never take their eye off it.

Charles Koch was asked recently whether he feels he has had enough influence. And his answer was revealing, he said, “Well, they haven’t nationalized us.” That’s his concern. So then you think about it, we would never, it would be so unthinkable to just talk about, well, why don’t we nationalize Koch Industries? That’s a crazy thing to say, but he’s thinking about it.

He’s also worrying about, “If I spend $900 million dollars on this election, by God, I want to get something back for my money.” And it’s frightening what he expects to get. But he’s disappointed in all the candidates, he said in that same interview.

Yes, he’s disappointed but he knows it could be worse. It’s amazing how much money they need to spend. Another way of thinking about it is it’s extraordinary how much money they have to spend and they don’t always win. That’s amazing.

And I do think it’s going to get harder for fossil fuel companies. It really is going to get scary. And they’re terrified of the Exxon investigations because if Exxon has been systematically misleading the public, if they knew, all of this is going to be coming out, then this raises huge questions about the legitimacy of their profits. And Exxon is the most profitable company in the history of the world, $42 billion dollars in profits in a single year. And here we are unable to pay for public transit, unable to pay for the kinds of infrastructure that we need to deal with the crisis that they have created.

This is a conversation that they’re going to really try to have not happen. And I know there are people here who are working on a carbon tax. And it’s great but often you’ll hear people say, “Well, it has to be revenue-neutral. It has to be fee and dividend. Don’t call it a tax.” Because we accept the Koch framework as a premise that if we’re going to take money from people we have to give it all back, all of it. That’s what fee and dividend means, it means we will tax you and we’ll give you the exact same amount back that you gave us. That leaves the government with nothing. So what are you going to use to pay for transit? What are you going to use to pay for a renewable energy grid? How are you going to get to 100 percent renewables? We have to talk about the fact that we need more money. It has come from somewhere. So I think it is really worth studying how the center was moved in that way.

The famous Overton window, moving us rightward. And the degree, just going back to what you were saying about the degree of denial, it’s just so flabbergasting and I was hoping you would tell the story that you tell about covering the annual meeting of the Heartland Institute and what happened with Oklahoma’s US Senator Jim Inhofe, which is such a great story.

So the Heartland Institute, which is a free market think tank that hosts this annual climate change denial summit, their influence is waning. They’re very interesting, because I think that somehow they managed to market themselves as somehow having some scientific credibility, but they’re not. They are a free market think tank and when we interviewed Joseph Bast, the head of the Heartland Institute, I asked him how he got interested in climate change and he said, very frankly, “Well, we realized that if the science was true that would allow liberals to justify pretty much any kind of regulation, so we took another look at the science.” [laughter] He’s very frank about this.

And in the book the name of the chapter is “The Right is Right” because they’re not right about the science but I believe that they understand the implications of the science better than most liberals in the sense that they absolutely understand that if climate change is real, it is the end of their ideological project. The entire scaffolding on which their attack on regulations, attacks on collective action rests falls apart. Because of course you need collective action, of course you need to regulate corporations, it’s over, it’s game over for them. So they have to do everything possible to deny the science. And what’s amazing to me is how many liberal think tanks devote almost no energy to talking about climate change.

So the issue is how hard it is to change people’s minds when they’re as invested in these ideas ideologically but also funding-wise. Jim Inhofe gets a lot of money from the coal industry. So he was supposed to be the keynote speaker of this particular Heartland conference. It was advertised, people were extremely excited to hear from him. And Joe Bast announced in the morning that James Inhofe was sick and he was not going to be regaling them that morning. People were very disappointed. It came out later — we didn’t know this at the time — I looked into it after, what was wrong with Jim Inhofe because I wasn’t sure, was he really sick or did he just for some reason think it wasn’t a good idea to hang out with these crazies?

And it turns out he really was sick and he was sick because — and he explained this — he’d gone swimming in a lake in Oklahoma and it was in the middle of a heatwave and there was an outbreak of blue-green algae, which is linked to climate change. He basically had a climate change illness. [laughter] And this is why he could not speak at the climate denial conference.
But this did not make him go, “Oh, maybe they have a point.” He sent a letter just saying, “I can’t be there because I’m sick,” basically from his hospital bed going, “Keep up the good work.” [laughter]

So people sometimes ask me, “Well, how can I change the mind of my extremely right wing uncle who only listens to Fox News and so on?” And I tell them, “Honestly, I’m not sure that you should devote that much energy to trying to change his mind. You can if you want to but first, there’s a much larger group of people out there who are not that invested in protecting an extreme ideological worldview or protecting their own financial interests who actually probably believe that climate change is real but are scared, don’t know what they can do about it, are sort of in a state of soft denial, like most of us are in, like, ‘Oh, I can’t look at it, it’s just too awful.’ That’s a much better place for us to invest our energy than trying to convince James Inhofe, because if getting a climate change-related illness didn’t impact him in any way [laughter], I don’t think you just laying out the science is going to help.”

I want to change course a little bit — what brought you to this point? How did you become this articulate advocate of this cause? What changed you? When you say, this changes everything, what changed Naomi Klein?

I think my wake-up call was definitely [Hurricane] Katrina. And I was writing the book that I wrote before this, I was writing The Shock Doctrine. And I was in New Orleans during Katrina while it was still underwater and doing reporting. I was there when all the lobbyists were descending on Baton Rouge with their wish lists: Close down public housing. Privatize the school system. And New Orleans, it was just such a horrifying thing to witness firsthand. To me, it’s one of those events that actually becomes more shocking with time. With some things you kind of get used to them, but I think actually what happened in New Orleans, it was so shocking that we couldn’t actually believe it or metabolize it, in particular the fact that African-American residents were given one-way tickets out of their city, forcibly relocated, at gunpoint, people were loaded onto buses. And there was no plan to bring them back. And while they were gone, their homes were bulldozed. I mean this is, to me, the more I think about it, the more shocking it becomes and there was so much happening in that moment that I actually think that we could not fully understand that this was — local residents were calling it genocide and I think they had every right to call it that.

I’ve been pretty apocalyptic up until now, but This Changes Everything is actually an argument for our best chance to build a better society. The flipside of the fact that the right understands — that if the science is true it means their ideological project collapses — is that if the science is true, and it is, it’s an opportunity to put forward another vision for how we want our society to function. We have to do it. There is going to be some kind of adaptation and transition in the face of climate change. There will have to be new infrastructure, there will have to be new jobs. What kind of jobs do we want them to be? Right now in California, 4,000 of the state’s 10,000 firefighters are prison inmates being paid $1 an hour to put their lives at risk fighting fires. That’s what this economic system does in the face of climate change. We could be fighting for them to be living-wage jobs. We could say the people who got the worst deal under the extractive energy model should be first in line to have energy democracy, to own and control their own renewable energy to create jobs and keep skills in communities.

