Urgently Building a Global Movement to Win the Fight of Our Lives

IN HER LATEST BOOK, THIS Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, Naomi Klein relates the tragic story of the remote South Pacific island of Nauru. As recently as 1985, Nauru boasted the world’s highest per capita gross national product. The island consisted of almost pure phosphate of lime, a valuable agricultural fertiliser. Intense mining resulted in vast immediate wealth for Nauru’s residents – but at the eventual cost of extreme misery and self-destruction. Today, the island has essentially been mined to death. To quote Klein: “Nauru, in other words, was developed to disappear, designed by the Australian government and the extractive companies that controlled its fate as a disposable country. It’s not that they had anything against the place, no genocidal intent per se. It’s just that one dead island that few even knew existed seemed like an acceptable sacrifice to make in the name of the progress represented by industrial agriculture. “ Having mined the island to its bones and still desperate for revenue, Nauru became the money-laundering haven of the world. These schemes, too, have since caught up with the country, and now it faces a double bankruptcy. With 90% of the island depleted from mining, it faces ecological bankruptcy. With a debt of at least 800 million, it faces financial bankruptcy as well. But these are not Nauru’s only problems. The island nation is also highly vulnerable to a crisis it had virtually no hand in creating: climate change, and the drought, ocean acidification, and rising waters that it brings. Sea levels around Nauru have been steadily climbing by about 5 millimetres per year since 1993, and they could rise much further if current trends continue. Intensified droughts are already causing severe
freshwater shortages. As Klein outlines it, the case of Nauru is a microcosm for what is happening on a planetary scale. Extractivism as a mode of accumulation has caught up with us and is threatening life on an unprecedented scale. Our planet has only a finite set of resources, which provide the industrial base for modern civilisation. As we over-exploit and over-consume these limited ‘gifts’, we enter stages of even more aggressive plundering of the earth, using ever-more polluting technologies. Tar sands and fracking are just recent examples of this phenomenon. We have not just reached peak oil, but are rapidly approaching peak everything. As regards several fossil fuels and other non-renewable natural resources, we are reaching a point where the maximum rate of extraction has been reached. Beyond that point, the rate of production enters terminal decline. Extractivism is not just the dominance of extractive industries within an economy. Rather, extractivism is a mode of development that subsumes all aspects of an economy and society, and subordinates them to the exploitation and export of natural resources and the re-investment of the surpluses thus produced into further expansion of extractive industries. Extractivism is not confined to minerals, gas and oil: it includes industrial agriculture, forestry and fishing. Extractivist modes of development crowd out alternatives and stand in the way of diversification of the economy, especially into manufacturing industries. Behind the phenomena of extreme extractivism lies extreme capitalism. Over the last few decades we have witnessed the dramatic privatisation of the commons and the commodification of all aspects of life. The so-called ‘green economy’ is just a new frontier of the same process, where vital environmental services are made the object of privatisation, commercialisation and commodification. These conditions of intense competition – of accumulation. Global average compound economic growth of roughly 3% is breaching planetary boundaries. The process of neoliberal globalisation accelerates this process while creating inequality and polarisation between and within countries. The lubricant of this rapacious system is the fossil-fuel energy system, which is based on the extreme exploitation and consumption of natural gas, coal and oil. It is a system based on addiction – an addiction to fossil fuels. The exploitation and consumption of fossil fuels has created an ecological disaster by producing a system that generates enormous amounts of energy that are used to mine yet more fossil fuels, as well as a range of minerals and metals that are processed in order to sustain the global energy system and its infrastructure and the ongoing commodification and commercialisation of life. Leading scientists have proposed nine planetary boundaries to mark the safe operating space for the planet. Three of these boundaries have already been breached: climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. We are approaching planetary breaches for others – in particular, fresh water use and ocean acidification. What this means in ecological terms is that the economy has grown to such a scale and intrusiveness that it is both overshooting planetary boundaries and tearing apart the bio-geo-chemical cycles of the planet. Science has painted increasingly doomsday scenarios in recent years, but the hunger for more fossil fuels continues unabated. In May 2013, soaring greenhouse gas emissions drove global CO2 concentrations past 400 parts per million. The world has a large stockpile of ‘unburnable carbon’ – that is, of carbon that must not be burned if we are to avoid the more extreme scenarios of runaway climate change. Specifically, in order to meet the agreed maximum temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius, at least 70% of existing proven reserves of oil, gas and coal must be left in the ground. Yet governments continue to invest scarce financial resources in the expansion of fossil fuel exploitation, even though cuts in such subsidies are critical for ambitious action on climate change prevention, and towards lowcarbon development. Five years ago, leaders of the G20 countries pledged to phase out ‘inefficient’ fossil fuel subsidies. Few subsidies are less efficient than those directed to exploration, yet evidence presented in a recent report from Oil Change International (OCI) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) points to a large gap between G20 commitment and action. They estimate that, collectively, G20 governments spend 88 billion on annual exploration subsidies, alone. To put this figure in context, this is almost double the amount of financing that the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates will be needed to achieve universal access to energy by 2030. It is also more than double global spending on exploration by the top 20 private oil and gas companies. This suggests their exploration is highly dependent on public finance. The International Monetary Fund estimates that overall global fossil fuel subsidies amount to about 1.9 trillion annually. According to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), as much as 80% of the coal, oil and gas reserves of private companies (such as Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal) are now ‘unburnable’. Unburnable carbon represents potentially ‘stranded’ assets. The problem is that, economically, these reserves, valued at 27 trillion, are already ‘above ground’. This commoditized value is already reflected
in share prices, and in the futures and derivatives markets based on them. Companies are already borrowing money against these amounts. Governments are basing their national budgets on the presumed returns from the exploitation of these resources. The drive for accumulation and profit maximisation has led us to the deepest global economic crisis since the great depression of the 1920s, but it has also resulted in multiple, intersecting crises in our economic, environmental and energy systems. The strategies used by the elites to overcome the economic crisis and restore profitability have only created ever-deeper crises. For example, to offset the loss of buying power caused by higher levels of unemployment and wage stagnation under neoliberalism, the extension of the credit system underpinning debt-driven consumption has spawned extreme financial volatility. Bursting financial bubbles in several sectors of the economy have created widespread misery and given rise to levels of inequality unseen in almost a century. The vested interests embedded in the fossil fuel industry represent some of the biggest and most powerful transnational corporations in the world, backed by the most powerful and most polluting states in the world. An enabling financial architecture of global financial institutions and regional development banks helps to reproduce the dominance and immovability of this global system – a system that is addicted to fossil fuels and at the same time incapable of doing what science tells us is required in order to avoid catastrophe. In order to halt runaway climate change, a radical coalition of powerful social movements that can serve as a counter-power to these vested interests must be built, and it must be built in a very short space of time. In the Middle East, the mass forces were brought on to the streets to confront dictatorships. In Greece, huge mobilisations confronted austerity. And yet the elites remained in power. These examples show the scale of the problem we are faced with. Climate change and its related ecological and economic crises are less immediate for many people than issues of employment, decent services and democracy, among others. But the challenge is enormous, and the need to prepare to meet it is urgent. We must find ways to build a mass-based, accountable and ambitious global movement if we are to rise to the challenge of our times.
Brian Ashley is director of AIDC, and co-founder and editor of Amandla! Magazine.