Category Archives: Climate Change

It’s The Social Connections That Are Being Broken

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Last night, ironically enough, I should have been participating in a panel called Nightmare on Wall Street: the One Percent and the Ecological Crisis. Today with great fanfare, the wretched Stock Exchange reopened, powered by a polluting generator, even as all around the power was out and people with different mobilities were stuck in buildings. Goldman Sachs remained powered up throughout the storm, no doubt having its own generating system. Meanwhile, people in NYC were forced to take holidays to cover the days lost if on salary, or were simply unpaid if not.

Crime Scene–the tape is about right

Downtown has been abandoned to fend for itself. The legions of wait staff, creative economy people, freelances and other precarious labor, who keep downtown what it is, are not working and so are not being paid. In high-rises below 34th Street, people with mobility issues are stuck. On the floor where I usually live–the 14th–there’s an elderly woman with a walker, a young woman in a wheelchair and a man with an electronic chair. Another man has heart issues and really should not be walking up 14 flights. And that’s just the people I know. Water is being restored to city housing by generators but that leaves tens of thousands without. The statistics about cell phone service are wildly different to the experience of trying to make a call. The social connections are being broken, not just the electrical circuits.

Further the climate disaster is being followed by a disaster for the climate. Generators are running everywhere, people are driving who would normally use mass transit and so on. The “climate” is an abstraction and so is the “economy.” In modernist practice, there was a division of mental labor designed to elucidate what was “really” happening. Whatever the name for our current condition, this separation no longer helps. All our grievances are connected. The social hangs together by a series of such connections, which can be broken as easily as water entering a fusebox. Once down, such connections are much harder to restore.

In relation to this idea, Peter Rugh’s essay at Waging Nonviolence has a rousing meme that will motivate all of us trying to connect climate work to political activism:

we’ll need an environmental movement as radical as reality itself.

For those of us still struggling to come to terms with the material impact of Sandy–no power, no water, no phone–this is not yet the moment for long essays in response to the motivating force of Pete’s call. But I hear it.

And it makes me think about the way that Strike Debt has been able to address the reality that so many of us experience–debt–and has thus made it possible to radicalize it. To follow the example in Pete’s essay, the Black Panthers supplied free breakfast for children that needed it and offered health care for those who could not afford it. If there is to be more than a green-washing moment after Sandy, we’ll need to be able to do those two things: first, find a way to identify the impact that biosphere destruction is having in people’s everyday lives in order to even think about alternatives; and second, offer mutual aid and sustainable alternatives, just as so many are doing in the streets of New York right now.

It’s about finding the connections and then finding the way to make them visible and sayable. So, as I have been saying, a debt strike is also a climate strike. Debt abolition is climate change mitigation. Because the way that debt is “repaid” is by more growth, which inevitably means more carbon emissions. Abolish debt, abolish those emissions. The Jubilee is not just a liberation of human misery but a breathing space for the biosphere.

But just as debt abolition can only be the first step to the end of the system that creates debt, so must a pause in emissions lead to systems of social connection that don’t rely on the oil-coal-steel-auto-defense nexus of the military-industrial complex. That’s the abstraction. The reality is what’s happening in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, West Virginia and everywhere touched by the disaster.

Today we learned that it would have cost about $10 billion to install floodgates at the entrances to New York Harbor. Not by coincidence, that is also the estimate of what it will cost to restore mass transit. They “couldn’t afford” the first, so now we all have to pay the second via higher transport costs. And so on.

Take a small step. The People’s Bailout on November 15–recovery permitting–intends to raise money to abolish debt. $5 will abolish $100 of someone’s debt. You can be part of the awareness raising by donating your Twitter account once a day to retweet a Strike Debt tweet. No other changes to your account will follow, just once a day, your followers will see a Strike Debt tweet retweeted by you. Join the resistance.