We have examples of this working. Germany has created 400,000 jobs in their energy transition. And so much of it is decentralized and community-owned, 900 new energy cooperatives in Germany. So we can do this in a way that heals wounds dating back to our country’s founding. This can be a process of healing and reconstruction. I think it can be incredibly inspiring. I forget what the question was. [laughter]

I was actually asking how you arrived at this point in your life.

So I arrived at it because The Shock Doctrine is about how our current system deals with crises, deals with shocks. And when I started that book, I was talking about wars. I went to Iraq after the invasion and reported for Harper’s about how the Bush administration was treating Iraq as their sort of playground to introduce extreme pro-corporate policies, like a 15 percent flat tax and to privatize all of Iraq’s industries and to get rid of the labor code and all of that. And I was looking at the history of how economic crises were used to push through extreme privatization policies and we see it happening in southern Europe right now, in Greece and Spain and Portugal.

And then, as I was writing The Shock Doctrine, I started to see it happening after natural disasters. So the first reporting I did was after the Asian tsunami. This was a devastating natural disaster, not linked to climate change, but that tsunami cleared beaches in Thailand and Sri Lanka, in India. And in country after country what we saw was developers using that as an opportunity to push new land laws that allowed resorts to take land from farmers and small fishing boats. Sri Lanka introduced a water privatization bill two days after the tsunami. So my mind started to focus on natural disasters, then Katrina happened. So this is how we got to it. So for me Katrina was like, “Am I seeing the future?”

What I felt when I was in New Orleans was this was science fiction but now. The future’s already here, this science fiction future that we’re so afraid of is already here in most parts of the world. So even though I see an opportunity for the shock of climate change to be a positive transformational moment, and I see that also because when I was researching The Shock Doctrine, I also researched how shocks like the market crash of 1929 became progressive moments and moments to expand democracy and expand participation and the inverse of the shock doctrine.

I believe that climate change could be that if we seized it. But what motivates me is not airy-fairy, la-la, like this is going to be so great, what motivates me is New Orleans. What motivates me is Katrina.

What motivates me is that if progressives do not enter this space with a vision of how we respond to crisis that brings us together rather than apart, we are looking at a future of Katrinas because there will be more and more climate shocks intersecting with weak and neglected public infrastructure.

When the successful campaign of the Koch brothers and their ilk, which has systematically defunded the public sphere, intersects with more and more shocks to the system, which climate change generates and also which capitalism just generates on its own through market shocks, like the 2008 financial crisis, what will happen under our current system is that rather than course correct, each shock becomes an opportunity for more and more privatization, which is what happened in New Orleans, more attacks on the public sphere.

So rather than learning the lesson of Katrina, which is if you neglect the public sphere, when shock comes, you will [be] completely unprepared. FEMA can’t find New Orleans for five days. People are abandoned on their rooftops and in the Superdome. The system, the state, is totally nonfunctional, [and] what’s the answer? Privatize the school system, shut down public housing and create this kind of corporate utopia.

And so the problem with climate change is it’s going to keep delivering more and more of these shocks, not just weather shocks, but budget shocks. You think about the price tag attached to an event like Sandy, many billions of dollars. And so it’s going to create bankruptcies. And so what happens?

Look at Flint, Michigan, look at what’s happening across Michigan where cities are handing over power because they’ve gone bankrupt to private managers and then you have water crises and layering on top of that it’s not just inequality, it’s racism and fear, security fears. People become more fearful of each other. That’s the other thing we saw in New Orleans. There was this sort of vigilante violence.

So climate change is an accelerant. We often talk about how when you interview a climate scientist like Michael Mann or James Hansen and you say, “Well, did climate change cause this storm?” They won’t say that. “No, it didn’t cause it, but it loaded the dice. So we were going to have the storm anyway but because of climate change you’ve got this super storm.” So what I would say is climate change does that but not just with the weather. If you’ve got a racist society, if you’ve got a problem of racism in your society and then you add climate change to it, then it goes crazy. If you’ve got a problem with inequality and then you add climate change to it, then it becomes sci-fi. So what brings me to this is that I’m not just worried about things getting hotter, and this is what I think that I wish more environmentalists would wrap their heads around: This is not just about things getting hotter and wetter, it’s about things getting meaner. And that’s why we have to talk about values and who we want to be in the face of this crisis.

If you have a culture that treats people like they’re disposable, that doesn’t value people, then, when you confront a crisis like climate change, those values will govern how you confront that crisis. And making a connection between the refugee crisis where the statistic was that 15 children died just this past week off of Greece, I think more than 45 people drowned. So if we live in a culture that allows people to disappear beneath the waves because we don’t value their lives enough, then it’s not that big a step to allow whole countries to disappear beneath the waves, which is what we are doing when we allow temperatures to increase by three degrees, four degrees.

I want to take some of these questions submitted by our audience: ““Of the candidates running for president, who do you believe will most effectively and aggressively move the issue of climate change?”

I think of the candidates Bernie Sanders has by far the best track record, so leaving aside the Republicans, it’s recognized by all the candidates that they’re sort of competing with one another over who’s more opposed to Keystone, who’s more opposed to Arctic drilling, who’s going to prosecute Exxon more and so on. So if we’re just looking at what people are saying, they’re actually pretty close together. Hillary’s climate policies are pretty good. Bernie’s are better.

But if we’re looking at track record, Bernie was standing with us on Keystone from the very beginning and Hillary was on the wrong side of Keystone in the beginning. So obviously I would trust him more, also because of where his money is coming from. And I think her ties to the oil and gas industry and the banks that fund them are really, really troubling. And frankly, I generally stay out of electoral politics and candidate endorsements and so on. And I haven’t endorsed a candidate.

But I must say that it’s pretty darn exciting that Bernie and his operation have advanced as much as they have and have proven the critics wrong again and again. And this is a pretty interesting moment where a candidate as radical, if that’s what you want to call him, and plainspoken and certainly as independent as Bernie, could have as much momentum as he has. And I don’t agree with him on several foreign policy issues. And I don’t think he’s a perfect candidate. If I dreamed up who I would like to see, it probably wouldn’t be Bernie. But he’s doing it, so at a certain point you just have to say, “Wow, they’re pulling it off.”

