By Gopal Dayaneni
Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project
Imagine waking up on December 1, 1999, and learning about the World Trade Organization for the first time, as a left organizer, by watching it fall apart on television. You’d probably be thinking to yourself, “Why didn’t I know about that?” or “This is a very different political moment,” or “Wow, things might really be changing.”
The potential for such a political moment is once again upon us, ten years after the collapse of the WTO in Seattle. From December 7-18, 2009, the 15th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be meeting in Copenhagen to forge a post-Kyoto climate policy that substantially reduces atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses, while addressing the certainty that many consequences of climate destabilization are coming and will disproportionately impact the poor. The UNFCCC will also see the massive convergence of social movements, indigenous peoples and vulnerable nations from around the world.
This meeting in Copenhagen should not be thought of as being about climate or carbon. It is about everything: international trade, forests, food and agriculture, the rights of indigenous, land-based and forest peoples, resource privatization, international finance (both private and public), development rights, oceans, technology, intellectual property, migration, displacement and refugees, health, wealth, poverty, the future of human settlements, and biodiversity, to name just a few.
We all have a lot at stake. Ruling elites from the North and corporations are exercising disproportionate pressure on the process to ensure that their interests-continued industrial exploitation of land and people in the service of growth and profit-are preserved. At the same time, social movements-from Via Campesina and Third World Network to indigenous peoples’ movements, from international labor organizations to the Alliance of Small Island States-are working to create the political space for a rights-based, justice-based approach to ecological sustainability that addresses historic causes of climate change and the disproportionate impacts which result.
The possibility of anything good coming out of the deeply flawed UN process is hard to imagine. The best we can hope for is to stop some of the worst policies from taking hold and create the political space needed, both inside and outside, for social movements to pressure governments to respond to the needs of people and the biosphere. If we can weaken the influence of corporations directly and through their proxy states, most notably the US, we may be able to put the brakes on their attempted land, air and water grab.
Social movements from all over the world-particularly radical social movements-have been intensely organizing for this moment by building massive coalitions such as Climate Justice Now and regularly meeting to forge positions and agreements for action in the lead-up to Copenhagen, in Copenhagen, and beyond. But US social movements have been largely absent. While there are a handful of politically left organizations and networks in the US advancing a justice-based approach to climate both domestically and internationally-most notably the Indigenous Environmental Network, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Rising Tide North America-grassroots base-building organizations working on racial, economic and environmental justice, and the US labor movement are missing. Without greater engagement by grassroots forces, the US civil society position is framed by the NRDCs and World Wildlife Funds, which are promoting a system of carbon markets, complete with exotic derivative schemes to help capital avoid responsibility for the problem it created.
False solutions
The attention to climate change provides an opportunity to advance deep and systemic changes that create greater equity, justice, and democracy as we weather the unavoidable economic and ecological transition. In fact, only such changes are sufficient to deal with the scale of the problem. Currently, however, most approaches to dealing with climate change, focused narrowly on “carbon reduction,” serve only to further advance the root causes and will not deal with the problem-in most cases they will actually exacerbate injustice.
The dominant framing of the problem is that we must stabilize the amount of carbon in the atmosphere at 350ppm by 2050 to avoid a mean atmospheric temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius. While the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 is an indicator of the problem and must be addressed, this narrow framing, de-linked from other ecological crises (such as the economic system that got us here and the inequity it spawned) is a strategic construction that forces us to view the problem as a technical one, which can be addressed through technical (technological or policy) solutions without looking at the broader root causes.
If we understand the problem as simply being one of atmospheric concentrations of carbon, then only solutions that seem “practical” because they are politically “viable” in the current system are considered “reasonable.” But those solutions-whether it be large-scale shifting of arable land from food production to agro-fuel production, carbon trading regimes, or synthetic biology-have huge consequences for poverty, food security, water security, human rights, and biological and cultural diversity.
Without a holistic, integrated approach to the ecological crisis predicated on justice and equity as central measures of efficacy, we will simply shift the problem around, making it worse and further compromising our survival. The dominant discourse on climate says, “We cannot afford to make ending corporate globalized capitalism a criterion for dealing with climate.” A justice-based approach says, “We cannot afford to do anything less.” Capital-intensive, globalized industrial production caused the problem, and transitioning out of it is the only solution.
State of play
Time is running out. Almost nine out of ten climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, and that an average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely. Without getting into the gory details, suffice it to say that 4-5C will likely be catastrophically bad. Additionally, a synthesis report on climate science issued in June says that climate change will proceed faster than predicted over the next five years and that we are running a very high risk of breaching some tipping points, including the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. A lead author of the report, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is the climate scientist credited with identifying the major tipping points.
The scale and pace of the crisis demands immediate, forceful, and systemic action. We must fully appreciate and understand that: 1) We are currently in the throes of the crisis and transition and that 2) change is inevitable. What matters most now is how that change happens and who leads the transition. When societies and economies go through major transitions, history teaches that the balance of social forces is incredibly important. The degree to which our new future embodies equity, justice and democracy as we move through these economic and ecologic changes depends entirely on how well we position popular social movements to take control of the transition.
The Copenhagen moment is a strategic opportunity to further build a trans-local movement that integrates ecological sustainability and economic justice; that coordinates the power of social movements to support systems shift and to build the capacity of communities to weather the transition. US racial, social and economic justice organizations must get into the game.
Everyone doesn’t need to travel to Copenhagen. The Copenhagen moment will be had all over the world, and the US is no exception. The Road To Copenhagen is paved with action opportunities. We’ve already seen the west coast climate action against Chevron, linking the local impacts of fossil fuels in Richmond, CA to the global impacts of climate change. The Mobilization for Climate Justice (www.actforclimatejustice.org) is a national coalition anchoring actions at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in September, actions in October and actions on November 30, just before the launch of the UN Talks. Beyond Copenhagen, we must set our sights on the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. The movement for a moratorium on all new fossil fuels exploration and extraction, and to shut down coal, oil, gas, and tar sands exploitation is gaining momentum. And while the US Congress is poised to pass a worse-than-nothing climate bill that will commodify atmospheric space and give the worst industries the right to pollute, an explosion of local solutions are emerging across the country.
If we fail to pick up the pace, the political space that should be occupied by grassroots social forces in the US, advancing a climate justice agenda led by those most affected and least responsible for climate change, will instead continue to be colonized by liberal NGO’s from the mainstream so-called Environmental Movement working hard to give corporate globalized empire new life. Given the pace and scale of the crisis and the enormity of the opportunity, we cannot afford to let this happen. The time to conspire is now, while we still have room to breathe.
The Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project provides in-depth analysis and information about the global ecological crisis and facilitates strategic planning for action among base-building organizations working for economic and racial justice in communities of color.