by DGR News Service | Jul 20, 2020 | ANALYSIS, Human Supremacy, Mining & Drilling, The Problem: Civilization
Editor’s note: As industrial civilization devours the natural resources of the Planet, it leaves destruction in its wake. Since this system always depletes the land rather than operating on sustainable yield, it necessitates imperialism of new lands. This piece examines a new frontier in the war being waged against the planet: deep sea mining.
Deep Sea Mining Threatens More Than The Seafloor
Climate and Capitalism / July 10, 2020
A previous Climate & Capitalism article, Capitalism’s growing assault on the oceans, argued that the world is entering “a new phase in humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, where the ocean is not only crucial but is being fundamentally changed.” It cited research that described and graphed capital’s growing drive to industrialize the oceans and sea beds — a process that some scientists have dubbed the Blue Acceleration.
A paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds more urgency, showing that deep-ocean mining poses significant risks to the vast mid-water ecosystems that lie far above the sea bed sites where mining is planned. The following summary is based on materials provided by the University of Hawaiʻi.
Interest in deep-sea mining for copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese and other valuable metals has grown substantially in the last decade and mining activities are anticipated to begin soon. Deep-sea mining poses significant risks, not only to the area immediately surrounding mining operations but also to the water hundreds to thousands of feet above the seafloor, threatening vast midwater ecosystems.
Currently 30 exploration licenses cover about 580,000 square miles of the seafloor on the high seas and some countries are exploring exploitation in their own water as well. Thus far, most research assessing the impacts of mining and environmental baseline survey work has focused on the seafloor.
However, large amounts of mud and dissolved chemicals are released during mining and large equipment produces extraordinary noise—all of which travel high and wide. Unfortunately, there has been almost no study of the potential effects of mining beyond the habitat immediately adjacent to extraction activities.
“This is a call to all stakeholders and managers,” said oceanography professor Jeffrey Drazen, lead author of the article. “Mining is poised to move forward yet we lack scientific evidence to understand and manage the impacts on deep pelagic ecosystems, which constitute most of the biosphere. More research is needed very quickly.”
The deep mid-waters of the world’s ocean represent more than 90 percent of the biosphere, contain 100 times more fish than the annual global catch, connect surface and seafloor ecosystems, and play key roles in climate regulation and nutrient cycles. These ecosystem services, as well as untold biodiversity, could be negatively affected by mining. The paper provides a first look at potential threats to this system.
“Hawai” is situated in the middle of some of the most likely locations for deep-sea mining,” said Drazen. “The current study shows that mining and its environmental impacts may not be confined to the seafloor thousands of feet below the surface but could threaten the waters above the seafloor, too. Harm to midwater ecosystems could affect fisheries, release metals into food webs that could then enter our seafood supply, alter carbon sequestration to the deep ocean, and reduce biodiversity which is key to the healthy function of our surrounding oceans.”
Featured image: Unsplash
by DGR News Service | Jun 4, 2020 | ANALYSIS, Human Supremacy
Grassroots activist Suzanna Jones observes how even long-time environmentalists can become misled.
Faulty: Bill McKibben’s Crisis Logic
By Suzanna Jones
Vermont has a reputation for producing sturdy New England farm folk – hardscrabble people who lived full lives in challenging conditions. Our neighbors, Frank and Virginia, were prime examples. Living well into their eighties, they never owned a car or a phone, and never went on a vacation; they saved and reused everything, and grew their own food. Despite – or probably because of – the simplicity of their lives, they were happy.
Now there is a different kind of folk in the Green Mountain landscape. You’ll find them rushing to the airport in their hybrid car, smartphone glued to their hands, trying to catch a plane for their vacation abroad. Often well-meaning and ‘progressive’, they tend to look down on people like Frank and Virginia for not being ‘green’ enough. The reality, of course, is that these self-described environmentalists have a far greater impact on the Earth than those older Vermonters did.
Mainstream notions of monetary and career ‘success’ lead us to dismiss simpler ways of life. Unfortunately, this leaves us utterly wedded to the economic system that lies behind all our environmental problems, including climate change.
Crisis Logic
Bill McKibben‘s recent appearance in Hardwick to promote his new book, Falter, got me thinking about this. Back in 2008 McKibben correctly identified our growth-obsessed economy as the source of the ecological collapse we face today, explaining that when the economy grows larger than necessary to meet our basic needs, its social and environmental costs outweigh any benefits.
He pointed out that our consumerist way of life – in which we strive for more no matter how much we already have – is one of the ways corporations keep our bloated economy growing. The irony, he added, is that perennial accumulation does not even make us happy. But now, sadly, McKibben studiously avoids criticizing the very economy he once fingered as the source of our environmental crisis.