Who’s not running that you would like to see run, Elizabeth Warren or someone like that?

Yes, I would have liked to have seen Elizabeth Warren run. I would have liked to see somebody who looked a little bit like the changing face of America. But that said, this is the person who is saying what needs to be said and who is building a movement that is gaining ground that people said could not be gained. So I had to ask myself, “Okay, well, why aren’t I publicly supporting Bernie?” These next five years are so critical when it comes to climate change. And even looking at what is going to happen based on what we find out in these Exxon investigations, who would we trust to make the most of that? To me it’s absolutely no question. I can’t think of anybody better than Bernie on that front — unless Bill McKibben himself decided to run.

“What is the most viable and efficient source of renewable energy?”

I think the sort of wonderful thing about renewable energy is that it isn’t one-size-fits-all. It really requires you to think about where you live and where you are in nature. And this is why I think when we think about shifting our energy from fossil fuels to renewables, it isn’t just sort of flipping a switch. It really is a paradigm shift because what fossil fuels sold was the illusion that it doesn’t matter where you live, the illusion of separateness from nature and dominance.

This was some of the most interesting research for me when I was writing the book was going back and reading the marketing material for the early steam engines. The way that the Watt steam engine marketed itself to British industrialists and the owners of fleets of ships was, “For the first time, you are the boss. You can sail your ships even when there’s no wind. You can build your factory wherever you want. You don’t have to be next to rushing water.” It’s very specific, right? Because before that you had to build your factories where there was hydropower. So that’s the wonderful thing about renewables, you actually have to think about where you live again. Maybe solar makes sense where you are, wind makes sense. It is not going to be the same everywhere or one will offset the other. I find decentralized renewables, whether it’s wind or solar or small scale hydro, to be most exciting because it decentralizes economic power at the same time that it decentralizes power. So because we face multiple crises, we have a crisis of concentrated wealth and concentrated power, why wouldn’t we seize the opportunity as we transition from fossil fuels to decentralized economic power as much as we can.

“Is it biologically possible to reverse climate change with seven billion people on the planet not just burning fossil fuels but eating, drinking, pooping, etcetera?”

So we’re not talking about reversing climate change. We’re talking about preventing catastrophic climate change, which is the road we’re on. At the same time as we can do everything possible to get to 100 percent renewable energy. It does mean reducing demand. But the issue around energy demand is much more about the consumption habits of a small minority of the world’s population than it is about numbers of people on Earth. It is a relatively small percentage of people on this planet who are responsible for the vast majority of emissions. Thomas Piketty has done a really interesting breakdown of the connection around wealth and emissions, showing that we really are talking about 10 percent of the world’s population being responsible for the vast majority of emissions.

So when we change the subject to population, which is what I think this is pointing to, my concern is that it’s not that population isn’t an issue. But I think that it changes the conversation away from the consumption habits of the wealthy to the procreation habits of the poor, which is convenient for us.

But the truth is that where population is growing fastest are in parts of the world that are the poorest and have the lowest emissions, like sub-Saharan Africa. So there are certainly issues around how we consume but I don’t think that population is the overriding issue. I think it’s our consumption habits.

Along similar lines, “Shifting to sustainable organic agriculture is now being touted as a way to capture most of the excess CO2. Is this a real contender for dealing with climate change and why wasn’t it part of the Paris conference?”

Carbon offsetting and not organic agriculture, which is what this question is about, but other ways of using plants to capture CO2, are part of the Paris climate accord in ways that are worrying because one of the things that’s most striking about the Paris climate accord is that the word oil is not mentioned once, neither is coal. They talk about getting to zero net emissions, which is code for “you can emit as long as you plant lots of trees to absorb those emissions.” So there’s a lot of worries around how that will be done, not through organic agriculture but through tree farms and land grabs and the record of those kinds of projects is particularly bad for indigenous people, tends not to be done very equitably at all and is usually just an excuse for us to continue to pollute on the idea that if we plant trees somewhere else it will fix it for us.

But absolutely changing the way our agriculture system works, embracing agro-ecological methods that don’t use fossil fuel inputs and that sequester carbon in the soil is a huge part of the solution. And so is tree planting, by the way. Not to offset our emissions but actually to draw down carbon in the atmosphere that is already there because we are already at 400 parts per million. I’m on the board of 350 because we need to actually get down to 350. But this is a slow process and the best way is to do that, not tree farming but reforestation, sustainable reforestation and also agro-ecological farming.

“How do we activists engage and mobilize people whose lives are too busy, too consumer-oriented, too focused on improving opportunities and fortune for their children to consider climate change the number one political and economic issue that it is?”

It’s a great question and I think that the first way I’ll respond is how we don’t do it. We don’t do it by going, “My issue is more important than your issue. You may be worried about whatever your issue is, you’re worried about feeding your kids, you’re worried about education, but none of that’s going to matter if the world cooks, so you all should care about climate change.” That’s the way to really piss people off. [laughter]

I think that the way you do it is by coming together as a community — it’s something I think that can really only happen locally — and dream together. What would a response to climate change be that addressed the issues that are most important to people? I mean, of course, people are more focused on their kids’ futures and their immediate economic concerns and people are under enormous economic stress right now. And it’s not about saying, “Well, don’t worry about fighting for $15 dollars an hour, you should care about climate change.” It’s about saying, “We can create millions of living-wage jobs in public transit and in renewable energy, in reimaging our cities, we can improve our services, if we take this crisis seriously, if we engage in this battle of ideas.”

So I think politics is always about meeting people where they’re at and I think we have made some real errors in the environmental movement by engaging in this “My issue is bigger than your issue, what does it matter if everything burns?” That really alienates people because so many people in this country are engaged in legitimately very, very urgent issues, whether they’re fighting police violence, criminalization or for jobs that allow them to have a life and support their kids, or health care.

So it’s really about connecting the dots and laying out this vision. And it is an expansive vision and I think we need not to be afraid of that. I think there’s really two camps out there. There’s this sort of scarcity worldview where there’s a finite amount of political energy and we have to get people to care about climate change and not these other issues because our issue is so important. And there’s even a sense among some that maybe climate change is more winnable than some of those other issues. Poverty has always been with us but everybody’s affected by climate change, so we need to focus on climate change instead of that.