Unprecedented, Not Unpredicted

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It was dramatic, you have to give Sandy that. About eight last night, a dramatic set of explosions with pink and green flashes was followed by a bright white pulse. And then the lights went out. Water started rising rapidly to the west of us, crossing Tenth Avenue and to the East, reaching as far as Avenue B. It was all over the FDR, down 34th St, 14th St, 4th St. There was a time when you began to wonder if it would reach us in the middle of Manhattan (just by Washington Square Park in the NYU housing). Then at 10.30pm Twitter reports indicated the water was falling back. We turned off the phones to save batteries and went to sleep.

Daylight revealed a plethora of problems. No power means no water in an apartment block like ours. No elevators of course. And we’re on the 14th floor. A look outside the door revealed that the exit signs and emergency lights on the stairs weren’t working. A long walk down revealed that all of downtown was without power. Long Island–one alternative destination for us–was just as bad. It became clear that solutions were days away. While we had many containers of water, it turns out that a manual flush uses a lot. Time to leave. Right now, I’m occupying New Haven, CT, where there are plenty of trees down but the power is still on.

And also to ask questions. From the radio, we learned that NYU Langone hospital had a defective back-up generator, leading to an emergency evacuation last night. As we drove past it today, a fleet of private ambulances with yellow stickers indicating that they had been commissioned by FEMA were lined up outside. No other sign of FEMA by the way. Why was so basic a safety system insecure? Why did the expensive and noisy building of the NYU Co-Generation plant not protect at least the water supply for its residences? And so on. All those infrastructure dollars shaved off budgets over the neo-liberal expansion years now stand revealed as essential, not dispensable.

The real bottom line of the hurricane is, as you know, that all the warnings and predictions so many have made about the game-changing effects of climate change. You can measure this from one simple figure. In 1821, the highest water level previously recorded at New York was 11.21 feet. To be prudent, Con Ed, the local electricity company, builds its facilities to be capable of withstanding not just this flood but one two feet higher. Only last night we went clean over 13.5 feet and the electric grid went down.

So much about Sandy is unprecedented, but none of it was unpredicted. There was very little rain by hurricane standards in New York. The wind was fierce certainly but it was a tropical storm, not even a hurricane. These events are about water level and water temperature. Sandy kept energy all the way to New York because the Gulf Stream is abnormally warm after the hot summer. The water levels are higher due to the ongoing effects of climate change. With the massive melt in the Arctic this year more water is liquid in the Atlantic than usual. As we saw in Japan last year, relatively small rises in sea level when compressed in high sea level events by wind or other forces result in extraordinary high waves, tides and storm surges.

The only surprise for anyone who has followed climate and ocean change news reports, let alone the scientific literature, is that it’s happening somewhat faster than expected. As I have observed on several occasions in this writing project, at some point the debate over Zuccotti Park would become academic because it would be underwater. Given that Wall Street was reported flooded last night, I’m assuming that happened last night. And from a New York-centric point of view, we dodged the real bullet yesterday because New Jersey took the worst of the storm.

Governor Cuomo has been talking extensively about the changed weather pattern but only  in terms of how to defend and prepare. We’ll have to do that of course. But unless we change the patterns of our existence, none of it will matter. A long, dreary clean-up is ahead. Let’s make the emergency into the emergence of a new pattern of everyday life that works on the understanding that there’s a new normal.

 

It’s the Climate, Stupid

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That, of course, is the election slogan that never was. As Hurricane Sandy meanders over towards New York, the streets are so deserted, you half expect to see tumbleweed. After an endless campaign, we face the farce of a huge climate-change generated weather “event” that no one can name as such, because the issue has become unsayable. The canard is that to discuss climate disaster will scare the low-information voter. Let’s look at why that’s wrong and why the political establishment has closed ranks anyway.

Nothing to see here

The Serious People in Washington tell us that there is no consensus on climate change or action to deal with it. Wrong and wrong. It’s true that around the time of the 2008 economic crisis, popular sentiment placed far less value on the issue. But that has notably rebounded since as you can see from this chart.

So while agreement on the settled scientific consensus around global warming did drop, it never fell below 50% and is now at 62%, perhaps the greatest majority around an issue tagged as “Democratic” or “progressive” that there is, other than on reproductive rights. Nonetheless, even the new-fangled moderate Mitt Romney did everything short of actually eat coal and drink crude oil in the first debate, prompting the always timid Democrats to back off.

