Part of Washington’s climate adaptation plan for the growing number of displaced people around the globe is more walls, surveillance technology, and armed agents on the border. Not long into our conversation, the young woman at the migrant resource center in Sasabe, Sonora, told me why she had left her home in Baja Verapaz, Guatemala: floods More
The post For the US, the Climate Plan is More Walls and Armed Agents at the Border appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
The private sector’s embrace of green finance appears to be yet another gimmick to avoid a real reckoning of what must be done right now to avert disaster.
An unexpected constituency is sounding the alarm on climate change: U.S. mortgage bankers.
Their predictions are dire: As climate change worsens and natural disasters wreak havoc on America’s housing stock, homeowners increasingly default on their mortgages. The ballooning financial losses force lenders to ratchet up interest rates. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the massive government-backed companies charged with supporting affordable housing, continue issuing loans in risky areas, subsidizing homes in harm’s way. Private sector investors in the housing market back away from communities facing severe climate risks, like rising sea levels, repeated flooding, and more severe wildfires. The economic losses, which could easily number in the billions of dollars, are shouldered by the federal government — and ultimately taxpayers.
That’s all according to a new report by the Research Institute for Housing America, a think tank founded by the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group representing the real estate finance industry.
“Climate change will impact all governments, industries, and individuals,” the report notes. “Housing and housing finance will not be spared.”
The U.S. housing market consists of a vast panoply of stakeholders, including homeowners, renters, lenders, insurers, government-backed entities, loan servicers, and the federal government itself. As climate-fueled disasters continue to wreak havoc, each group faces different risks and consequences, according to the report. Homeowners in the path of hurricanes and other climate disasters may see their home values plummet. If homeowners weathering ever more severe flooding and wildfires increasingly default on their mortgages, it will ricochet through the entire financial ecosystem. Both lenders and investors could see major losses as a result. The federal government stands in the middle of it all: It runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which is responsible for 5.1 million residential flood insurance policies nationwide, and backstops Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The specter of massive bailouts looms large.
It is not a far-off scenario. The National Flood Insurance Program is already deep in debt. The program is currently more than $20 billion underwater, and research from The Pew Charitable Trusts, a public policy nonprofit, found that about 1 percent of the properties enrolled in the program are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the claims. The cost of paying out claims from properties that repeatedly flood is more than $12 billion.
“Is there going to be a point where the public is no longer willing to fund these programs?” said Sean Becketti, a former chief economist at Freddie Mac and author of the report. “If you live in Iowa, how much do you want to pay in taxes to protect people against coastal flooding? There’s going to be real political stress on these programs because they’re going to get a lot more expensive.”
The report is the first from the Research Institute for Housing America since the think tank was founded in 1998 to take an in-depth look at the many ways that climate change is likely to reshape the mortgage industry and broader housing market. It is definitive in its assertion that climate change is real, that it will profoundly affect housing and housing finance, and that no player in the industry will be able to escape the consequences. With federal regulators beginning to examine the risks that climate change poses to the housing market and the broader economy, Adam DeSanctis, a spokesperson for the Mortgage Bankers Association, said that the group’s members are preparing for the impact of climate change and potential regulatory requirements. “Everyone knows that this is coming down the road,” he said.
The report says that climate change will test the limits of insurance and that the ever-growing risks from a warming planet will stress lenders, investors, and the government. Firms that are trying to quantify those risks and put a dollar value on it face practical challenges to doing so. Climate models are uncertain and depend on actions that governments may take now to reduce emissions. Standardized climate risk indicators don’t yet exist. And historical measurements of climate risk are unavailable.
“It is quite a challenging task,” said Becketti. “There’s not an obvious way to do things that all regulators would be comfortable with and approve of.”
Many players in the mortgage industry — including banks, lenders, and investment firms — are already making business decisions based on climate risks. Using private and public data on the evolving risks posed by climate change, some firms are steering their investments away from disaster-prone regions. The approaches, however, are varied and inconsistent. Without clear federal guidelines or industry standards on how to use the data and price the risk, each institution is developing its own method, according to Becketti.
“The results are not very comparable,” he said. “One firm says they have a lot of risk, but maybe it doesn’t have as much risk as the next firm which has a more optimistic estimate.” The inconsistency could create an uneven playing field where major institutions continue to support housing investment in the path of climate change’s wrath.