And then there’s the climate justice movement. And the climate justice movement is really about marrying the fights for economic and racial and gender justice with the imperative to get off fossil fuels. And I think that’s a much more winning strategy. It’s more complicated in terms of how you build those coalitions. It’s really, really hard to get in rooms with people you don’t usually work with and try to find common ground. But I think that it’s our only chance of winning. And I say this because when you think about the math of fossil fuel divestment, the fact that these fossil fuel companies have five times more carbon in their reserves that is compatible with what our politicians say we need to do, they’re fighting for their survival. That’s why they fight so hard. That’s why they pour so much money into opposition groups and it’s not a coincidence that the Koch brothers made their money in fossil fuels, they have so much to lose if we take this crisis seriously.

And I think that the climate movement has always been hurt by this perception that this is a luxury issue, that this is the issue for people who don’t have more urgent economic issues to worry about.

And it’s that kind of idea that this is kind of a bourgeois concern. And so I think that when climate action is married with those urgent needs for jobs and better services and a better quality of life for people, that’s when people will fight to win. That’s when people will fight because they’re fighting for their lives. And they’re fighting not just for the future, they’re fighting for their present. And I think that’s the kind of movement we haven’t had yet. We haven’t seen what that looks like yet.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America-East, was senior writer for Moyers & Company and Bill Moyers’ Journal and is senior writer of BillMoyers.com.

How elites contained the climate justice movement

Written by Herbert Docena and first published at Transnational Institute

Corporate executives and climate skeptics that mobilise against strong international climate change agreements have rightly been the focus of attention of many people concerned about the climate crisis. But another group of elites—those who actually believe in climate change —may paradoxically have done more to block effective solutions to the crisis.

“The object is to change the heart and soul.” – Margaret Thatcher

On the final day of the UN summit held in Paris in December 2015, thousands of people defied a ban on public gatherings by converging at a boulevard leading to the business district in La Défense to denounce the new climate agreement that government negotiators were about to sign and celebrate at the conference venue in Le Bourget, 20 kilometres away. Hoping to counter governments’ attempts to control the narrative regarding the summit, they gathered behind giant inflatable ‘cobblestones’ and a red banner proclaiming “System change not climate change!”

Departing from some other environmentalist groups, they held placards criticising the undemocratic ways in which decisions regarding our relationship to nature are ultimately made only by capitalists and other powerful groups in the current global capitalist system.

In different ways, they put forward a more democratic alternative: a system in which ‘the people’ decide on important questions such as what sources of energy to use and what activities to power and for whose benefit, how many trees to fell and to produce what goods for whom or, more generally, how to organise our relationship to nature and in pursuit of what ends.

Broad and as defiant as the action turned out to be, however, it was still not as large or as confrontational as some of the organisers had hoped. Unable to rally more people behind them, the radical anti-capitalists had little choice but to abandon their original plan to barricade Le Bourget and also ruled out marching on La Défense. In the end, the protesters could only gather, lobbing their ‘cobblestones’ in the air, aimed at no targets. Meanwhile, the popping of champagne corks in Le Bourget or La Défense went undisturbed.

Why, as this particular but not uncommon episode indicates, are activists struggling for a more democratic system unable to attract more people to their side? Or why, despite the intensifying ecological crisis caused by capitalism, is the movement for radical system change still confined to the margins?

Part of the answer surely has to do with how the world’s elites have increasingly resorted to more coercive measures to keep people off the streets or prevent them from conceiving or expressing anti-systemic demands. But – as shown by the large number of people who refused to be cowed by the threat of force or to buy into the governments’ discourse in Paris and beyond – it is not merely the presence or absence of physical or ideological repression that determine people’s willingness to take on the powerful.

Indeed, it pushes us to ask why more people are not willing to defy repression to fight for a democratic system.

This essay seeks to contribute to understanding the causes of the movement’s weakness by drawing attention to another, typically overlooked, way by which the dominant seek to contain challenges to their undemocratic rule other than by trying to repress people’s bodies in order to dissuade or restrain them from overthrowing the system: that of trying to mould people’s very subjectivities – how they see their identities, how they make sense of their life situations, what they aspire to, whom they consider their ‘friends’ or their ‘enemies’ – in order to persuade people to actively defend the system.

I argue that part of the reason why activists struggling for a democratic alternative to capitalism find it difficult to draw more people to their cause is because a section of the world’s dominant classes have been waging what we can think of, extending Gramsci, as a kind of global “passive revolution”: an attempt to re-construct or secure (global) hegemony by attempting to fundamentally reform global capitalism in order to partially grant the demands of subordinate groups.

I show how, by purportedly trying to ‘change the system’, a particular section of the world’s elites have achieved some success in countering radicals’ attempts to reshape people’s subjectivities, thus preventing them from fighting for a radically democratic system.

A resurgent global counter-hegemonic movement

To better understand how world elites seek to contain counter-hegemonic challenges to their rule, it is useful to go back to the late 1960s when new radical movements, including those mobilising around ecological issues, burst onto the world stage as part of a broader resurgence of radicalism. Even before then, a growing number of people in industrialised countries and also in the ‘Third World’ had been increasingly concerned about their deteriorating living conditions as a result of the ecological degradation that came with capitalism’s renewed post-war global expansion.

Before the 1960s, many people still typically thought of these ecological problems and the impacts these had on their lives to be the result of others’ ‘bad personal habits’, ‘unscientific management’ of resources, or insufficient regulation of ‘big business’. They therefore generally thought that these problems could be solved and their suffering ended by the inculcation of better personal habits, more ‘scientific management’ of resources,’ or greater checks on big business.

Consequently, few directed their anger at the world’s dominant classes in response to ecological degradation. While there would be a growing number of protests as people ‘spontaneously’ defended themselves against direct attacks on their wellbeing, they did not amount to the kind of organised and sustained resistance that threatened the ruling classes in earlier revolutionary upheavals in various countries.1

Starting in the 1960s, however, various intellectuals began to advance a different way of making sense of, and responding to, ecological problems. Herbert Marcuse, Barry Commoner, Murray Bookchin, or Chico Mendes, along with other scientists, journalists, writers, and organisers, began drawing not only from Marx but also from Morris, Kropotkin, Weber, and other critical thinkers to popularise new ways of looking at the world that challenged not just the dominant worldviews but even those propagated by so-called ‘Old Left’ activists. Calling on ‘the people’ as members of exploited classes and other dominated groups whose interests were antagonistic to those of the world’s elites, they argued that deteriorating living conditions were not just  because of bad habits, poor management, or the insufficient regulation of big business by governments, but because of the historically-specific property relations under capitalism.