During his talk he referred to Exxon’s ‘big lie’: the company knew about climate change long ago but hid the truth. Ironically, McKibben’s presentation did something similar by hiding the fact that his only ‘solution’ to climate change – the rapid transition from fossil fuels to industrial renewables – actually causes astounding environmental damage.
Out of the Back Comes Modernity
Solar power, he said, is “just glass angled at the sun, and out the back comes ‘modernity’.” But solar is much more than just glass. One example? Like wind power, it requires the environmentally devastating – and fossil-fuel based – mining of rare earth metals. And that ‘modernity’ coming out the back? That is the lifestyle that is killing the planet.
McKibben extolled the virtues of Green Mountain Power’s industrial ‘renewable’ developments, failing to mention that GMP sells the Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) from those projects to out-of-state utilities, thereby subsidizing the production of dirty energy elsewhere. He also neglected to say that one of GMP’s parent companies is tar sands giant Enbridge, which owns a $1.5 billion stake in the Dakota Access Pipeline and is currently working to use Vermont as a corridor for future fracked-gas transport.
Therein Lies the Deception
McKibben once claimed that “every turn of the blade” of an industrial wind turbine “reduces fossil fuel consumption somewhere.” When the RECs are sold, however, this is simply untrue. And while the production and installation of every turbine has serious environmental costs, every reduction in consumption really does reduce fossil fuel use somewhere, while simultaneously reducing environmental impacts.
Renewables only make sense in tandem with drastic reductions in energy consumption, and are best implemented through small-scale, grid-free efforts. But what we have instead is corporations continuing to market the psychotic American dream – powered by ‘renewables’! This co-opted response to climate change is no longer about protecting nature from the ever expanding human nightmare, it is about sustaining the comforts and luxuries we feel entitled to. It is business-as-usual disguised as concern for the Earth. It is utterly empty, but it serves the destructive economy.
Though not Mckibben’s intent, this is what he implicitly supports.
Changing the Fuel Does Not Stop Ecocide
Climate change is a crisis, but it is only one of many ways the planet is being destroyed. Changing the fuel that runs the system that is killing the planet is not a solution. An effective response would resemble shifting towards the way Frank and Virginia lived. It won’t look ‘cool’, or stroke the attention-seeking narcissism of social media addicts, but it would have immediate benefits.
That shift will require a major rethinking of our lives and economy; it asks us to have the maturity, courage, humility and wisdom to put nature and her needs first. McKibben deserves credit for sounding the alarm about climate change early on, but now he should tell people the unvarnished truth: that if we cannot sacrifice our comforts, luxuries and rapid mobility because we love this Earth, then there really is no hope.
Suzanna Jones lives off grid on a small farm in Northern Vermont. She has been fighting injustice, destruction of the land, and industrial wind projects for decades and has been arrested several times.
Featured image by Hotshot977, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. To repost this or any other content on this website, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org.
by DGR News Service | Apr 9, 2019 | ANALYSIS, Movement Building & Support
Resistance News
April 9, 2019
by Max Wilbert
Deep Green Resistance
max@maxwilbert.org
https://www.deepgreenresistance.org
Current atmospheric CO2 level (daily high at Mauna Loa): 411.33 PPM
A free monthly newsletter providing analysis and commentary on ecology, global capitalism, empire, and revolution. For back issues, to read this issue online, or to subscribe via email or RSS, visit the Resistance News web page. Most of these essays also appear on the DGR News Service, which also includes an active comment section.
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In this issue:
- With China no longer accepting used plastic and paper, communities are facing steep collection bills, forcing them to end their programs or burn or bury more waste
- Seattle: A City on the Cutting Edge of Empire
- Party With Ecocentric Values Challenges the Political Orthodoxy in Tasmania
- Indigenous Peoples Call for Help After Devastating Wildfires Sweep Through Their Communities
- Surviving the Violence of Transactivism: Interview with Ana Marcocavallo from Argentina
- WWF-Funded Guards Helped Poachers, Then Tortured Informant Who Tried to Stop Them
- Submit your material to the Deep Green Resistance News Service
- Further news and recommended reading / podcasts
- How to support DGR or get involved
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“[Laws like the Endangered Species act] exist not to protect the natural world, but to neutralize revolutionary energy”.
– Will Falk
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With China no longer accepting used plastic and paper, communities are facing steep collection bills, forcing them to end their programs or burn or bury more waste
[Link] Editor’s note: this article illustrates how recycling is a profit-driven industry operated by and for corporate power. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, recycling will sometimes become more profitable, and sometimes collapse under situations such as this.
By Michael Corkery
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
Read on.
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Seattle: A City on the Cutting Edge of Empire
[Link] by Max Wilbert
Seattle is the “cutting edge” of hyper-modern industrially-outsourced capitalism.
