Transcript Climate justice resurfaces amidst New York’s corporate sharks By Patrick Bond (published in Telesur), 24 September 2014 The world’s largest-ever march against climate change on Sunday brought 400,000 people to the streets of New York, starting a lively parade at Central Park. On Tuesday, 120 of the world’s political leaders – notably not including the Chinese and Indians – gathered 25 blocks away at the United Nations. The message they got from society was symbolised by the march route: instead of heading towards the UN building, the activists headed the other way, west. This directional choice reveals that hope for action on climate change comes not from the apparently paralysed heads of state and their corporate allies, who again consistently failed on the most powerful challenge society has ever faced: to make greenhouse gas emissions cuts necessary to halt certain chaos. Instead, momentum has arisen largely from grassroots activists, even those fighting under the worst conditions possible, amidst denialism, apathy, corporate hegemony, widespread political corruption and pervasive consumer materialism. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the place which according to Pew Research polling of major countries, suffers the second most poorly educated citizenry on climate (only 40 percent acknowledge it is a crisis): the United States itself. (Keep travelling west and the country with the least knowledge of climate – only 39 percent are informed – emerges on the horizon: China. In Brazil, awareness is 76 percent.) So the main encouragement offered by this march, for me as a witness to similar but smaller outpourings of protest at UN Summits in Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, and Warsaw between 2009-13, comes from the harsh terrain crossed, especially at gaudy Times Square: amongst the most culturally insane, ecologically untenable and politically barren on earth. The US not suffers a congressional science committee led by Republican Party dinosaurs who deny climate change, but its civil society is populated by far too many single-issue campaigning NGOs unable to see outside their silos, defeatist environmentalists many of whom are coopted by big business, and mild-mannered trade unions scared to engage in class and environmental struggles. Nevertheless, it is here in the US that the most extraordinary victories have been won by climate activists against coal-fired power plants (300 have either been shut or prevented from being constructed). In addition to a huge battle against Canadian tar-sand oil imports, which included 1200 arrests at the White House three years ago, there are countless micro-struggles against fossil fuel extraction and refining sites, whose activists made up the most vibrant delegations at the march. Many of the battles involve black, Native American, Latino and low-income people, who because of an exceptionally wicked history of environmental racism – akin to South Africa’s systematic dumping of pollution on blacks – have had to take leadership where the ‘Big Green’ NGOs comfortable in Washington DC have failed miserably: insisting on justice as a central component of social-ecological harmony. This movement named itself ‘Environmental Justice’ in 1982 when deadly toxins were dumped in a North Carolina landfill and African-American communities fought back. In earlier times, the cry was ‘Not In My Back Yard!’ (Nimby) – but as critical mass emerged and links became clear between oppressed people who saw that their plight was not just local racism but systemic ecocide, it became ‘Not On Planet Earth!’ (Nope!). As climate activists increasingly became concerned with justice since the early 2000s, beginning perhaps most forcefully with Ecuadoran eco-feminist NGO Accion Ecologica’s work in the Amazon, slogans rang out: ‘Leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sand in the land, the shale gas under the grass.’ Beyond just conservation, these slogans reflected front-line concerns as well as the need for the Global North to pay its climate debt and begin a Just Transition to post-carbon civilisation. In New York on Sunday, a renewed Climate Justice Alliance – a name I last heard in Copenhagen five years ago – was the main network connecting dozens of these struggles by people of colour (especially Indigenous Peoples) across North America. They offer a vision that includes a fairer distribution of costs and benefits of climate policy, and a transformative view of a world economy that must go post-carbon and post-profit if our species and countless others are to survive. What the march did, better than any other event in history, was demonstrate the unity of activists demanding genuine emissions cuts and government funding of an alternative way of arranging society. Whether public transport, renewable energy, organic agriculture oriented to vegetarian diets, new production systems, a shift in our consumption norms, new ways of developing cities (so as not to resemble ghastly US suburban wastelands) and even ‘zero-waste’ disposal strategies, the huge crowd showed support for genuine post-carbon alternatives. Public health activists in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power warned of resurgent opportunistic infections thanks to climate change. Anti-war activists connected the dots between global warming and Middle East and African oil, as well as renewed water wars. Democracy activists noted the Koch brothers’ and other fossil fuel corporations’ malign influence in Washington and