But the Brookings Institute report on climate change action options published in June 2012 shows how it would be possible to claim that majority for climate-related policy. It’s true that taxation and cap-and-trade schemes are not popular. But other options remain.

Here 77% of respondents, including 58% of Republicans, support requiring electricity to come from renewable sources. That’s a Senate-proof super-majority!

And a 52% majority (75% D /28% R) support the existing policy of using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions. So there’s no need for Democrats to obfuscate the issue, one on which a clear divide exists between the two parties, so much so that 90% of oil company campaign contributions, which are usually carefully divided between candidates, has gone to Romney.

So why has the issue been so comprehensively back-burnered? There’s a dark corner of think-tank and government activity called climate security. This purports to measure the impact of climate change on national security. So climate security types have a different assessment of the situation than most people.

The Lancet, 2009

This diagram is taken from the British medical journal The Lancet. It shows, on top, countries mapped by quantity of carbon emissions. The United States is huge, while Africa is tiny. The bottom half maps countries by likely mortality due to climate change generated events. Here Africa becomes huge, whereas the US all but disappears.

There are those in climate security who see this kind of disparity as a form of strategic advantage to the US, despite the many issues of migration and disruption that are expected. In short, then, some in the US military-industrial complex are willing to let this kind of scenario play out for the strategic gains it entails. To be fair, others are not. But there’s a funny way that the most cynical view tends to win out in such circles.

The Lancet based its diagram on the 2007 IPCC consensus that a 3-4 degree rise in temperature was what could be expected. Since then, global efforts at CO2 mitigation have largely failed, emissions have risen to new heights and the feedback loops appear to be more virulent than had been expected. Translation: it’s much worse, much faster than was thought in 2007-9. US mortality rates are still going to be a lot lower than Africa’s, but drought, flood, fire and hurricane is not exactly what the term “security” suggests.

We know how to deal with this. It would mean a decentralized, demilitarized and de-industrialized way of life. Sounds good to me. And it may be something that people will be more willing to talk about if the New York city subway floods. Already the expectation is billions of dollars of damages. If we had spent that money on renewables and research back in 2007, perhaps this wouldn’t be happening. It’s not too late. But don’t look to our defunct electoral system for the solution.

Mapping Strike Debt

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Lately everyone has been telling me how tired I look. In part, that’s the cold that everyone in New York seems to have. Partly, it’s a way of saying that I am middle-aged. It’s also that Strike Debt is in full gear and it has been throughout so everyone is, in fact, wiped out. But it continues to be interesting and provocative so we keep doing it.

Over the course of two long discussions yesterday and today, one within Strike Debt and the other at Occupy University, the figure of Strike Debt as a set of intersections arose. It’s not “just” about the debt in other words. It’s about using debt to open new conversations and new approaches that make it possible to organize and conceptualize differently.

So the figure of Strike Debt above is both a map of how debt and debt resistance plays out, and a configuration of how the group might be organized. There are four poles: mutual aid and resistance form one axis, while the local and the (inter)national forms the other. Each site and each axis is in itself a place of intersection and none exists independently. Debt itself, after all, is a set of agreed or compelled relationships. It allows us to explore questions of human interaction, as well as the interface of the human and non-human.

Sets of related terms arise as a result of the interplay across the axes.

Cluster one: Modes of Engagement

Mutual Aid/Jubilee/Gross Domestic Product/Growth/Abolition/The Commons/ Bankruptcy/Refusal/Resistance.

These are different ways of configuring relationships to debt, credit, interest–in short, mediated human interaction in terms of value. They are not linear but reconfigure according to which term in the cluster you stress (like mind-mapping software if you get the geeky reference). So if you stress bankruptcy, it might be as refusal or resistance but it might also have to do with GDP. It might be a way of talking about Jubilee. Growth becomes a question rather than a solution. It might not be growth in conventional terms but growth of leisure time or social services.

