Category Archives: Climate Change

X-marks

Posted on by

For all its success, Occupy has had conceptual failures as well. So far, the movement has been aware of the need to address indigenous issues but–at least in New York–we have not got very far with it. By the same token, while people are aware of climate change, it’s been hard to turn it into an action agenda item. It could be that the accelerating disaster of the Keystone XL pipeline serves as the catalyst to bring these crucial questions to the forefront.

Yesterday two votes in the Senate showed that the Keystone advocates continue to gain ground. A proposal to void the requirement for a federal permit to cross the US-Canada border won by 56-42, falling only on the filibuster rule. That means that eleven “Democrats” voted for the pipeline and with two Republicans absent, Big Oil needs only two more votes to get this passed. While the White House is oddly touting this as a victory, a quick look at the list of pro-pipeline Democrats reveals a major overlap with seats the party needs to retain to hold the Senate. Translation: expect a “compromise” soon.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben has become a convert to direct action. Yesterday he wrote:

we need to stop just playing defense against bad projects and go on the offense. The next clear target is subsidies for fossil fuels–why are we paying the richest industry on earth billions in taxpayer dollars?

The Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, along with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, have already passed legislation against the Keystone XL oil pipeline and have adopted the Cochabamba Mother Earth Accord. Debra White Plume explains why in this video.

Now Oglala Lakota people from Pine Ridge in South Dakota have started to take direct action against the pipeline by placing their bodies in the way of trucks carrying its equipment. This Monday 5 March, as Brenda Norrell’s blog Censored News reports:

Lakotas Alex White Plume, Debra White Plume, Andrew Ironshell, Sam Long Black Cat and Don Iron Shell, were arrested at a blockade of tar sands pipeline trucks. Debra White Plume, released from jail in Kyle, South Dakota, said Monday night: “We formed a blockade to stop tar sands oil mine equipment from passing our lands. The truckers told us the corporation office from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the State of South Dakota made a deal to save the truckers $50,000 per truck, there were two trucks, from having to pay $100,000,” Debra White Plume told Censored News. “There were about 50 to 75 people on the blockade at the village of Wanbli in Eagle Nest District on the northern side of the Pine Ridge rez.” Debra White Plume said the trucks were coming from Texas and going to Alberta, Canada to the tar sands oil mine. “They each carried a ‘treater vessel’ which is used to separate gas and oil and other elements.”

The protestors were, ironically enough, arrested by Tribal Police for disorderly conduct, the catch-all offense that has been widely used by the NYPD.

No doubt it was entirely a coincidence that the next day the New York Times ran one of those long social issue pieces about alcoholism in indigenous populations: on the very same Pine Ridge reservation. This is not to minimize the issue but there was no mention of the Keystone action, the questions of sovereignty and Treaty observance that it raises.

I’m reminded of Scott Richard Lyons’s work on the signing of those treaties and the x-marks that were used to designate native signers:

The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency.

Lyon suggests that all the Indian nations are in effect x-marks. It might be interesting to think of Occupy sites as x-marks as well, places where we try to do what we want under conditions that are not of own making. And then get evicted whenever they want. One of those conditions is that we occupy land that is already occupied and cannot do otherwise.

Decolonize Wall St

This problem was and is recognized but has been hard to address. An issue like Keystone allows us to demonstrate actual solidarity with First Nation peoples in Canada and indigenous peoples in the US, creating a new space between Occupy and Un-Occupy that could be where we should go next, a horizontal action against the inequality that is constitutive of the settler colony.

 

Order? Or Chaos? Love Rosa

Posted on by

Rosa Luxemburg as Cindy Sherman

Today is the birthday of (radical, disabled, Jewish) Rosa Luxemburg. She’s 141. Her idea for the mass (or general) strike is going strong. In 1906 she wrote:

The overthrow of absolutism is a long, continuous social process, and its solution demands a complete undermining of the soil of society; the uppermost part be placed lowest and the lowermost part placed highest; the apparent “order” must be changed to a “chaos,” and the apparently anarchistic chaos must be changed into a new order.

It was expressions like that which once got her expelled from the canon of orthodoxy but make her seem all the more relevant today. Substitute “globalization” for “absolutism” and it reads like something from an Occupy pamphlet.

Let’s once again try and make visible the chaos of financial globalization that undermines its own substrate, the oceans by which it delivers its goods in steel containers. Their purported order is creating natural and social chaos.

Design for the Olympic monument: the AcelorMittal "Orbit" by Anish Kapoor

The monument above is Anish Kapoor’s “Orbit,” designed to be the symbol of the London 2012 Olympics. It is being financed by ArcelorMittal and their chair Lakshmi Mittal, held to be the wealthiest man in Britain at about $23 billion or so. Readers of O2012 will remember this firm as one whose blast furnaces in France are currently under occupation by a threatened workforce.