Clarity on how to assess climate risk may still be years away. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden issued an executive order tasking various federal agencies with developing recommendations and reports that assess the financial risks of climate change and provide solutions. The Federal Housing Finance Agency also solicited comments on regulatory actions it can take to address risks on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s books in January. And separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission has requested public comment on how companies should disclose climate risks on their books. It’s the first step toward requiring more transparency from companies about the ways in which climate change may affect their bottom lines.
Thursday’s report makes clear that the country’s housing sector is starting to see the writing on the wall. “Climate change triggered by global warming already has happened and will continue to happen at a difficult-to-predict pace in the future,” it reads. “Its global impacts are significant, and the housing and housing finance industries will feel these impacts along with all other industries.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Even U.S. bankers are getting anxious about climate change on Sep 23, 2021.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Thursday that humanity’s “future is at stake” with governments’ climate commitments, as he marked the launch of a U.N.-backed report he called “an alarming appraisal of just how far off course we are.”
“This year has seen fossil fuel emissions bounce back, greenhouse gas concentrations continuing to rise, and severe human-enhanced weather events that have affected health, lives, and livelihoods on every continent,” wrote Guterres in a foreword to the report, United in Science 2021.
“Unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” he continued, “limiting warming to 1.5°C will be impossible, with catastrophic consequences for people and the planet on which we depend.”
The third edition of the multi-agency United in Science report was compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and brings together assessments from partner organizations including the Global Carbon Project (GCP), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Guterres also gave a video message alongside the launch in which he said that “we continue to destroy the things on which we depend for life on Earth.”
The U.N. chief noted in his remarks that developed nations aren’t immune from climate-related disasters, pointing to recent events like Hurricane Ida, which “cut power to over a million people in New Orleans” and left New York City “paralyzed by record-breaking rain that killed at least 50 people in the region.”
Key points noted in the report are that concentrations of key greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) — continued to increase in 2020 and the first half of 2021.
CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels dropped in 2020 as a result of the pandemic-related economic slowdown. And while there remains “uncertainty about the global post-pandemic recovery,” the report warns that decline appears to be temporary, pointing to “initial estimates for 2021 [that] show a strong recovery in emissions with a possible return to pre-Covid levels within a year or two.”
The report also highlights the warming planet’s impact on Arctic sea ice.
“In every year from 2017 to 2021,” the report stated, “the Arctic average summer minimum and average winter maximum sea-ice extent were below the 1981–2010 long term average. In September 2020, the Arctic sea-ice extent reached its second lowest minimum on record.”
The publication further notes the climate crisis’ impacts on human health.
“The increased occurrence of wildfires leads to peaks in air pollution concentrations,” the publication states, and “long-term exposure to air pollution is linked to chronic diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, heart diseases, effects on the nervous system and diabetes.” The study also cites increasing evidence related to how “the compound effects of air pollution and Covid-19 may lead to increased Covid-19 mortality.”
It’s also likely that the annual global mean temperature will be between 0.9°C and 1.8°C above pre-industrial conditions for the period of 2021–2025, with a 40% chance of a single year within that five-year span being 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
According to WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, the report shows that global demands for governments to “build back better” from the pandemic have fallen on deaf ears. “We are not going in the right direction,” he wrote in a foreword to the report.
Joeri Rogelj, one of the authors of the report and the director of research and lecturer in climate change and the environment at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said the publication is another call to action.
“The messages in this report provide a grim and alarming picture,” he said in a statement. “We are experiencing unprecedented climate change. We have caused it. And our actions to date are largely insufficient to avoid it from getting worse.”
“The combined evidence in this report should empower anyone to make sure the report’s messages are heard in places of power by those making decisions about our future,” said Rogelj, pointing to COP 26, the upcoming U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, as “a key date where the world will have to come together to take the decisions necessary to halt climate change within our lifetimes.”
Growing up was already hard enough. Now kids are also facing the prospect of living with rising temperatures, ferocious floods, and an unstable climate for the rest of their lives.
The largest study of its kind shows that the environmental crisis is causing widespread psychological distress for young people across the globe. In a paper released Tuesday, researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Finland found that 45 percent of teens and young adults say climate anxiety is affecting their daily lives and ability to function. It’s the first study to suggest that young people’s emotional distress is strongly linked to their governments’ failure to respond.
“This study paints a horrific picture of widespread climate anxiety in our children and young people,” said Caroline Hickman, a co-author and a researcher at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, in a statement.
Three-quarters of those surveyed said that the “future is frightening,” with more than half believing that “humanity is doomed.” Nearly 4 in 10 said that they are hesitant to have children.