Cluster two: Politics of Affect

Calm/Love/Radicalism/Encouraged/Healing/Smile/Feminism/Trust

These are all terms used by participants at the end of the OccU session on Debt and Climate this evening. They are not words often associated with either debt or climate change. The ways in which people worked together to see intersections and commonalities, as well as emerging tactics to engage with these issues, generated this positive sense. Just as it has been crucial to make people feel better about being in debt by talking about it, so does climate change need to seem scaleable. Presenting debt abolition and climate change mitigation as mutually reinforcing solutions–because debt cancellation reduces the need for growth and allows for lower emissions–was more successful than dealing with the two issues separately.

Cluster three: Tactics

 Mapping/Aesthetics/Organizing/Social Cost Accounting/

Stop Shopping/Countervisualizing

Some of these terms might be interchanged with Modes of Engagement and vice-versa: they are intersecting. Mapping, though, emerged repeatedly as a key tactic for debt resistance and climate change mitigation. In short, it’s a fundamental mode of countervisuality. Aesthetics, both in the formal sense relating to artworks, and the generalized sense of bodily perception was also something we wanted to reclaim from the banner to the performance and the street action.

Want to see what this intersection looks like? Check this video promoting the 14N International Strike in Europe:

Vivir Bien: Why Trees Have Standing

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There’s a moment in one of the videos from the early days of OWS that stayed with me after we saw it again last month. Chris, a long-time occupier and Direct Action mainstay, leans into the park from the stairs and says

This is the epicenter of a global revolution!

Massive cheers. It would have been more accurate perhaps to say: “this is the node of the planetary fightback at the epicenter of global media.” Less thrilling, though. Watching Thomas Sankara speak in the videos from 1987, you see a confidence in the forward march of history that now seems so long ago and far away. But his agenda of sustainable, regional and peaceful economies is still a viable alternative. You can see emerging a triangulation of how it might–might–be possible to triangulate it into being.

Node one: Africa

Sankara’s claim that Africa could be the center of an alternative economy seems far-fetched in the era of the Troika consensus. But the rebellion by South Africa’s majority is ongoing, not just in the mining industry but also in trucking and now municipal workers. Unemployment continues to rise and South Africa’s credit rating was just downgraded.  And most of the country’s trade is with Europe, so things are going to get worse. The question is whether calls for land redistribution and the nationalization of the mines might lead to a rethinking of what the economy is intended to do. If, as the strikers hope, its primary purpose is to support the living standards of the majority, then everything would have to change.

Node two: Bolivia

In a classic legal essay from 1972, Christopher Stone asked

Should trees have standing?

Meaning can non-human entities have legal rights? As Stone pointed out, corporations do. And each time an extension of rights occurs, it had previously been “unthinkable” to do so.  Stone proposed that “natural objects,” such as forests, rivers and oceans should have rights. Since then, such basic ideas have come to be enshrined in law but always fiercely opposed by the neo-liberals. For it creates a stalemate between the “rights” of the corporation and those of the natural object.

How can such issues be resolved? In Bolivia, a new proposal for legal rights to the planet that would give a clear direction:

Bolivia’s government will be legally bound to prioritise the wellbeing of its citizens and the natural world by developing policies that promote sustainability and control industry.

This principle is known as Vivir bien, or “Living Well.” The proposed law defines it as follows:

Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.

Bolivia does not have the luxury of considering climate change to be something you can ignore in two Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates (unless you count Romney’s “I Like Coal” sloganeering for West Virginia’s benefit). As the climate changes, Bolivia is running short of drinking water and is also, ironically, at risk of flooding from melting glaciers. Vivir bien is exactly what would motivate the South African grass-roots activism and why should it not?

Node Three: Texas (yes Texas)

While such ideas have routinely been dismissed as “tree-hugging” in the United States, the term is no longer just rhetoric. In East Texas, eco-activists have occupied the trees that have to be cut down for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

There’s plenty of hostility in Texas as you might imagine. Texas land commissioner Jerry Patterson marvelously argues that the pipeline to bring Canadian bitumen to the Gulf:

will create thousands of jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

Perhaps Canadians aren’t foreign? But what about that nasty socialized medicine they have? Sarcasm aside, it’s direct action in defense of vivir bien that might open a space in which the new legal doctrine of planetary non-human rights could take effect. To the immense benefit of humans–well, most of them. Say 99%?