This is why, despite having the most progressive city government of any big city in the country, Seattle has been unable to address a crisis of homelessness or pass taxes on big corporations. The liberal, progressive culture of Seattle will never provide real solutions to the problems of capitalism and industrial civilization.
Despite any claims to the contrary, Seattle is an oligarchy run by the rich, for the rich. The city was created as an imperial outpost of a society hellbent on logging all the old growth forest and stealing all the land from the indigenous inhabitants. Today, it has morphed from primarily a lumber and salmon extraction site to a central managerial site for global techno-capitalism.
The psychology of an exploitative colonial state is reflected in Seattle’s dominant news organizations.
Read on.
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Party With Ecocentric Values Challenges the Political Orthodoxy in Tasmania
[Link] by Dr. Geoff Holloway
Ecocentrism is an all-encompassing concept that covers geo-diversity and biocentrism but extends the latter. Also, by definition, eco-centrism is the basis of calls for the Rights of Nature and is the fundamental basis of Deep Ecology (including Deep Green Resistance). Eco-centrism is the opposite of anthropocentrism. This creates a divide within the Green/environment/conservation movement – but a largely unacknowledged divide (however, United Tasmania Group [UTG] has experienced clashes with the anthropocentric section of this movement).
As Kopnina et al point out (2018), anthropocentrism supports and is based on utilitarianism and human self-interest. They also argue that there is no such thing as ‘good’ anthropocentrism or, for that matter, ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ human interests. I have argued elsewhere about the limitations and consequences of utilitarian and bureaucratic attempts to redefine wilderness (Holloway 2018).
Anthropocentrism is not just about capitalism and economic elites, it is about the ideology that privileges humans above the rest of nature (Kopnina et al, 2017). Also, often over-looked conveniently by leftie conservationists is the fact that ‘socialism’, however defined, is based on (over) exploitation of nature.
Read on.
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Indigenous Peoples Call for Help After Devastating Wildfires Sweep Through Their Communities
[Link] by Ana Barón / Intercontinental Cry
Este artículo está disponible en español aquí
An unprecedented wave of wildfires has swept through indigenous communities in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Three deaths have been reported, and up to 700 people have been listed in critical condition. In the aftermath of the fires, the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo Peoples have declared a state of emergency and turned to the international community for help.
Located on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is one of the world’s highest coastal ranges. Its millenary guardians are the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo, the four indigenous descendant communities of the ancient Tayrona civilization.
Read on.
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Surviving the Violence of Transactivism: Interview with Ana Marcocavallo from Argentina
[Link] by Luis Velázquez Herrera / FRIA (Independent Radical Feminists of Argentina)
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, a group of radical women are about to speak in the middle of a crowd at the assembly “Ni Una Menos” (Not one more woman) that took place anticipating preparations for the coming March 8th, you can listen to the noise and a unison shout against them to “go away!”
There is a man standing beside them yelling with a defying fighting pose, pointing at them aggressively. He is dressed in a plaid miniskirt and white shirt. He is far taller than the average women present.
From the multitude of radical women that are preparing to speak, a woman with a calm expression appears, she wears a black blouse and short hair, asks for the microphone: “Freedom of speech, female partners, freedom of speech”!
Her name is Ana; she knows she is unwelcome, as are her partners from FRIA/Feministas Radicales Independientes de Argentina (Independent Radical Feminists of Argentina) and RADAR Feministas Radicales de Argentina (Radical Feminists of Argentina). They are attending what they thought was a democratic assembly to present their abolitionist stance against sexual exploitation. The man dressed in a miniskirt, who hasn´t stopped threatening them through shouts and flinging fists in the air, throws himself over her to take away the microphone.
Read on.
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WWF-Funded Guards Helped Poachers, Then Tortured Informant Who Tried to Stop Them
[Link] by Survival International
Park officials in India’s Rajaji Tiger Reserve colluded with poachers in the killing of endangered leopards, tigers and pangolin, according to an investigation by a senior wildlife officer.
The accused officials range from the park director to junior guards. WWF-India boasts that it trained “all Rajaji frontline staff in skills that were vital for protection,” including law-enforcement. It also provided vehicles, uniforms and essential anti-poaching equipment to the guards.
The investigation, reported in India’s Down to Earth magazine, found that not only were officials helping to hunt down and kill wildlife, they also beat and tortured a man named Amit – an innocent villager who was trying to stop the poaching.
Officials are reported to have arrested Amit under false charges, resulting in him being detained for up to a month. He was also beaten and given electric shocks by a wildlife warden and two range officers.
These revelations of serious human rights abuses by guards trained and supported by WWF follow the recent Buzzfeed exposés that WWF funds guards who kill and torture people.
