
The
People’s Climate March, which took place two days before a one-day United
Nations Climate Summit, was about twice as large as organizers had expected.
There were so many present that by the time the back of the march began to
move—over four hours after the front stepped off—many thousands of people had
already finished the 2.1-mile route. It took more than six hours for the entire
march to end.
The event
was organized by 350.org and the liberal internet activism group Avaaz, with
over 1500 endorsing organizations. While the New York march was the largest, 2646
companion rallies took place in 162 different countries. A West Coast People’s
Climate Rally in Oakland , Calif. , drew about 4000 participants.
Despite
political flaws, the march represents a huge step toward building a unified
movement against climate change. The diverse crowd included groups from around
the continent representing many different environmental and social causes.
Large contingents of indigenous people, anti-fracking activists, anti-nuclear
activists, tar sands pipeline fighters, scientists, union members, antiwar
veterans, and eco-socialists were present. Groups promoting immigrant rights,
freedom for Palestine , and justice for the victims of
racist police violence were also present. One contingent carried a
300-foot-long banner that read “Capitalism = Climate Chaos,” created by the
organizers of the Flood Wall Street civil-disobedience event that took place
the next day.
That event,
which fell on a Monday, drew an estimated 2000 protesters, who blocked Broadway
for about eight hours until cops finally unleashed tear gas and made over 100
arrests to break up the crowd. The symbolic blockade had no immediate goals
other than to close the street and get media attention—or “to confront the system
that both causes and profits from the crisis that is threatening humanity,”
according to the “call to action” on the event’s website. Many of the
participants interviewed by “Democracy Now!” showed up to protest against
fossil-fuel extraction and burning. “We come from a land that is heavily
resource-rich, and we came to tell the world that we’re not going to be a
resource colony anymore, and enough is enough,” said one Diné (Navajo)
activist.
The day
prior to the Climate March, the ecosocialist System Change Not Climate Change
coalition and Green Party-backed Global Climate Convergence held a one-day
“Converge for Climate” conference, with dozens of workshops at various
locations around lower Manhattan on topics including indigenous peoples’ rights,
anti-racism, fossil-fuel struggles, renewable energy, U.S. imperialism, Marxist
ecology, and eco-socialism.
Workshops
brought together people engaged in direct struggles against pollution and
resource extraction, with writers and theorists who presented capitalism as the
source of the crisis and socialism as the solution. The closing plenary
featured Olga Bautista, an activist working to shut down a petcoke (petroleum
coke, a carbon-dioxide-heavy byproduct of tar sands) operation that coats her
South Side Chicago neighborhood with carcinogenic slime, and author Naomi
Klein, who told the crowd that “there are no non-radical options left” to stop
the climate crisis. Organizers estimated that 2500 people attended.
Discussion
on movement demands
The march
and surrounding events sparked vigorous discussion about what that movement
should look like and how it can best be built. The Convergence event partially
arose out of critiques of the Climate March by leftist writers, several of whom
quite rightly criticized the decision of organizers to include neither a major
rally nor any specific demands.
The slogan
put forward by march organizers was “to change everything, we need everyone.”
As journalist Chris Hedges wrote in a piece titled “The Last Gasp of Climate
Change liberals,” the march’s appeal to concerned capitalists opened the door
to sponsorship by corporate-backed fronts like The Climate Group, which counts
among its members British Petroleum, Dow Chemical, and JP Morgan Chase. Hedges
dubbed the march “a climate-themed street fair” and encouraged marchers to also
participate in more “radical” events like the Convergence and Flood Wall
Street.
Leftist
writer Arun Gupta pointed out that march organizers spent $220,000 on New York subway advertisements “inviting Wall
Street bankers to join a march to save the planet,” and labeled the event “a
corporate PR campaign.”
We
certainly concur that the spectacle of Hollywood celebrities and Al Gore marching
alongside anti-capitalists points to some serious political contradictions of
march organizers. However, this is nothing new to public marches organized by
liberal outfits, such as the 2004 pro-Choice “March for Women’s Lives,” which
featured Hillary Clinton as a keynote speaker. The fact that the march took
place at all—that even liberals like McKibben no longer feel they can put faith
in establishment politics to press for change—represents a stepping stone to
building an effective, multi-faceted movement.
McKibben
pointed to successful mass movements such as those against the Vietnam War and
Jim Crow segregation as the way forward for climate change activism, and we
agree. While in those cases marching alone did not win the movement’s
victories, the mass marches shifted political awareness throughout the country
and acted as catalysts for revolutionary organizing.
