{"id":5861,"date":"2022-03-15T13:18:07","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T17:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=5861"},"modified":"2022-03-20T22:32:11","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T02:32:11","slug":"another-silent-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/03\/another-silent-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"Another silent spring"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span>fter the worst year yet of climate disruption, 2021 closed with another failure of international negotiations at COP26 and the slow death of President Biden\u2019s meager legislative climate agenda.<\/p>\n

North America faced heightened levels of drought, heat, fire, flooding, wind, climate-enhanced migration, and crop failures. Yet the climate movement\u2019s support and campaigning for Biden and Democratic Party achieved little. Expectations are even lower for the next three years.<\/p>\n

To respond to this impasse the climate movement, particularly the predominant organizations in the U.S., needs to reorient away from the over-emphasis on electoral politics, and toward protest and struggle as the priority strategy.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there are some glimpses at how to expand this potential, but the central question remains, what socialists and the Left, in general, can do now to best catalyze more disruptive, sustained, and mass-based climate action.<\/p>\n

COP26 and Biden<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s inaccurate to imagine the annual United Nation Conference of Parties (COP) summits as peaceful diplomatic gatherings, where our leaders work diligently in tandem to solve an urgent crisis. It\u2019s far more accurate to imagine them as the twenty-first-century equivalents of the Wannsee Conference, the 1942 meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee where Nazi leaders plotted swift extermination of European Jews. The deaths of millions were calmly negotiated as an acceptable price to pay for the maintenance of an insane utopia\u2013in today\u2019s case, endless capitalist expansion. While there was plenty of sanity in Glasgow the first two weeks of November, all of it was outside the walls of power, in the demonstrations of 100,000 in the streets. Within those walls, there was nothing but genocidal insanity masking itself as pragmatism.<\/p>\n

A similarly grim assessment is forced upon us domestically. Despite 2021 being a year in which the impacts of global heating should have been obvious<\/a> for all, the federal government\u2019s response has been pathetic. Biden has said that the IPCC August 2021 Assessment Report, which repeats previous years calls for \u201cimmediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions\u201d universally appreciated as a \u201ccode red for humanity,\u201d \u201cdoes not present sufficient cause<\/a>\u201d to alter our destructive practices, from record expansion of offshore drilling, to continued exploitation of public lands, to urging expanded oil production in the Middle East. Hopes of signature climate legislation in the extremely weak, underfunded, and inadequate Build Back Better package are now dead, falling victim to Biden\u2019s own party.<\/p>\n

The net result of all of this is that keeping warming to below 1.5\u00a0\u00b0\u00a0C\u00a0 \u00a0(the U.N. benchmark to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown) is increasingly unlikely. The goal was effectively abandoned at COP26 last year. Despite lip service being paid to keep warming under 1.5\u00a0\u00b0\u00a0C, the \u201cnationally determined contributions\u201d put forward in Glasgow will only keep warming to 1.8\u00a0\u00b0\u00a0C if they\u2019re kept. Considering the track record<\/a> of countries\u2019 actual accomplishments since the Paris Agreement in 2015, expecting warming to stop there if there are no fundamental changes to the way we do things is little better than a pious wish.<\/p>\n

Fossil capitalism<\/h4>\n

How is it that capitalism has made no emission reductions for 30 years despite the well-understood ecological and social impacts of global heating?\u00a0 We need to have a basic answer to this question.<\/p>\n

The power and self-interest of the fossil fuel industry explain some of this. One study shows<\/a> that 25 fossil fuel producers account for 50 percent of all planet heating emissions. The state and corporate fossil majors hold enormous power over government policies. They are the target of divestment climate strategies\u2014in hopes of turning off the spigot of capital for extraction. Divestment campaigns focussed on banks haven\u2019t dented the $3.8 trillion the world\u2019s largest banks have invested in fossil fuels in the last five years.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

But the root of the system\u2019s antagonism to emission reductions extends deeper beyond the fossil fuel industry. Fossil capitalism<\/em> helpfully describes the structures we are up against. As described by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective in White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Fascism<\/i><\/a>, there are two parts of fossil capitalism. Primary fossil capital and fossil capitalism as a total system.<\/p>\n

Primary<\/em> means the oil, gas, and coal companies that have amassed riches and are dedicated to continuing their business and profits from extraction indefinitely<\/em>. This is not surprising and their power over investment and public policy must be broken. Left green new deals<\/a> recognize this and call for nationalization of the fossil fuel industry, itself a herculean task.<\/p>\n

Fossil capitalism as a total system encompasses more. It is the economic and technological blood and bones of capitalism that has developed around primary fossil capital, and the fossil fuel and raw materials that materially feed business growth at every level. This includes transport, tourism, manufacturing, retail, entertainment, health care, military, education, finance, etc.<\/p>\n

While some capitalists are perhaps better positioned than others, there is no significant part of the capitalist economy that would be spared restructuring, lost investments, and\/or elimination, if fossil fuels were phased out. Fossil capitalism may have produced misery for billions of people, and the threat of extinction\u2014however, for each particular enterprise, the rapid elimination of fossil fuels is not in the budget, or the strategic plan, or in the shareholders\u2019 interests. Capitalist managers can no more imagine union demands for wages, retirement, and healthcare cutting into projected profits than they can stop plastics manufacturing or the rejigging of the travel industry from jet setting to low carbon alternatives.<\/p>\n

There may be a few sectors of capital that are enthusiastic about wiping out primary fossil fuel businesses. But capital as a whole opposes transition to a sustainable future because the character of existing technology and economic relations need to be democratically, intentionally, and rapidly changed. And as with working-class demands for dignity and secure livelihoods that undermine expected profits, capital won\u2019t agree willingly without a fight, and will continue to use up our lives and the earth in the meantime.<\/p>\n