Naomi Klein also relies on corporations to deliver on climate change

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

Capitalism's Arctic plan - get the oil, destroy the lives of millions

Citizens of every country will pay a massive, painful price for the melting of Arctic sea ice, even though capitalist corporations and governments view it as a potential profit bonanza.

A study in the journal Nature models the economic impact of the release of 50-gigatonnes of methane from melting permafrost and shows it would result in flooding, sea-level rise, agriculture damage and health impacts amounting to a cost of $60 trillion – roughly the size of the entire global economy last year.

And a parallel study confirms that this release of methane is already happening at an alarming rate. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet started a little later this year but is spreading fast and will probably match last year's record melt by September.

The result of this annual trend is that permafrost in the Arctic, in Siberia and Alaska is melting, releasing methane and speeding up global warming.

The methane could continue to be released gradually, albeit on a rising trend, or there could be a sudden pulse as tipping points are reached. This would push temperatures up so fast we could reach 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2035.

Once you say that of course you are really saying "anytime" because emissions of all greenhouse gases continue to rise and no effort is being made to halt or slow them. A feedback effect could kick in at any moment.

A slowing of the rise in temperatures over the last few years provided a breathing space. 

But instead of using this to take urgent action to halt the growth in emissions, it was simply exploited by climate change deniers to say there is no global warming.

Now we know that much of the heat was being absorbed into the deep oceans and as they lose their capacity to soak up more, warming will take off again. Indeed, the overall upward trend has never halted, with all the hottest summers on record taking place during this disputed period.

Corporations and governments may be greedily eyeing the Arctic, but alongside the process already in train, this scenario would result in the worst possible conditions for agriculture. The worst effects would be in Africa, Asia and South America, but no country is immune as farmers from Europe and America can testify.

But the opposite of action to halt emissions is happening; Lloyds of London estimates more than $100bn will be invested in extraction and shipping in the Arctic in the next five years.

Writing these blogs, one begins to feel a bit like the Trojan prophetess Cassandra who was locked up as a madwoman by the fellow citizens for warning them the war with the Greeks could only end in disaster.

But so be it – the truth can always bear repeating, which is that without system change we cannot begin to start to slow and then reverse climate change. If the corporations are permitted to start operating in the Arctic, the consequences are unthinkable.

Solutions are tantalisingly within reach – from permaculture, perennial grains, recycling of waste products to support organic farming, to abandoning fossil fuels in favour of locally-planned renewable energy strategies, and, in the case of the Arctic, leaving the fossil fuels and minerals in the ground!

But capitalism cannot permit this approach. As Bolivian climate strategist Pablo Solon puts it: "In this race to the top, capital needs to colonize territories and natural resources, decrease the cost of human labour, develop new technologies and promote new financial, investment and trade rules that allow capital to have more and more profit."

As a result, capitalism has already, in Solon’s words, "reached and surpassed the limits of the Earth system". To redress the damage, and to have a future for humanity, we must move to a model where humans work in harmony with nature and that means that the absolute supremacy of growth and profit must be overthrown.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Nature's final frontiers fall to the corporations

The Rio+20 final document is so shocking and the risks it poses so great that it bears revisiting. "Ecosystem services", and other so-called “green economics” initiatives set out at Rio represent capitalism's final assault on wilderness, untamed habitat and the plants and animals (including humans) who live inter-connectedly in these spaces.

If, as the UK's Stern Report explained, climate change is the biggest-ever market failure, then how can bringing the planet's remaining wild spaces into this failed framework protect them? These areas of forest, ice-cap and permafrost are our last protection against runaway climate change and this fresh attack on them could prove disastrous for humanity.

Two examples of why it cannot work are carbon credits and the REDD treaty on deforestation.

First carbon credits, a new form of currency that came into being with the Kyoto Protocol. Google the phrase and you'll get myriad financial advice sites explaining how to profit from them. It's a market, which has run along the same rails as all capitalist markets  – sometimes profitable, sometimes less so. But it has brought absolutely no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

REDD is the new international treaty on deforestation. It rewards countries that achieve cuts in deforestation with credits from big polluting countries. This creates the perverse incentive to start cutting down forest that has been untouched up until now so you can claim credits for stopping. It's putting a gun to the head of the forest, and saying "pay up or we shoot".

Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s former UN ambassador and now head of Focus on the Global South, has written that it is the transnational corporations that are promoting green economy:

"According to them, the mistake of capitalism that led us to this current multiple crises is that the free market had not gone far enough. And so with the ‘green economy’, capitalism is going to fully incorporate nature as part of its capital. They are identifying the specific functions of ecosystems and biodiversity that can be priced and then brought into a global market as ‘Natural Capital’."

Natural capital is defined as the “five pillars of life” – water, oceans, land and ecosystems, energy and raw materials. Think privatisation of electricity, gas, railways and health and the fraudulent claims made for that process, and you get an idea of what they are planning.

Capitalism is a system that renews itself continuously by developing new markets and new commodities. Current commodity production is in crisis, with a contraction of up to 90% of productive capacity needed, and already well underway.

With Rio+20 we are seeing capitalism's last great grab from the planet - the commodification of every part of nature that will run alongside the current shift of capital into the market in land.

The GM and chemical food speculators such as Monsanto and Cargill will move in for rapacious copyrighting of plants and natural processes. And alongside these fat new profits, indeed fuelled by it, the destruction of eco-systems will continue.

The lesson of the Barclay's rate-fixing scandal is that there is no free market, and this new commodity market too will be subject to corruption, lies and profit-grabbing speculators. Why not, after all? If you can profit from it, you must profit from it – that's the essence of capitalism.

In theory every species and every zone can be forced into the framework of profit monomania, but there is a huge price to be paid. Millions are already paying it, most of them are in the global south. But nowhere – not the United States and Europe nor the BRIC “developing economies” - has immunity.

As Solon concludes: "The capitalist system has gone beyond control. Like a virus its going to kill the body that feeds it… it’s going to damage the Earth System in a way that makes it impossible for human life as we know it. We need to overthrow capitalism and develop a system that is based on the Community of the Earth."

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Kyoto II abandoned as corporates call the shots

Any attempt to reduce the risk of runaway climate change with a new international treaty to limit carbon emissions is off the table for the foreseeable future as corporate profits take precedence.

The next round of UN climate talks in Durban next week will be a waste of time, since the richest countries have already made clear in private they are not ready to even make a start on negotiating a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol before 2016.

As former Bolivian UN climate change representative Pablo Solon says: “The Kyoto Protocol has many weaknesses, but to turn it into an empty shell or make it disappear in Durban would be suicide. The only responsible alternative is to preserve the Kyoto Protocol with an emissions reductions goal that allows us to avoid incinerating the planet.”

The Alliance of Small Island States, which represents countries that would disappear in a “business-as-usual” scenario say the delay is "reckless and irresponsible". Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), warned that without an international agreement working by 2017 the chance to hold a rise in global temperatures below 2ºC “will be closed forever".

The failure to make a serious start on cutting emissions means global output of CO2 has already jumped again, rising by the biggest amount on record in 2010. The world pumped out about 564 million more tons of carbon than it did in 2009.

That's an increase of 6% a "monster" rise that is unheard of, says Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate the figures for the US Department of Energy.

As a result, the scenario for climate change is beyond than the worst case scenario outlined by scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only four years ago.

At the last round of talks in Cancun, developed capitalist countries promised to pledge emissions cuts (to be achieved between 2012-2020) that would limit warming to 2ºC. This rise in itself would mean millions of deaths from drought and flood, and putt some 20-30% of animal and plant species at risk of extinction. Many coastal zones and island states would sink below the waves and glaciers disappear entirely.

But the actual pledges made since Cancun would lead to an average increase in global temperature of around 4°C or more – a catastrophic level which it seems likely the ecosystem could not survive.

The complex impact of global warming on weather was highlighted this week in a new IPCC report. It warns that in a high emissions scenario “it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world” and that “heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease”.