 

Becoming Wild

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Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a dense, emotional film that has the dramatic achievement of being perhaps the first film to create a means to visualize climate resistance. We already have films like the mediocre The Day After Tomorrow that depict climate disaster. Beasts of the Southern Wild gives us a way to begin to imagine wild alternatives to governmentality, without sentimentalizing the prices that have to be paid for that. By mixing magical sequences with cinematic realism, it does for climate resistance what Pan’s Labyrinth did for anti-fascism.

The plot is intricate and so most reviews have concentrated on describing what happens in the lives of Hushpuppy (Quvenshané Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) to the detriment of what is seen, heard and felt. Its scenario depends on the transformation of the climate and rising sea levels. But this is a visceral film, often quite literally, as in a lingering shot of an animal’s intestines, or the disease that kills Wink. It is filmed very tight, meaning that the screen is filled with whatever we are looking at with nothing else to distract us or any means to set it in context. Piles of crustaceans fill the screen, or thickets of dense vegetation, or masses of melting glacial ice. Even the air is thick with dust motes, glinting in the sun, or insect life. The crisp, empty space of the modern cinema is here overflowing with what Jane Bennet calls “vibrant matter.” It’s wild, unbounded and undomesticated.

Such visualization of wild space is resistant to neo-liberalism’s passion for order and its terror of a profit-less wilderness. The commodity drive exists to fill space, whether the private house or the public domain with commodities. To suggest that wild space is always already “full,” or perhaps better, occupied, is to say that maybe the need is not so clear.

In the houses built by the residents of the Bathtub, as they call their low-lying Gulf island, poverty registers as an accumulation of material objects in a small space. The risk of romanticizing deprivation is clearly present. It is negotiated by a contrast with the spaces of governmentality, when the Bathtub is evacuating for “health” reasons after a hurricane. The sanitary but depressing geometric spaces of the shelter show those who don’t have to live in them why homeless people often avoid such spaces. It further suggests that having Hushpuppy narrate the story is not a “child’s eye view,” as most reviews suggest, but the wild view, the untrained and unrestrained way of seeing. Like Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, Hushpuppy sees differently because she refuses the discipline and domination around her.

Wild seeing allows Hushpuppy to visualize her absent mother as or at a lighthouse. There’s a seeming dream sequence when she and the other children visit the lighthouse and find it to be a kind of speakeasy-cum-brothel, where the women all desire to mother the children. They don’t stay, it’s just a trip. And then there are the aurochs, prehistoric creatures, frozen into the ice, who come back to life as the glaciers melt. Hushpuppy can see the aurochs, just as we all breathe atoms of prehistoric air released by ice melt.

The Bathtub folk choose to remain in their flooded and devastated wild dwellings, even at great cost to personal health. The vibrancy of this vitalism is expressed by the driving Cajun soundtrack, one of many similarities between Beasts and Treme. Disaster survival and the physical deprivation that comes with it can, it is suggested, generate meaningful alternatives.

For all the dynamism of this wilding, Beasts is a film about loss and it leaves you feeling devastated. Wink dies and Hushpuppy walks across a flooded causeway into our mutual uncertain future, where the waters are rising, and we don’t know what to do or how to live. This isn’t a perfect film. It begins the possibility of imagining a re-wilding of social space, of the costs we are going to pay as living bodies for the climate change caused by the phantoms of financial debt, and of new ways to visualize that situation. Go see it.

For A Climate Debt Strike

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Yesterday I had a bit of a rant about the destruction of the biosphere, ending in a call for action. It was that piece that got tweeted and FBed more than anything. So what does climate-related direct action look like? At the end of a day of Strike Debt meetings, it became clear: a climate debt strike.

How did we get here? There was a full day of Strike Debt discussion. A two-hour meeting looked at next steps for the movement after S17 in long breakouts. The consensus was to pursue greater networking at local NYC level and at national level. Task forces were created to investigate both processes. The immediate target is October 13, or O13, the European day of debt action, when Strike Debt will be doing solidarity actions.

