~~ posted for dmorista with introduction by dmorista ~~
Introduction
Today the Cop-26 Meetings are going on in Glasgow, Scotland. It is worth noting that the Political and Business and NGO leaders had to be driven past unsightly and perhaps smelly piles of refuse and trash. There is a garbage collection workers strike going on that started a few days ago. After nearly 2 ½ decades of ckearly ineffectual meetings and agreements, since at least the Kyoto Accord of 1997, the facts are that the amount of Green House Gas emissions have steadily continued to increase.
But the real facts are that the executives of the major Fossil Fuel companies have known for 62 years that the consequences of continuing to burn their products would cause horrific environmental consequences. The duplicitous and dishonest stance of the Fossil Fuel companies is pointed out in the article "What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words" October 28, 2021, Benjamin Franta, The Conversation. He notes in that article that the first report to a major fossil fuel company that predicted a climate debacle was made during a Petroleum industry conference at Columbia University in New York City in 1959. No less than Edward Teller (the “father of the H-Bomb) pointed out to the attendees that the sea level rise that would result in warming world would eventually flood the coastal cities of the world. Many other reports, with increasing specificity pointed out, with a high degree of accuracy the amount of warming that would result from continued fossil fuel combustion; and the increased frequency of floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters.
And the response of the Fossil Fuel companies was to hide the truth from the public and from government officials as well as they could. And to fund large numbers of “Climate Denial” organizations and political pressure groups. This was done for years and it is still being pursued by some companies even as the supposedly pivotal Cop-26 meetings are taking place. The current efforts, specifically those being pursued by Exxon-Mobil are reported in “Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial”, October 29, 2021, Elliott Negin, Counterpunch.
The third article posted as " Climate Justice in America", November 1, 2021, Thomas Kilkauer & Meg Young, Counterpunch, discusses the somewhat more abstract issue of just whose ox is getting gored by the ongoing Climate driven debacles and less dramatic changes. It also looks at the way the rich and the corporations they own are benefitting from actions around the world. These authors dub Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing President of Brazil as the “most dangerous man in the world” for his many actions making the critical lands of the Amazon Basin available to the rich from other parts of the world for maximum exploitation and resource extraction.
These are all critical issues, among many others, that relate to the ever increasing exploitation and despoliation of our planet by the Capitalist forces and the rich. It is, of course, not even a remote possibility that Cop-26 will resolve any of these problems.
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What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words
https://theconversation.com/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-in-its-own-words-170642
Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.
I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear.
What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.
On Oct. 28, 2021, a Congressional subcommittee questioned executives from Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute about industry efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told lawmakers that his company’s public statements “are and have always been truthful” and that the company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change.”
Here’s what corporate documents from the past six decades show.
Surprising discoveries
At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.
1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?
In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie – this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the U.S. oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.
“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.” He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”
Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”
As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the '60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.
Secret research revealed the risks ahead
While I traveled the country, other researchers were hard at work too. And the documents they found were in some ways even more shocking.
By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.
In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.
Exxon had a secretive research program too. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent an internal memo observing that the company’s long-term business plans could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”
The next year, Exxon completed a comprehensive, 40-page internal report on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the amount of global warming we’ve seen, as well as sea level rise, drought and more. According to the front page of the report, it was “given wide circulation to Exxon management” but was “not to be distributed externally.”
And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report’s existence only because investigative journalists at Inside Climate News uncovered it in 2015.
Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too. In 1986, the Dutch oil company Shell finished an internal report nearly 100 pages long, predicting that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be “the greatest in recorded history,” including “destructive floods,” abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world. That report was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” and only brought to light in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a Dutch journalist.
In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study showing through company documents and interviews how the Paris-based oil major Total was also aware of global warming’s catastrophic potential as early as the 1970s. Despite this awareness, we found that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.
Big Oil’s PR pivot
These companies had a choice.
Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.
But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.
We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition – but it wasn’t an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.
For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition’s chairman, William O'Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that “Climate scientists don’t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,” contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl.
Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue to fight fossil fuel controls and promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they still put the vast majority of their investments into fossil fuels. As I write this, climate legislation is again being blocked in Congress by a lawmaker with close ties to the fossil fuel industry.
People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: weird weather, shifting seasons, extreme heat waves and even wildfires like they’ve never seen before.
Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.
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Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial
Refinery, near Bakersfield, CA. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.
“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy, then ExxonMobil’s senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. “Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”
For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did “join”—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.
That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy’s boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the “long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.”
ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.
In 2020, according to ExxonMobil’s most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there’s a catch.
True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.
Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company’s new threshold.
Still, it’s worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil’s self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.
In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”
That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to “do everything [it] can to prevent” the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—“from becoming law.” And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for “the increased use of natural gas” to make “further progress.”
Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.
The American Enterprise Institute
Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residence at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” has called the Paris climate agreement an “absurdity,” and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.
Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue of National Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly that AEI brought in-house in 2019. In his essay, “The Case for Climate-Change Realism,” he falsely argued that the “available science” does not support the notion that human activity is “the single most significant cause of climate change” and the “available data” undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are “evidence of an ongoing climate crisis.”