The study, under peer review in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, surveyed 10,000 people between the ages of 16 to 25 in February and March this year. The respondents came from 10 countries: Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, the U.K., and the U.S. Researchers found that concern about climate change was concentrated more heavily in poorer countries, which have contributed the least to the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the planet. In the Philippines, for example, 92 percent agreed that the future was frightening, compared with 68 percent in the United States.
Some 58 percent of those surveyed said that their governments are betraying them and future generations. That number was particularly high, 77 percent, in Brazil, where deforestation and fire in the Amazon rainforest have risen under President Jair Bolsonaro.
The results lend credence to lawsuits in which young people have taken their governments to court over climate change, arguing that political leaders have failed to protect their futures and their right to a healthy environment. Because government inaction is so psychologically damaging, the report argues, it could be considered a violation of human rights. Young activists in Germany saw some success with this logic earlier this year. In April, the country’s highest court said that parts of Germany’s emissions reductions laws were unconstitutional since the goals were too vague and offloaded the burden onto younger generations.
The study uses “climate anxiety” as a catch-all to describe the many emotions that people feel when confronted with the facts about climate change: worry, fear, anger, grief, despair, guilt, even hope. These feelings, the authors write, are a rational response. But they are often disregarded by others: Among the 81 percent of respondents who said they talked to people about their concerns, nearly half said they were ignored or dismissed.
And while climate anxiety is often seen as a personal problem with an individual solution (“take action!”), the study suggests that action really needs to come from those in power.
“I grew up being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom,” said Mitzi Tan, a 23-year-old from the Philippines, in a statement accompanying the study. “Society tells me that this anxiety is an irrational fear that needs to be overcome — one that meditation and healthy coping mechanisms will ‘fix.’ At its root, our climate anxiety comes from this deep-set feeling of betrayal because of government inaction. To truly address our growing climate anxiety, we need justice.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: More than half of young people think ‘humanity is doomed’ on Sep 14, 2021.
Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of Western violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk like Esalen and avocados.
Now the wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year even Greenland burned.
Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger; fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry, but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp Fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. Now, the Dixie Fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going.
The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichés, ready to spill into the culture wars.
The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, we’ve hit field capacity. What more can we say?
One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species, and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations.
I’m a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening, but as an emergent property that’s intrinsic to life on Earth.
So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest—all the flames we see.
But then there are fires that should be present and aren’t—the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed “a second nature.”
But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower we remade second nature into “a third nature,” one organized around industrial combustion.
Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good, and way too much combustion overall.
Add up all those varieties of burning, and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an ice age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction, and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace.
It’s said that every model fails but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age — a Pyrocene — gives us, is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.
What we have made—if with unintended consequences—we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.
We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it.
This is a lightly edited excerpt from A People’s Green New Deal (Pluto Press, 2021) by Max Ajl.
Concern about the climate crisis has become overwhelming in the Global North. It is no longer the isolated worry of climate scientists, forward-thinking investors, coastal real estate proprietors or “environmental” activists. From financiers at Davos to McKinsey Consulting, it is everywhere, as the business press and mainstream media emit blizzards of policy papers, communiques and financial forecasts. Why? In part, climate change is now unmissable. Eighteen-degree celsius days in January in New England. Catastrophic floods and hellish heatwaves across the US Great Plains and Paris. Climate change is no longer in the future tense. It is today. The media is forced to pay attention as people understand more clearly what is happening and why it is happening. Yet most media outlets are owned by big corporations that are part of the capitalist system responsible for climate change. So the speed and simultaneity with which the ruling class has changed its tune, from decades of denialism to widely touted tabulations like that of the World Economic Forum “that $44 trillion of economic value generation … is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and is … exposed to nature loss”, ought to make anyone curious.
For climate change does not dictate any specific political response. This chapter considers the rising chorus for “emergency change” from those with their hands on the pulleys and levers of the machine, in order to understand how top-down plans seek to maintain exclusion and exploitation in the world-system. Not the 1% but more like the .01%, who have seen incomes and net worth scrape the sky during the neoliberal age. They wish to preserve an imperial way of life and the planetary resource base upon which to live it. Their hands, pens and plans are not idle. Amidst rising awareness of the capitalism-climate nexus, it is only natural that the ruling class would seek to avert a climate crisis which could imperil their power, to displace blame from fossil capitalism to a faceless and structure-less humanity, and to make the poor pay the costs of transition.
