extractivism

By Patrick Bond - New Politics, Winter 2006

The billion residents of Africa are amongst the most vulnerable to climate change in coming decades, and of special concern are high-density sites of geopolitical and resource-related conflicts: the copper belt of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and mineral-rich African Great Lakes stretching into northern Uganda, western Ethiopia (bordering the Sudanese war zone), Madagascar and smaller Indian Ocean islands, and the northern-most strip of Africa and West Africa including Liberia and Sierra Leone (recent sites of diamond-related civil war and then Ebola epidemics). In other words, the African terrains hardest hit by war and economic looting are going to be sites of climate stress and socio-political unrest, according to the University of Texas project researching vulnerability for the U.S. Pentagon (Busby et al 2013).

The lost opportunity to change this map at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit in Paris, December 2015, is tragic. In the 2015 Pew Research world public opinion survey, a near majority of those surveyed—46 percent—identified climate as a threat about which they were “very concerned,” the highest score of any issue in the poll (economic crisis was second). But where it counts most, in the top two polluting countries, the percentage of people who name climate as a major threat is just 42 in the United States and 19 in China (Carle 2015). And even if consciousness rises faster from below, global elites apparently remain too paralyzed to take necessary actions to keep temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the point at which runaway, catastrophic climate change is likely to take off (Bond 2012, Klein 2014). Going into the Paris UNFCC Conference of the Parties (the 21^st, COP21), the French hosts estimated that the combined declarations of voluntary commitments would warm the planet by 3 degrees Celsius this century, but this is a vast understatement given the likelihood of runaway climate change once a 2-degree tipping point is reached.

The annual UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) has been held in Africa thrice: in 2001 in Marrakech, 2006 in Nairobi, and 2011 in Durban. But the critical moment that defined Africa’s future climate crisis was in December 2009 in Copenhagen. The negotiations at COP15 were diverted one night into a room where five leaders—from the United States and the group of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China (BASIC)—agreed on a side deal, the Copenhagen Accord. That was the source of Africa’s major problems in climate negotiations for years thereafter, including at the Paris COP21.

The fortnight-long COP talk-shops are typically sabotaged by U.S. State Department negotiators, recently joined by brethren governments in Australia and Japan, with Canada a loyal co-polluter prior to the October 2015 election (and probably long after, given the national elites’ commitment to exploiting the Alberta tar sands). Initial hopes that the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc might make a difference in world climate policy as well as address undemocratic global financial governance have since been dashed, not only because of BASIC’s 2009 alliance with Barack Obama (Bond and Garcia 2015). Individually, they are each failing to grapple with new responsibilities to decarbonize their economies.

The world’s largest single emitter is China, even if in per capita terms it is far lower than the Northern countries. Beijing claims to have recently reduced coal consumption are dubious given notorious undercounting (probably by 15 percent). The Communist Party leadership decided upon an upward trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions at least through the 2020s. The Chinese standpoint that they need more emissions to “develop” is contradicted by a stark reality: Recent U.S. and European claims to be slowing their emissions rely upon their corporations and consumers outsourcing large amounts of emissions to new production sites, mostly in East Asia. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “A growing share of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in developing countries is released in the production of goods and services exported, notably from upper-middle-income countries to high-income countries” (Hawkins 2014). In the case of China, the amounts of such outsourcing are vast, having risen from 404 million tons of CO2 in 2000 to 1.561 billion tons in 2012.

Moreover, BRICS leaders have all endorsed carbon markets, the capitalist strategy for offsetting local emissions by buying someone else’s carbon allowances. Initially, from 2005-2012, these took the form of United Nations “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM) opportunities to sell often-corrupt and gimmick-ridden “emissions credits” as contributing to emissions mitigation (Bond, Dada and Erion 2009). 

In recent years, after the BRICS no longer qualified for CDMs, seven Chinese cities started their own carbon markets, with Brazil and South Africa likely to follow in a few years. Moreover, China’s attempts to control emissions in future appear certain to foster faith in dangerous techniques such as nuclear energy, hydropower, and untested carbon-capture-and-storage technology.

The strongest efforts to address climate change from the North are in Europe, where in October 2014 a new goal of 40 percent greenhouse gas reduction from 1990 levels by 2030 (not including the carbon outsourcing of hundreds of millions of tons per year) was sought—far too low according to most scientists, but far ahead of goals set by other historic pollution sites. In a late-2014 deal between China and the United States, the latter’s goal was only 15 percent reduction by 2025 (from 1990 levels).

