Global South

By Staff - Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, May 9, 2023

Last week, we looked at the Boric administration’s launch of the National Lithium Strategy, the creation of a National Lithium Company, and some initial responses by trade unions. In this bulletin, we’ll highlight clips of interviews from diverse trade union perspectives on the role of the labour movement in the lithium sector. 

By Rachel Rose Jackson and Adrien Tofighi-Niaki - Corporate Accountability, May 2023

This exposé brings into question Chevron’s proclaimed climate action and ‘green’ image. Analysis of the activities associated with Chevron’s ‘net zero’ climate action plan raises significant concerns about whether its ‘climate action’ is displacing the needed emissions reductions to avoid climate catastrophe, spurring harm to communities and ecosystems, and further hindering the likelihood of meaningful climate action globally.

Key findings this research yielded:

• More than 90% of the carbon offsets Chevron has retired through the voluntary carbon market to ‘cancel out’ its emissions seem to be worthless— presumed ‘junk’ until proven otherwise.
• The technological ‘low carbon’ schemes appear to be failing to capture the emissions promised, in some cases missing targets by as much as 50%.
• A major proportion of the schemes it’s investing in as part of its ‘net zero’ plan are linked to claims of local community abuse, environmental degradation, and/or may even be fueling further emissions. Almost all of the harm claimed to have been inflicted is on communities in the Global South.
• Chevron’s ‘net zero’ pledge—even if fully implemented to the greatest effect without causing harm—overlooks 90% of the total emissions associated with its business practices.
• Chevron is ignoring the scientifically founded need for a fossil fuel phase out, projecting emissions for 2022-2025 equivalent to that of 10 European countries during a similar period.
• It invests millions annually to manipulate the political will for climate action, seeking to shape climate policy to its will.

It’s imperative that shareholders, policymakers, and the public see Chevron’s green claims for what they are—greenwashed destruction. As this exposé illustrates, Chevron appears to be continuing its legacy of preventing, not promoting, the legally binding regulations, the rapid deployment of real solutions and the fast track to Real Zero emissions that needs to happen to avert climate catastrophe.

Download a copy of this publication here (link).

By Roberto Lobos and Horacio Fuentes - Constramet, April 2023

President Gabriel Boric presented his National Lithium Strategy, the great absentee in his speech were the workers of Chile, and we can not fail to point out our concern about it. This is why we want to express our opinion on the national chain and express some of the ideas of the workers' world.

In the more than twenty minutes that the President's speech lasted, several questions remained for the world of labour. The decision to move forward with the creation of a National Lithium Company, a campaign promise cast into doubt less than a week ago by the same government team, was welcomed. Yesterday's position, much more in line with the sentiments of the workers, is weighted for its positive value. It is clearly a decision that will have to be defended against the more neoliberal positions, which will oppose the strengthening of the state, which for us still needs to be delimited and clarified in greater depth.

The decision to transform Chile into the "main Lithium producer in the world" is an important bet; accompanying the energy transition process together with Green Hydrogen is part of the strategic development plan that CONSTRAMET and Plebeya have been working on, together with the need to discuss the current situation of copper in Chile in terms of the new energy matrix of the contemporary world-system. We highlight the decision to participate through the State in the entire production process by means of a national company, which is the only possible way towards redistributive economic growth.

With regard to exploration, exploitation and value addition from a "virtuous public-private partnership", there are several questions that plague us. Starting with the content of the link itself. Any process of dialogue between the state and the private sector must include the participation of workers. The greater the participation of the social world in sovereign decision-making in our country, the greater the strength of the public world in the negotiation process, the same for Codelco, today weakened to carry out the plan presented.

By Cuevas Zambrano and Staff - Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, April 2023

Cristián Cuevas Zambrano is a trade union leader and activist of the Chilean left. He is currently director of the Federation of Mining Workers Fetramin and Spokesperson of the National Coordination Committee of Codelco's contractor workers. Previously he was one of the founders of the Confederation of Copper Workers CTC and was its first President for six years. In addition, he was a leader of the Executive Board of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores CUT Chile.

TUED: Some analysts have taken issue with the characterisation of a "nationalisation" of lithium with historical parallels to the nationalisation of copper. They say it is NOT a classic expropriation but a public-private partnership in which the state-owned company collaborates with the capital. Could you clarify this characterisation for us?