Kapoor’s peculiar construct appears to be a capitalized deformation of Tatlin’s monument to the Third International, designed in 1919, the very year of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder at the hands of the forces of “order.” For Tatlin, steel was a modern material, forging a new way to see and understand the international.

Tatlin "Monument for the Third International" 1919

For Kapoor, it appears now to be a means to visualize planetary networks, as if seen from orbit, but rendered as a perhaps unintentionally revealing chaos. The point perhaps is to show how steel, the epitome of “strength,” can also be rendered flexible, neo-liberalism’s favorite word. “Flexible” means lower wages, higher profits, lower corporate taxes, longer hours and lower benefits.

And it also means flexible interpretations of data and what, in a naive way, one might call the truth. In this form of flexibility, steel furnaces are renewable energy now, once again at the behest of our friends ArcelorMittal:

AK Steel of Middletown wants to build a $310 million power plant that would use the foul gases from its blast furnace as a fuel rather than a waste gas that it must by law now flare. ArcelorMittal in Cleveland is interested in the technology, said a spokeswoman. AK Steel has already won a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for this first-of-its-kind U.S. power generator…The proposal also has the blessing of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because it would produce something of value from a dangerous waste gas. The company therefore has asked lawmakers to amend Ohio’s green energy law and classify the electricity generated with blast furnace gases as “renewable energy,” even though the blast furnace itself is fueled with coke, a substance made from coal.

Coke by-products are now “renewable energy,” steel companies are getting “green” grants and their order is chaos.

Today a review essay in Science examines the dramatic acidification of the ocean as a result of the continued acceleration of CO2 emissions like, say, blast furnace waste gases. The process they describe is literally chaotic in the scientific sense of multiply interacting strands of causation. It’s visualized like this:

Diagram of Occean acidification

To follow the diagram: black is reduced carbon. Yellow represents reduced alkalinity. whereas blue is increases in alkanization offsetting acidification. Red is increased acidity. Simply put, the vastly increased CO2 in the air overwhelms all the feedback loops and acidifies the sea to a dramatic extent.

Their conclusions are clear:

the current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 My [ie 300 million years] of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.

That means a system in which the change cannot be predicted by anything that has happened for three hundred million years. Or so. Their order is creating insane chaos.

What can we learn from Rosa in response to this chaos? Let’s refuse to get depressed: that’s what Big Pharma exists for, to medicate us with its happy pills. Luxemburg wants us to act–through the act comes real education, she says.

No more corporate “order” visualized as giant, phallic monuments. Time for some anarchic “chaos,” from the chaos of the biosphere to those of lived relations. MayDay is coming, Rosa’s day:

 a festival [that] may naturally be raised to a position of honor as the first great demonstration under the aegis of mass struggle.

 

Seeds of Democracy and the Smog of Law

Posted on by

Today was the inaugural Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park seed swap and seed library. Just to be sure we got the point, a federal judge rejected a class action lawsuit by organic farmers against Monsanto. Chemical culture got a boost from the UK government who decided that their own Parliamentary recommendations on clean air are too expensive, even though the pollution is acknowledged to kill thousands a year. To adapt Gandhi, we might say that Western democracy would be a very good idea.

Seed swapping at Liberty/Zuccotti today

Occupy the Food Supply’s day of action began outside the Stock Exchange and then marched to Liberty. We heard from David Murphy (below), an Iowa-based activist with Food Democracy Now! about the threat posed by Monsanto’s aggressive patent campaign for its genetically-modified corn. He held up an ear of Oaxaca corn that he had acquired at the recent California seed swap (covered here).

Murphy with indigenous corn

Because it has been decreed by agribusiness that corn is yellow and that other forms are therefore not corn, this green cob is a biological misfire in their view. In fact, Monsanto used the food crisis to push GMO corn into Mexico:

After originally denying authorization for a pilot program to cultivate its GM corn in Sinaloa last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) just gave the company the green light to plant genetically modified yellow corn resistant to the herbicide glyphosate as a part of a pilot program in Tamaulipas’ current agricultural cycle. According to the National Commission for the Use and Understanding of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Tamaulipas is home to 16 of the 59 remaining strains of native corn.

The risk of contamination between the GMO corn and native varietals is clear to everyone except agribusiness and their allies, who don’t care. Nonetheless, Monsanto also aggressively sue farmers who find themselves accidentally growing Monsanto’s patented pesticide-resistant plants because of seed dispersal. That is to say, they not only patent life, they sue it.

The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and several other growers and organizations filed a counter-suit against Monsanto to prevent the company from taking such hostile action. Regrettably but unsurprisingly, today we learned that:

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a “transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists.”

The hard lesson here is that seed democracy is unlikely to be fostered by a legal system whose prime function is the defense of “property” rights.