They revealed how capitalism drives capitalists, or those who own land, factories, power plants and other “means of production” and who therefore monopolise social decisions over production, to constantly intensify their exploitation of both workers and nature so as to maximise profits. To overcome their suffering, they argued that reforms such as regulating big business – while not necessarily wrong – would not suffice; they needed to challenge nothing less than capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other forms of domination.

Though they did not necessarily agree on how to go about it, they urged them to end what Marx once called the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, or the system of rule in which only those who own the means of production ultimately make production decisions. This would involve fighting for the abolition of private property relations and building a society in which everyone collectively and democratically own the means of production and therefore have a say in making decisions about how to organise production.

Only then, they argued, would it be possible to prioritise people’s welfare and the planet’s well-being over the need to constantly maximise profits. Through their myriad efforts to propagate these new ways of making sense of and acting upon ‘ecological’ problems, these radical intellectuals began to reshape people’s subjectivities by providing alternative ways of looking at the world, of understanding their identities, of diagnosing and overcoming their suffering.

As indicated by the growing membership and supporters of radical anti-capitalist ‘environmental’ organisations or movements that were concerned with ‘environmental’ questions, ever more people would begin to see themselves and the environmental problems they suffered in a new light.2 Many started to think of themselves as members of oppressed and exploited classes and also began to connect ‘environmental problems’ and their social impacts to capitalist, patriarchal, colonial, racial or other forms of domination.

As one activist who came of age during this period put it: “a complete disaffection with ‘the system’… resonated deeply between East and West, North and South”.3 Protesters moved beyond critiques of particular aspects of capitalism and “challenged the very essence of capitalism”, according to the environmental historian, John McCormick. Many began to aspire to a post-capitalist, if not socialist, society. And they recognised the need to confront and overthrow the ruling classes and other dominant groups determined to perpetuate capitalism. “Whatever the cause”, notes McCormick, “by 1970, there had been a revolution in environmental attitudes”.4

With these changed subjectivities, people connected the struggle around ‘environmental’ problems to broader struggles for social justice and equality and channelled their anger about ecological degradation away from fighting other individuals or other subordinate groups towards the dominant classes, their allies in the state apparatus, and other influential groups. Struggles around pollution, nuclear power, pesticides, and so on would become central to a reinvigorated global radical anti-capitalist bloc and re-ignited something that world elites thought they had ended: a “global civil war”.5

Although they did not necessarily succeed in – or did not even attempt to – seize state power, their actions, the historian Eric Hobsbawm argued, were still revolutionary “in both the ancient utopian sense of seeking a permanent reversal of values, a new and perfect society, and in the operational sense of seeking to achieve it by action on streets and barricades”.6

Or, as geographer Michael Watts noted of the uprisings that swept the world in 1968, they were revolutionary not “because governments were, or might have been, overthrown but because a defining characteristic of revolution is that it abruptly calls into question existing society and presses people into action”.7

Critical of ‘existing society’ and pressed into action, a growing number of people began fighting for what later activists called ‘system change’ to address ecological problems.

Intra-elite struggles

This resurgence of radical environmentalism in particular and of radicalism in general troubled those intellectuals drawn from or aligned with the world’s dominant classes in the United States and other advanced industrialised countries. Barraged with unrelenting criticism – pickets, protests, boycotts, direct actions – and besieged by demands for stronger regulation and ‘system change,’ many US business leaders felt under attack.

One executive probably captured the mood when he said in jest: “At this rate business can soon expect support from the environmentalists. We can get them to put the corporation on the endangered species list”.8 Not since the Great Depression and the New Deal, notes political scientist David Vogel, did US capitalists feel so “politically vulnerable”.

Although the exact conditions varied, the situation was similar in other countries where radical movements emerged. Under siege, many dominant intellectuals and corporate elites struggled to understand what was going on, how to define their interests in the face of it, and how to react.
Many thought that the so-called ‘environmental problems’ were not ‘problems’ at all or that they could be solved through the normal workings of the market or through existing institutions.9 Insofar as they acknowledged the problem, many perceived only a threat to their company’s or their industry’s interests and sought to protect them by simply rejecting the grievances aired by subordinate groups, killing their proposals, and resorting to coercive measures to intimidate or discredit their proponents.10

But there were other intellectuals who pursued and advocated an altogether different response. Unlike most reactionary elites, these reformists were typically from patrician or bourgeois families in their respective countries. Others were from less privileged backgrounds but had assumed high government office or positions in ‘civil society’ organisations, most notably the philanthropic foundations. But unlike government officials, they were what Weber called the “notables”: those who lived for rather than off politics.11

Among those from such backgrounds who would play leading roles on climate-related issues would be people like Laurence and David Rockefeller, of the famous dynasty’s younger generation; Robert O. Anderson, owner of the oil giant Atlantic Richfield; McGeorge Bundy, the former dean of Harvard and National Security adviser and later president of the Ford Foundation; Robert McNamara, former CEO of Ford Motors, Defense Secretary, World Bank President, and Ford Foundation trustee.

In other countries across Europe, Latin America and Asia, they included those with very similar backgrounds to their US counterparts. Among them were the likes of Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Italian car company Fiat; Aurelio Peccei, former president of Olivetti and convenor of the Club of Rome; Alexander King, an influential British scientist; Maurice Strong, former president of a large Canadian oil company and later head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); Barbara Ward, a British economist and best-selling author, and adviser to numerous world leaders; Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau; Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India; Gamani Corea, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), from Sri Lanka; Mahbub ul-Haq, World Bank vice president from Pakistan; and numerous other ‘gentlemen lawyers’ and ‘learned cosmopolitans’.

Though they came from different countries, had their own specific interests, and pursued different and not always congruent projects, this loose network of elite intellectuals often pursued the same actions or took the same positions on particular issues. This was not because they were engaged in a ‘conspiracy’ but because their background meant that they generally thought about and acted upon global ecological issues through the lens of a common worldview.12

Unlike other elites, they were generally more open to the view that global warming and other ecological changes were indeed happening. Thus, for example, the oilman-turned-philanthropist who funded some of the key organisations that would push for action on climate change, Robert O. Anderson, called for a “steady mid-course between doom and gloom alarmists and those who resist acknowledging the clear danger to which the human environment is being subjected”.13

Similarly, the industrialists, executives, and scientists gathered in the Club of Rome would portray the environmental issue as nothing less than a “global crisis”.14 And, unlike other elites, they thought that the problem involved far larger threats than simply the diminution of specific firms’ prerogatives or countries’ economic competitiveness. They worried about pollution impairing their access to raw materials, intensifying international competition and prompting protectionism, and potentially even igniting inter-capitalist wars, such as World War I and World War II, that could once again fragment the global market and impede capitalist expansion.