As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and “changes in solar activity,” when, in fact, the sun’s energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.
This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page “code red for humanity” report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is “unequivocally” to blame.
Zycher’s main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could “be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy.” In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is “now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant.” To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil’s interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy, thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.
George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center
The relatively unknown Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington (GW) University received $140,000 from ExxonMobil in 2020 and $1.2 million from the company since 2013. Director Susan Dudley founded the center in 2009 after serving as President George W. Bush’s “regulatory czar” at the Office of Management and Budget and, before that, running the Regulatory Studies Program at Koch-financed Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She currently serves in various capacities for other longtime climate science disinformation groups, including the Koch-founded Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The Regulatory Studies Center portrays itself as an “objective, unbiased” policy shop, but—like the Mercatus Center—its primary raison d’être is to weaken and quash government regulations, according to a 2019 analysisby the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The GW center’s main tools are reports and public comments it submits to Congress, and although it does not get much mainstream news media attention, it has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill—and in the previous administration. Much of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, Public Citizen found, echoed the center’s recommendations, including “dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions.”
But should the Regulatory Studies Center be lumped in with climate science disinformation groups? In response to the Public Citizen report, as well as criticism from UnKoch My Campus and GW student groups, the center issued a statement in February disputing the charge that it rejects climate science. “Contrary to unsubstantiated claims, no one in the Regulatory Studies Center questions climate science,” it said. “In fact, most of the Center’s scholars do not focus on environmental or energy issues at all. Those who have written on climate issues address economic and legal questions, not the science.”
Whether or not the center directly disputes climate science is beside the point. In the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence, most ExxonMobil-funded disinformation groups have revised their position on the reality of climate change. Instead of challenging the science, their efforts now tend to focus on denigrating renewable energy, overstating the costs of transitioning to a clean energy economy while ignoring the benefits, and preventing government action. That is exactly what the Regulatory Studies Center does. In recent years, for example, it has published papers and filed public comments opposing stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.
The center also has enlisted the help of unabashed climate science deniers. In the fall of 2018, for example, it tapped Julian Morris to file a public comment supporting the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of Obama-era standards for cars and light trucks designed to increase fuel economy and, for the first time, substantially reduce tailpipe carbon emissions. Morris, president and founder of the International Policy Network and vice president of research at the Reason Foundation—two libertarian, climate science denier organizations—falsely declared in a paper published in March 2018 that the “effects of climate change are unknown—but the benefits may well be greater than the costs for the foreseeable future.”
Millions More for Disinformation
The money ExxonMobil donated in 2020 to AEI, the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents only a small percentage of the company’s recent outlays to sway public opinion and blunt government climate action. It is difficult to document all of the company’s related expenditures, but they include:
+ More than $5 million on Facebook ads in 2020, which is more than half of the $9.6 million that the U.S. oil and gas industry spent on the ads, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap that reviewed more than 25,000 ads on Facebook’s U.S. platform. Many of the ads described natural gas as a “green” fuel source and argued that cutting carbon emissions would drive up energy costs.
+ An estimated $10 million in annual dues to the American Petroleum Institute (API) (based on how much Shell Oil recently revealed it paid). The U.S. oil and gas industry’s oldest and largest trade association, API is working overtime to block stricter methane emissions standards. McCoy indirectly referenced API during the secretly taped interview when he said ExxonMobil relied on third parties to publicly represent its interests in Congress. “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing,” he said. “It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be, for the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress.”
+ At least $100,000 in annual dues to trade associations (based on what it reported it spent in 2019) that have a long track record of peddling climate disinformation, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
+ Nearly $834,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles to 118 of the 139 climate science deniers currently in Congress. Over that same time period, the company reportedly spent nearly $41 millionto lobby in Washington, but neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil’s other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic of a carbon tax—the company’s avowed top priority—with legislators since 2018, according to its quarterly lobbying reports.
So while ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and his colleagues proclaim that they fully understand the threat posed by climate change and are “committed to being part of the solution,” the evidence shows they continue to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to promote gridlock in Congress on the issue. The future of the planet as we know it hangs in the balance, but as McCoy acknowledged in his interview, ExxonMobil was—and still is—looking out for its investments and its shareholders’ short-term interests, regardless of the long-term consequences.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Climate Justice in America
Power plant. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
A few days ago, President Biden was urging climate action when saying, we don’t have much more than 10 years. Fighting global warming is inextricably linked to what Bill McKibben and others call climate justice. Commonly, many like to distinguish between climate justice and ecological justice. Ecological justice is about non-human beings and the wild unspoiled by human interference. It is about animals and their moral entitlements to an adequate and safe habitat, for example.
By contrast, climate justice is about the interaction between human beings and nature. It is about issues like global warming understood as an ethical and political issue. Necessarily, climate justice involves social equality, human rights, collective rights, animal rights and our common responsibilities to prevent global warming.