In short, very little reason for hope on climate or other aspects of environmental stewardship can be found in any of the major countries’ governments. There is, of course, the exception of Cuba, which by compulsion began a strong decarbonization strategy once Russian-subsidized oil became unavailable after 1990. But the good examples that were anticipated in 2008-2011 from left-leaning Latin American countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, and even oil-rich Venezuela—subsequently soured, as each turned to more intense hydrocarbon “extractivism,” albeit with nationalist redistributive ends instead of multinational corporate profiteering. 

When the September 2014 United Nations special leadership summit on climate was preceded by a march of 400,000 people with strong messages of anger about elite procrastination, nothing more than vague promises were offered. The array of global and national power appears as difficult to affect as ever, what with unprecedented corporate influence—including of fossil fuel companies—over policymakers, and with further awareness that major restructuring of vast industries will be needed. 

Going back to 2009, the US+BASIC meeting in Copenhagen not only “blew up the UN,” as Bill McKibben (2009) of 350.org put it, in terms of evading the more democratic process. The Copenhagen Accord also promised only inadequate and voluntary emissions cuts. Japan, Russia, Canada, and Australia subsequently announced they would withdraw earlier commitments made under the Kyoto Protocol. 

By November 2015, the (voluntary) Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) statement of the G20 countries confirmed huge barriers to reaching the required emissions cuts. According to Climate Action Tracker (2015), “None of the G20 INDCs are in line with holding warming below 2°C, or 1.5°C.” The agency rated the following contributions as “inadequate”: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey, with the INDCs of another set—Brazil, China, India, the EU, Mexico, and the United States—also “not consistent with limiting warming to below 2°C either, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort.” 

By Patrick Bond - Climate and Capitalism, December 17, 2015

Patrick Bond is director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa

Paris witnessed both explicit terrorism by religious extremists on November 13 and a month later, implicit terrorism by carbon addicts negotiating a world treaty that guarantees catastrophic climate change. The first incident left more than 130 people dead in just one evening’s mayhem; the second lasted a fortnight but over the next century can be expected to kill hundreds of millions, especially in Africa.

But because the latest version of the annual United Nations climate talks has three kinds of spin-doctors, the extent of damage may not be well understood. The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) generated reactions ranging from smug denialism to righteous fury. The first reaction is ‘from above’ (the Establishment) and is self-satisfied; the second is from the middle (‘Climate Action’) and is semi-satisfied; the third, from below (‘Climate Justice’), is justifiably outraged.

Guzzling French champagne last Saturday, the Establishment quickly proclaimed, in essence, “The Paris climate glass is nearly full – so why not get drunk on planet-saving rhetoric?” The New York Times reported with a straight face, “President Obama said the historic agreement is a tribute to American climate change leadership” (and in a criminally-negligent way, this is not untrue).

Since 2009, US State Department chief negotiator Todd Stern successfully drove the negotiations away from four essential principles: ensuring emissions-cut commitments would be sufficient to halt runaway climate change; making the cuts legally binding with accountability mechanisms; distributing the burden of cuts fairly based on responsibility for causing the crisis; and making financial transfers to repair weather-related loss and damage following directly from that historic liability. Washington elites always prefer ‘market mechanisms’ like carbon trading instead of paying their climate debt even though the US national carbon market fatally crashed in 2010.

In part because the Durban COP17 in 2011 provided lubrication and – with South Africa’s blessing – empowered Stern to wreck the idea of Common But Differentiated Responsibility while giving “a Viagra shot to flailing carbon markets” (as a male Bank of America official cheerfully celebrated), Paris witnessed the demise of these essential principles. And again, “South Africa played a key role negotiating on behalf of the developing countries of the world,” according to Pretoria’s environment minister Edna Molewa, who proclaimed from Paris “an ambitious, fair and effective legally-binding outcome.”

Arrogant fibbery. The collective Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – i.e. voluntary cuts – will put the temperature rise at above 3 degrees. From coal-based South Africa, the word ambitious loses meaning given Molewa’s weak INDCs – ranked by Climate Action Tracker as amongst the world’s most “inadequate” – and given that South Africa hosts the world’s two largest coal-fired power stations now under construction, with no objection by Molewa. She regularly approves increased (highly-subsidized) coal burning and exports, vast fracking, offshore-oil drilling, exemptions from pollution regulation, emissions-intensive corporate farming and fast-worsening suburban sprawl.

A second narrative comes from large NGOs that mobilized over the past six months to provide mild-mannered pressure points on negotiators. Their line is, essentially, “The Paris glass is partly full – so sip up and enjoy!”