But more than that, they also worried that environmental degradation would further fuel public dissatisfaction and anger and therefore encourage support for radicalism. Breaking with other elites, they effectively concluded that in order to defuse such a threat, at least some of the grievances and demands of subordinate groups needed to be addressed – something that could be done only by fundamentally reforming global capitalism. Bound by these common views, these “enlightened reactionaries” – to use Karl Polanyi’s label – set out to build a transnational reformist movement or “bloc from above”, bringing together otherwise isolated elites and drawing in members of other classes to push for their project of ‘changing the system.’ They did this despite more conservative elites who wanted no change at all, and of course, against the radicals who wanted a very different kind of system change.

Undertaking parallel, sometimes even clashing initiatives, they deployed their vast economic resources and social connections – straddling the worlds of business, politics and science – to build this movement’s capacity to engage in ideological and political struggle on the world stage.

Radical language, reformist ends

To attract support, they advocated a different way of making sense of, and, thus, of thinking, talking, and acting about ‘global environmental change’ that absorbed certain elements proposed by radicals while departing from them on the most fundamental questions. Like radicals, they sometimes called upon or “interpellated” members of subordinate groups as belonging to the ‘poor’ as opposed to the ‘rich’, and sometimes even borrowed from radicals in designating them as part of the ‘periphery’ as opposed to the ‘core’.

But they studiously avoided calling them members of exploited or dominated classes whose interests are in conflict with those of the exploiting or dominant classes; instead, they preferred to emphasise their identity as members of one “mankind” whose interests are not at odds with the interests of the world’s elites – all inhabitants of Only One Earth, as the title of Ward’s bestselling 1972 book for the first UN conference on the environment put it.

Echoing radicals, they told people that global ecological problems had less to do with ‘bad personal habits’ and more to do with the broader political and economic system. As the 1974 Cocoyoc Declaration, a follow-up to the 1972 Stockholm declaration written by Ward, ul-Haq, and others, put it: “[M]ankind’s predicament is rooted primarily in economic and social structures and behavior within and between countries”. But unlike radicals, they stressed that the problem was not the system as such but rather the lack of regulation and inadequate ‘scientific management’ of the system at the global level. Though they would disagree over what counts as “excessive”, all saw ecological problems as “evils which flow from excessive reliance on the market system”, in the words of the Cocoyoc Declaration.

So, like radicals, they explained to people that they could only alleviate their suffering by pushing for what radicals called ‘system change’. But against radicals, they told people that changing the system did not entail overthrowing capitalism, but rather enhancing the global regulation of capitalism through what the Club of Rome called “radical reform of institutions and political processes at all levels”. Countering both conservatives and radicals, they argued for the need neither to keep the system nor to junk it altogether but to improve it by reducing the “excessive reliance on the market” and by moving towards what the Cocoyoc Declaration calls the “management of resources and the environment on a global scale”.

The Club of Rome, for example, called for a “world resource management plan”15 while the Trilateral Commission advocated “international policy coordination” for managing the “global commons”16 in order to correct market failures, minimise inefficiencies, foster competition, and redistribute wealth in order to reduce poverty and mitigate ecological degradation. These proposals were what later scholars would call “international ecological managerialism”, or global “ecological modernization”.17

Put differently, they told people that they should aspire not to the creation of a post-capitalist society but to a greener, more regulated, capitalist society. For only by perpetuating reformed ‘green’ capitalism, pursuing more trade, more growth and ‘sustainable development’ could ‘mankind’ solve ecological problems, address social grievances, and realise the vision of the good life.

As the Founex Declaration put it: “development” – meaning capitalist development – is the “cure” for the environmental problems facing the poor. Consequently, against radicals who urge people to view the dominant classes as their oppressors and the targets of opposition, they urged the public to focus their anger only on particular members of the dominant group – i.e. ‘bad capitalists’ or those ‘bad elites’ (variously, the USA, the advanced economies, big business, the oil corporations, the Republicans, and so on).

At the same time, they called upon the public to join the moral, responsible elites as ‘partners’ in pushing for and bringing about ‘system change.’ Much of what succeeding reformists would say and prescribe from the 1970s through to the 2000s essentially built on these recurring discursive or ideological themes.

Building their movement’s capacity

Reformist intellectuals did not, however, stop at rallying people to their side and exhorting them to fight for their cause. Often in coordination, but also sometimes competing with each other, they mobilised to equip their supporters with cutting-edge knowledge on global environmental problems – and with ‘policy options’ for managing them – by funding or otherwise supporting hundreds if not thousands of universities and government or inter-governmental research departments and thinktanks.

Thus, for example, the Ford Foundation financed a whole battalion of academic centres, research departments and scientific networks such as the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the Brookings Institute, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Trilateral Commission “study groups”, and many other outfits.

The Volkswagen Foundation funded the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth study. McNamara transformed the World Bank into the world’s largest centre for research on the relationship between environment and development. As its first Executive Director, Maurice Strong established UNEP as one of the key initiators of large-scale collaborative research on the ozone hole, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Reformists in developing countries formed the South Centre, a think-tank that became a key source of analysis for government officials from the South.18

This is not to say that they merely funded research with which they would agree. Indeed, probably as a result of their own lack of knowledge, uncertainties, or internal tensions, they chose, or at least strove, to ‘diversify their portfolios’ by supporting different researchers approaching the problem from dissimilar perspectives, including those they would subsequently disagree with.

To improve their ability to advocate for the reforms they wanted, they also undertook various initiatives to identify and groom scores of highly educated middle-class professionals – lawyers, economists and scientists – who were supportive of their reformist vision, and devoted considerable  resources and energy towards promoting the ‘professionalisation’ of their activism.

Ford, Rockefeller, Anderson and others, for example, bankrolled the formation of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Natural Resources Defense Council (NDRC), and possibly thousands of other moderate or non-radical groups across the world.19

These ‘capacity-building’ efforts extended to a wide range of organisations, in part because of a deliberate strategy of taking risks and finding innovative people. Ford, even as it supported more moderate or even more conservative reformists, also funded ‘public interest’ organisations that were more critical of ‘big business’ and more inclined to raise questions of social justice.