Next, a debrief from S17. A strong sense here that the day went well for OWS in general and Strike Debt in particular, who were in the thick of things throughout. There was some concern that our messaging didn’t get out in the MSM, but no real surprise about that. On the positive front, The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual was a huge hit everywhere from Occupy Tampa to the Brooklyn Book Fair and the Free University.

At the end of all this a group retired to a local Happy Hour just to kick back. Everyone’s kidding around and suddenly a passionate debate about climate justice has started. Perhaps it was no coincidence that people from Panama, India and Palestine got this moving, calling attention again to the privilege that even a protestor on Wall Street has in relation to residents of underdeveloped nations. The daily threats of toxicity, disease, food insecurity (aka hunger), pollution and sea level rise make daily life in many locations a permanent emergency.

Climate justice activists have long highlighted the “climate debt” that the developed world owes to those places it has underdeveloped. That is to say, developed nations should cut cut their carbon emissions sufficiently far as to leave “room” for currently underdeveloped nations to expand their industrial economies in such a way as to mitigate their everyday emergency.

So far, this concept has won lip-service, some green-washing ads from corporations and not much else. Eco-activism has long concentrated on trying to influence national governments or global governance structures like the United Nations. The collapse of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio earlier this year made it clear that such options are no longer viable.

Just as we have seen with financial justice, the only way that the global one per cent will concede climate justice is if a radical movement forces the issue onto the agenda. We have begun to organize a debt resistance movement in the finance economy. We need to start to organize debt resistance in the climate economy. Which is to say that all debt refusal is also climate debt resistance.

The reason is simple. In order to “pay back” purported “debt” it is necessary to increase the size of the economy. At the present moment that cannot be done without increasing carbon and other toxic emissions, increasing land grabs from indigenous peoples and increasing primary extraction, like tar sands. Debt refusal is not an immoral welching on an obligation. It is at once the political claim that such debts were coerced; and deceptive and the moral claim that the economic growth required to “repay” them must be refused in name of all life.

A debt strike is a climate debt strike. Join the resistance. Strikedebt.org

The Extinction of Natural Time

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Take a moment out of the beautiful fall day to mourn the passing of the biosphere. It seems to have barely registered on the global hive mind that the Arctic sea ice melted this year to an extent never seen before. In a matter of years, not decades, there will be no ice in the Arctic in summer. A world without a North Pole. A biosphere that no longer plays out according to its own rhythm and time but has become a by-product of the capitalist profit/loss cycle.

People often say this is too depressing to think about because it’s so overwhelming. Let’s try and come at it through a single detail. And get angry, not sad.

A scientist from the National Snow and Ice Data Center tried to document the change in the Arctic by measuring ice floes, pieces of ice floating in the sea.

She was unable to find one sufficiently dense to support her weight. In the nineteenth century, when British whaling ships went to exactly the same region of the Arctic, near Spitsbergen (Svalbard in Norwegian, as in the map), the ice was so dense and heavy that they moored their ships on ice floes. They would then use chains to lift whales out of the water to strip their blubber, while counterbalanced with the ice.

 

Visually, in a century we have gone from here, a whaling ship trapped in the ice with other ships operating nearby:

to here, a former whaling site in the summer of 2012, the whaling season:

Baffin Bay in 2012, former whaling site (AFP photo)

This isn’t long in human time. In what used to be geological time, it’s too short to measure. Capitalist time has now eliminated geological time, it’s extinct. This wasn’t supposed to happen until 2050 or later, according to projections made only five years ago.

The cause is the same as that which led the whalers to the Arctic in the first place: the relentless autoimmune destructive force of capitalism’s need for energy. Whalers first hunted commercially in the Bay of Biscay in the sixteenth century. Soon, the animals were extinct there. They turned to walruses and eliminated them. By the late eighteenth century an Arctic whaling boom was in full swing, as whale oil could be used in the textile and lighting industries. So the whales died to keep factories open after dark, as the oil produced by Arctic whales was low quality compared to sperm whale oil. The shift, the working day and the concept of separating time into “work” time and “leisure” time are by-products of the human conquest of diurnal time and space.

