disaster capitalism

By Kathleen Brosemer, et. al. - various, Spring 2020

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a justice crisis. It also brings to light multiple ongoing, underlying social crises. The COVID-19 crisis is actively revealing crises of energy sovereignty in at least four ways:

• First, there are many whose access to basic health services is compromised because of the lack of energy services necessary to provide these services.
• Second, some people are more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of exposure to environmental pollution associated with energy production.
• Third, energy services are vital to human well-being, yet access to energy services is largely organized as a consumer good. The loss of stable income precipitated by COVID-19 may therefore mean that many lose reliable access to essential energy services.
• Fourth, the COVID-19 crisis has created a window of opportunity for corporate interests to engage in aggressive pursuit of energy agendas that perpetuate carbon intensive and corporate controlled energy systems, which illuminates the ongoing procedural injustices of energy decision making.

These four related crises demonstrate why energy sovereignty is essential for a just energy future. Energy sovereignty is defined as the right for communities, rather than corporate interests, to control access to and decision making regarding the sources, scales, and forms of ownership characterizing access to energy services. Energy sovereignty is a critical component in the design of a post-COVID-19 energy system that is capable of being resilient to future shocks without exacerbating injustices that are killing the most vulnerable among us.

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By staff - Rising Tide, March 18, 2019

More than 30 years ago leading scientists from NASA began warning policymakers that global temperatures were warming as a result of the emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gasses. By the early 1990s, there was a broad and growing consensus within the global scientific community that human emissions of greenhouse gasses were causing significant changes to the global climate.

In the following decades, fossil fuel companies and corporate interests would continue to deny the mounting evidence and even the policymakers who recognized the potentially devastating impacts of global climate change would fail to take decisive action to curb the emissions of greenhouse gasses. At the same time, super storms like hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan would devastate entire regions, killing thousands and causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, providing dramatic examples of the gravity of the risks caused by climate change. Slower onset consequences including multi-year droughts in Somalia, the Sudan and Syria would destabilize entire regions fueling civil conflicts that displaced millions.

After decades of inaction and neglect, the climate crisis is here. Already the rapid warming of the earth is causing changes in weather patterns, increases in both the frequency and occurrence of extreme weather events, sea level rise, floods, droughts, wildfires, and increasing desertification of farmlands [1].

Together, all of these environmental changes are contributing to localized food shortages and conflict over increasingly scarce resources. Around the world, people are being forced to adapt to the changing environment, fortifying homes to withstand superstorms, changing crop patterns and seeking new sources of food and water. As the effects of catastrophic climate change continue to emerge, it is clear that some of the places that people are currently living will become uninhabitable and others will not be able to support current population levels. In the face of the climate crisis, tens of millions of people will likely use migration as a strategy for adapting to climate change, seeking shelter and sustenance in other parts of the world.[2]

By Basav Sen - Truthout, February 15, 2019

As the dust settles from the last long government shutdown, it’s time to reflect on some fundamental truths about our political system.

First, during the last shutdown, the government forced 420,000 of its own employees to work without pay indefinitely, while another 380,000 were furloughed. A government that cares so little about the economic security of its own employees obviously cares even less about people experiencing poverty in the wider public.

Second, all this happened as a result of the president’s demonstrably false claims of a “crisis” of migration — and his demands to further militarize an already militarized border with a neighboring country that, the last time I checked, we aren’t at war with.

But there’s a third set of reasons we should be outraged and worried about the shutdown. The stories that form the nucleus of this narrative have all been in the news, but the common thread that ties these stories together is not widely understood or discussed, and it should be.

Consider this juxtaposition. During the last shutdown, the National Park Service, an agency of the Interior Department, couldn’t do its job looking after our national parks because its employees weren’t considered “essential” and were furloughed. This had some serious consequences, including permanent damage to the namesake trees in Joshua Tree National Park.

But while parks closed, other agencies of the Department of the Interior were busy leasing oil and gas drilling rights on public lands, including in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The department even recalled furloughed employees to process drilling permits, which is potentially illegal.