state capitals. Dozens more such groups related their particular concerns to our more general survival. Even better, not a single sign I witnessed over six hours traipsing back and forth from start to finish promoted establishment ‘fixes’. We have been bombarded with ‘false solutions’ by business and their government allies in climate policy debates the past fifteen years: carbon trading, carbon capture and storage (‘clean coal’), lacing the air with sulphur as a coolant, dropping iron filings in the ocean to create algae blooms (to suck up CO2), biofuels which cause landgrabbing, nuclear energy, genetically modified organisms and other geo-engineering frauds. That was surprising because the social media campaigning group Avaaz.org had paid for signs plastering New York subways this week, hinting at corporate greenwashing. “What puts hipsters and bankers in the same boat?”, one Avaaz advert asked, on a backdrop of ocean water, illustrating the commonality of our plight. This was also a reference to the October 2012 flooding of Wall Street by Superstorm Sandy, shutting off the subway as waters rose to the tune of $60 billion in damages – a profound wake-up call to the climate-sleepy, politically backward island of Manhattan. Sorry, Avaaz allies, in my experience nothing but trouble comes from inviting bankers into coalition. After all, they cannot even sort out their own industry’s messes, and evidence of their involvement in climate politics is appalling. Banker logic promotes carbon trading, in which the air itself is privatised and sold to the highest bidder. It has been a disastrous experiment in the European Union since 2005 where carbon credit prices fell nearly 90 percent amidst persistent scamming. Many feared that for-profit ‘Green Economy’ gimmicks like carbon trading – resurgent now in California, China, South Africa, Brazil and Korea – would result from a big march lacking a central demand. As activist-writer Arun Gupta put it the day before the march, in Counterpunch ezine: “This is one of those corporate-designed scams that in the past has rewarded the worst polluters with the most credits to sell and creates perverse incentives to pollute, because then they can earn money to cut those emissions. So we have a corporate-designed protest march to support a corporate-dominated world body to implement a corporate policy to counter climate change caused by the corporations of the world, which are located just a few miles away but which will never feel the wrath of the People’s Climate March.” It was a valid fear, yet Gupta’s critique proved excessively cynical. The prevalence of eco-socialist and anarchist marchers generated repeated anti-capitalist slogans. No one believes that the UN promise to ‘put a price on carbon’ can incrementally address the crisis, given how erratically the trading mechanisms have so far set that price, in a world continually battered by financial speculation. So on Monday, several more thousand hard-core activists turned out at “Flood Wall Street” which the Occupy Wall Street movement helped prepare. The planning session I attended was beautifully illustrated by activists using the water metaphor as a way to show participants the ebb and flow of people, attempting to block roads and access to the stock market and nearby banks, amidst an anticipated police crack-down. Even though New York City now has a progressive Democratic Party mayor, Bill de Blasio, there continue to be persistent police abuses, what with the return of the notorious chief Bill Bratton. But on Monday from 9am-6pm, 3000 activists took first Battery Park at the island’s southern tip, then achieved a seven-hour long occupation of Broadway at the site of the Wall Street raging bull statue. Though police ultimately arrested 100, what with the world’s media glare they were under pressure from de Blasio not to bust heads in the process. The crowd had been revved up by Canadian writer Naomi Klein whose new book This Changes Everything explicitly challenges capitalism as a mode of production. And from Cape Town, so too did Archbishop Desmond Tutu again call for divestment from fossil-fuel corporations, and reinvestment in post-carbon technologies. The UN heard mostly meaningless babble from heads of state on Tuesday – for example, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma trying to pretend that three massive new coal-fired power plants, widespread fracking, vast increases in coal exports and deep-sea oil drilling all underway now can be made consistent with cutting emissions by 34 percent by 2020, as he promised in Copenhagen. But the hundreds of thousands who turned out on Sunday and a hundred thousand more across the world who had solidarity marches show conclusively that while there remains paralysis above, there is movement below. Climate justice has just received a new lease on life. Archbishop Desmond Tutu Calls For ‘End Of Fossil Fuels Era’ By Antonia Blumberg (The Huffington Post) As the UN Climate Summit approaches, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has recorded a new video calling for “the end of the fossil fuel era. The destruction of the earth environment is the human rights challenge of our time,” Tutu said. Uploaded to YouTube by The Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, the video addressed rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate degradation which wreak havoc primarily on the poor and underprivileged. Time is running out,Tutu urged. Tutu called the summit a “decisive moment in the struggle to maintain God’s Earth.” But the UN alone can only do so much, Tutu said. Independent governments and world leaders must also step up to the challenge to protect the environment for future generations. The archbishop wrote an article for The Guardian in May saying, “We need an apartheid-style boycott to save the planet. There is no excuse not to prioritize the earth, Tutu wrote, for climate change affects us all. He encouraged colleges, companies and faith organizations to divest from fossil fuels, as the World Council of Churches has done. To serve as custodians of creation is not an empty title,” Tutu wrote. “It requires that we act, and with all the urgency this dire situation demands.