The involvement of those supposed to protect wildlife in hunting is common. A UN report in 2016 confirmed that corrupt officials are at the heart of wildlife crime in many parts of the world, rather than tribal peoples who hunt to feed their families.
Stephen Corry, Survival International’s Director, said today: “Rangers who poach as well as violate human rights won’t surprise those environmentalists who’ve been speaking against fortress conservation for years. Corrupt rangers often collude with poachers, while tribal people, the best conservationists, bear the brunt of conservation abuses.”
Read on.
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Contact Deep Green Resistance News Service
[Link] To repost DGR original writings or talk with us about anything else, you can contact the Deep Green Resistance News Service by email, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
Email: newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
Twitter: @dgrnews
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Please contact us with news, articles, or pieces that you have written. If we decide to post your submission, it may be posted here, or on the Deep Green Resistance Blog.
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Further news and recommended reading / podcasts
Will Falk—Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio—March 24, 2019
Karla Mantilla: author of Gendertrolling—Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio—March 31, 2019
Andrew Glikson, Earth & Paleo-climate scientist—Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio—April 7, 2019
White Shamans & Plastic Medicine Men
Cherry Smiley on Indigenous Feminism
Porn, Trafficking and the Social Construction of Masculinity
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How to support DGR or get involved
Guide to taking action
Bring DGR to your community to provide training
Become a member
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“The tough gangster type of detective fiction was of little use [in underground operations], and, in fact, likely to be a danger. Help and support to the Norwegian resistance could only be provided by [people] of character, who were prepared to adapt themselves and their views—even their orders at times—to other people and other considerations, once they saw that change was necessary. Common sense and adaptability are the two main virtues required in anyone who is to work underground, assuming a deep and broad sense of loyalty, which is the basic essential.”
– Colonel John S. Wilson, leader of the Norwegian Section of the Special Operations Executive in British Exile during WWII
Please feel free to forward this newsletter to those who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint this newsletter, but it must be reprinted in whole.
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 25, 2018 | ANALYSIS, Movement Building & Support
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
People often talk about ecological collapse as if it were a distant scenario that might play out in the future, but the reality is that the planet is currently in a state of collapse. This process has been underway for decades.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa and a state still emerging from its legacy as a principal hub of the transcontinental slave trade and decades of British colonial rule.
Although it has long since gained independence, Nigeria has been a virtual oil colony for more than 60 years. Multinational corporations such as Shell and Chevron essentially run the Nigerian government, funding corrupt politicians and military officers to quash all legitimate dissent. Despite the supposed shift to democracy in 1999, Nigeria remains an economic colony run by oligarchs and foreign corporations. Its current president is retired general Muhammadu Buhari, who some locals describe as “Mr. Oil.”[i]
The hardest-hit zone is the oil-rich Niger River Delta, a vast wetland that has been turned into a toxic cesspool by the equivalent of an Exxon-Valdez sized oil spill every single year. Between oil spills, acid rain, and water contamination, the residents of the Niger River Delta are on the front lines of the environmental and capitalist crisis.
In the 1990’s, political opposition to oil extraction in the Niger River Delta became widespread. Much of the resistance was led by women, as Nigeria has a long history of collective women’s action. But the most famous figure of the resistance was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a poet-turned activist who led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni people (MOSOP).
In 1995, Nigeria’s ruling military dictatorship arrested Saro-Wiwa along with 8 other leaders of MOSOP on trumped-up charges. They were tried and executed by hanging, and their bodies were dumped into a mass grave. This atrocity marked the end of the non-violent campaign in Nigeria and the beginning of a new phase of struggle.
In the mid-2000’s, a militant group emerged in Nigeria known as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta—MEND. Born out of the failure of non-violence, MEND adopted radical new tactics: kidnapping oil workers for ransom, assassinating executives, and sabotaging oil pipelines, tankers, pump stations, offshore platforms, and other infrastructure.
MEND’s tactics have been innovative, using speed, stealth, and intelligence to target their attacks where they will do the most damage. At the height of their operations, MEND disabled a full half of all oil capacity in Nigeria, the largest oil exporting nation in Africa and a member of OPEC. One analyst writes that MEND’s targets have “been accurately selected to completely shut down production and delay/halt repairs.”[ii]
In 2006, MEND militants released a chilling letter reminding the oil companies of their total commitment.
“It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it,” the group wrote. “Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”[iii]
It is difficult for us to imagine the level of courage it takes for people from the Niger River Delta to rise up in the face of nearly impossible odds against Shell’s elite private mercenary armies and the American-trained special forces units of the Nigerian military.
But we must imagine it, and compare this to our own courage, or lack of courage.