There is not a whit of concern here for the well-being of the working class, or more than a few grains of worry for non-human life. If that were the case, they would have taken action on climate change 30 years ago. Rather, a constellation of forward-looking right-wing and liberal forces plan for what the global sociologist Philip McMichael calls “managing the future”. These range from the Australian Breakthrough Institute – a doppelganger of the Ted Nordhaus think-tank with the same name based in California – the Energy Transitions Commission, and on to figures often associated with the progressive Left. Such proposals share a number of leitmotifs: corporate-community and corporate-state/business-state partnerships, warmth to the national security sector, a Promethean enthusiasm for “new tech”, recasting models to integrate variables like climactic risk and enfolding them into investment horizons and a greened US military. A large number are converging on what the economist Daniela Gabor calls the Wall Street Consensus, reorganising “development interventions around selling development finance to the market … escorting capital” into bonds, and melting and reforging Third World governments as the “de-risking state”, relegating risks onto states and their treasuries and budgets as sovereign representatives of the people and removing those risks from the mountains of capital which such plans seek to mobilise.
Green social control aims to preserve the essence of capitalism while shifting to a greener model in order to sidestep the worst consequences of the climate crisis. Because there is no capitalism that exists apart from the violent hand of the state, such plans emphasise the national security sector.
Drawing borders around the people, denizens or citizens of the nation means exclusion. Structural exclusion, from popular development. Ideological exclusion, from concern or care. Physical exclusion, through hardened steel, concrete, razor-wire and motion-sensor kitted-out borders and militarised maritime zones. And temporal exclusion, in the erasure of a past of colonial looting and atmospheric enclosure. Such plans are engineered by the best and the brightest, and we have to take them at their precise word. What they say or do not say about the Third World is what they mean. And because the US is an empire, sitting astride tremendous flows of energy and capital, silences speak. A decision to avoid reparations is a blueprint for world management in which imperial loot remains in the North.
Part of the right’s Great Transition is to match up existing assets such as working-class pensions, or the public resources of the people in the form of the state budget, with new tech to harness and commodify the sun and the wind through solar power and wind energy. Greening the US military is central. Putting prices on “ecosystem” services, including a potentially serf-like labour-intensive CO2 drawdown programme, is a third pillar of their programmes. And because the framework of threat is paramount in securing the consent of the core citizenry to their programmes, the alarm bell of emergency blares daily (in this case accurately) to frighten people into accepting any plausible programme to preserve a livable Earth.
How we describe a problem helps mould how we will address it. Notions of rising emergency and climate-related risk hide something pointed out by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.” Lawlessness, disorder, threat, human insecurity, privation, deprivation and suffering are the rule for most of humanity. Endless war, primitive accumulation, colonial genocide, neo-colonial depopulation and state-shattering are permanent emergency.
The rhetoric of risk is not a recognition of the emergencies that batter the lives of the world’s majority population. The newly noticed threats, about which the core’s governments have blithely done nothing for decades, are to long-term accumulation: social stress in the South leading to drought and mass migrations and now a chance of runaway warming. The World Economic Forum, for example, slots risks into “physical”, “regulatory and legal”, “market” and “reputational”: perils to business. Such parochialism is risk and emergency from the very particular viewpoint of Western monopolies. If open and democratic debate about the distribution of wealth can be muffled under the smothering blanket of emergency, those who own the blanket and insist on asphyxiating discussion can preserve existing distributions of wealth.
Other uses of emergency are the canary in the coalmine for an acceleration of the worst of current fortress nationalist regimes, those countries which are increasingly militarising their littorals and southern borders to stem immigration from countries which they have often made unlivable. Worry about mass migrations is worry about whether the cloistered settler-states and the European capitalist heartland will remain safe. What will Australia do if Indonesia is inundated and monsoons fail across rural India? Mexico, the Caribbean and the Central American isthmus are even closer to the US, and large-scale Central American migration is already taking place, as hurricanes and brutal heat smash vulnerable farmers in a strip of land long concussed by US interventions. Emergency and panic about amorphous threats to life in the Third World have always justified illegal US aggression, much as neo-colonial environmentalists fretted about the forests of the Bolivian Amazon in 2019, to try to blacken the globally unparalleled ecological advocacy of the Indigenous-led Left political party MAS. Furthermore, the war always boomerangs back to where it started through settler-colonial frontier wars. Suspending law, civil liberties, democratic deliberation and struggles for liberation amidst warnings of a falling sky or “terror” have been common in a post-9/11 world, the pretexts for deepening hierarchies of class and nation.