Despite the recent flooding of sections of New York, it is clear by now that there are disproportional impacts of climate disruptions on the world’s most vulnerable people. The promise of capitalism as the solution to global warming might turn out to be a hallucination. Instead, many climate justice advocates have been in the forefront of critiquing policy measures that aim to implement emission reductions through so-called market mechanisms.
It is even worse when one considers that less than ten years ago, the wealthiest 10% of individuals worldwide were responsible for 59% of resource consumption and the poorest half of the world were…only responsible for about 7%. At around the same time, many became aware that the wealthiest 10% of the global population are now responsible for 49% of individual emissions.
One of the problems of the global imbalance may well be biofuel causing a massive expanse of land away from food crops, polluting and then capturing and locking up pollutants in some carbon prison is not a new idea. It is a brilliant marketing spin. Yet, the focus on fuel can have additional consequences.
Many environmental groups have chosen to be silent on the issues of large dams for example, as they must choose their battles and have prioritized opposition to fossil fuel. The conversion of nature into biofuel production, large dams, and marketing spin can be easily observed in a country like Brazil. In the era of the world’s most dangerous man, President Jair Bolsonaro, the oil industry’s expansion policy is focusing on the privatization of Petrobras, Shell, BP, Chevron, Total, Statoil/Equinor, Repsol, and other companies from Portugal, China and the US are directly investing in the new frontier, opened up by Bolsonaro.
To some extent, it is fair to say that what happens in Brazil also happens in India where climate change doesn’t make nouveau riche in Brazil, the USA, and elsewhere vulnerable. Instead, it provides new opportunities to grow even richer.
To camouflage rampant global environmental vandalism and to delay serious action on global warming, climate change mitigation, une idée fixe of resilience, as well as, short-term adaptations to climate change remain largely a chimera used to camouflage the rapidly advancing destructiveness of an impending Anthropocene or better yet, Capitalocene. Caused by global warming, a different problem emerged in a different corner of the world.
Scientists announced that five Solomon Islands have disappeared due to rising sea levels. It does not stop there. Despite Donald Trump, who was president in the year 2018, in that year, the US Department of Defense predicted that more than a thousand low-lying islands risk becoming uninhabitable by the middle of the century – or possibly sooner – because of rising sea levels.
In the USA, rising sea levels will also impact on Florida, Louisiana, California, New York, and New Jersey, as well as Guangzhou and Shanghai, China; Hong Kong; Mumbai, India; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Lagos, Nigeria; Manila, Philippines; Dakar, Senegal; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Much of this are the bitter consequences of a system that supports big businesses which is a system that, of course, also includes corporate lobbying where the oil, gas, and coal industries have spent a whopping $543 million on lobbying in 2009, while alternative energy companies spent less than $32 million. Outspending the people by 17-to-1, Big Oil, Kochland, etc. assures that US lawmakers pave the way towards the Uninhabitable Earth.
For those without corporate dollars, protest remains the preferred option to fight environmental vandalism and global warming. Many have been arguing that protest is more important than public opinion or legitimate advocacy in influencing federal environmental law. This is the case even when the other side operates what Earth First! Founder Mike Roselle calls, first they ignore you, then they sue you.
When all their corporate lobbying and court cases fail, polluting corporations offer compensation. Examining the case of African climate justice, the entire pathology comes to light when polluters offer compensation and when, as in one case, their initial offer of an annual $10 million was not enough to buy us coffins.
This is only going to get worse and it will do so not just in Africa. In Africa. Desmond Tutu once said, we are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale condemning Africa to incineration. This is what global heating means for the vast areas of the world – incineration. Perhaps Greta Thunberg, in her usual clarity, was not wrong when saying, either we choose to go on as civilisation or we don’t. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy-tales of eternal economic growth.
Yet, climate justice also relates to issues such as the impact of privatization of water can have on local communities. The people in and around Detroit, for example, not only suffered from lead contamination of the water but also from Detroit’s water shut-offs impacting mostly on the poor. Privatization is all but yet another mechanism of an ever increasing financialization of nature.
On a much grander scale, it means that, the Paris Agreement is a trade agreement, nothing more. It promises to privatize, commodify, and sell forested lands as carbon offsets in fraudulent schemes. Essentially, those responsible for the climate crisis do not only get to buy their way out of compliance but they also get to profit from it as well.
On much of this, ecofeminism would argue that we need a transition from life-denying capitalism to a life-affirming, post-capitalist commons. Ecofeminists might also say that all over the world, fossil capitalism has violated human rights and the rights of nature. It undermines local subsistence and communal social relations. Supporting this, climate justices would argue that we must resist the neoliberal imperatives for scalable solutions or one-size-fits-all roadmaps.
Overall however, there is no evidence that the environmental and climate change problems that we face today, or any complex social and economic problems of this scale, can be effectively tackled by economic incentives of the sort offered by capitalism – a sobering thought.
In the end, the concept of climate justice offer a theoretical or even philosophical discussion on how to understand global warming. Climate justice remains indispensable to the debate on global warming.
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