Cristian Cuevas (CC): Nationalisation is a concept that is commonly used to define a process of rescue or expropriation of productive activities in the hands of national or international private capital. This occurred with Law 17.450, promoted by President Salvador Allende, which expressly stated that "the state has absolute, exclusive, inalienable and imprescriptible control of all mines, meadows, metalliferous sands, salt flats, coal and hydrocarbon deposits and other fossil substances, with the exception of surface clays.

The spirit of Allende’s law was aimed at advancing our sovereignty and economic independence, which was completely disregarded during Pinochet's Civil-Military Dictatorship with the enactment of a Constitutional Organic Law that allowed mining concessions to private companies.

However, the Pinochet government issued a supreme decree decreeing lithium as a non-concessionary product given its strategic character in defence (base material that allows the creation of nuclear fusion). Therefore, the Boric administration’s announcements regarding the creation of the national lithium company are intended to allow the State to reclaim the sector and enter into the process of production and development of products made from this raw material.

TUED: In his announcement, Boric stated that the National Lithium Company will articulate public-private partnerships. What are the expected consequences of such a public-private partnership arrangement? What role should trade unions play in developing an alternative?

CC: President Gabriel Boric's announcement reflects the Government's inability to confront the national and foreign business sectors that seek to profit from this important mineral resource, the consequence of which is that the State will not capture for itself 100% of the value generated by lithium, handing the private sector a very good deal. Moreover, this government's surrender is reflected in the declarations of the Minister of Finance Mario Marcel, who only a couple of days ago pointed out as feasible the possibility that some salt flats could be fully exploited by the private sector.

The role that some trade unions have played through public statements, they have come out to reject this public-private partnership because it harms the interests of the State of Chile. However, the weakness of the Chilean trade union movement and the obsession with the CUT is a major constraint for the mobilisation of workers and society in defence of lithium and our common goods.

By Collin Rees, Allie Rosenbluth, Valentina Stackl, et. al - Oil Change International, April 2023

This report examines the gas certification market, specifically one of the current industry leaders, Project Canary. We raise serious concerns about the integrity of gas certification and so-called “Responsibly Sourced Gas” (RSG). Our investigation, which included field observations of oil and gas wells in Colorado monitored by Project Canarya, exposed significant shortcomings in its operations and claims.

• Project Canary monitors consistently fail to detect pollution events: Earthworks’ trained oil and gas thermographers captured alarming evidence of Project Canary monitors failing to detect emissions in the field. The seven-month survey found that Continuous Emissions Monitors (CEMs)b failed to capture every significant pollution event detected with Optical Gas Imaging (OGI) cameras. Our observations suggest that the company is misrepresenting the capabilities of its technology – a concern echoed in the testimony we gathered from several industry experts – and the underlying data behind certified gas.
• Greenwashing: Project Canary’s marketing aggressively positions its certification services as a conduit to a ‘net zero’ emissions world. Its CEO has openly discussed fixing the gas industry’s “brand problem.” In doing so, the company appears to be aligning itself with gas industry lobbyists and pushing the concept of ‘net zero’ to new levels of incredulity, which risks sabotaging rather than serving global climate goals. The company is pushing a false narrative that methane gas is an energy source compatible with climate goals as long as it is certified as being produced below a certain methane threshold.
• Lack of Transparency: Despite claims of ‘radical transparency’ and third-party verification, there is limited access for regulators, academics, or the public to the data generated by the certification process. Given the evidence that monitoring may not be reliable, there is clear justification for greater scrutiny from regulators, scientists, and concerned citizens.
• Conflicts of Interest: Evidence suggests that a key Project Canary DIrector and Advisory Board Members have direct financial interests in the same gas companies it certifies.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

Irene HongPing Shen, et. al. - Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, March 13, 2023

By Michael Levien - Historical Materialism, March 2023

Review of Matthew Huber, (2022) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, London: Verso.

The year-long American saga that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored the difference between two ways of mitigating climate change at the national level. The first is elite climate policy in which wonks and technocrats come up with the smartest policies to incentivise private capital to invest in the right technologies. This is, ultimately, what we got with the IRA, which has been accurately characterised as the triumph of ‘green industrial policy’.¹ The second is popular climate politics which seeks to build a broad political coalition for decarbonisation by tying it to social programmes that directly improve people’s lives. This is the idea behind the Green New Deal, which to a surprising extent made its way into the initial Build Back Better bill before Joe Manchin got his hands on it. Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War provides a powerful critique of the first while advancing a labour-centred version of the second.