Through such investments in generating knowledge and building movements, they assembled a loose, decentralised, transnational network of highly-trained reformists, occupying strategic positions in various governments, international organisations and civil society groups worldwide, which then pushed the world’s governments to adopt a raft of far-reaching environmental measures to address global environmental problems at the local and global levels.

Thus, for example, equipped with research confirming global warming and with studies assessing possible policy options, this global network of reformists mobilised to raise the alarm and push for unprecedented global regulatory interventions to address climate change. It was UNEP, for example, that encouraged scientists to speak up and to push for an internationally coordinated response.

Scientists and activists associated with EDF and other reformist groups organised a flurry of international conferences on the issue and pressed the world’s governments to commence negotiations on an agreement. And it was EDF and others that spearheaded the formation of the Climate Action Network (CAN), which would go on to be become the world’s largest network of NGOs calling for government “action” on climate change.20

Simply put, if it had not been for the independent but converging initiatives of these reformists – and the elites that supported them – the UN negotiations on climate change might never have happened. Although they did not necessarily agree on all the details, they did converge in pushing for a strong, legally-binding international climate agreements. They united behind demands for unprecedented internationally coordinated interventions in the global economy that could oblige certain countries and industries to drastically reduce their emissions and for establishing a kind of de facto global ‘welfare scheme’ that could compel some countries to transfer finance and technology to others.

A global battle for hearts and souls

Thanks to all these investments in political and ideological mobilisation, the reformist movement was able to go on the offensive from the 1970s onwards. Effectively backed by the threat of the more radical alternatives posed by the movements to their left, it succeeded in overcoming conservative resistance and incrementally put in place a range of ambitious and far-reaching environmental regulatory measures in many countries, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act approved in the USA in the 1970s.

At the international level, this reformist bloc secured agreements tackling global environmental problems such as the ozone hole, biodiversity loss, desertification, and climate change. These measures, as limited as they may have been, likely prevented even worse outcomes had reformists not pushed for them. In so doing, reformist elites did more than just deliver limited relief and material concessions to members of the dominated classes; they also countered radicals’ attempts to reshape their subjectivities and succeeded in dispelling their attempts to channel people’s anger and anxiety towards fighting for radical system change.

This is because, by appearing to change the system and channelling limited benefits or advantages to subordinate groups, they undermined radicals’ capacity to convince people to diagnose their suffering as the inevitable result of capitalism and to see themselves as members of antagonistic classes whose interests are always incompatible with the dominant classes.

And, as an increasing number of people came to see themselves as members of harmonious communities, to believe that their suffering is caused only or primarily by the lack of regulation of capitalism, to conclude that they could improve their conditions without going so far as having to overthrow capitalism, and to view at least some elites as ‘partners’ or ‘leaders’ to support, so ever fewer would therefore be motivated to defy the powerful and to cast their lot with movements fighting for radical system change.

For this and other reasons, radicals worldwide have not only found it harder to gain new adherents from the 1970s on, but even once committed fighters would either lay down their arms or ‘defect’ altogether.21 Once on the upsurge, radical anti-capitalist movements would consequently be on the defensive, continuing to organise but increasingly pushed to the margins.

In the USA, Europe, and probably in other countries where the radical environmentalist message had only a few years before gained traction, radical critique would “fizzle out” and anti-capitalist environmentalism would suffer a “precipitous decline”.22

Conclusion

Thus, without always deploying the violence they constantly keep in the background, the more forward-looking of the world’s elites have at the very least been able to dissuade people from struggling to replace capitalism with a different, radically democratic system; at most, they have been able to persuade or motivate them to actively fight to ‘improve’ an inherently undemocratic system in order to prevent it from being overthrown.

By organising and mobilising a transnational movement from above to wage a global “passive revolution” in favour of regulating the market, they have been able to partially defuse the class antagonisms that the radical intellectuals had sought to kindle. By so doing, they have not only prevented or restrained more people from expressing or venting their anger, but have been able to harness that anger towards tinkering with the system in order to keep it the same.

Had these reformist elites not mounted this global passive revolution, it is unlikely that the world’s governments would have attempted to establish global-level regulation to address global ecological problems. And had the world’s governments not acted, it is unlikely that they would have staved off a global counter-hegemonic challenge to capitalism.

And yet, it is also important to stress that, as indicated by the willingness of a significant number of people to engage in mass civil disobedience action on the final day of the latest UN climate summit in Paris and the growing radicalisation of many climate activists worldwide, they still have not succeeded in completely defeating or eliminating this challenge altogether.

For reasons that have to do in part with leading reformists’ decision to accommodate conservative elites’ demands to weaken their proposed reforms, our movement has not only survived the reformist offensive but in recent years, we have even become resurgent again. But whether we will do more than survive ultimately depends on whether we can counter these more forward-looking elites’ sophisticated and well-organised attempts to change the hearts and souls of those we seek to draw to our side.

This does not necessarily mean always opposing the reforms and concessions that the more ‘radical’ among the reformists are promoting, or refusing to work with them. But it does mean constantly subverting their attempts to channel people’s anger to only their chosen enemies and to confine them to just aspiring for a greener, more ecologically-conscious ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.’

Put differently, it means pushing people to go beyond the horizon that the reformists seek to restrict them to, and to help empower them to dream of a democratic, because socialist, alternative. The alternative is that we just remain stuck in place without being able to march forward.

Herbert Villalon Docena is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of a workers’ group, Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (Solidarity of Filipino Workers), in the Philippines. Prior to pursuing graduate studies, he was a researcher and campaigner with Focus on the Global South.

Endnotes:

1. On growing protests around environmental issues worldwide, see among others: Hays, Samuel (1987) Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; Gottlieb, Robert (1993) Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Washington, DC: Island Press; Brechin, Steven R. and Willett Kempton (1994) “Global Environmentalism: A Challenge to the Postmaterialism Thesis?” Social Science Quarterly 75(2):245–69; Doyle, Timothy (2005) Environmental Movements in Minority and Majority Worlds: A Global Perspective, New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press; Guha, Ramachandra (2000) Environmentalism: A Global History, New York: Longman.

