An unseemly row is raging between author Naomi Klein and
some big environmental groups Klein made
the shocking
claim that they are more damaging to the fight against climate change than
climate change deniers, because of links with the corporations and their
dependence on the market.
Ian Pooley, vice-President of the Environmental Defence
Fund, has hit back, accusing
Klein of publicity-seeking and of "waging ideological warfare instead of
tackling climate change". He points to his own organisation's success in
campaigning for the US Clean Air Act as an example of how partnership with business
can work.
In reality, the Clean Air Act was passed in the teeth of
opposition from coal burners and was then watered down by George W. Bush. Now
President Obama has reneged on a promise to reverse that, because of the need
to reduce regulatory burdens on business during the "recovery".
In other words the drive for growth and profits will always
trump environmental benefit, and gains can always be reversed.
So what is Klein's alternative view? She believes that
climate change is "potentially the biggest disaster-capitalism free-for-all
that we've seen yet". "Disaster capitalism", is Klein's term for
corporations making huge profits out of crises.
In Shock Doctrine
she even suggested that the corporations organised crises to provide fresh
opportunities or as a cover for forcing through unpopular policies. But surely capitalism
is not just one big conspiracy and on the whole prefers consumers who are alive
and waged?
In any case, Klein suggests that corporations and
governments have a real grip on the situation, and can manipulate situations at
will. In fact, as the crash of 2007-8 demonstrated, they often have no idea
what is really going on within their own system and cannot control the outcomes
of market forces at will.
So how should people fight back against this allegedly
clever and manipulative system? Klein says that in responding to climate change
we can "rebuild the public sphere, strengthen our communities, have work
with dignity and address the financial crisis and the ecological crisis at the
same time. But I think it’s by building coalitions with people, not with
corporations, that you are going to get those wins."
Klein highlights as an example the coalition of 100
environmental groups who are calling on the EU to scrap the failed carbon
trading system and "start really talking about cutting emissions at home
instead of doing this shell game".
But how is that different from what Poole and the EDF
advocate? It still leaves us dependent on corporations and governments that serve
them. In the one case the goal is to achieve it through regulation and in the
other through pressure from below. But both these approaches leave the
capitalist system, the cause of the eco-social crisis, untouched.
As former Bolivian ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon writes:
"The preservation of nature and the rights of Mother Earth cannot be based
on the expectation that the capitalist world will pay for it based on their
environmental debt or that the payment will come without conditions and strings
attached.
"Yes, it is the right and just thing to demand as they
have historical responsibility and the polluter needs to pay. The reality
though is that we will never be able to make the capitalists pay until we
defeat and replace the capitalist system."
In the end the row between Klein and Poole is a fight in an
empty house, where two almost identical visions argue over marginal differences.
At least the EDF recognises that we need to fundamentally change
our economy, industry and mode of production. Of course their efforts to do this
within the system cannot succeed, but then endless protest and activism cannot
do it either.
As Solon says: "Defending the rights of nature cannot
be based on the promise of compensation. Nature, in the first place, is not a
bargaining chip. Nature is not only our home, we belong to nature."
We must aim for a revolutionary transformation in the way we
relate to nature, and to do that we must end the capitalism system of
unfettered exploitation, once and for all.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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