Here in the United States, a grossly inequal and destructive society has been built on land stolen from indigenous people. Slaves built the American capitalism which today is maintained by weapons manufacturers, parasitic drug companies, predatory finance and investment banks, a private prison system that differs little from chattel slavery, and a global oil empire that has been built on the bones of the Ogoni people, on the total poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico, and on the tar sands, the largest and most destructive industrial project on Earth.
The signs of what is happening are so clear ignorance is a willful choice. Just a few days ago, the United Nations warned of imminent “ecosystem collapse.” The IPCC has issued warning after warning of the dire consequences of global warming. Plankton populations, the very foundation of oceanic life and the source of most of the world’s oxygen, are collapsing. Insect populations are collapsing. The last fragments of uncut forests around the world are falling to the chainsaw as fascists and militarists like Bolsonaro, Trump, Putin, Jinping, and Duterte sell off every last fragment of the planet to fund their nationalist, militarist dreams. Coral reefs are dying, wetlands are being drained, and rising seas are expected to make 2 billion people into refugees by century’s end.
As our world teeters on the brink of total ecological and social collapse, we have no more excuses. We have all the information and all the inspiration we need. The times are prompting us to exercise our “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” the systems that are murdering the planet and trampling human lives.
If we continue to take no action, we are all cowards. There is no other way to explain our inaction.
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement, and works with Deep Green Resistance. He is the author of two books.
[i] Nigeria Oil and Gas: An Introduction and Outlook. By Dele Ogun. Oil and Gas IQ. October 16, 2018. https://www.oilandgasiq.com/market-outlook/news/nigeria-oil-and-gas-an-introduction-and-outlook.
[ii] Nigerian Evoluition. Global Guerillas. January 2006. https://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/01/nigerian_evolut.html.
[iii] NIGERIA: Shell may pull out of Niger Delta after 17 die in boat raid. By Daniel Howden. Corpwatch. January 17, 2006. https://corpwatch.org/article/nigeria-shell-may-pull-out-niger-delta-after-17-die-boat-raid.
Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 23, 2018 | ANALYSIS, Strategy & Analysis
Featured image: Richard Walker. A techno-green future of limitless abundance sounds great, writes Aaron Vansintjan, but it’s totally unsustainable.
by Aaron Vansintjan / Red Pepper
If you hadn’t heard, despair is old hat. Rather than retreat into the woods, now is the time to think big, to propose visionary policies and platforms. So enter grand proposals like basic income, universal healthcare, and the end of work. Slap big polluters with carbon tax, eradicate tax havens for the rich, and switch to a 100% renewable energy system.
But will these proposals be enough? Humanity is careening toward certain mayhem. In a panic, many progressive commentators and climate scientists, from James Hansen and George Monbiot to, more recently, Eric Holthaus, have argued that these big policy platforms will need to add nuclear power to the list.
In a recent issue on climate change in the Jacobin, several authors also suggested we need to consider carbon capture technologies, geo-engineering (the large-scale modification of earth systems to stem the impacts of climate change), and even GMOs make an appearance. What’s more, one of the contributors, Christian Parenti, actually proposes that we should increase our total energy use, not reduce it.
Any critique of this kind of utopian vision is often dismissed as green conservatism. In her article, “We gave Greenpeace a chance,” Angela Nagle argues: faced with President Trump promising abundance and riches, greens can only offer “a reigning in of the excesses of modernity.” Despite all its failures, modernity freed us from the shackles of nature. Modernity promised a world without limits—and the environmentalist obsession with limits, she says, amounts to “green austerity.”
This argument is associated with an emerging body of thought called ecomodernism. Ecomodernism is the idea that we can harness technology to decouple society from the natural world. For these techno-optimists, to reject the promise of GMOs, nuclear, and geo-engineering is to be hopelessly romantic, anti-modern, and even misanthropic. An ecological future, for them, is about cranking up the gears of modernity and rejecting a politics of limits.
Maxed-out modernism
Like it or not, this attitude actually fits quite well with the socialist tradition. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, modernity brought wonders and horrors. They argued the desire to go back to a Feudal world of craftspeople and cottage industries was reactionary: their revolution would try to move beyond the present, not before it.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), is the embodiment of this kind of maxed-out modernism, rebranded for the 21st century. But, given that we are fast approaching the planetary boundaries of the capitalist system, is it really that reasonable to suggest that now is the time to power up the automated factories?
In his article “Fully automated green communism,” Aaron Bastani, one of the main proponents of FALC, tries to respond directly to this kind of criticism. For him, eco-modernist socialism can be sustainable, too.
“[T]he idea that the answer to climate change is consuming less energy – that a shift to renewables will necessarily mean a downsizing in life – feels wrong. In fact, the trends with renewables would point to the opposite: the sun furnishes our planet with enough energy to meet humanity’s annual demand in just 90 minutes. Rather than consuming less energy, developments in wind and solar (and within just a few decades) should mean distributed energy of such abundance that we won’t know what to do with it.”