By the late nineteenth century, Arctic whales had disappeared in turn and the British industry went fallow for a few decades. Another time we’ll think about whaling as the first paradigm for globalization. The remnant of all this destruction is the continuing Norwegian insistence on hunting whales, despite their extensive oil reserves.

The message of the open Arctic is clear. Capitalism is constitutively incapable of restraining itself. It cannot be reformed or regulated in its quest for energy, as indicated by the insane efforts of governments and corporations to use the melting in the Arctic to drill for more oil. Its only measure of time is the profit cycle, which must always move forward and always creates “externalities,” such as the death of the biosphere.

So don’t mourn the biosphere: organize. It’s time.

How Occupy Has Won the Argument

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A rash of Serious Books by Serious People–the kind who get on the news or NPR–has validated Occupy’s critique of American political economy. Not that they put it that way. But from debt to Big Oil to the economy, it seems that the unwashed anarchist rabble–as those same Serious People see OWS–were right all along.

I’m bit a bit unfair to some of these writers. Joseph Stiglitz, whose term “the one percent” was part of the inspiration for “the 99%,” calls his new book The Price of Inequality, an Occupy-friendly concept. And Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! uses a slogan for a title. The primary conclusion of both writers is that the current economic crisis is in fact a political crisis. It’s at this point that we tend to say, “we know!” However, in the rarefied domain of academic economics, this is heresy. Stiglitz warns mainstream liberals that they are at risk of an Arab Spring:

our own country has become like one of these disturbed places, serving the interests of a tiny elite.

Apart from the Orientalism, the idea that this is new and the suggestion that the 2011 events were a bad thing, I agree!

Of course, what’s at stake in many of “these places” is oil. New Yorker writer Steve Coll has a massive tome out, exploring what he calls the Private Empire built by ExxonMobil. The book uses the judicious tone of his home journal but nonetheless amply reveals how astonishing the power wielded by this “too big to fail” behemoth has become. For example, when agreeing to drill oil in Chad, ExxonMobil and other Big Oil companies secured a thirty-five year compact. It provides that

the State guarantees that no governmental act will be taken in the future, without prior agreement between the parties, against the Consortium which has the effect either directly or indirectly of increasing the obligations or amounts payable by the Consortium or which adversely affects the rights or economic benefits of the Consortium.

As well they might: Coll notes that the $5.3 billion profit made by ExxonMobil when this was signed in 1988 was several times larger than Chad’s entire economy.

This history, and many others of its kind, like the Memorandums of Understanding by which India’s mineral wealth has been handed over to private corporations, indicates that the concept of corporate personhood, complete with “human” rights, was created in the underdeveloped world and then imported to the neocolonial metropole. Even Republican administrations wait to be told what ExxonMobil want. The reviewer of this book for The Nation noted that even Coll’s own foundation has received grants from ExxonMobil–although, to be fair, Coll recused himself from the process.

Coll cites some interesting evidence that ExxonMobil were prepared to accept a carbon tax, while vehemently opposing a cap-and-trade policy for carbon. You wonder why the Obama administration, never one to stand on principle, couldn’t have found that out so that some small limitations on fossil fuel use might have resulted.

Arguably, it’s too late. In an article on Truthdig, Chris Hedges quotes Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,

Our solution is our problem. Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable.

This is Strike Debt’s argument: the “externalities” created by growing the carbon-based economy sufficiently to pay off even a percentage of household and sovereign debt would include disastrous eco-cide. Coll notes in passing that extracting fuel from tar sands uses immense quantities of water, as does fracking. In both cases, the water is horribly toxic afterwards. When we have 63% of US counties in drought, can we really afford to use this water to accelerate climate change and produce more drought? What happens when humans start running short of water in the US? Are humans small enough to fail?

Where there are political arguments in these books, they are not being discussed by either political party. Where there are political implications, they are being drawn out only by the social justice movements. The disturbances have only just begun.