Against this grim background, Liberty was filled with would-be urban growers collecting and swapping seeds. The organizers had sensibly brought an extensive collection, which they gave away in packets and then encouraged us to sub-divide amongst ourselves.

Seed distribution

The promise exchanged was that everyone who grew plants should let a portion run to seed and bring them back to the next seed swap, or to create a seed library. On the way downtown, I happened to read an essay by Jeff Sharlet about OWS in which he spoke of the “joyousness” and “beauty” of what he called “the physical democracy” of Zuccotti during the encampment. In the more confrontational atmosphere post-eviction, we sometimes forget what that was like and how good it felt. This event reminded me and gave me hope.

And in case you wondered why we occupied in the first place, a quick look over the Atlantic shows why. In November 2011, a Parliamentary committee reported that air pollution caused over 30,000 death in 2008. EU air quality standards are being flouted wildly in London, whose air is notorious.

Welcome to London

Yet today the appalling heirs to Mrs Thatcher (another quick boo for Meryl Streep here, please) in power in the UK dismissed the issue as generating “disproportionate costs.” Disproportionate to whom? Certainly not to the one in five Londoners whose deaths are attributable to the pollution, a figure the government did not dispute. And, let’s see, who thinks we’ll have a debate about London air quality before the Olympics in the way that we did before the Beijing Olympics?

These two issues are linked biologically as well as conceptually. Aldo Gonzalez, a Zapotec engineer who has led the struggle against GMO corn in Mexico, points out that indigenous varietals evolved over 10,000 years in a great diversity of climates and altitudes. It may very well be literally life-saving to have some of these hardier plants at our disposal once the neo-liberals have had their way with the climate.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When the Occupy movement began, the Very Important People wanted to know what our demands were. When the courts and the representative governments reject basic claims to life–except should one happen to be a foetus–there was and is no point in making demands to them. You have to sow democracy.

 

 

Futures of Occupy

Posted on by

As much as I have wanted to stress the present and future present of Occupy, I keep getting asked to do events or to write about the future of Occupy. I’m coming to think that the “future of Occupy” would be changing the terms of the way that the “economy” is discussed. From this perspective, we can see how two parallel, failing discourses of governance regarding austerity and climate change need to be converged and reversed.

The prevailing governance requires austerity to placate the bond market, even as it also wants to promote growth to generate revenues to make future bond payments. It dismisses the possibility of climate change being a present-day issue, displacing it to a remote future. If Occupy is truly “a state of mind,” as many post-eviction banners have had it, then one way to express it would be to present a radical alternative to this neo-liberal consensus.

Present austerity is actively producing the societal emergency it claims to be solving from Greece to Portugal, Ireland and Italy. It seems as if bond-holders hope to recoup as much of their investment as they can as soon as possible, ignoring the future social ramifications of the crisis thereby produced. The Greek elections in April will undoubtedly be, shall we say, interesting. There are rumors from France that the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen may finish first in the Presidential elections: if she is in a run-off against the Socialist, it is uncertain that right-wing voters can be relied on to rally to Hollande. So neo-liberalism seems actively willing to gamble with the rise of the far right in order to sustain profits.

The vague hope for “growth” as a solution to the social crisis fails to recognize that all industrial and manufacturing growth at present is going to entail higher levels of carbon emissions. In New York today, I saw a cherry tree in blossom: on February 19. Yet when the New York Times published today about the impossibility of ice-fishing in Minnesota due to the thin ice this winter, the phrase climate change was not used. The deniers have pushed the debate out of the liberal mainstream.

In a report published yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists entitled Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public’s Expense, the list of smear and diversion tactics described is as striking as the direct connection to the polluting corporations.:

the key driver of political interference in federal science: the inappropriate influence of companies with a financial stake in the outcome…

 

In 2010, the oil and gas sector donated more than $10 million to PACs. The largest donors were Koch Industries ($1.2 million) and ExxonMobil ($1 million).

For this, the oil and gas industry obtained the active support of a Republican House. A larger investment will secure the Senate and independence from the Presidency.

There is a further irony that one of the few government interventions into the recession that appears to have been very successful was also one that does most damage in terms of climate change–the auto industry “bailout.” After reading the UCS report, it is hard not to suspect that the same players that have targeted climate science were comfortable letting the government support the car industry, while being happy to see that mass transit options were defeated.

In the background lurks Keystone XL.

Al Gore's comment on Keystone

Al Gore has tried to characterize the tar sands campaign as “addiction,” part of the “addiction to oil” meme that is now a cliché. My feeling is that the neo-liberal corporate machine is constantly harping on Keystone not just to gain approval of the pipeline. The Canadians seem set on producing the “oil” and the Chinese will buy it, meaning that the multinationals will make their money. However, the “controversy” makes it less and less likely that the Democrats in Congress and the President will campaign on climate issues.