No measures are being taken to prepare for these problems – quite the opposite. More fossil fuels – the major contributor to global emissions – are being burned than ever before. No attempts have been made to support serious development of renewables. Air travel has contributed to the leap in emissions measured by the US Energy Department, and as far as manufacturing is concerned “from an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over,’ says Tom Boden, who chairs the US Energy Department’s carbon dioxide information analysis centre.

And that’s the heart of the matter: Capitalism and its political proxies at state level will pay any price to achieve growth. The only diplomacy that will achieve the kinds of cuts in emissions needed to halt climate change is the open discussion and debate taking place between global assemblies of free peoples. Liberated from the drive for profit, they will shift to a system of planned production for need, and start to try to repair the damage.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Market mechanisms for nature lead to disaster

Instead of being subtitled "securing the value of nature", the government's new environment White Paper should be called "securing profits from nature".

Disguised by many thousands of pious words, it simply underlines the importance to capitalism of the commodification of the eco-system.

Adopting a profit-driven interpretation of last week's interesting report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, it confirms that the government will have no active role in nature conservation. Instead it is handing it over to the private sector.

There is no more than a nod to new networks of local partnerships, with no funding and no statutory powers. A paltry £7.5m is being made available for local partnerships to "compete" to create one of 12 new-style conservation areas.

The ConDem coalition had already let the cat out of the bag on their true perspective when they announced plans to privatise the Forestry Commission’s holdings.

You might say, it isn't just about money – but isn't that exactly what last week's report said it was about? That nature has a value, which must be accounted for in land use and economic planning?

But the White Paper makes clear that the national planning policy framework to be published later this year will focus on growth, growth and more growth – at any cost.

This underlines the inherent weakness of the whole concept of leaving the conservation of nature to the tender mercies of the capitalist market. Nature may have a value but you can't make it profitable! Quite the opposite, in fact.

As nature (or as the White Paper calls it "natural services") becomes “scarcer” it must, by definition, become more profitable. That is why the global market in agricultural land is booming and the mineral and timber commodity markets soaring.

The White Paper states: "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study shows that protected natural areas can yield returns many times higher than the cost of their protection. There are multi-million pound opportunities available from greener goods and services, and from markets that protect nature’s services."

What this will mean in practice is that the government will try to find ways to ensure that private business uses opportunities for profit taking. Ministers will "publish an action plan to expand markets and schemes in which payments are made by the beneficiary of a natural service to the provider of that service". Landowners are rubbing their hands with glee!

And they will also set up a “business-led Ecosystem Markets Task Force to review the opportunities for UK business from expanding the trade in green goods and the market for sustainable natural services".

They are not talking here about supporting exports of charming wood furniture or eco-friendly clothes - and they have already destroyed the UK's chance of leading in renewable power technology. They are talking about nuclear power, shale gas, and the trade in carbon credits.

This idea of using “green economics” – the valuation of nature – as a foundation for protecting the eco-system was being discussed at the UN in New York this week. Bolivia's ambassador Pablo Solon summed up the problem perfectly:

The creation of new market mechanisms for nature, the development of a market for environmental services, will bring us toward a collapse. We believe it is wrong to break down nature into simple environmental services subject to economic valorization and market exchange. The laws of the market, of supply and demand, are in conflict with the laws and natural cycles of the Planet Earth.

The concept of building "whole earth costs" into planning can only contribute to the protection of eco-systems when it is part of a global not-for-profit economic system.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

The struggle for clean water

Photo: Survival International

Voting on a proposal put forward by Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon, the United Nations General Assembly voted yesterday to declare that “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights.”

So it was fitting that on the same day in London, police were out in force to prevent protesters gate crashing the AGM of the British-based mining transnational Vedanta. The corporation is accused of fatally polluting the local water supply around its aluminium refinery in Lanjigarch, Orissa state in India.

A petition signed by 30,000 people was handed in to the meeting calling on shareholders to stop Vedanta’s local subsidiary, the Orissa Mining Corporation, opening a bauxite mine to feed the refinery, in the nearby Niyamgiri hills.

