The title above is the subtitle to
Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes
Everything (Simon & Shuster: 2014). Though it’s not as pathbreaking as
Klein’s previous book The Shock Doctrine,
it’s still a much-needed review of what global warming really means and what
really must happen if an earth hospitable to humans is to have a fair chance of
survival. In a nutshell, if our earth is to continue as a human home,
capitalism has to go. Or change. Or go through a mutation that would mean it
was no longer the profit-driven, growth-mad capitalism we know. This is because
the logic of capitalism, especially the “grow-or-die” paradigm that drives
modern corporations to put profit and growth above all other concerns including
life on earth, is proving to be—especially concerning the fossil fuels that are
its engine—hostile to civilization, humans, and life on earth generally. As we
all know (except for some of the ‘denialists’ in our U.S. Congress), burning
fossil fuels like coal and oil produces an inevitable by-product: carbon
dioxide. This has been happening at an accelerated rate since at least the 18th
century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and its accumulated
effects (a kind of CO2 bubble that traps warming air in the atmosphere)
are now heating up the planet beyond anything seen since the dinosaurs. The
Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 issued the warning that we now live with:
if the accumulated warming of the planet exceeds 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit), it will set in motion unstoppable changes in our climate like sea
level rise that will be catastrophic to large swathes of the inhabited globe,
not to mention drastically acidifying the oceans (making shells and coral
unable to form). In short, anything over 2 degrees and we’re all cooked. The
problem, as Bill McKibben noted in his recent book Oil and Honey (see my blog “Global Warming’s Big Three Numbers,”
Oct. 23, 2013), is that the proven reserves of the major fossil fuel producers amount
to about 2,795 gigatons, which they must, according to capitalism’s dictates, sell
for burning. But in order to keep global warming below 2 degrees, the planet
can only tolerate the burning of about 565 gigatons. That means that the fossil
fuel companies would have to refrain from
using 80% of the reserves that constitute their wealth; and more, they
would have to stop doing what they’re now doing via fracking and tar sands and
offshore drilling, i.e. adding to those
burnable reserves. So you can see the
situation (and, as Klein vividly points out, the denialists do see it very clearly, which is why the
Koch Brothers among others are spending small fortunes to deny and muddle and
in any way discredit and short-circuit the science of global warming): it’s
either capitalism as we know it, or life as we know it. One or the other has to
go.
Needless
to say, this is a most dire situation. International corporations now rule the
world. They control governments (like ours), international trade, and can keep
and have kept individual countries from doing anything to save themselves (see
my Nov. 10 blog, “Inmates Control the Asylum,” which discusses how the WTO
ruled that Canada’s use of “buy local” standards to encourage its renewable
energy industry was illegal, a restraint on
trade). Trying to get them to agree to keep their assets (oil and coal) in
the ground to benefit a vast planetary Other seems like the sheerest folly. And
it probably is. As Klein puts it early on in her book,
..(this
is) what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore
conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that
climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our
time (40).
What Klein lays out, however, is
first, the urgent need to win that battle and keep that fuel in the ground; and
second, the possibility that people power, whole districts, regions, nations of
people, could make it happen if they joined forces. Pie-in-the-sky it may be.
But what Klein is convincing in demonstrating is that there is no alternative.
Either we change the way the world does business, or we die. And ‘changing the
way we do business’ means far more than corporations simply refraining from
using assets, or finally admitting that global warming is real and their
products are responsible. It means
actually using some of their accumulated wealth, our accumulated wealth, to help the poorer nations develop. It
means reparations—no other word fits
the case, and the comparison with abolitionism and the more recent demands of
African Americans is intended—from
those who have done most to pollute the planet to those who have already suffered and stand to suffer more if
nothing is done. It means paying the climate debt the developed nations owe for
the three centuries of pollution by which they grew rich; it means, oh horrible
word, redistribution. In other words,
either the wealthy already-industrialized nations (Britain, the U.S., most of
Europe, Canada) and their corporations agree to help (via donations or taxes,
both of money and technology) the developing nations bypass the
carbon-intensive stage of industrialization by going straight to renewables and
mass transit; or, by refusing to help, guaranteeing that the mass burning of
carbon-based fuels by those developing nations trying to catch up (India,
China, Brazil, and countless nations in Africa) will push the entire planet
into a warming trend that will doom us all. That is the analysis and those are
the stakes in this ideological battle. It’s either continuing with the policy
known as extractivism (mountaintop
removal to get at coal more cheaply; fracking that pollutes precious aquifers;
in short, a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth typical
of capitalism); or moving to a policy and mindset of stewardship—that is, taking from the earth only in a way, common
among indigenous peoples, that concerns itself with fostering the fertility of
soil, plants, animals and the earth upon which all depends.