2. See, among others: McCormick, John (1989) Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; O’Riordan, Timothy (1979) “Public Interest Environmental Groups in the United States and Britain,” Journal of American Studies 13(3):409–38; Schnaiberg, Allan (1980) The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, New York: Oxford University Press; Vogel, David (1986) National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy in Great Britain and the United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

3. Watts, Michael (2001) “1968 and All That...,” Progress in Human Geography, 25 (2), 157-88.

4. McCormick, John (1989) Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

5. On the resurgence of the anti-capitalist Left in the 1960s, see Arrighi, G., and Silver, B. J. (1999) Chaos and governance in the modern world system. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Schurmann, F. (1974) The logic of world power: an inquiry into the origins, currents, and contradictions of world politics. Pantheon Books; Vogel, D. (1978) “Why Businessmen Distrust Their State: The Political Consciousness of American Corporate Executives,” British Journal of Political Science, 8 (1), 45–78. The quote on the “global civil war” is from Watts 2001:162.

6. Hobsbawm, Eric (1996) The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, New York: Vintage.

7. Watts, Michael (2001) “1968 and All That...,” Progress in Human Geography, 25 (2), 157-88.

8. Quoted in Vogel, David (1986) National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy in Great Britain and the United States, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p.145; see also Vogel, David (1989) Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, New York: Basic Books.

9. Caldwell, Lynton Keith and Weiland, Paul Stanley (1996) International Environmental Policy: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Hays, Samuel P. (1989) “Three Decades of Environmental Politics: The Historical Context” in M.J. Lacey (Ed.), Government and environmental politics: essays on historical developments since World War Two, (pp. 19-80). Washington, DC and Lanham, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press; Buttel, Frederick and Flinn, William (1978) “The Politics of Environmental Concern,” Environment and Behavior, 10 (1), 17-36.

10. Egan, Michael (2007) Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Gottlieb, Robert (1993) Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Washington, DC: Island Press; Hays, Samuel (1987) Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; Hays, Samuel P. (1989) “Three Decades of Environmental Politics: The Historical Context,” in M.J. Lacey (Ed.), Government and environmental politics: essays on historical developments since World War Two, (pp. 19-80). Washington, DC and Lanham, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press; Vogel, David (1986) National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy in Great Britain and the United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Schnaiberg, Allan (1980) The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, New York: Oxford University Press.

11. For more on the social backgrounds of these intellectuals, see especially Dezalay, Yves and Garth, Bryant G. (2002) The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. See also Arnove, Robert and Pinede, Nadine (2007) “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” Critical Sociology, 33 (3), 389-425; Berman, Edward H. (1980) “The Foundations’ Role in American Foreign Policy,” in R. F. Arnove (Ed.), Philanthropy and cultural imperialism: the foundations at home and abroad. (pp. 203-32). Boston, MA: G.K. Hall; Fisher, Donald (1980) “American Philanthropy and the Social Sciences: The Reproduction of a Conservative Ideology,” In R.F. Arnove (Ed.), Philanthropy and cultural imperialism: the foundations at home and abroad, (pp. 1-23). Boston, MA: G.K. Hall; Gill, Stephen (1990) American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

12. For more on their worldview, see, among others: Arnove, Robert F. (1980) Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall; Arnove, Robert and Pinede, Nadine (2007) “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” Critical Sociology, 33 (3), 389-425; Berman, Edward H. (1980). “The Foundations’ Role in American Foreign Policy,” in R. F. Arnove (Ed.), Philanthropy and cultural imperialism: the foundations at home and abroad, (pp. 203-32). Boston, MA: G.K. Hall; Gill, Stephen (1990) American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; Goldman, Michael (2006) Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Golub, Robert and Townsend, Joe (1977) “Malthus, multinationals and the Club of Rome,” Social Studies of Science, 7 (2), 201-22; Packenham, Robert A. (1973) Liberal America and the Third World; Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Slaughter, Sheila and Silva, Edward T. (1980) “Looking Backwards: How Foundations Formulated Ideology in the Progressive Period,” in R.F. Arnove (Ed.), Philanthropy and cultural imperialism: the foundations at home and abroad. (pp. 55-86). Boston, MA: G.K. Hall.

13. Quoted in McCormick 1989:97.

14. Hajer, M. A. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford University Press.

15. Hajer 1995:83.

16. Gill 1990:174.

17. Hajer 1995: 3-32; see also Dryzek, John (1997) The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

18. On foundations’ support for RFF and the Conservation Foundation, see Barkley, Katherine and Weissman, Steve (1970) “The Eco-Establishment,” Ramparts, 48-58.; on EDF, see Newell, Peter (2000) Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Pooley, Eric (2010) The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, New York: Hyperion; on the Trilateral Commission, see Gill, Stephen (1990) American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; on IIED, see Morphet, Sally (1996). NGOs and the Environment. In P. Willetts (Ed.) ‘The conscience of the world’: the influence of non-governmental organizations in the UN system (pp. 116-46). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.: 131; on the IUCN, see McCormick, John (1989) Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Hajer, M. A. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process, Oxford University Press.

19. Bjork, Tord. 2012. The UN Participatory Rebellion - People's Stockholm Summits Stockholm: Association Aktivism.info; Keck, Margaret E. and Sikkink, Kathryn (1998) Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.; Rich, Bruce (1994) Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development, Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Goldman, Michael (2006) Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

20. Andresen, Steinar and Agrawala, Shardul (2002) “Leaders, Pushers and Laggards in the Making of the Climate Regime,” Global Environmental Change, 12(1), 41-51; Newell, Peter (2000), Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Boehmer-Christiansen, Sonja (1994) “Scientific Uncertainty and Power Politics,” in B. Spector and I.W. Zartmann (Eds.), Negotiating international regimes: lessons learned from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) (pp. 181-98). London and Boston, MA: Graham and Trotman/Martinus Nijhoff; Pulver, Simone (2004) Power in the Public Sphere: The Battles Between Oil Companies and Environmental Groups in the UN Climate Change Negotiations, 1991-2003 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Berkeley; interviews with the author.

21. Watts, Michael (2001) “1968 and All That...,” Progress in Human Geography, 25(2),157-88; Dobson, Andrew (2000) Green Political Thought. London; New York: Routledge.

22. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso.; Gottlieb, Robert (1993) Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Washington, DC: Island Press; Hajer, M. A. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford University Press.; Mol, A. (2000) “The environmental movement in an era of ecological modernisation,” Geoforum, 31(1), 45-56; McCormick, John (1989) Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Buttel, Frederick and Flinn, William (1978) “The Politics of Environmental Concern,” Environment and Behavior, 10(1),17-36; Spaargaren, Gert and Mol, Arthur P. J. (1992). Sociology, Environment, and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of Social Change, Society & Natural Resources, 5 (4), 323-44.