The development threatens the very survival of the Dongria Kondh indigenous community who live there. A report from Amnesty quotes a member of the community saying: “The hill is our god and the earth our goddess. Between the two we have the rains and the water. Those wanting to mine here will slowly take over this. Where will we go then?”

An estimated 884 million people don’t have safe drinking water and about 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year from diarrhoea and other water-related causes. Dirty water kills more children than AIDS, malaria and measles together. Three and a half million people die each year as a result of contaminated water.

One of the United Nations-sponsored Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2001, was to halve the number of people who cannot reach or afford safe drinking water and halve the number who do not have basic sanitation. But in reality, the opposite is happening.

As the effect of global warming increases, water is becoming more than ever a scarce and expensive commodity. Some 10 million people in West Africa are facing starvation right now as a result of a long and worsening drought.

New figures show that global temperatures are soaring to their highest-ever level this year. The Met Office Hadley Centre, drawing on the work of more than 100 scientists from more than 20 institutions, has compiled ten indicators of temperature. “They provide, in a one place, a snapshot of our world and spell out a single conclusion that the climate is unequivocally warming,” the Met Office reports.

Clean water must be a right, but like all others it will need to be fought for in the teeth of opposition from the corporations and the rich. Rights can’t be left as words on paper, as all the Development Goals for Africa have been.

It is absolutely right to use any legal recourse to defend rights, including working through the United Nations. Ultimately, however, power rests in the hands of corporations and even governments have to kowtow to them. This week, for example, the government of Uruguay has been forced by Phillip Morris to revisit their strict no-smoking laws because the death-dealing corporation has made a complaint to the World Trade Organisation.

In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, we tried to put the concept of rights into a revolutionary context. We propose that human rights must expand beyond the concept of the individual to societal rights – the right to decent housing, health care and so on. This connects with the idea of “Mother Earth Rights”, proposed in the World People’s Declaration on Climate Change: for what is nature but the body of human beings, whose health is our health.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Creative accounting blocks climate action

Rich nations could go on increasing carbon emissions by up to 8% if they exploit gaping loopholes in a new draft agreement which is going to the next UN climate summit in Mexico in December.

An analysis compiled by the Bolivian government and published by the United Nations at talks in Bonn this week shows that using a series of accounting tricks, rich nations could carry on business as usual.

Selling surplus carbon credits created when the Soviet economies collapsed in the 1980s is one ruse. Using carbon markets to “offset” emissions and adopting new rules giving credits for palm plantations on areas cleared of virgin forest would also do the trick.

Christian Figueres, the new UN climate chief, admitted: “The pledges that we have on the table are not sufficient to meet the 2ºC pledge made in Copenhagen, and certainly not enough to guarantee the survival of the most vulnerable and poorest."

Without the loopholes, rich countries would have to reduce emissions by 10-14% below 1990 levels by 2017 to meet the targets agreed at Copenhagen last December. With them, they could increase emissions by between 4% and 8% above 1990 levels and still meet Copenhagen’s already shameful targets.

Bolivia’s UN ambassador Pablo Solon warned: “The new data shows a frightening chasm between what the science says, what the people have asked for and Earth needs, and what rich countries are saying they are willing to do."

Friends of the Earth is one of the organisations that will be excluded from the climate summit in Cancun in November because the major economies don’t want any kind of public pressure and debate around the talks. FoE international climate change campaigner said this week: "The proposals on the table are riddled with loopholes so its not surprising that current targets will do nothing to protect the world from climate disaster."

So now it is clear – even limiting warming to 2ºC is not an honest target for rich countries. Their servility to profit-driven growth and to the power of markets, could lead to 4ºC and more.

The absence of serious commitment to change was underlined this week by an International Energy Authority report, showing that fossil fuel subsidies rose to $557bn in 2008, from $342bn in 2007. Renewable energy innovators struggle to get any help, but subsidies allow fossil fuel to be consumed at less than market price.