And
impossible as it seems, there are examples, as Klein points out, of small
pockets of human communities beginning to do just this. She points to
“transition towns,” for example, the first of which in 2006 was Totnes, an
ancient market town in Devon England. In a movement that has spread to more
than 460 locations in more than 43 countries, “each (transition) town tries to
design what the movement calls an ‘energy descent action plan’—a collectively
drafted blueprint for lowering its emissions and weaning itself off fossil
fuels” (364). Town residents discuss everything from increasing food security
through local agriculture to building more efficient affordable housing.
Another example closer to home is Greensburg, Kansas. Devastated by a tornado
in 2007, Greensburg was almost totally rebuilt by local government efforts on a
“green” plan (406-7). The new buildings like the hospital, city hall, and
schools have “all been built to the highest certification level issued by
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.” The town has become a virtual
laboratory for low-energy lighting, green architecture, waste reduction, and
power generation via wind turbines that produce more than locals need. The
other point of hope for Klein is the movement by Indigenous peoples to stop high-polluting
energy projects like Alberta’s tar sands (by blocking the pipelines without
which the dirty tar sands oil is useless) and hydraulic fracking. Klein cites
two important rulings in Canada that offer this hope. First, in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia in 1997, the
court “ruled that in those large parts of B.C. that were not covered by any
treaty, Aboriginal title over that land had never been extinguished and still
needed to be settled” (371). Native people there concluded that they still had
full fishing, hunting and gathering rights to that land. In 1999, another
ruling, the Marshall decision, established that when First Nations in New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia signed “peace and friendship” treaties with the
British in 1760, they did NOT
…agree
to give up rights to their ancestral lands. Rather they were agreeing to share
them with settlers on the condition that the First Nations could continue to
use those lands for traditional activities like fishing, trading, and ceremony (371-2).
If these rulings were extended to
cover the Alberta tar sands region, it would mean that Indigenous peoples in
Canada and elsewhere would have veto rights over the use of their lands by
corporations that, by their damaging extractive processes, make native use of
that land impossible (what use are fishing and hunting rights in lands polluted
by crude oil?). As Klein puts it, “No one has more power to halt the reckless
expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream” (375).
Klein
of course has no illusions about how great a shift in power such a
transformation (from extractivism to stewardship) would represent in our world.
As she writes,
..moving
to renewables represents more than just a power shift in power sources but also
a fundamental shift in power relations
between humanity and the natural world on which we depend. The power of the
sun, wind, and waves can be harnessed to be sure, but unlike fossil fuels, these forces can never be fully possessed
by us. (394, emphasis added.)
The point she is making, though, is
that if we humans want to live in a hospitable world, in the world as we have
known it for thousands of years, we have no choice. We must either change
worldviews—from one based in the unbridled individualism that undergirds
Western culture, that sees the earth and all other animals as exploitable, buyable
objects unrelated to us, to a new/old view of the “collective, the communal,
the commons, the civil and the civic” in which we see ourselves as embedded in,
as continuous with the earth and all her creatures—or perish from our
arrogance. In order to make this momentous shift, Klein, again employing the
comparison with abolitionism (Chris Hayes first made this argument in a 2014
essay in The Nation, “The New
Abolitionism”), insists that rather than using economic arguments (carbon
trading, renewables are cheaper), climate activists must use moral arguments to define the struggle.
She quotes David Brion Davis (historian, author of Antebellum American Culture):
“The
abolition of New World slavery depended in large measure on a major
transformation in moral perception—on the emergence of writers, speakers, and
reformers, beginning in the mid-18th century, who were willing to
condemn an institution that had been sanctioned for thousands of years and who
also strove to make human society something more than an endless contest of
greed and power.”
That, Klein writes, is what those
who argue for sweeping changes in moral perception must do if humanity is to
survive this latest threat. And indeed, they must do more than argue. They must
use every tactic known and unknown—protests, blockades, sabotage, more—that
will resist and overcome the money and corporate and national/international
power that will be galvanized to oppose them. For it is already known to what
lengths entrenched power will go to stop the people of the world from
gathering, feeling, and exercising their strength to close the gap between rich
and poor individuals, rich and poor nations. Abolition required a deadly Civil
War after all. Here, though, the stakes are, if anything, far higher than
ending the horror that was slavery. Here, the stakes involve the death and
destruction of entire islands, entire populations, entire species, the planet
as the life-giving source we depend on, that we, in fact, are. What, in the
end, could be more crucial than that?
Lawrence DiStasi
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