The Bali conference featured an alternative movement-building component outside: a Climate Justice Now! coalition made up of Carbon Trade Watch (the Transnational Institute); the Center for Environmental Concerns; Focus on the Global South; the Freedom from Debt Coalition, Philippines; Friends of the Earth International; Women for Climate Justice and the Global Forest Coalition; the Global Justice Ecology Project; the International Forum on Globalisation; the Kalikasan-Peoples Network for the Environment; La Vía Campesina; the Durban Group for Climate Justice; Oilwatch; Pacific Indigenous Peoples Environment Coalition; Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (Institute for Policy Studies); The Indigenous Environmental Network; Third World Network; Indonesia Civil Society Organizations Forum on Climate Justice; and the World Rainforest Movement.
The coalition criticised carbon trading and called for genuine solutions: ‘reduced consumption; huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation; leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy; rights-based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and sustainable family farming and peoples’ food sovereignty.’
In October 2004, the Durban Group was founded to tackle the problems in the carbon trade, warning of all the dangers above, especially Shiva’s point that the transfer of the right to pollute is a multitrillion dollar giveaway to the people who caused the bulk of the climate problems.
But establishment figures will continue confusing matters. At the Bali meeting, a key Third World leader was South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk – successor to FW de Klerk as leader of the National Party after serving the apartheid police as a spy against fellow students (he later folded the NP into the ruling African National Congress and was rewarded with a do-little ministry). His strategy for bringing the US into the fold came at the price of evacuating any emissions target and accountability mechanism in the official declaration, and reinforcing the carbon trade.
Van Schalkwyk’s leadership is a travesty, for he has said nothing about South Africa’s own $20 billion in new investments – partly privatised through the US multinational AES – in cheap coal-fired electricity generation for the sake mainly of large corporations; he endorses nuclear energy expansion. SA already has an emissions output per person per unit of GDP twenty times worse than the US, and van Schalkwyk’s official carbon trading policy argues that it is primarily a ‘commercial opportunity.’
This is true only if there is resistance; in Durban, Sajida Khan fought carbon trading before her death by cancer caused by an apartheid-era landfill next door – SA’s Clean Development Mechanism pilot for methane-extraction.
In contrast to carbon trading, what is reverberating within grassroots, coalface and fenceline struggles in many parts of the world is a very different strategy and demand by civil society activists: leave the oil in the soil, the resources in the ground.
This call was first made as a climate strategy in 1997 in Kyoto by the group OilWatch when it was based in Quito, Ecuador. Heroic activists from Accion Ecologia took on the struggle to halt exploitation of oil in part of the Yasuni National Park. This led President Rafael Correa to declare in mid-2007 that the North should pay Ecuador roughly $5 billion in compensation for its commitment to permanently forego exploitation of Yasuni (albeit with concern amongst indigenous people about nearby oil extraction especially by the voracious Brazilian firm Petrobas).
A year ago at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, many other groups became aware of this movement thanks to eloquent activists from the Niger Delta, including the Port Harcourt NGO Environmental Rights Action. For example, women community activists regularly disrupted production at oil extraction sites with sit-ins in which, showing maximum disrespect for the petro multinationals, they removed their clothing.
In my own neighbourhood, which includes two of Africa’s largest oil refineries, the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance has been mobilising against corporate and municipal environmental crime, including three major explosions and fires since September and a massive fish kill at Christmas from toxic dumping in Durban’s harbour, the busiest in Africa.
But the legacy of resisting fossil fuel abuse goes back much further, and includes Alaskan and Californian environmentalists who halted drilling and even exploration. In Norway, the global justice group ATTAC took up the same concerns at a conference last October, and began the hard work of persuading wealthy Norwegian Oil Fund managers that they should use the vast proceeds of their North Sea inheritance to repay Ecuadorans some of the ecological debt owed.
Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George Monbiot, so it was revealing that last month, instead of going to Bali, he stayed home in Britain and caused some trouble, reporting back in his Guardian column:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it to you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called … leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
‘On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this policy into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will be used.’
Canada is another Northern site where activists are working to leave the oil in the soil. In an Edmonton conference last November, the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute and its allies argued for no further development of tar sand deposits (which require a litre of oil to be burned for every three to be extracted, and which devastate local water, fisheries and air quality).
Institute director Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for exceptionally strict limits on the use of water and greenhouse gas emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic land reclamation plans and financial deposits; no further subsidies for the production of dirty energy; provisions for energy security for Canadians (since so much of the tar sand extract is exported to the US); and much higher economic rents on dirty energy to fund a clean energy industry (currently Alberta has a very low royalty rate).
I have mentioned this demand in many sites over the past two years, enthusiastically commenting on the moral, political, economic and ecological merits of leaving the oil in the soil. Unfortunately, in addition to confessing profound humility about the excessive fossil fuel burned by airplanes which have taken me on this quest, I must report on the only site where the message dropped like a lead balloon: with dear comrades in petro-socialist Venezuela.
Never mind, there are a great many examples where courageous communities and environmentalists have lobbied successfully to keep nonrenewable resources (not just fossil fuels) in the ground, for the sake of the environment, community stability, disincentivising political corruption and workforce health and safety.
The highest-stake cases here in South Africa at present are the vast Limpopo Province platinum fields and the titanium and other minerals in the Wild Coast dunes (where, ironically, the film Blood Diamond was shot). Tough communities are resisting multinational corporations, but will need vigorous solidarity, because the extraction of these resources are extremely costly in terms of local land use, peasant displacement, water extraction, energy consumption and political corruption, and require constant surveillance and community solidarity.
Still, the awareness that local activists are generating in these campaigns makes us all more aware of how damaging bogus strategies like carbon trading can be, in contrast with a genuine project to change the world.
(Patrick is co-editor of a book on climate change which will be launched in several sites in the Northeastern US in Feb-March; details will be posted at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs)
Read at Monthly Review
From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change, by Patrick Bond
Reat at Znet
Food, Forests and Fuel : From False to Real Solutions for the Climate Change, by Vandana Shiva