Likewise,
the Climate March opened up opportunities for socialists and other radicals to
speak with many, many people—particularly young people—who are looking for
solutions to the myriad crises created by capitalism. The march gave expression
to many urgent struggles taking place around the country and the world against
tar sands pipelines, strip mining, oil and gas drilling, and environmental
contamination heaped upon Indigenous and other marginalized communities.
We would
also quibble with several of the leftist critics for complaining about the
march’s lack of a clear message but failing themselves to provide a message
that the masses of working-class people who attended could get behind. As their
alternative to “corporate PR,” Hedges, Gupta, and other leftist critics
supported the Flood Wall Street civil-disobedience action—which didn’t have any
demands either!
Styled
after Occupy Wall Street, the demonstration’s slogan was “Stop Capitalism: End
the Climate Crisis.” But how to stop capitalism is a key question
that such anarchist-style events fail to address. Protesters might cheer the
arrest of a man in a polar bear suit as symbolic of capitalism’s crimes, but
clear, immediate, and winnable demands would make a much better point out of
such arrests. They would demonstrate that capitalism is incapable of addressing
the climate crisis.
It is easy
to be incensed at the presence of corporate front groups at a liberal march.
But the larger problem with the lack of unifying demands at both liberal and
“radical” protests is the missed opportunity to measure the actions of
political “leaders” against a concrete yardstick and hold them accountable for
their utter failure to act to avert global catastrophe. As environmentalist
Anne Petermann put it in an article in The Daily Kos, “The media will not
cover a march with no demands. They will find a message, and if it’s not The
Climate Group’s “business will save the planet” message, what will it be?”
To answer
this question, the critics might look to those who attended Flood
Wall Street and suggest that similar events in the future incorporate explicit
demands such as “end fossil fuel extraction!” and “100% renewable energy now!”
We should also try to draw lessons from the Converge for Climate conference
sessions, where various groups put forward a myriad of demands: for
environmental justice, government-sponsored climate jobs, mass transit,
fossil-fuel divestment, clean energy, and a halt to fracking, mountaintop
removal coal mining, tar sands mining, and their filthy offshoot industries, to
name a few.
Obama’s
false “solutions”
The
overarching goal to “stop capitalism” can be viewed as implicit in all of these
demands, as capitalism simply cannot meet them due to its requirement of
constant expansion. Yet we cannot wait for a revolution to start addressing the
imminent crisis that threatens all of humanity. Nor will simply sitting on the
steps of the Stock Exchange precipitate one.
Thus, when
President Obama spoke at the UN Climate Summit two days after the march, he
could tip his hat to protesters and still claim with a straight face that the U.S. is meeting its obligation to cut
carbon emissions. He didn’t have to address the demands of the mass
movement—because none were put forward in a unified voice.
The
obligation that Obama hypocritically referred to—the pledge to cut carbon
dioxide emissions “in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year
2020”—was of the president’s own making at the 2010 COP (Conference of Parties) Summit in
Copenhagen.
Immediately
after that gathering, which was supposed to work out an international treaty to
replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. was roundly condemned by climate
change activists for being the wrecking ball that caused the talks to collapse.
In the middle of that conference, a conspiracy of U.S. and European negotiators to strong
arm conference attendees into a one-sided agreement was revealed, throwing the
negotiations into turmoil. In the wake of the uproar and mass arrests of
activists outside the conference, Obama jetted in and announced the back-door
non-binding agreement between the U.S. , Brazil , China , India , and South Africa that he now ballyhoos as being
nearly met.
The
17%-by-2020 “accord” was denounced by the rest of the world as an undemocratic
sham and ecocidal. A team of scientists from MIT modeled the pledges made at Copenhagen and estimated that they would
entail a 3.9-degree celsius global mean temperature rise. This level of warming
could melt the global ice caps entirely and trigger what scientists call
“runaway climate change,” where melting permafrost and warming seas release
massive amounts of methane trapped in tundra soils and in clathrates (methane
ice) on the ocean floor. Methane is a greenhouse gas about 20 times as potent
as carbon dioxide on a 100-year timescale.
In his
speech to the UN, Obama also paid lip service to helping poorer nations through
“climate assistance” programs. But this assistance has not come from the
international “Green Climate Fund” set up by the sham Copenhagen Accord, which
promised to raise $100 billion a year from developed nations by 2020. From 2009
to present, the fund—which is presently controlled by the World Bank, infamous
for pushing poverty-inducing “structural adjustment” policies on debtor
nations—has raised a paltry $2.3 billion total. In comparison, the U.S.
military budget for FY 2015 is $756.4 billion.
