Just off the Washington Monument, there’s a mass of people in front of a soon to be lively stage. They’re protecting themselves from the whipping wind chill with fleece jackets and knit hats. Individuals from over thirty states and innumerable environmental organizations are in attendance. Direct action contingents on the frontlines of the Keystone XL pipeline, college students from nascent fossil fuel divestment campaigns, and a cornucopia of other groups populate the now muddy lawn. Perhaps the most interesting sight is one on the edge of the crowd, though. A few people are arrayed in a standing circle, beating drums. Their pulsing chants, borrowed from the Spanish Indignados and popularized Occupiers in Zucotti Park are unmistakable: “Ah, Anti, Anticapitalista!”
This amalgam of activists, organizers, environmentalists, and otherwise concerned individuals, gathered in Washington, D.C. on February 17 for the Forward on Climate Rally, offered a kind of microcosm of the environmental movement in its current form. 40,000 rallied on this frigid day and while they specifically targeted the Keystone XL pipeline, these people sent a message that was seemingly bigger than one piece (albeit a big piece) of infrastructure. What organizers of the event deemed “the largest climate rally in history” showed, if nothing else, was a reinvigorated environmental movement resuscitating some old ideas, exposing innovative new tactics, and maybe even a projecting a novel ideology.
This resurgence is long overdue. For decades, scientists, activists, and even a few politicians have iterated and reiterated the potentially fatal consequences of unchecked human-induced climate change. For decades these voices of reason have fallen on deaf ears. In 2012, though, US citizens began to see and feel the effects of this largely abstract and vaguely understood problem. Droughts in the country’s breadbasket, unusually aggressive wildfires out West, sweltering summer temperatures, and of course Hurricane Sandy, seem to have awoken many Americans to the dire status of our climate, not to mention the social, economic, and political catastrophes that accompany it. As the Daily Beast bluntly put it, “Climate Change Is Here.” The only doubt that remains is how we’ll respond to it, and how bad things will get before we do.
In August of this past year, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published an article in Rolling Stone entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” In it, the writer-turned environmental activist made the imminence of catastrophic climate change glaringly clear with three simple numbers:
- 2°C – The scientifically established limit for a global temperature increase. Consensus was achieved on this figure at the 2009 conference at Copenhagen. 167 countries responsible for 87 percent of global emissions have signed onto the Copenhagen Accord, including the United States and China. So far, we’ve raised the temperature about .8°C.
- 565 gigatons: The amount of carbon that scientists estimate we can burn and stay under that 2° limit. This wouldn’t be as worrying if global emissions were falling or even leveling off – but they’re rising. 2011 saw the highest jump yet – 31.6 gigatons worldwide. At this rate, we’ll burn through that 565 gigaton limit in just sixteen years.
- 2795 gigatons: The amount of carbon the fossil fuel industry already possesses in its known reserves (including state owned companies), as calculated by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.
That last number merits another glance. Fossil fuel companies already have five times as much carbon that scientists say we can afford to burn without careening off the climate cliff. In no time at all, the article exploded onto the social media scene and sparked a twenty-one city “Do The Math Tour.” Out of a biodiesel bus and sold out concert halls, McKibben publicized that ominous equation he had developed and then offered a solution: divestment. The call, issued by 350.org, called on to students across the country to ask, convince, and demand that higher education administrations divest university holdings in companies that profit from the burning of fossil fuels. In just over six months, more than 300 campaigns are underway and four colleges have already divested.
The movement is even spreading to city and state funds. As Jay Carmona of 350.org writes, “In San Francisco, organizers are preparing for a hearing at City Hall on a resolution to divest around $1 billion from the 200 fossil fuel companies on our list. In Maine and Vermont, 350 activists are working on state-level divestment legislation. Divestment resolutions are also moving forward in religious communities, from the United Church of Christ to Methodist congregations.” Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has already called on the city’s pension fund managers to divest from fossil fuels.
The movement is not without its skeptics though. Christian Parenti, contributing editor at The Nation, though supportive of the tactic, doubts its economic implications. In the New York Times, Parenti emphasized the fact that “three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned by governments and government companies” and that “some of the worst carbon polluters,” like the climate change denying brothers of the privately-owned Koch Industries, “do not even sell stock.”
Parenti is right to question the impact of divestment on the shift to renewable energy. But as McKibben recently made note of on Democracy Now!, when Nelson Mandela visited the United States for the first time after the end of apartheid, he made sure to stop at the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley was a hot bed of divestment activity during the South Africa divestment movement of the 1980’s (the fossil fuel campaign is modeled off of it). After protests across campuses, sit-ins at presidents’ offices, and even make shift shanty-towns on quads, the California university system eventually divested its $3 billion in holdings. As Desmond Tutu said “The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure,” especially from “the divestment movement of the 1980s.”
Divestment is not a silver bullet, but it can be part of a buckshot offensive that bolsters public support, engages students in the climate justice movement, and stigmitizes the use of fossil fuels. As was done in South Africa, it can reframe the debate as a moral issue rather than an economic (or in this case scientific) one. To do so, it’ll need to be executed and integrated with a number of other tactics, many of which are already underway.