Meanwhile, at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), work on the US-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which deals with issues, such as toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie that affect water quality for hundreds of thousands of people, was stalled. (These blooms are a direct consequence of fertilizer runoff from our polluting food production system, exacerbated by climate change impacts, such as warmer water and heavier rains that increase runoff.)

And in North Carolina, communities devastated by Hurricane Florence — an event whose damaging impacts were amplified because of climate change — couldn’t access reconstruction funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development because of the shutdown. Remember that the people hurt most by Hurricane Florence were disproportionately Black or Native, and low-income.

By Christopher Baum - Socialist Worker, February 1, 2019

But socialists should also use this opportunity to ask why anyone in New York — or anywhere else — should have to pay a fare to use the subways.

It’s time to claim public transportation as a basic right — a service that should be available to all people, and fully funded not through fares, but through progressive taxation of the city’s wealthy businesses and individuals.

AFTER ALL, while it is primarily working people who ride public transportation every day, it’s our bosses who reap the benefits from our daily commutes.

As Vincent Michael wrote in SW, “[V]iable transit systems are vital to the larger capitalist economy, connecting workers to employers and consumers to products, and enabling urban development, from which the real estate, construction and financial industries profit.”

Whether you’re a local on your way to work or a tourist headed into the city to see a show or do some shopping, capitalists need you to be able to get where you’re going. Disrupt the flow of workers or consumers by removing mass transit, and the whole system threatens to break down.

As gentrification pushes us further and further away from the central areas where many of us work, our commutes get longer, we spend increasingly more time in buses and our crumbling subway system, and our quality of life suffers accordingly — especially for those who work more than one job.

Meanwhile, those who can’t afford to pay are left with a choice of geographic isolation or risking criminal punishment. New York City has reduced arrests for turnstile jumping, but over 5,000 people were still arrested last year for not being able to afford a Metrocard, while another 53,000 were issued summonses.

All in all, not only do capitalists rely upon public transportation to maintain the flow of workers, and therefore the goods and consumers on which their profits depend, they also play a decisive role in setting the terms under which the transit system is accessed.

So why shouldn’t they pay for it?

By staff - Fossil Free, December 14, 2018

The climate crisis is hitting unevenly- those who are least responsible for causing it and who are already affected by other forms of injustice, suffer the most.

The Gilets Jaunes movement sprung up in France, responding to a decision by the French government to increase taxes on fuel starting in 2019, officially to finance incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. In reality, only a fraction of the money collected from the tax would have gone to finance green programs: most of this tax would’ve been used to bridge the gap in the budget that the cancellation of the tax on the highest incomes has created. Rather than holding accountable those most responsible for causing the climate crisis – for instance, French fossil fuel giant Total – the French government seemed to want to force the less privileged to pay for the consequences of climate change.

While the situation in France is still very volatile, the Gilets Jaunes movement carries the potential for a much deeper learning and change, one that truly addresses the roots of many intertwined problems. There is an urgent need to bring about a rapid transition away from the fossil fuel economy and to address the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of vast parts of the population in many democracies, as well as an economic paradigm that governments have so far been unable or unwilling to challenge. The first lesson to learn from the Gilets Jaunes is that tackling climate change cannot be a matter of simply taxing fossil fuels.

At times it is very unclear what the Gilets Jaunes movement stands for. Day after day, the demands shift, as does the composition of the movement and its relationship with established political forces. Some of the first local protests were led or facilitated by right wing extremists inciting racist, islamophobic and homophobic acts. Some sectors of the Gilets Jaunes are still turning this into an excuse to scapegoat migrants and other minorities – this needs to be forcefully rejected and denounced. There can be no place in any truly popular movement for acts and words that exclude, marginalize or discriminate people based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation.

At the same time, while the ultimate shape that the Gilets Jaunes are going to take is still unclear, and a risk of it being hijacked by far-right narratives is very present, we still need to investigate and understand the ultimate causes of this uprising.