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/19/tutu-fossil-fuels_n_5849436.html Desmond Tutu: We fought apartheid. Now climate change is our global enemy Desmond Tutu (The Observer) 21 September 2014 On the eve of the UN Climate Summit, Desmond Tutu argues that tactics used against firms who did business with South Africa must now be applied to fossil fuels to prevent human suffering Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth. As a species, we have endured world wars, epidemics, famine, slavery, apartheid and many other hideous consequences of religious, class, race, gender and ideological intolerance. People are extraordinarily resilient. The Earth has proven pretty resilient, too. It’s managed to absorb most of what’s been thrown at it since the industrial revolution and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Until now, that is. Because the science is clear: the sponge that cushions and sustains us, our environment, is already saturated with carbon. If we don’t limit global warming to two degrees or less we are doomed to a period of unprecedented instability, insecurity and loss of species. Fossil fuels have powered human endeavour since our ancestors developed the skills to make and manage fire. Coal, gas and oil warm our homes, fuel our industries and enable our movements. We have allowed ourselves to become totally dependent, and are guilty of ignoring the warning signs of pending disaster. It is time to act. As responsible citizens of the world – sisters and brothers of one family, the human family, God’s family – we have a duty to persuade our leaders to lead us in a new direction: to help us abandon our collective addiction to fossil fuels, starting this week in New York at the United Nations Climate Summit. Reducing our carbon footprint is not just a technical scientific necessity; it has also emerged as the human rights challenge of our time. While global emissions have risen unchecked, real-world impacts have taken hold in earnest. The most devastating effects of climate change – deadly storms, heat waves, droughts, rising food prices and the advent of climate refugees – are being visited on the world’s poor. Those who have no involvement in creating the problem are the most affected, while those with the capacity to arrest the slide dither. Africans, who emit far less carbon than the people of any other continent, will pay the steepest price. It is a deep injustice. The United Nations deserves kudos for its leadership on human rights issues. But on climate change, it has run up against governments and leaders of industry who have until now put short-term economic and political goals ahead of our collective long-term survival. We can no longer tinker about the edges. We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there were no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow. As a matter of urgency we must begin a global transition to a new safe energy economy. This requires fundamentally rethinking our economic systems, to put them on a sustainable and more equitable footing. I am not without hope. When we, humans, walk together in pursuit of a righteous cause, we become an irresistible force. There are many ways that all of us can fight climate change: by not wasting energy, for instance. But these individual measures will not, the scientists assure us, make a big enough difference. And they may not be appropriate for the world’s poor. We can boycott events, sports teams and media programming sponsored by fossil fuel companies; demand that their advertisements carry health warnings; organise car-free days and other platforms to build broader societal awareness; and ask our religious communities to speak out on the issue from their various pulpits. We can encourage energy companies to spend more of their resources on the development of sustainable energy products, and we can reward those companies that demonstrably do so by using their products to the exclusion of others. Just as we argued in the 1980s that those who conducted business with apartheid South Africa were aiding and abetting an immoral system, we can say that nobody should profit from the rising temperatures, seas and human suffering caused by the burning of fossil fuels. We can encourage more of our universities and municipalities, foundations, corporations, individuals and cultural institutions to cut their ties to the fossil fuel industry. To divest, and invest, instead, in renewable energy. To move their money out of the problem and into the solutions. We can urge our governments to invest in sustainable practices and stop subsidising fossil fuels; and to freeze further exploration for new fossil energy sources. The fossil reserves that have already been discovered exceed what can ever be safely used. Yet companies spend half a trillion dollars each year searching for more fuel. They should redirect this money toward developing clean energy solutions. We can support our leaders to make the correct moral choices and to avoid undue industry influence that blocks the political will to act on climate change. Through the power of our collective action we can hold those who rake in the profits accountable for cleaning up their mess. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Young people across the world have identified climate change as the biggest challenge of our time, and already begun to do something about it. Over the last three or four years, we have seen the rise of a new civil society divestment movement to stand alongside the scientists, environmentalists and social activists who have been challenging the moral standing of the fossil fuel industry. Once again, it is a global movement led by students and faith groups, along with hospitals, cities, foundations, corporations and individuals. It is a moral movement to persuade fossil fuel companies away from a business model that threatens our very survival. My prayer is that humankind takes its first tangible steps in New York this week – as a collective – to move beyond the fossil fuel era. There is a word we use in South Africa that describes human relationships: Ubuntu. It says: I am because you are. My successes and my failures are bound up in yours. We are made for each other, for interdependence. Together, we can change the world for the better. Who can stop climate change? We can. You and you and you, and me. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so that began in the genesis of humanity, when God commanded the earliest human inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, “to till it and keep it”. To “keep” it; not to abuse it, not to make as much money as possible from it, not to destroy it. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/21/desmond-tutu-climate-change-is-the-global-enemy Heirs of Billionaire Oil Tycoon John D. Rockefeller Join Growing Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement In major climate divestment news, the Rockefeller family, which made their vast fortune on oil, has announced it will begin divesting from fossil fuel companies. The heirs of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller are joining a growing movement of institutions and wealthy individuals who are pledging to divest from oil, coal and natural gas companies. We speak to Scott Wallace, co-chair of the Wallace Global Fund, which has coordinated the Divest-Invest effort. He is the grandson of Henry Wallace, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president and ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket. Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: Neil Young, singing his new song, “Who’s Gonna Stand Up and Save the Earth?” Neil shared his song with Democracy Now! ahead of Sunday’s People’s Climate March. You can listen to the full song at our website, democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to the growing fossil fuel divestment movement. The Rockefeller family, which made their vast fortune on oil, has announced it will begin divesting from fossil fuel companies. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is joining other foundations and wealthy individuals today to announce pledges to divest from fossil fuel companies. Together, these institutions hold over $50 billion in total assets. In a statement, Stephen Heintz, an heir of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, said, quote, “We are quite convinced that if he were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy,” unquote. According to the Divest-Invest coalition, more than 650 individuals and 180 institutions have pledged to divest from fossil fuels. This morning, billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer announced he’ll divest, as well. The Rockefellers will officially make their divestment pledge at a news conference today. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu will deliver a video message at the event. ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU:: It is time to change the profit incentive by demanding legal liability for unsustainable environmental practices. Encourage governments to stop accepting funding from the fossil fuel industry. Such funds erode governments’ responsibilities as managing custodians of our world. Divest from fossil fuels and invest in a clean energy future, benefiting the world’s majority. It is no longer acceptable for any of us to seek to profit from systems and industries that threaten our values. Move your money out of the problem and into solutions. AMY GOODMAN: That’s South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. For more, we’re joined by a man who lives half the year in South Africa and half here. We’re joined by Scott Wallace, co-chair of the Wallace Global Fund, which has coordinated the Divest-Invest effort to recruit foundations to divest. The Wallace Global Fund supports many organizations, including Democracy Now! Scott Wallace is an attorney who has previously served as legal counsel on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice and the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. He’s also the grandson of Henry Wallace, who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president and ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket. Scott Wallace, welcome to Democracy Now! SCOTT WALLACE: Good morning, Amy. And thanks for all that you do. AMY