For eco-modernists like Bastani, the problem is not technology itself: the problem is who owns it. When asked if his techno-optimism doesn’t understate the reality of climate change, Bastani responds that any tool can be turned into a weapon. Technology is only violent in the hands of a for-profit system.
Technology without context
The thing is, there’s very little “eco” in eco-modernism. Ecology is about the big picture: understanding the relationships between people, animals, plants, materials, and energy—how they co-evolve and are interdependent.
So, for an ecologist, any technology cannot be understood as separate from the context that created it. In contrast, eco-modernists see technology as simply a tool, which anyone could pick up and use. Their modernism becomes “eco” when we take the machines of modernity and use them to decouple society from nature.
This is certainly the case for nuclear power. Anti-nuclear activists point to the harmful effects of nuclear radiation and accidents, but, as ecomodernists point out, coal has killed more people historically and will kill many more if we don’t do anything soon. The only thing that can save us, they say, would be to replace the fossil fuel-based energy system with one dependent on nuclear power—which in turn would require large state subsidies and centralized planning. We have the technology for a low-impact energy system, we just need the political will.
Sounds simple, but let’s look at the big picture. Nuclear power requires a regime of experts to manage, maintain, and decommission; a centralized power grid; large states to fund and secure them; and, then, a stable political environment to keep the waste safe for at least the next 10,000 years. The technology is only 80 years old, modern states have existed for about 200, humans have only been farming for 5,000, and most nuclear waste storage plans operate at a 100-year time-span. To put it mildly, an energy grid dependent on nuclear means having lot of trust in today’s political institutions.
The problem with nuclear clearly isn’t technical, it’s political. The prospect of scaling up nuclear to the level needed to replace fossil fuels begs two questions. First, are our political institutions robust enough? Second, do we want the world that nuclear creates? A world full of nuclear power plants is a world of highly centralised power, an energy system removed from people by an army of specialised engineers and, to protect it, a maximum-security state. To think that any technology can be grabbed out of the current system and scaled up without consequences is a profoundly un-ecological idea.
Similarly the idea of going 100% renewable and increasing total energy use, as advocated by ecomodern socialists like Aaron Bastani and Christian Parenti also has its faults. As Stan Cox points out,
“There’s nothing wrong with the ‘100-percent renewable’ part… it’s with the ‘100 percent of demand’ assumption that [scientists] go dangerously off the rails. At least in affluent countries, the challenge is not only to shift the source of our energy but to transform society so that it operates on far less end-use energy while assuring sufficiency for all. That would bring a 100-percent-renewable energy system within closer reach and avoid the outrageous technological feats and gambles required by high-energy dogma. It would also have the advantage of being possible.”
The idea that there’ll be so much solar energy that “we won’t know what to do with it” also merits a second glance. True, solar energy is practically infinite. But unlike the alternatives, it’s dissipated and difficult to collect, transport, concentrate, and store. It’s like trying to catch the rain when you’ve spent the last two hundred years drawing water from enormous underground reservoirs. It would mean more than democratising ownership of technology, but a total reboot.
And even if we were able to press that restart button, this luxurious future would require infrastructure, land, resources, and energy to build. These are unfortunately not super-abundant, but, by definition, limited. Simply grabbing technology from the machine of profit won’t solve this problem.
Ecology or barbarism
It’s here that we’re forced to really think through the ecological position. Capitalism, as Andreas Malm argues, was built on coal and oil, and is inextricable from it. The extraction and burning of coal made the creation of the working class possible, and it generated new forms of hierarchy and inequality. In other words, any technology developed in the current system isn’t neutral—by its very design, it shapes relationships between people and nature.
Being an ecologist today certainly doesn’t mean refusing to improve humanity’s lot, but it also means having a real conversation about the limits we face. And if an alternative system is to be at all ecological, it would mean democratically weighing the costs and benefits of different technologies: which ones we want, and which ones we don’t. That’s not anti-modern, that’s a basic requirement for a better world.
So how do we get out of this mess? Now, more than ever, we need visionary proposals and new imaginaries. But, with the ecomodernists, this gesture to “think big” gets taken to the extreme: any “buts” and you’re branded as, basically, eco-Thatcher.
Today, breathless modernism—the refusal to collectively discuss limits—is no longer tenable. The dismissal of any political discussion of limits has real costs; Ironically, modernity without limits will send us back to the dark ages.
For Andreas Malm, there is only one option. If we want to avoid a new dark age, we can’t just collectivize the grid. We have to dismantle it and build a new, very different one. And if those driving the train of modernity can’t see the catastrophe up ahead, we’ll need to pull the emergency brake.