What money
has been given to other countries by the U.S. for “adaptation” to rising seas
and stronger storms comes with many strings attached. The forms of it mentioned
by Obama are grants to African “entrepreneurs,” funding African farmers to
“plant more durable crops,” and “launching a free trade agreement for
environmental goods.”
In fact,
Obama was referencing three programs designed to promote economic colonialism
in Africa, where the U.S. increasingly finds itself in competition with Chinese
business interests. The first is a new African Renewable Energy Fund, which is
controlled by Berkeley Partners LLC. This company’s website calls it “an
investment manager founded in 2007 to capitalise on the attractive yet relatively
untapped opportunity identified for private equity investment into renewable
energy infrastructure in developing markets.”
The fund
seeks to develop privately held renewable energy projects throughout the
continent. These projects have no intention of replacing existing fossil-fuel
energy sources. Rather, the goal is to wring profits out of new energy
consumers, turning what absolutely should be developed as a common good into a
private commodity for the benefit of wealthy investors.
The second
Obama program is the “Feed the Future Initiative,” launched by USAID in 2010
and incorporated into the World Economic Forum’s “New Vision for Agriculture”
in 2011. At that gathering of the business elite, the head of USAID ballyhooed
the program’s 17 agribusiness “champions”—among them Archer Daniels Midland,
Kraft Foods, Wal-Mart, and Monsanto—who will receive $3.5 billion in U.S.
taxpayer subsidies to invest in “profitable, modern commercial farming and
agribusiness” in sub-Saharan Africa (according to the Pesticide Action
Network).
The kind of
large-scale export-oriented agriculture this vision entails plays a significant
role inworsening climate change. The countless small farmers it will
displace use far less polluting pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers, and
“may be best poised to lead the way in adapting to a warmer world and ensuring
the security of the global food supply,” according to a May 2 article in National
Geographic.
The third
program—establishing a “free trade agreement for environmental goods”—was
announced in 2013 and includes 13 WTO member nations. According to the White
House fact sheet on the initiative, “the [Environmental Goods Agreement] aims
to eliminate tariffs on environmental technologies such as wind turbines, water
treatment filters, and solar water heaters.” In other words, it seeks to
increase global dependence on U.S.- and E.U.-manufactured renewable energy
systems and prevent any homegrown renewable energy manufacturing from taking
hold in poorer countries where such jobs are desperately needed.
This is to
say nothing of those initiatives that went unmentioned in the speech, such as
the Obama administration’s push for development of fracking overseas. Hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, was exempted from most U.S. environmental regulations
in 2005 and has poisoned the water supply of thousands of farmers and rural
residents. The half-million active fracking wells in the U.S. release 4-8% of
the heat-trapping methane they produce directly into the atmosphere.
The
administration has pursued a gung-ho fracking policy—at home as part of Obama’s
“all of the above” energy strategy, and in the form of ‘technical assistance’
to dozens of countries the U.S. regards as strategic allies to develop their
own fracking operations (with investments by U.S. fossil-fuel companies, of
course).
Taken
together, these three initiatives create a web of dependence on U.S., European,
and to some extent Chinese capitalists designed to ensnare those nations most
at risk from climate change, using that very risk as PR bait.
These
Obama-style “development” initiatives simply paint a Green veneer over the same
profit-driven mentality that has led the world into the current climate crisis.
Instead of pushing corporate hegemony, the advanced capitalist countries should
be paying poorer nations directly to develop their own renewable energy systems
and support small farmers who use techniques to grow food that work best with
the local ecology. And future protests should put this demand for real climate
justice front and center, diametrically opposed to the corporate colonialism
pushed by Obama and company.
We should
build on the momentum generated by the Climate March to generate organizing for
immediate fights like stopping tar sands pipelines, oil trains, and fracking
wells. But we also need more mass actions to promote unifying demands. These
will be the demands that best draw in new forces to not just broaden but to
deepen and strengthen the movement against climate change.
Let us
stand for 100% renewables, for an end to all fossil fuels, and for a massive public investment
in climate jobs to fuel the transition. Let us demand the government support
the conversion of defunct auto factories into worker-run mass-transit-vehicle
production facilities. Let us require a heavy tax on the sources of carbon
emissions, and let us also outlaw those sources over the next decade. Let
working people, environmentalists, farmers, and anyone who represents the
interests of the 99% come together to decide upon next steps and shared demands
for future mass actions.
> The article above was written by Carl Sack.
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