GOODMAN: Well, today you are going to be making a major announcement with the Rockefellers and other heads of foundations about divestment. Talk about what you’re going to be doing. SCOTT WALLACE: Well, we’re going to be announcing this afternoon that 50 additional foundations are divesting, representing $50 billion in total assets, and over 600 individual investors with tons of money. This is building on the movement that started on college campuses and that Bill McKibben and others so brilliantly mobilized yesterday to take the streets. It’s just the foundations that have invested in climate solutions with their grant dollars are finally deciding that they also have to invest their entire endowments consistent with her programmaticals. AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of the student movement that has launched all of this, I wanted to turn to one of the people I spoke to yesterday in the People’s Climate March. I interviewed Yale student Lex Barlowe of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network. LEX BARLOWE: The Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network is an organization that’s been in the works for a couple of years, since the beginning—since the first, very first, convergence at Swarthmore in 2011. So, yeah, so the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network is trying to coordinate all the over 400 divestment campaigns that we have against fossil fuels on our campuses across the country. We’re really excited to be here at the march today. Fossil fuel divestment has created a huge movement. It’s gone in three years from like 10 schools to over 400. And we’re really working on getting our students in line with this climate justice messaging. We really believe that students have created a movement out of finding this way to leverage their power as students and how they can specifically be in solidarity with front-line communities at their universities, instead of just always going to these communities and going to see what they can do, how can they take action right now on their campuses. AMY GOODMAN: That’s Yale student Lex Barlowe of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network. Yale has announced they will not divest, unlike Stanford, that made a major decision recently. Scott Wallace? SCOTT WALLACE: Right, Stanford is one of the growing number of universities that has decided, under pressure from the students and the Board of Trustees and people, graduates, who have demanded it, to get out of fossil fuels—that’s defined as getting out of the 200 top dirtiest polluters—and to invest in good, clean energy solutions. AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about the Divest-Invest part. So, divest, many might say, “So what? While you have a lot of money, in the long term, the fossil fuel companies have much more. Does it really matter? Your divestment will immediately be bought up by others.” What is your response to that? SCOTT WALLACE: Well, two things. One, it’s an environmental—I mean, an economic and a moral issue. I mean, we have to make a pariah out of these companies. We have to send a message. But it’s also good financial sense. We got out five years ago, completely divested from fossil fuels and invested in clean energy solutions, and we’re ahead of where we would have been. We’ve been keeping track of our benchmark of how we were investing. So we’re doing better. And it’s because the market is starting to understand that all the reserves that are on the books of Exxon and the major oil companies cannot be burned. Their capitalization reflects these huge reserves that are still in the ground, and we’re now realizing—the financial analysts are realizing that they can’t take them out of the ground. They can’t burn them. So the capitalization, the valuation of the companies is dropping. And over the next decade or so, the value of the stocks will continue to plummet, and the value of the alternatives—solar and wind—now competitive with oil and gas, will make those stocks more valuable. AMY GOODMAN: I mean, a lot of heads of foundations who are listening right now, or pension funds who might be listening right now or watching, might be saying, “You can’t be serious. You can actually make money off of divesting from these extremely lucrative investments?” SCOTT WALLACE: Absolutely. And I would say to the trustees and the universities and the foundations that are concerned about losing money, concerned about risk, I would say, if you like risk, if you want risk, then stay in fossil fuels. That’s the risky alternative. If you want a solid financial future, stick to stuff where you’re not going to get sued when the Deepwater Horizon blows up in the Gulf and you’re not going to lose your market value because of the stranded assets, the oil and coal that has to be left in the ground because we can’t afford to burn it. AMY GOODMAN: Scott Wallace, you live half your time in South Africa. You know Desmond Tutu well. Talk about the other aspects, dimensions of this movement, the moral dimensions, the comparisons to the divestment movement in South Africa. SCOTT WALLACE: Well, as Archbishop Tutu points out in his statement that was released a couple of days ago—and you can find this on the website divestinvest.org—he looks at this as the human rights challenge of our time. And from living in Africa for the last 10 years, we see that the consequences of global warming are visited on the people who have the least to do with creating it—the poorest, the most vulnerable in the