Huber lands many good punches against what he calls professional-class climate politics. Building on the Ehrenreichs’ concept of the professional managerial class (PMC),² Huber argues that PMC climate politics characteristically over-emphasises that class’ stock-in-trade: education and credentials. In their hands, climate politics thus becomes a matter of knowledge (communicating the science) more than one of power (tackling the class power of the fossil-fuel industry). PMC policy technocrats further internalise neoliberal logic with their obsession with pricing carbon – a policy that ultimately balances the carbon budget on the backs of working-class consumers. In its more radical manifestations, PMC environmentalism – degrowth being the main target here – espouses an ascetic ‘politics of less’ that has no resonance with working-class people who already do not have enough. This type of environmental politics, Huber argues, explains why the right has been able to mobilise the working class against the environment.

By way of alternative, Huber advances a theory of working-class climate politics which he dubs ‘proletarian ecology’. The starting point, developed over Chapters 1 and 2, is to recognise that industrial fossil capital is responsible for the vast majority of emissions. As Huber sketches with discussions of the cement and fertiliser industries – for the latter, Huber draws on some interviews with managers of a fertiliser plant in Louisiana – their carbon intensity is not a matter of greed but of the structural imperative to produce surplus value, and therefore will not be halted (as opposed to greenwashed) by any amount of shaming. Thus, ‘Climate change requires an antagonistic approach towards owners of capital in the “hidden abode” of production’ (p. 106). The problem is that ‘the climate movement today – made up of professional class activists and the most marginalized victims of climate change – is too narrowly constructed to constitute a real threat to the power of industrial capital’ (p. 69).

This brings us to the bold and controversial claim of Climate Change as Class War: it is the working class (and organised labour in particular) that must be the main agent of radical climate politics, not the diverse coalitions of ‘marginalised groups’ – which includes Indigenous movements against pipelines and Black-led environmental justice organisations – who are currently the vanguard of the climate justice movement. What Huber calls ‘livelihood environmentalism’ only sees the working class as having environmental interests when their communities’ land, water or health are directly threatened (p. 195). Huber’s theory of proletarian ecology, by contrast, proceeds from the broader recognition that ‘a defining feature of working-class life under capitalism is profound alienation from the ecological conditions of life itself’ (p. 188). Thus ‘a working-class interest in ecology will emerge not from the experience of environmental threats, but from a profound separation from nature and the means of subsistence’ (pp. 181–2). Rather than defending bodies or landscapes, it will focus on the working class’s material interest in decommodifying the means of subsistence (p. 196).

By staff - Central Única dos Trabalhadores, March 2021

The defense of a trade unionism that fights for a fairer model of society for workers has always been a principle that guided the debates and actions of CUT Brasil. Over the years, the unionism of CUT-Brasil has understood that the defense of the environment and of a model of sustainable development is in the interest of the working class and this topic has become an issue of growing importance. The 13th CONCUT (National Congress of the CUT-Brasil) approved in its resolutions the defense of a just transition, advancing even further in the debate and struggle for a model of society that avoids the climate and environmental crisis and guarantees jobs and rights for the working class.

The booklet “Just Transition: a trade union proposal to address the climate and social crisis” comes at a time when the working class is facing a challenge of containing the unbridled advance of the destruction of the environment and the climate crisis, while defending democracy and its rights against attacks by capital and the extreme right. As the result of a partnership with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the booklet aims to identify the main specificities of the just transition agenda for CUT-Brasil and the Brazilian working class, in addition to spreading the debate among trade unions, leaders, workers and to strengthen the fight against the production model that exploits the poorest and destroys the environment and our future.

The model imposed by capital causes unemployment, poverty and hunger, at the same time that it destroys entire biomes and threatens to cause permanent damage to the planet, increasing the risks for the working class. For the richest, it is possible to pay for housing, health care and other diverse protections against the problems caused by the climate crisis, such as desertification, floods and pollution. For the working class, avoiding the climate crisis is a necessity for survival.

Although the topic of climate change has many technical terms, in this booklet we seek to use a familiar and accessible language for the entire Brazilian working class.

Read the entire statement (PDF).

By Maristella Svampa, Trusha Reddy, Ashish Kothari, and Liliana Buitrago - Alan Fisher, February 14, 2023