Just a few days before the Forward on Climate Rally, the Sierra Club decided to break its ban on civil disobedience as President Michael Brune was arrested for zip-tying himself to the White House gates. “For 120 years, we have remained committed to using every ‘lawful means’ to achieve our objectives,” Brune wrote in the Huffington Post in January. “Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go further.” “Traditional tactics of lobbying, electoral work, litigation, grassroots organizing, and public education” are apparently proving insufficient in containing the market induced destruction of the climate.
That said, non-violent civil disobedience is nothing new for the environmental movement. Groups like Tar Sands Blockade, “a coalition of affected Texas and Oklahoma residents and organizers using nonviolent direct action to physically stop the Keystone XL [pipeline],” are merely carrying the torch once wielded by Edward Abbey, Julia Hill, and innumerable others. The group recently coordinated a week of protest against the pipeline that saw fifty grassroots organizations stage fifty-five actions across the continent. Groups like Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Greenpeace USA, and numerous Occupy contingents stopped traffic, sat down in corporate offices, and rallied against institutional enablers of the pipeline, like TD Bank. Even the progressive petition hub CREDO has jumped into the mix by facilitating a “Pledge of Resistance.” Over 50,000 individuals have signed on to commit “peaceful, dignified civil disobedience” should President Barack Obama approve the Keystone XL pipeline.
These increasingly frequent direct actions against those profiting from the burning of fossil fuels and the growing movement for divestment are inspiring. They have, if nothing else, injected a much-needed shot of adrenaline into the nationwide struggles for environmental justice. What’s still unclear, though, is exactly what these individuals and organizations are fighting for. While the unlikely partnerships and diverse coalitions have empowered the movement, they have also made it harder to project a common ideology. Previous incarnations of environmental activism have typically had specific targets, such as preserving a natural area or phasing out a specific source of pollution, or maybe even ending a power source capability like nuclear energy. Necessity demands, however, that the movement embrace a more holistic perspective in the current struggle against climate change. It’s not a singular coal plant that needs to be shut down or an isolated area that needs to be conserved, but the entire system that powers our societies that needs phasing out. If the equilibrium of our global climate is to be reestablished, a truly transformative change is needed. That much seems to be agreed upon. How to affect this transformation is still up for debate.
One trend that does seem to be gaining traction is the increasingly anti-corporate nature of the dialogue, a testament to the tacit but powerful influence of Occupy Wall Street. For decades now, activists have been calling for the systemic changes necessary to ensure a sustainable planet—changes that involve regulation, oversight, and even dissolution of certain industries. This newly focused aim at the profit motive in the extractive capitalist economy appears to be striking a chord with an indignant population.
Contrasting this call for a check on corporate power are President Obama’s repeated calls for a “market-based” solution. His language coincides with the reality of his administration’s policies (which consistently applauds the record levels of oil and gas production as part of an “all of the above” energy strategy). The subscript for this jargon? That renewable energy and a sustainable planet will not come at the expense of the fossil fuel industry’s profit. This is not to simply vilify Obama. Without congressional and state legislative support, Washington could not provide billions of dollars in subsidies, allow unregulated companies to spew huge amounts of noxious carbon, and even fill the executive cabinet with ex-industry executives, like recently appointed Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. The lobbying efforts and campaign donations of these corporations, thoroughly unleashed by the 2010 Citizens United ruling, are of course invaluable in this royal treatment.
This contradiction of sustainability and regulation against growth and profit is stark. The question recently posed by Noam Chomsky on Truthout.org: “Will Capitalism Destroy Civilization?” is not an unfounded one. “The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species,” writes the world-renowned writer and activist.
If this sounds dystopian, recall McKibben’s thesis: if humans hope to limit the temperature increase to 2°C, then we can afford to burn no more than 565 gigatons of carbon. Yet the fossil fuel industry already possesses 2795 gigatons. This math is frightening enough as is, but even more worrying are the market forces that surround them. These fossil fuel reserves are those that are already known, that corporations and nation-states have already laid claim to. As McKibben notes, these assets are “economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony.”
McKibben continues: “John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both.” Something has to give. And unless we humans want to resign our societies to the annals of history textbooks, it’ll have to be the wealth and power of those within the industry. If there was ever a more urgent call to fundamentally restructure our economy, and our societies as a whole, this is it.
Exactly which aspects of modern capitalism will need to be phased out and just how quickly are intricate questions that merit serious thought and reflection. What is irrefutable though is the notion that if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change within the short time we have left, the capitalism we know and live today will have to change drastically. It may, as Chomsky suggests, have to dissolve altogether.
Anti-corporate crusader Naomi Klein, who’s currently writing a book on climate change, has also taken note of the fundamental contradiction of market capitalism and a livable planet. As she wrote in The Nation in 2011, “Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.”
“We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them…Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process.” Achieving these transformations will be a monumental struggle in and of itself. The fact that we only have sixteen years left makes it seem implausible. So how do we get there from here? As Klein writes, “the only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future.” Finally, after a quarter century, that movement is emerging.
Divestment and direct action will be vital tools in this struggle for justice, as will traditional tactics like delivering letters, pressuring elected officials, and yes, altering individual behavior so as to be more sustainable. But these efforts will be in vain if they are not guided by an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the current political-economic structure. The climate crisis is truly, as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change called it, “the greatest market failure the world has seen.” But this failure may also be the greatest opportunity for a transformation. The climate crisis might just open up enough space to affect truly transformative change – to generate alternate theories based not on profit and growth, but sustainability and above all, continued existence.