Therefore, any return to “growth,” the only solution that neo-liberal capital can offer, will not only be to the profit of corporations but structured around fossil fuel extraction and transport, leading to the continued success of the spectacularly profitable oil and gas sector. Mainstream liberalism nonetheless continues to believe that discussion can produce a return to what the UCS call “transparency and accountability in the use of science” and, by extension, in politics.

Occupy knows that this future is not going to happen. The future we’re likely to get is a willingness to “liquiduate everything” in the newly-fashionable phrase of depression era Treasury Secretrary Andrew W. Mellon. Fossil fuel generated growth will promote both greater climate change and further political chaos and extremism, funded by the unrestrained PACs. The Occupy encampments actively performed an alternative to that future. Other, unexpected ways have to be found to visualize it now, to make the connection between “prosperity without growth,” ending climate change and ending political corruption.

Occupy Climate Change (again!)

Posted on by

If the climate is the economy, then there is a political economy of climate. In the past few days, that politics has become noticeably visible in the U. S., reminding us once again why we occupied Wall Street and not, say, City Hall. The Wall Street Journal has aggressively launched a campaign of absolute climate ignorance–meaning both that they refuse to know what is patently known and also that they are campaigning for us to simply ignore the climate. It is no coincidence that Republicans are again pushing for the disastrous Keystone pipeline–and, big surprise, the Democrats are beginning to cave.

Thanks to the U.K. Guardian, I became aware that the Wall St Journal had launched a manifesto under the unintentionally hilarious title “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27, 2012. Yesterday, scientists published a rebuttal, which, while absolutely right on the substance, once again failed to take the measure of the political economy of climate. Their call is for respect for their expertise. A look at the brazen effrontery of the Journal‘s claims should have made it clear that this is a waste of time.

The piece begins with a long palaver, familiar climate denier rhetoric, that there are a “large and growing number” of scientists that disagree with climate change: in fact 97% of published refereed articles support the diagnosis, making it clearly settled science. The WSJ takes it up a notch by claiming that there is no perceived warming of the planet, flying in the face not just of all data but now of common sense.

However, they are just getting warmed up. Their next move is to go into Michele Bachmann territory:

the fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth.

There is no point in rebutting this kind of argument because it has departed from the norms of public debate, as has so much neo-liberal rhetoric in this election year. However, they have still more to say. Why, they ask are scientists afraid to question global warming, as they call it:

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have detailed how cold war ideology and those promoting it have been co-opted into climate denial. Nonetheless, even by red-baiting standards, this is pretty exceptional stuff.

It might seem that this piece doesn’t matter, it’s just more red meat for the Republican base: but the Tea Party does not read the Wall Street Journal. And this denialism has now produced its own “policy” proposal:

the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now.

That’s right–no controls at all because the “modest” warming will be beneficial anyway and cost-benefit analysis is always right, right?

In the rebuttal, the real climate scientists rightly observe:

most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert

It would be like asking your dentist about cardiology, they say. Forced to waste space rebutting the various allegations, it is only in the last paragraph that the group can hint at an alternative political economy:

In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.

Whether by choice or, more likely from space or editorial restrictions imposed by the Journal, they don’t give specific examples.

The neo-liberals, however, have one: the Keystone XL pipeline. While taking a break from throwing filmmakers out of Congress yesterday, Republicans launched yet another bid to have the pipeline approved. Opposing the pipeline are “hard-left environmentalists,” according to this logic, using the WSJ rhetoric, standing in the way of American jobs and energy security for ideological reasons. Even according to the pipeline’s most enthusiastic proponents, the maximum job creation would be some 20,000 jobs. The reality might be less than half that.

Obama and the Democrats are stuck: having fudged the issue of climate change into so-called energy security and “green” jobs, they have little space to maneuver. Yesterday the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid started talking about a deal. Expect a “sensible” compromise in which the pipeline is routed away from the Sand Hills in Nebraska and there’s some boiler plate about not exporting the oil. None of the politicians will talk about the huge increase in carbon emissions that will result from using this heavy oil. For James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first detected global warming, if we go there, it’s “game over” for efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Pipeline Protest, Nov. 2011

Keystone activists already undertook a successful action of civil disobedience at the White House last November, when 12,000 demonstrated and many were arrested, including Bill McKibben. Now it’s important to realize that “Keystone” has become the symbol of a political economy that actively chooses to ignore all questions of climate. Remember, Transcanada, the promoters of the pipeline, are also the owners of Zuccotti Park. The lesson is that we cannot “demand” the cancellation of the pipeline, we have to make it an impossibility by our own actions.

I’m going to say this again and I’m going to keep saying it: occupy climate change.