Against a renewed imperialist urge to generalise the “state of exception” through new regimes of state-private accumulation, greened and global, we can process the sudden cacophonous concern for climate change among the planet’s wealthy and their court intellectuals. Take some examples. A recent Brookings Institute report discusses rising “droughts, fire” and natural disasters. These plagues translate to “risks to economies and livelihoods”. Furthermore, the “current growth path” pressures water, land and biodiversity, causing “accelerated loss of natural capital”. Words like economies and livelihoods are kaleidoscopic. They hint at human needs for food, shelter and the good life and conflate them with the wellbeing of the economy. In this discourse, it is simply assumed that the health of “the economy” leads to the health of concrete individual human beings. Their history is important: the blurry notion of livelihoods emerged in force at the Rio+20 Summit, which marked 20 years after the original Rio Earth Summit which set in motion world climate negotiations. At Rio+20, mandates for “sustainable development” of the world’s resources bloomed, alongside sterile calls for a “green economy”, and were adopted by consensus at the United Nations General Assembly. Yet in an imperialist world, that which all states agree upon as a programme cannot have any emancipatory content. Neither economy nor livelihoods implies any particular distributional pattern: “Class, not as an institutional context variable, but as a relational concept, is absent from the discourse of livelihoods,” argues sociologist Bridget O’Laughlin, which is why it studs such reports so frequently. They do not wish to question the existing maldistribution of wealth.
Take another example: the Australian Breakthrough Institute, in a May 2019 report, Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach, offers a perspective from David Spratt, the institute’s in-house research director, alongside Ian Dunlop, a former international coal, oil and gas industry executive, and the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. The foreword by Admiral Chris Barrie calls for “strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities” to combat the cataclysm of climate change (akin to kindred blurring devices like economies and livelihoods, “communities” fuses interests of the rich and poor within nations and is silent on diverging interests between nations). The report warns of “existential risk”, and urges “we must take every possible step to avoid it”. How? Under a scenario better than the current emissions trajectory, with an emissions peak at 2030 and an 80% decline by 2050, “Deadly heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in West Africa, tropical South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia”, displacing one billion people. Water availability would decrease in the dry tropics and subtropics, parching two billion. Agriculture would become “nonviable in the dry subtropics”. As watersheds and temperature bands within which humans millennially flourished drift north, social structures erected on a more or less stable climactic bedrock would shudder. We could “see class warfare” as the wealthiest “pull away from the rest”, shattered international trade flows, a retreat into autarky, collapses in economic interchange and the inability of governments to govern.
Such national security bureaucrats and military-defense intellectuals know climactic shifts threaten to shift the planetary ecology sufficiently severely to evaporate the gossamer logistical flows and political scaffoldings of global capitalism. They write, think and plan accordingly. These reports are not the handicraft of melioristic humanitarians, but diamond-hearted strategists dumbfounded at the sluggishness with which most of their fellow ruling-class and governments have acted.
To avoid the massive human migrations such a scenario would entail, the report calls for “a zero-emissions industrial system [to] set in train the restoration of a safe climate”. The predictable analogy they draw upon is World War II, the crucible of military Keynesianism and worldwide neo-colonialism. The report highlights the “national security sector’s” potential role in a vast mobilisation of resources. The role of the military in a peacetime transition is unclear, although one chapter of World War II less discussed by its refurbishers, Right and Left, is the role of the military in suppression of labour unrest or union agreements to avoid independent labour action. Furthermore, they propose enlisting the national security sector to assist resource and labour mobilisation. Such help could mean anything, but gestures at forced labour recruitment. To carry out this programme, they imagine a new social consensus, based on a triangular relationship between Parliament and “corporate leaders”, and community. The former will provide wisdom and “leadership”, the latter will provide support and internalise and normalise in “everyday discussion” the logical conclusions of emergency planning.
What does that look like? A wholesale renovation of the technological and institutional infrastructure and architecture of fossil capitalism, the new product a lot of the same old capitalism but covered with honeyed rhetoric of sustainability, community, livelihoods and resilience, so it can be smoothly swallowed by those who might balk at climate crisis as an occasion to socialise risk and privatise profit. There is a logical and political correspondence between the language and strategies they use to address the worsening emergency for humanity, and their positions in society: elite management, links to the most polluting forms of fossil capitalism and the national security state. We would expect them to frame the problem, identify stakeholders and propose solutions in ways that do not disturb the patterns of power and powerlessness from which they speak, and which they wish to preserve.