low-lying areas without the homes that are strong enough to resist the flooding, and the people who don’t have the money to deal with the drought and the famine that comes with global warming. And that’s Desmond Tutu’s concern. This is a practice of the developed world which is visited upon the less-developed world. AMY GOODMAN: The headline of The New York Times today, and it was, you know, about 12 hours the front piece of their website, “Heirs to an Oil Fortune Join the Divestment Drive.” It begins: “John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels.” Of course, the significance—ExxonMobil, direct descendent of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company—of the Rockefeller family pulling out of fossil fuels? SCOTT WALLACE: It’s huge. I mean, it gets fantastic attention. It’s the definition of irony, to have Standard Oil, Exxon, the heirs now saying, “We’ve got to move on.” And they can, if they would transition to clean energy sources. And as I say, they are becoming competitive in pricing, so I don’t know why—BP used to say they were “Beyond Petroleum.” And they haven’t acted on that. But I think the point of this movement is to issue a challenge to the companies, and as Archbishop Tutu talks about, we should have some accountability from those companies for the harm that they’re doing. AMY GOODMAN: The significance just learning today that Tom Steyer is going to divest? I believe he was marching in the people’s march yesterday. SCOTT WALLACE: Yeah, he is our Koch brother. He is the leader of the billionaire movement to try to push back against what the Koch brothers are doing. And I think many people have talked about the flow of money, of oil money, into elections, and of corporate money. And he is right, and Bobby Kennedy is right. We’ve got to— AMY GOODMAN: He runs a major hedge fund, Steyer. SCOTT WALLACE: He runs a hedge fund. I think he has completely gotten out of the hedge fund, but he now runs this movement, this movement that invests in politicians that are going to make a pledge to do something about climate change. AMY GOODMAN: This is NextGen. SCOTT WALLACE: Called NextGen—I think it’s Climate Solutions. And he is making a huge difference. He’s trying to inject an electoral politics angle into this movement. AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, the issue of foundations actually making money off of divestment. What are the kinds of companies that you are investing in or areas that you’re investing in, as you pull out your full investment from fossil fuels? And when you say fossil fuels, you’re talking coal? SCOTT WALLACE: Coal, oil and natural gas, fracking—the whole works, anything that comes from fossils. And investing in solar, wind, biomass. You can buy shares in Tesla Corporation. I mean, it’s the Motor Trend Car of the Year. You can make a lot of nice money off the clean energy solutions. And I think what’s so magical about this movement is that it’s led by ordinary people. It’s led by the students who were out there marching yesterday. Everybody who owns a 401(k), a pension fund, who is an alumnus of a university that writes a check occasionally, who has any sort of mutual fund investment, you can go to your advisers, you can go to your fund and say, “I want out of the dirty stuff. I want you to set up a clean energy fund. I want a vehicle where I can express my values consistent with my financial goals.” Everybody can put that kind of pressure. And I love that the students, the kids, are getting so engaged in this. AMY GOODMAN: Well, Scott Wallace, I want to thank you very much for being with us, co-chair of the Wallace Global Fund, which has coordinated the Divest-Invest effort to recruit foundations to divest. He is also the grandson of Henry Wallace, who served as vice president for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and ran for president himself in 1948. www.democracynow.org Breakthroughs Unlikely at Upcoming UN Climate Summit As the climate justice movement prepares for an historic convergence in NYC, political economist Patrick Bond warns that the “big tent approach” of the People’s Climate March might backfire Patrick Bond Interviewed on the Real News Network 3 October 2014 SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. This is another edition of The Patrick Bond Report. The official UN climate summit of world leaders are to gather in New York next week, focusing our attention on the grave climate crisis before us. To put pressure on the world leaders, a people’s march is also being organized by the environmental movement on 21 September, also in New York. Now here to talk about the summit and the People’s March is Patrick Bond. Patrick Bond is the director of the Center for Civil Society and professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and he’s the author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below. PATRICK BOND, DIRECTOR, CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY: Thanks, Sharmini. Great to be back with you and the viewers. PERIES: So, Patrick, you are planning on being in New York for this great world leaders summit, as well as a global convergence of various social movements coming together to protest what’s happening to our climate. What is your initial take on what’s going to be happening? BOND: Well, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to see how the climate justice movement is reconverging. It’s a time when the heads of state will be meeting, on Tuesday the 23rd, with no expectations of any major