Politics is the collective deliberation of the future we want. It follows that we would also need to debate the things we really don’t want, the things whose price we refuse to pay. Without this kind of discussion, we’ll never have a truly sustainable society. Talking about limits isn’t constraining, it’s liberating—perhaps paradoxically, it’s the basic requirement for building a ecological future of real abundance.
Originally published at Red Pepper. Republished with permission.
Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 27, 2018 | ANALYSIS, Toxification
by Alex Jensen / Local Futures
That pollution is bad for our health will come as a surprise to no one. That pollution kills at least 9 million people every year might. This is 16 percent of all deaths worldwide – 3 times more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than all wars and other forms of violence. Air pollution alone is responsible for 6.5 million of these 9 million deaths. Nearly 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. All this is according to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, a recent report by dozens of public health and medical experts from around the world. This important report is sounding the alarm about a too-often neglected and ignored “silent emergency”—or as author Rob Nixon calls it, “slow violence.”
In one media article about the report, the Lancet’s editor-in-chief and executive editor points to the structural economic forces of “industrialisation, urbanisation, and globalisation” as “drivers of pollution.” Unfortunately, however, the report itself doesn’t elaborate upon this crucial observation about root causes – in fact, when it moves from documentation of the pollution-health crisis to social-economic analysis, some of the report’s conclusions go seriously awry, espousing debunked “ecological modernization theory” and reinforcing a tired Eurocentric framing that paints the industrialized West in familiar “enlightened” colors, while the “developing” countries are portrayed as “backward.”
For example, one of the Commission’s co-chairs and lead authors Dr. Philip Landrigan (for whom I have the greatest respect for his pioneering work in environmental health), points out that since the US Clean Air Act was introduced in 1970, levels of six major pollutants in the US have fallen by 70 percent even as GDP has risen by 250 percent. According to fellow author Richard Fuller, this sort of trend proves that countries can have “consistent economic growth with low pollution.”
Coupled with the fact that about 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, this would indeed appear to validate one of the core doctrines of ecological modernization theory—”decoupling”—which posits that while pollution necessarily increases during the early “stages” of economic development, it ultimately plateaus once a certain level of wealth is achieved, whereupon it falls even as growth continues ever upward.
It is understandable why the Commission might want to package its message in this way: it makes an “economic” case for addressing pollution that is palatable to policymakers increasingly ensconced within an economistic worldview, one that is increasingly blind to non-economic values (including, apparently, the value of life itself – one would have hoped that 9 million deaths would be reason enough to take action against pollution). The economic costs of pollution, along with the apparent happy coexistence of economic growth and pollution reduction, are marshaled to challenge “the argument that pollution control kills jobs and stifles the economy.” This favorite bugbear of industry and big business is certainly spurious—forget about pollution control “killing jobs;” the absence of such control is killing millions of people every year!
But, as I showed in my previous blog post (Globalization Blowback), much of the rich countries’ pollution has been outsourced and offshored during the corporate globalization era. It is disingenuous at best to cite instances of local pollution reduction alongside increased economic growth in the rich world as evidence of decoupling, when those reductions were made possible only because of much larger pollution increases elsewhere. A global perspective—where true costs cannot be fobbed off on the poor and colonized—is necessary for gaining a meaningful and accurate picture of the relationship between wealth, growth, development and environmental integrity and sustainability. Panning out to this broader global perspective shows that, in fact, GDP growth and pollution continue to be closely coupled. And because a large percentage of the pollution in poorer countries is a consequence of corporate globalization, so is a large percentage of pollution-caused deaths.
Choking—and dying—on globalization
China’s export-oriented industrial spasm, powered largely by burning coal, has bequeathed it notoriously lethal air pollution, so much so that, according to one study, it contributes to the deaths of 1.6 million people per year (4,400 per day), or 17% of all deaths in the country. Another study puts the total at two-thirds of all deaths, and concluded that the severe air pollution has shortened life expectancy in China by more than 2 years on average, and by as much as 5.5 years in the north of the country.
Interestingly, some studies have actually calculated the number of globally dispersed premature deaths from transported air pollution and international trade. One such study found that deadly PM2.5 pollution (particulate matter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller) produced in China in 2007 was linked to more than 64,800 premature deaths in regions other than China, including more than 3,100 premature deaths in western Europe and the USA. At the same time—despite manufacturing- and pollution-offshoring—about 19,000 premature deaths occur in the US from domestically emitted pollution for the production of exports, 3,000 of which are linked to items exported to China.
