Our task is to find ways to become ungovernable. We need to challenge, in practice, the right of governments and corporations to destroy the climate to sustain an economic model which condemns people to poverty, war and social breakdown. Penny Cole reports.
When governments met in Paris in 2015 at the COP21 conference (conference of the parties to the UN Climate Agreement), they agreed to limit global warming to no higher than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. When the accord was announced there were cheers and tears.
But the corporate shills who dominated that conference were weeping tears of joy because nothing was going to change. They were right. In fact, they got worse. Since 2015 public subsidies to the oil and gas industry have soared. Commitments made by governments will not achieve the Paris Agreement.
We are on course for a disastrous 3°C of warming, not 1.5°C. The poorest countries have not received the money they were promised to help mitigate and adapt to extreme weather happening now.
Six years on from Paris and a new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed our worst fears. This is “code red for humanity” warned UN Secretary General António Guterres, who added: “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
Read a summary of the IPCC report
Yet on the very day the IPCC report was published, UK and Scottish energy ministers were celebrating with oil company bosses at the opening of the new Aberdeen office for industry body UK Oil and Gas. For them, fossil fuel exploitation remains a priority.
The UK government is preparing to give the go-ahead to production at the giant Cambo oil field west of Shetland; much of the exploratory work has been paid for by taxpayers. The Scottish government is silent on this topic.
Governments are meeting again in Glasgow in November at COP26. It’s their last chance to get real, to stop lying, to keep the corporate lobbyists out of the conference and be led by the science, a phrase that has become commonplace in the pandemic. Will they do it? No they won’t, and the example of the pandemic, where they ignored the science, is before us.
And therefore, nothing short of a political and social revolution can deliver the transformation that is needed to save human society and earth’s eco-systems from catastrophe.
Net Zero is not zero
Commitments to achieve “net zero” will be at the centre of COP26 discussions. This mantra offers modest emission cuts now and for the next two decades, whilst technological and other fixes are expanded. The idea is that by the middle of the century, remaining emissions will be offset and a stable state will be reached.
It is the latest version of “magical thinking” – fake solutions to avoid challenging the free market’s right to emit – that has dominated the COP process from the start.
Carbon capture and storage, “green fuels”, offsetting, carbon taxes, “environment services”, where a cash value is ascribed to “natural products”, techno-fixes like burying charcoal, direct air extraction of CO2, green new deals, seeding the stratosphere with sulphuric acid – every single one provably useless at this point and in some cases really damaging.
Some might make a contribution but only as part of an energy transformation that is not on the cards. They all linger on as zombie solutions and “net zero” simply combines them into one climate-wrecking fraud. The latest scam is switching to profitable hydrogen as a green fuel.
Read more about the zombie solutions and the great hydrogen hoax
This article by three leading climate scientists, including a former IPCC chair, sums it up:
“We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier ’burn now, pay later‘ approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.”
For example offsetting carbon emissions by planting trees, or switching to “green fuels” would use so much land and water that whole populations would be condemned to starvation and natural habitats and species destroyed. Biofuels use land to grow crops to make oil for burning, instead of food.
The article by James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr is worth reading in full. It concludes:
“In private, scientists express significant scepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.
“Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?
“The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.”
There is an urgent need for an alliance between climate scientists like them and a worldwide people’s movement, to give leadership and take the steps needed to keep us below 1.5°C, the best we can now achieve. The question for us is not how to pressure governments during the COP26 in November, but how to create an alliance that can stop them from wrecking the climate even more.
The fifth horseman – extreme weather
Governments have shown during the Pandemic that in the face of crisis, they will revert to nationalist and populist policies. The climate crisis poses the risk of wars over resources and the destruction of living standards of the poorest.
A country’s ability to cope with climate impacts depends on its capacity to subsidise and invest in rebuilding, resilience, adaptation and so on.
Taking as an example the recent floods in Germany: the government there can support recovery, but what if it becomes a frequent event, say every three or four years? Areas will simply become uninhabitable over time. People will lose their properties and their belongings. Where will they go? How will the government compensate them? Imagine this scenario in every country including the poorest.
As the Washington Post put it:
“Imagine in the coming years a global politics shaped by resurgent nationalism. Governments prioritize their own energy and food needs, invest more in national security than in global development, and undercut international efforts to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases.
“When some climate scientists speak casually, they categorize this imagined future as ’Trump world’, a reference to former president Donald Trump’s rejection of climate science in favor of an aggressive nationalism that championed short-term economic growth over the looming calamities posed by a warming climate.”
We saw how this would play out with the example of the Johnson government’s response to Covid19. Having first gone for “herd immunity”, recklessly leading to thousands of deaths, they then went all in for the vaccine, using their wealth to grab more than their share, hoard it and prevent poor countries getting any.
This self-defeating action will of course lengthen the pandemic, creating ideal conditions for new strains of the virus to emerge in unvaccinated populations and spread. It is more disruptive of the global economy than international shared distribution would have been. But that’s the world we live in – globalisation in economy but backward nationalism in politics.
One can easily imagine a scenario where the Chinese and Saudi owners of African agricultural land grabbed with the support of corrupt governments, use local police and military to ensure the export of crops to their home countries as those living around their corporate-run farms – often the former owners of that land – starve.
But before long that precious land would itself be infertile through over-cropping, desertification, loss of top soil, flooding or salination or all of the above. In other words, nationalism and populism can only lead to a zero-sum game where everybody loses. Climate has no borders, as the slogan runs.
Becoming the ungovernable – the new human subject
Our challenge is to find ways to become ungovernable. We need to challenge, in practice, the right of governments and corporations to destroy the planet to sustain an economic model which condemns people to poverty, war and social breakdown. And at the same time we have to develop the alternatives, working across borders and boundaries, with the help of science. In fact we need to rely more than ever on expanding our knowledge of eco-systems and the world’s fragile ecology.
We could reconvene the alternative people’s climate conference that led to the 2010 Cochabamba Accords and base ourselves on The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, as the foundational legal and organising document of our movement. In parallel with creating this global movement, we need political movements to bring about real democracy in our own countries.
The capitalist class rules through states on their own behalf. Whilst they can flexibly change their story about climate change – denying it one minute, claiming to have the answers to it the next – they have one inflexible goal, which is built in – to sustain their rule.
To do this they must continuously reproduce consciousness or subjectivities that help to uphold and sustain the status quo.
It is remarkable how quickly greenwashing has been integrated into hegemony through the power of social media.
The corporations are going all out to win the new generation to the idea that THEY are the answer, with green marketing and claims of climate leadership, like Amazon’s “Meet the Paris agreement 10 years early”. Amazon which kept the consumerist show on the road during the pandemic, as a climate leader! You couldn’t make it up!
It is increasingly clear that existing capitalist state systems are unreformable, and we are going to have to make a combined leap beyond them and the private ownership of all the world’s resources by the few, to a new social model that respects the right to life of the many – of all species.
We need to produce our own subjectivities, based on a totally different understanding of the role and purpose of human society and economy. The new human subject must understand itself as a property of nature: we are nature and nature is us. Through us, nature thinks and nature has a history and a future – and it is up to us to produce and continually reproduce it.
We need to overcome our triply divided nature as wage slaves, oppressed citizens of capitalist states and suffering individuals forced into the continuous social reproduction of capitalism. We can become integrated human beings, with a well-defined niche and the key role in the preservation, conservation and restoration of eco-systems.
As members of a collective of associated producers, we can mobilise the potential within the concepts of law, and scientific knowledge, on behalf of the whole of nature.