One aspect of the “emergency” discourse that is slightly new, albeit a recurring reflex in the course of capitalist social management, is Malthusian thought. An economist, Thomas Malthus floated the folly that the poor’s food consumption would rise faster than agricultural production, and asserted that the poor had no right to poor relief and no capacity to control their numbers. Giving them alms would undermine one of the checks on their numbers, producing an intractable biological-natural problem: food supply supposedly increased arithmetically, whereas population could increase exponentially. These were fabulations heaped on misinterpretations heaped on nonsense. Famines tend to occur due to decisions to deprive certain populations of the power to access food, not absolute lack of food. Contemporary worries about food production are founded on similar social science fiction, for far more food is produced than humans currently need, much of the food that’s produced is nutritionally hollow, and far more food could be produced than is produced currently. Claiming otherwise is a Trojan horse for the entry of capitalist logic into dissident thought. The aim is to prevent the conscious and collectively decided use of what is produced to feed those who need it most: the working class, whose labour directly produces almost everything anyway.
Below is a short submission from Lakota ‘Black Elk’ Maroon, a youth militant on the struggle to #StopLine3. Critical of movement leadership, the text looks at how mutual aid and political education could be a counter to the culture of constant mobilization.
Even if this pipeline is completed, this is my home. Many seem to forget this fact, swearing there is no future if this pipeline is finished. Once again, the Native people are erased but now by fellow Indians who swear on our futures. I promise you my Nephews and Nieces will still call this land home and their Nieces and Nephews will do the same.
I would consider myself a Rebel and, in true Zapatista fashion, I wish to convince my comrades, oyankte, and opposition to stop fueling these Indian mascots and their rhetoric, which is individualistic in approach and stagnant in the peoples. I’ve seen many great peoples put their persons at risk, endangering their lives in front of Slave Catchers and Bounty Hunters, locking themselves down unable to fight. “Land Back” they chant, following their Indigenous leadership blindly. Many of whom are politicians, political advisors in “Native Affairs,” independent candidates and Democratic Congressional hopefuls. One whose words reach Vogue and New York Times yet doesn’t touch Panema or Cass Lake. No Native supports the pipeline but many are ambivalent to its creation, as if we are futureless already.
So you see this shortsighted take does not just forget the people but is doubling – down on the colonial, inherently necrophilic and abusive ways of creating “solidarity” and “camaraderie.” I’ve seen this abuse take shape in array of different forms. In one story I know of, a young person who, in a mistake/misunderstanding with one of these so-called leaders, was called a “retard.” In more than plenty of discourse I have seen those who sacrifice their safety in efforts to stop this pipeline considered as nothing but bodies. I’ve watched the approach of these non-profits amidst the chaos peoples are facing in their daily struggles. The Giniw Collective and Honor the Earth consistently “recruit” (majority white) youth into their bidding while simultaneously acting as the voice for Indigenous struggle. Red Lake on-reservation natives currently have the 2nd shortest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere behind Haiti; please trust me when I say this pipeline is just one of many struggles. One which must be confronted; but it will not be confronted in totality by those whose careers depend on this conflict. If you wish to confront the Hydra of colonization, it will not be on their terms but rather on ours.
On 9/4/21, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Corey Bush, Ayanna Pressley and Mary Kunesh-Podein came to Camp Namewag at the invitation of Giniw Collective to stand in solidarity and to hear firsthand the voices of our water protectors and land defenders fighting to #StopLine3 pic.twitter.com/S0QT19MZsV
— Indigenous Environmental Network (@IENearth) September 7, 2021
I am not one just to complain neither, if these Native “activists” and their allies (hopefully soon to be accomplices) wish to take part in a revolutionary struggle, and legitimately stop extraction and colonization, they could allocate their resources into building community mutual aid and resources, such as schools, gardens, and daycares for those who are partaking in long-term struggle or live in the areas of these encampments. They should be looking to build local community and self-governance, not “supporters.”
Instead of these encampments hosting white foreigners who have no bidding in the living conditions for the native, it could be converted into more permanent structures for the houseless, abused women, or community child-rearing needs. Other encampments equipped to face the pipeline will be created and hidden by the people in part of the community. Leaving no Vanguard, no voice and no “political” leader in between the people and their struggle. In truth, it is the radical’s responsibility to divest the resources misallocated to the community and put wedges in-between the so-called leaders and the people daring to struggle.
– Lakota ‘Black Elk’ Maroon
September 2021
Photo credit: @GiniwCollective on Twitter