This line derives not merely from the predictable back-slapping associated with petit-bourgeois vanity, gazing upwards to power for validation, such as one finds at the Worldwide Fund for Nature and Climate Action Network, what with their corporate sponsorships. All of us reading this are often tempted in this direction, aren’t we, because such unnatural twisting of the neck is a permanent occupational hazard in this line of work.

And such opportunism was to be expected from Paris, especially after Avaaz and Greenpeace endorsed G7 leadership posturing in June, when at their meeting in Germany the Establishment made a meaningless commitment to a decarbonized economy – in the year 2100, at least fifty years too late.

Perhaps worse than their upward gaze, though, the lead NGOs suffered a hyper-reaction to the 2009 Copenhagen Syndrome. Having hyped the COP15 Establishment negotiators as “Seal the Deal!” planet-saviours, NGOs mourned the devastating Copenhagen Accord signed in secret by leaders from Washington, Brasilia, Beijing, New Delhi and Pretoria. This was soon followed by a collapse of climate consciousness and mobilization. Such alienation is often attributed to activist heart-break: a roller-coaster of raised NGO expectations and plummeting Establishment performance.

Possessing only an incremental theory of social change, NGOs toasting the Paris deal now feel the need to confirm that they did as best they could, and that they have grounds to continue along the same lines in future. To be sure, insider-oriented persuasion tactics pursued by the 42-million member clicktivist group Avaaz are certainly impressive in their breadth and scope. Yet for Avaaz, “most importantly, [the Paris deal] sends a clear message to investors everywhere: sinking money into fossil fuels is a dead bet. Renewables are the profit centre. Technology to bring us to 100% clean energy is the money-maker of the future.”

Once again, Avaaz validates the COP process, the Establishment’s negotiators and the overall incentive structure of capitalism that are the proximate causes of the crisis.

The third narrative is actually the most realistic: “The Paris glass is full of toxic fairy dust – don’t dare even sniff!” The traditional Climate Justice (CJ) stance is to delegitimize the Establishment and return the focus of activism to grassroots sites of struggle, in future radically changing the balance of forces locally, nationally and then globally. But until that change in power is achieved, the UNFCCC COPs are just Conferences of Polluters.

Via Campesina was clearest: “There is nothing binding for states, national contributions lead us towards a global warming of over 3°C and multinationals are the main beneficiaries. It was essentially a media circus.”

Asad Rehman coordinates climate advocacy at the world’s leading North-South CJ organization, Friends of the Earth International: “The reviews [of whether INDCs are adhered to and then need strengthening] are too weak and too late. The political number mentioned for finance has no bearing on the scale of need. It’s empty. The iceberg has struck, the ship is going down and the band is still playing to warm applause.”

By Alex Lotorto - Energy Justice Network, September 2, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Riverdale Mobile Home Park was located on the Susquehanna River in Piatt Township, Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. Residents were ordered to leave the park in March 2012 by Aqua PVR LLC, a project of Aqua America, a private water utility, and Penn Virginia Resources, a natural gas pipeline company.

The property was purchased in order to build a water withdrawal pump station and water line that would withdraw three million gallons per day for use in hydraulic fracturing by Range Resources, a Texas-based Marcellus shale drilling company. Each shale gas well requires five to nine million gallons of water to force open the rock, allowing the gas to flow out.

Aqua America's facility takes 6,000 water truck trips off the road each day, according to Aqua America, which displaced truck drivers, parts suppliers, fuel deliverers, mechanics, and service employees from their jobs in Lycoming County. The Marcellus shale industry hasn't proposed any relief, solution, or alternative to this loss of employment opportunities for Pennsylvania residents.

The facility's two permits were approved by the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, a federal commission made up of Governors Corbett (R-PA), Cuomo (D-NY), O'Malley (D-MD), and President Obama.

The capacity of the park was 37 units and in March 2012, 32 families lived there. The initial offer from Aqua America included $2,500 for residents to move by April 1 and $1,200 for residents to move by May 1.

Immediately after the tragic story of Riverdale hit the press with the help of volunteers, Aqua America extended the deadline for $2,500 in compensation until June 1st.

A series of town halls, vigils, and picnics were organized by residents with some help from volunteers from around northeast and central Pennsylvania in opposition to the project. Residents and allies even held protests at Aqua America's headquarters in Bryn Mawr, at their shareholder meeting, and in front of Aqua's CEO Nick DeBenedictis' mansion in Ardmore.

Unfortunately, many residents felt forced to leave the park for reasons including fear of losing the $2,500 offer, uncertainty of what Aqua would do on June 1, and termination of their leases.