breakthroughs, probably more gimmicks, a series of announcements by heads of state that really, probably, will continue the paralysis and maintain the fiction that there will be some technical fixes, and also carbon trading, market-based strategies. In contrast, what I’m most enthusiastic about, Sharmini, is how well the climate justice movement, especially Climate Justice Alliance, with many groups from around grassroots and sites of struggles [incompr.] environmental justice that involve people of color in the United States, And they’re in Alliance with many groups across the world. And the Global South will have a fair representation of activists, the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance from this continent, for example. And between the 18th, when Naomi Klein launches her new book, which is going to be quite a blockbuster, by injecting the word capitalism very firmly into this debate, can climate change be a source of inspiration to change capitalism, the book called This Changes Everything, launch on Thursday, right through to the subsequent Thursday. Lots of talking, strategizing. And then a big march, probably a couple of hundred thousand people in New York City. And then direct action the next day on Wall Street, protests throughout that week. And I think those are the kinds of opportunities, when the climate justice movement has been on its back foot, really, since Copenhagen–. Here in Durban in 2011 you’ll recall we hosted the alternative climate summit, and the CJ movement really haven’t recovered from a kind of shock at trying to make change at the global scale. And I think in the meantime we’ve seen a great deal more happening at the local scale, and that’s what’s going to be brought together in an attempt to connect many of the dots to find common themes. PERIES: One of the things that is happening is, in terms of the broad climate march that’s going to be happening in New York, a number of corporations have actually signed on to the march and will be marching with everyone else, group called Climate Group, which is a constellation of corporations, some of them actually contributing to fossil fuel emissions and pollution of our oceans. What do you think of that? And what is the role they’re playing in the broader gathering? BOND: Well, I think that will be considered a big mistake. Those groups include Chevron and Exxon, that world’s number one and two historic emitters of CO2. And it reflects a sort of big-tent approach that some of the organizers have thought advisable. Now, I can’t second-guess them, because it’s their terrain, being it in New York, but, for example, to see pictures of subway signs advertising that hipsters and bankers are in the same boat, the boat crossed out with march amidst a sort of background of a sea, suggesting that the bankers really have some role in solving this problem. Well, they’ve been trying. Since 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, it’s really been a bankers strategy of allowing the big corporations to continue emitting, especially in Europe, the pilot for carbon trading, and then letting the bankers try and sort out how a system can be devised that would most efficiently allocate the right to pollute by basically privatizing the air and putting it up into the financial markets. Well, needless to say, like so many of the financial market gimmicks we’ve seen in the past 15, 20 years, this one also a dramatic failure, with the European pilot crashing. What I’m worried about is the strength of neoliberalism, that free-market ideology, the power of bankers and their mentality, not just allow them into the march. But probably on Tuesday we’ll be hearing, for example, that not only California, but China, maybe some of the other BRICS countries, South Africa, starting carbon trading on their own and eventually trying to link up a carbon trading network–way too little, way too late, when it’s absolutely clear that we need explicit caps and bans. And, indeed, we had word this last week that the Montreal Protocol–that was the agreement in the United Nations in 1987 that banned chlorofluorocarbons and stopped the ozone hole from growing–has been a success. And that’s the kind of wide and broad and very firm state action that there’s no question we’re going to have to ultimately revert to, not to privatizing and gimmickry like carbon trading. Therefore I would worry that the big-tent approach, bringing everybody who says they care about climate in even if it’s to make a few bucks, like the bankers, is the wrong approach for that Sunday march, and also the failure to have a real set of demands and a rally and to have the march confront power. It’s marching away from the United Nations. These are the kinds of questions I think people will be asking. And as a result, those with a more strong and activist orientation taking heart that on Monday on Wall Street, activists have put together, with the Occupy movement, an idea called flood Wall Street, harking back to Sandy, that hurricane in November 2012 that flooded Wall Street and began to wake up this very backward little island from its sleepy days that maybe climate’s not a problem. Well, they realized losing about $60 billion in infrastructure and damage across the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut coastline and that little island nearly sinking, that even Wall Street is quite vulnerable to climate change. PERIES: Patrick, one of the criticisms of the IPCC and all the efforts of the UN is that they actually in the last 25 years has not been able to come up with a treaty, or any agreement, for that matter, on climate change. Why is this summit happening? And is there any hope that anything more concrete will come out of such a summit focused on climate change? BOND: Yes. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, regularly issues reports every five years, major reports, and they have been behind the curve and very conservative. The situation’s worsening faster than the IPCC’s always anticipated. They did win the Nobel prize. And these reports do raise consciousness. And they compelled Ban Ki-moon, the UN general secretary, to at least call, a day ahead of its usual heads-of-state summit, a special one-day discussion. Now, the question is: can the balance of forces shift dramatically before next Tuesday and then before the next COPs? One is the Conference of the Parties 20 in Lima, Peru, in November. And then the following year in Paris is meant to be the very big COP 2015, where perhaps several hundred thousand people will be out protesting. And, now, those are the chances to really do something at the global scale. But as you said, we haven’t had any global treaty, no progress toward it worth describing, the Copenhagen Accord the last really big chance, and that ended up being very destructive, because Barack Obama got together with the South African, Brazilian, Indian, and Chinese leaders to cut a side deal, the Copenhagen Accord, which was entirely voluntary and very weak pledges. Four degrees is pretty much guaranteed with that Copenhagen Accord. And as a result, you can really feel that this balance of forces in which these corporations have much, much more power than, say, back in 1987 when the Montreal Protocol banned the CFCs. And these corporations in the fossil fuel sector, as well as their facilitators, the bankers, the financiers of fossil fuels, as well as the transporters–and I feel that in this current period, the divestment movement can target the fossil fuel companies, as well now, for example, with Keystone Pipeline, as the companies running the oil on trains and in the pipelines, these are the kinds of new innovations that here in South Durban, where we have a huge petrochemical complex, the biggest in Africa, and a proposed $25 billion expansion of our shipping industry right here in this port, the largest in Africa–. And those are the contestations that we’re going to see and we already have in the last few months, quite angry communities up in arms, with environmentalists saying, really we’ve got to factor in climate and not go ahead with this port petrochemical expansion. And you know, Sharmini, all over the world it’s that microscale of protests right at the fence line and the coal face, if you will, of so many of these fossil fuel projects that I feel we can increasingly rely on, since [the global (?)] is not really going to be changed dramatically enough in the next period to invest any hope in a global deal. We really have to be much more local, but also more militant and much more connected to each other. That’s the challenge ahead for climate-justice activists. PERIES: And finally, Patrick, the absence of both China and India at this summit has been talked about quite a bit, but what are the reasons for them not attending the conference? BOND: Well, the ultimate reason is that these will be the countries that are on the growth trajectory of fossil fuel consumption, though, to be fair, China has registered last week a 5 percent decline in coal consumption, and for South Africa, which exports coal, that’s something that we hope will worry the big coal companies. However, China and India are as the workshops of the world, more or less now, exporting and therefore, in a sense, the victims of the outsourcing. And because the outsourcing of carbon still hasn’t been properly factored into global discussions–in other words, you in the United States are consuming so many products that used to be made in the U.S. but now are made in China, and hence the carbon emissions associated with those products really should be on the United States’ account. And for the climate debt, the so-called loss and damage to be paid, that’s going to be an important factor. I feel the Chinese, the Indians, especially with that new, very right wing government in Delhi, and also the Russians, who dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol, even the Brazilians, allegedly the more green force within the BRICS, and, of course, the South Africans [going ahead (?)] with big coal-fired power plants, fracking, and a variety of other big fossil-centric projects, really suggests that these BRICS, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa emerging market network actually amplify these problems at the global scale. They’re not really an alternative or a solution to the world’s problems; I fear they actually will make these worse. PERIES: Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. BOND: Thank you very much, Sharmini. Good to be with you. PERIES: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. Patrick Bond is the director of the Center for Civil Society and a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Bond is the author of the recently released books, South Africa – The Present as History (with John Saul) and the 3rd edition of Elite Transition. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12381 More articles  Mithika Mwenda (CCS masters student) presents to Converge-for-climate workshop, 20 September, NYC                             |