But this is far less than what the Chinese are suffering because of consumption in the West. According to the study, “consumption in western Europe and the USA is linked to more than 108,600 premature deaths in China.” (Worldwide, pollution emitted for the production of goods and services consumed in the US alone caused 102,000 premature deaths; European consumption caused even more: 173,000 premature deaths). Note that the above fails to take into account the costs of various other air pollution-related chronic illnesses. And of course, air pollution isn’t the only harmful human cost of China’s coal-driven industrial growth and export-orientation. According to Chinese government statistics, some 6,027 Chinese coal miners died in the course of work in 2004, though analysts point out that official estimates are usually highly conservative, and “the real number is probably higher.” Since 2004, coal extraction has grown significantly in China.
Shipping
What about the transport of incomprehensible quantities of materials back and forth across the planet? Coal to China, commodities from China, waste back to China (the undisputed locus of global waste trade)—nearly all of it is done via oceanic shipping, which carries heavy ecological costs. The statistics on the scale and impact of the global shipping industry are arresting: a 2014 study found that ship traffic on the world’s oceans has increased 300 percent over the past 20 years, with most of this increase occurring in the last 10 years. According to one analysis, emissions from international shipping for 2012 were estimated to be 796 million tons of CO2 per year (or 90,868 tons per hour), more than the yearly emissions of the UK, Canada or Brazil. (An earlier study put the amount of annual emissions from the world’s merchant fleet at 1.12 billion tons of CO2.) Whatever the actual figure, shipping accounts for at least 3 to nearly 4.5 percent of global CO2 emissions.
Much worse, shipping contributes 18-30 percent of the world’s total NOx and 9 percent of its sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution. A single giant container ship can emit the same amount as 50 million cars: “just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars.” By 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from shipping were 70 percent higher than in 1990, and, left unchecked, were projected to grow by up to 250 percent by 2050; this would make shipping responsible for 17 percent of global emissions. According to the University College London’s Energy Institute – whose astonishing ShipMap may be one of the best visualizations of globalization available—“China is the center of the shipping world; Shanghai alone moved 33 million units in 2012.”
And this is only maritime shipping. Air freight is even more pollution-intensive: though much less merchandise and material is moved by air, some estimates are that the relatively minor 1% of the world’s food traded by air may contribute upwards of 11 percent of CO2 emissions.
In sum, the toll of the global shipping industry makes the “death footprint” of globalization’s air pollution even larger. A 2007 study conservatively estimated that just the PM (particulate matter) emissions of global shipping—estimated at 1.6 million metric tons—kill 60,000 people per year, which the authors expected to increase 40 percent by 2012.
Conclusions
To point out the harms of global pollution outsourcing is emphatically not to argue that US corporations, for example, should simply return their outsourced production and pollution to the territorial US. This was the erstwhile “Trumpian” right-populist recipe. Under this ideology, the way to facilitate “insourcing” is not to insist on higher labor and environmental standards abroad, but to systematically dismantle the framework of laws in the US (however weak many of them already are thanks to corporate-captured government agencies)—that is, to bring the race to the bottom home. Whether generous tax cuts and other hand-outs will entice the outsourcers back remains to be seen: it’s becoming evident that the Trump/Koch brothers enterprise is about both eviscerating domestic environmental and labor laws, and accelerating global transnational corporate pillage—the worst of all worlds.
An anti-corporate, degrowth, eco-localization stance is the unequivocal opposite. Firstly, it rejects the broader ends and means of the entire consumerist, throw-away project. Rather than merely bringing the disposable extractive economy back home, localization is about reconnecting cause and effect and overthrowing irresponsible and unethical environmental load displacement on the global poor. Localization is about re-orienting the entire economy towards sufficiency and simplicity of consumption, towards needs-based, ecologically-sustainable and regenerative production, and towards fair, dignified and democratic work and production. By definition, localization connotes less dependence on external resources and globalized production chains that are controlled by global corporations and are congenitally undemocratic. Putting power into workers’ hands is to not have globally—outsourcing, hierarchically—owned and managed corporations, tout court.
Of course Dr. Landrigan is right that reducing pollution doesn’t “stifle the economy”—quite the contrary, if “the economy” is understood in a much more holistic sense than mere GDP. But, as has been pointed out previously on this blog (here and here), we also shouldn’t equate a healthy economy with a growing economy. The converse is more often the case. To reduce global pollution deaths, we not only need robust pollution control regulations, we must reduce corporate power, globalization, and the scale of the economy as well.
Alex Jensen is a Researcher and Project Coordinator at Local Futures. He has worked in the US and India, where he co-ordinated Local Futures’ Ladakh Project from 2004-2015. He has also been an associate of the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics in Himachal Pradesh, India. He has worked with cultural affirmation and agro biodiversity projects in campesino communities in a number of countries, and is active in environmental health/anti-toxics work.
Photo by shawnanggg on Unsplash
