As climate catastrophe threatens — The case for eco-socialism

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Alexandre Araujo Costa, a Brazilian ecology activ­ ist, spoke to Belgian ecology writer and activist Daniel Tanuro on a range of questions concerning the environ­ ment. Major excerpts from that exchange appear below. The full article, which first appeared in International Viewpoint under the title, “Ecosocialism is more than a strategy, it’s a project for civilization,” can be found at www.socialistaction.org.

• From your viewpoint, how worrying is climate change? Is it simply a matter of using the right technologies such as substituting fossil fuel by re­ newables? Can the Earth’s climate be set right by a combination of carbon capture and geo-engineer­ ing?

Climate change is extremely worrying. Actually, it is probably the most dangerous social and ecological threat we must cope with, with huge consequences in the short, middle, and long term. I won’t go into too much detail, but one must know that a 3°C tempera­ ture rise will most probably provoke a sea-level rise of about 7 metres. It will take us a thousand years or more to get there, but the movement will be impos­ sible to stop. In the short term, specialists think a sealevel rise by 60-90cm could occur by the end of this century. It would mean hundreds of millions of refu­ gees.

If you take into account the other effects of climate change (extreme weather events, decrease in agricul­ tural productivity, etc.), the conclusion is frightening: above a certain threshold, there is no possible adapta­ tion to climate change for a humankind of 8-9 billion people. Where you place the threshold is not (only) a scientific question but (above all) a political one. In Paris, the governments decided to act in order to maintain the warming well below 2°C and to try to limit it to 1.5°C. An average 2°C warming should be considered a catastrophe.

Obviously, climate change is not the only threat: oth­ er threats are the massive extinction of species, the acidification of the oceans, the degradation of soils, the possible death of marine life due to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, chemical pollution, the deple­ tion of the ozone-layer, overuse of freshwater resourc­ es and aerosol loading of the atmosphere.

But climate change plays a central role and is con­ nected, directly or indirectly, to most of the other threats: it is an important factor in biodiversity loss, ocean acidification is caused by the rising atmo­ spheric concentration in CO2, the excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus in the oceans come from agribusiness, which plays a central role in freshwater overuse and soil loss, and so on.

The fact that most problems are interconnected en­ tails that it would be wrong to isolate the response to climate change from the response to the other chal­ lenges. However, all these ecological challenges have the same fundamental origin: capitalist accumulation, quantitative growth driven by the race for profit.

This means that climate change is far more than a technological issue. It poses the fundamental ques­ 4 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2017 tion of a global alternative to this mode of production. And this alternative is objectively extremely urgent. Actually, it is so urgent that, even from a technologi­ cal point of view, the strategy of green capitalism is biased.

Of course, it is perfectly possible to rely only on re­ newable sources to produce all the energy we need. But how do you produce the PV panels, windmills and other devices? With what energy? Logically, you have to take into account that the transition itself will re­ quire extra energy, and that this extra energy, being 80% of fossil origin when the transition starts, will provoke extra CO2 emissions.

Thus, you need a plan, in order to compensate these extra emissions by extra cuts elsewhere. Otherwise, the global emissions can continue to rise even if the share of renewables improves quickly, which means you may be exceeding the so-called “carbon budget,” which is the amount of carbon you can add to the at­ mosphere if you want to have a certain probability of not exceeding a certain temperature rise threshold before the end of the century.

According to IPCC, this carbon budget for 1.5°C and 66% of probability is 400 Gt for the period between 2011-2100. The global emissions are about 40 Gt/ yr, and they’re improving. In other words, the 1.5°C carbon budget will be spent in 2021. So, we have al­ ready hit the wall. This is the concrete outcome of the capitalist frenzy for profit and of its refusal to plan the transition in function of the necessary emissions re­ ductions.

This, indeed, opens the debate on carbon capture and geoengineering. Within the framework of the cap­ italist productivist system, carbon capture and geoen­ gineering are the only possible “solutions” to offset exceeding the carbon budget. I use quotation marks, because these are sorcerer’s apprentice solutions.

One of the most mature technologies is so-called bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS). The idea is to replace fossil fuels by biomass in power plants, to capture the CO2 resulting from the combustion and store it in geological layers. Because growing plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, a massive deployment of the BECCS should permit to reduce the greenhouse effect, and, as a consequence, improve the carbon budget.

It’s a very hypothetical solution, among other rea­ sons because nobody knows if it will be technically possible to keep the CO2 underground, and for how long. At the same time, it’s an extremely tricky re­ sponse to the problem, because producing the neces­ sary biomass will require huge land surfaces: about the equivalent of a fifth or a quarter of the land used by agriculture today.

On the one hand, conversion of cropland to biomass plantation would be detrimental to food production. On the other hand, establishing industrial biomass plantations in non-cultivated areas would entail a terrible destruction of biodiversity, a phenomenal im­ poverishment of nature.

It is, let’s say, highly questionable that 95% of the IPCC climate scenarios include the implementation arena.

• Recently Oxfam presented a study show­ ing that eight men alone control the same amount of wealth as half of humanity. We also broke the global temperature record (again), and our atmosphere surpassed 400 ppm of CO2 concentration. Are climate change and inequality connected?

Of course they are. It is well known that the poor are the main victims of catastrophe in general and of cli­ mate catastrophe in particular. Obviously, this is also true for climate catastrophes due to human activity (more accurately: due to capitalist activity). It is al­ ready the case, as we have clearly seen in all regions of the world: in the Philippines in 2014 with the ty­ phoon Haiyan, in the United States in 2005 with the hurricane Katrina, in Pakistan in 2010 with the great floods, in Europe in 2003 with the heat wave, in Benin and other African countries with the droughts and the rising sea level, and so on.

Furthermore, the capitalist response to climate change works as an accelerator of this social inequal­ ity. This is because this policy is based on market mechanisms—in particular, commodification/appro­ priation of natural resources. It relies mainly on the “internalising externalities,” which means the price of environmental damage has to be assessed and includ­ ed in the prices of the goods and services.

Of course, this price is then passed on to the final consumers. Those with money can invest in cleaner technologies—electric cars for instance—the others cannot, so that they pay more for the same service (in this case, for mobility).

In the deepening of inequalities, the insurance sector plays a specific role: it refuses to ensure growing risks in areas where the poor live, or improve the premiums people have to pay to the companies. The financial sector in general plays a major role, because it invests in the carbon market, which is highly speculative. For example, it invests in forests because the function of forests as carbon sinks has become commodified. As a result, Indigenous peoples are banned from their live­ lihoods, in the name of the protection of nature that they have shaped and protected for centuries.

A similar process of expropriation and proletarian­ ization is under way in the agricultural sector, due to the production of biofuel and biodiesel, for instance. Here too, the protection of nature is used as a pretext for a policy that deepens inequalities and enforces corporate rule.

It is likely that these market mechanisms of com­ modification and appropriation of resources will be­ come more and more important in the future, generat­ ing more and more social inequalities. This is obvious in the light of what has been said before, about the im­ plementation of geo-engineering, BECCS in particular.

But it goes even further than that. The last report by the Global Commission, a very influential think-tank chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern, is dedicated to the role of infrastructure in the transition to a so-called green economy. The document defines nature in general as “infrastructure,” explains the necessity to make the in­ frastructures attractive to capital, and concludes that a key condition for this attractiveness is generaliza­ tion and stabilization of property rules.

Potentially, capital wants to incorporate nature in general as it incorporated the workforce (though the workforce also is a natural resource). n