There is a mood of gloom amongst some climate campaigners, who fear that the impact of the economic slump, spending cuts and unemployment, and the propaganda onslaught by climate change deniers, means people no longer care about climate change.

But a survey by Cardiff University shows that 78% of British people think the climate is changing, a substantial base to build on. Four out of ten thought that the threat from global warming is exaggerated, but 42% disagreed. And a similar survey in the US shows that public concern about the issue is increasing.

The UN Climate Change talks have become a diversion from real political action aimed at halting the rise in emissions, and a front for continued inaction. Qumrul Chowdhury, who is lead negotiator for the least developed countries' block, asked in Bonn what would happen if the talks dragged on beyond Mexico, warned: "It will be tragic, a holocaust. I warn all the world that it will be at the expense of 1 billion people. We cannot afford to lose this battle."

He is right. But what is needed is a bold approach that makes the connection between the economic crisis which is devastating people’s lives across the world, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy, where the views of the majority count for nothing.

For even if 100% of people in Britain wanted action on global warming, they could not get it within the national and global status quo of capitalism.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Bolivia stands firm as Europe/US abandon climate targets

Bolivia is leading a last-ditch stand to achieve a binding agreement on climate change through the United Nations Framework Convention in the teeth of opposition from the US and Europe.

Through a mobilisation of global public opinion, including a world referendum on climate change, and with support from some other countries, Bolivia hopes to force the issue of binding limits on emissions and “climate justice” back on the agenda of the next round of talks in Mexico in December.

But more than 100 countries have signed up to the charade of the Copenhagen Accord, which abandons binding targets in favour of countries declaring their “intentions”. The argument is that the Accord and not documents drafted through the UN process, should form the basis for future negotiations.

New Zealand has suggested the Kyoto Protocol Working Group should cease to exist while the European Union’s latest proposal is for emissions reductions of between 30-70% from 1990 levels. European governments have, in effect, abandoned the fight against climate change in favour of growth at any cost.

Speaking in New York this week, Bolivia’s UN Ambassador Pablo Solon said the fight to keep warming below 2 degrees has been discarded by the developed world, and that these countries seem to be ready to countenance even higher temperatures.

What is happening is that the developed economies are trying to push any substantive talks even further into the future, arguing that Mexico is too soon for agreement and that perhaps South Africa in 2011 is the place to make a deal.

Mexico should only address issues of mitigation, they say, and their desired outcome for the talks is that developing countries should sign up to emissions reductions. In return, a bit of money will be thrown at those most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. But this money will be guaranteed only through the carbon market.

There is huge pressure on small countries on the basis that if they agree, the paltry money pledged at Copenhagen will be handed over more quickly. It is like facing a robber who puts a gun to your head and stuffs a few dollars into your wallet at the same time. And when you take the dollars out later, you find they are fake.

A meeting in Bonn in April will set the basis for the Mexico talks, and the “77 plus China” group will continue to call for the UN process interrupted in Copenhagen, to be restarted. In reality there are big differences inside the G77, with India, China, Brazil and South Africa accepting that the substance of Copenhagen Accord should be brought into the talks.

Bolivia has set itself the goal of reaching two billion people with its global referendum, says Pablo Solon. It will probably contain a clause calling for an end to “capitalist consumer culture” to save the planet. Thousands of people are expected to attend the People's World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights from in Cochabamba, Bolivia, from April 20-22. Organisers say it is intended to "give a voice to the people" on climate change after the failure of Copenhagen. The results will be presented by Bolivia at the talks in Mexico.

"The only thing that can save mankind from a tragedy is the exercise of global democracy," insists Solon. Quite right, but the reality is that nothing can restart the UN Framework Convention process. The rich countries have definitively abandoned it.

However, we do have an opportunity to start building democratic structures in every country, and through co-operation globally, to challenge the right of the corporations to continue to call the shots for people, planet and production. We can confront not only capitalist consumer culture, but capitalism itself.

With our call for people in Britain to “hang on to their vote” at the General Election and instead focus on building People’s Assemblies, A World to Win is putting forward a model for setting out on this revolutionary road.

Penny Cole
Environment editor