400,000 call for

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activist working to shut down a petcoke (petroleum coke, a carbon-dioxide-heavy byproduct of tar sands) operation that coats her South Side Chicago neigh­ borhood with carcinogenic slime, and author Naomi Klein, who told the crowd that “there are no non-rad­ ical options left” to stop the climate crisis. Organizers estimated that 2500 people attended.

Discussion on movement demands The march and surrounding events sparked vigor­ ous discussion about what that movement should look like and how it can best be built. The Conver­ gence event partially arose out of critiques of the Cli­ mate 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 con­ cerned 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 encour­ aged 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 ad­ vertisements “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-capi­ talists 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—repre­ sents a stepping stone to building an effective, multifaceted 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 march­ ing 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 opportu­ nities 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 4 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2014 urgent struggles taking place around the country and the world against tar sands pipelines, strip mining, oil and gas drilling, and environmental contamina­ tion heaped upon Indigenous and other marginalized communities.

We would also quibble with several of the leftist crit­ ics 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 attend­ ed could get behind. As their alternative to “corporate PR,” Hedges, Gupta, and other leftist critics support­ ed 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 Cri­ sis.” 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, immedi­ ate, and winnable demands would make a much bet­ ter 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 mea­ sure the actions of political “leaders” against a con­ crete yardstick and hold them accountable for their utter failure to act to avert global catastrophe. As en­ vironmentalist 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 con­ ference sessions, where various groups put forward a myriad of demands: for environmental justice, gov­ ernment-sponsored climate jobs, mass transit, fossilfuel 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 capital­ ism simply cannot meet them due to its requirement of constant expansion. Yet we cannot wait for a revo­ lution 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 Cli­ mate Summit two days after the march, he could tip his hat to protesters and still claim with a straight MIT modeled the pledges made at Copenhagen and estimated that they would entail a 3.9-de­ gree 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 “en­ trepreneurs,” funding African farmers to “plant more durable crops,” and “launching a free trade agreement for environmental goods.”

In fact, Obama was referencing three programs de­ signed to promote economic colonialism in Africa, where the U.S. increasingly finds itself in competition with Chinese business interests. The first is a new Af­ rican 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 renew­ able energy infrastructure in developing markets.”

The fund seeks to develop privately held renewable energy projects throughout the continent. These proj­ ects 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 incorporat­ ed 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 Dan­ iels 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 in worsening climate change. The countless small farmers it will dis­ place use far less polluting pesticides and petroleumbased 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 agree­ ment for environmental goods”—was announced in 2013 and includes 13 WTO member nations. Accord­ ing to the White House fact sheet on the initiative, “the (continued on page 5, in “Hong Kong protesters demand democratic rights”)

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