Revenge of the Water Spirits: The Drowning of Capitalism

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There’s an amazing moment in Spike Lee’s film about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Break. Labor organizer Fred Johnston recalls a conversation with a friend in which they agree that Katrina was caused by spirits angry about the loss of African lives during the Middle Passage. The simbi (water spirits) are getting their revenge all right: they’re going to drown capitalism.

Johnston was referring to the “many thousands gone” who died or self-killed during the hellish journey from Africa to slavery. There were infamous moments like the voyage of the Zong, during which the captain threw 138 enslaved people overboard to lighten his load during a storm. And then claimed insurance on them. Turner rendered the scene in his classic painting usually known as The Slave Ship, just after the abolition of slavery.

You can see the presence of the formerly enslaved suspended in the water in the foreground, caught between life and death, between freedom and slavery. The painting suspends realism (because a person weighted with iron thrown into the sea will sink immediately) in order to give proper weight to the moment. At the far right you can see a curious water monster approaching, Turner’s intuitive understanding of the simbi.

For African diaspora cultures have visualized the world as a cosmogram in which the living are separated from the spirits by the ocean. The ocean is a barrier we cross twice, once at birth and again at death, in a cycle that continues. Thus a child’s birth would be celebrated on the eighth day of life, once the spirit had made the decision to remain in the world of the living. For the enslaved, self-killing was a rational choice because it entailed the return of the spirit and its subsequent rebirth in Africa.

On the island of Martinique, the sculptor Laurent Valère has created a powerful monument to three hundred Africans drowned with their slave ship in a storm after they had led a successful revolt.

Laurent Valère, Monument at Anse Cafard, Martinique

The hunched figures are arranged in a triangle evoking the Atlantic triangle created by slavery, looking across the sea in the direction of Africa. They are white, the color of death and of mourning. They have not been sleeping. They have been biding their time.

Now the economic system that sent the slave ships is set to drown in its turn. It is no coincidence that the spirits sent Isaac seven years to the day after Katrina.

Flooding in New Orleans

The point with these Anthropocene hurricanes is not the wind but the water. Like Katrina, Isaac is bringing huge amounts of water with it. As global warming develops, the warm air holds more water vapor. As the ice-caps melt, there is more water in the ocean. As the oceans warm, there is more energy for a storm system to draw on. Put these three together and you have the new once-a-year “storm of the century.”

By 3pm, there had already been nearly ten inches of rain in New Orleans. The storm surge was twelve and a half feet in Plaquemines Parish and some people have had to be rescued off the rooftops. In New York, half-an-inch of rain leads untreated sewage to be flushed directly into the rivers and oceans. We learned last year that a storm surge of five feet would flood much of Manhattan. When–not if–that happens, it’s not going to matter who is in charge of Zuccotti Park–it will belong to the water spirits.

Despite the levee overtoppings, the floods and the massive loss of power, New Orleans is surviving Isaac. But only because $14.5 billion was spent defending it in the last seven years, on top of a century of levee building. What will it take to defend the entire Eastern seaboard? It doesn’t matter, no one will spend it.

Capitalism has been blithely indifferent to climate change. Why? Look at this diagram. On top, the world mapped by quantity of emissions. On the bottom, the world mapped by likely consequences of climate change.

The Lancet, 2009

So it’s easy to see the calculation: the US, Europe and Japan get off lightly, Africa and Asia pay the price, who cares? Only this was made on the basis of the now evidently conservative IPCC reports. This summer has shown a far more accelerated melting of the Arctic ice than anyone has previously predicted. The total disappearance of Arctic ice in summer is now expected by 2030, far sooner than ever imagined. No one really knows what the consequences will be but they will not be good. It’s going to mean flooding becomes the new normal, rain for months on end for some, and drought for others. Just like we’ve been seeing this summer, in fact, with 63% of the U.S. in drought, while other places have flooded.

And what are our lords and masters doing? Debating how to divide the drilling rights in the Arctic. George Monbiot reports:

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk.

The revenge of the spirits is devastating but in a certain way beautiful. Just as the enslaved were driven to choose drowning over slavery, the death of life over social death, so now capitalism is choosing to drown itself rather than die.

Unless we choose to do something about it. S17. S stands for survival. Sorry about that.