This Changes Everything (73 page)

Standing at the front of the conference room, the University of California, San Diego professor took the crowd through the advanced computer model
he was using to answer that rather direct question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations, and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human
systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the “Is Earth f**ked” question, he set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”
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There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as “resistance”—movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not
fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.” Such mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement—represent
the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control.
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This, he argued, is clear from history, which tells us that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved.” It stands to reason, therefore, that “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment,
we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics.” And that, Werner said, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem.”
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Put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering,
and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on. The only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road, and simultaneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.

The movements explored
in these pages—Blockadia’s fast multiplying local outposts, the fossil fuel divestment/reinvestment movement, the local laws barring high-risk extraction, the bold court challenges by Indigenous groups and others—are early manifestations of this resistance. They have not only located various choke points to slow the expansion plans of the fossil fuel companies, but the economic alternatives
these movements are proposing and building are mapping ways of living within planetary boundaries, ones based on intricate reciprocal relationships rather than brute extraction. This is the “friction” to which Werner referred, the kind that is needed to put the brakes on the forces of destruction and destabilization.

When I despair of the prospects for change, I think back on some of what I have
witnessed in the five years of writing of this book. Admittedly, much of it is painful. From the young climate activist breaking down and weeping on my shoulder at the Copenhagen summit, to the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute literally laughing at the prospect of extinction. From the country manor in England where mad scientists plotted to blot out the sun, to the stillness of
the blackened marshes during the BP oil disaster. From the roar of the earth being ripped up to scrape out the Alberta tar sands, to the shock of discovering that the largest green group in the world was itself drilling for oil.

But that’s not all I think about. When I started this journey, most of the resistance movements standing in the way of the fossil fuel frenzy either did not exist or
were a fraction of their current size. All were significantly more isolated from one another than they are today. North Americans, overwhelmingly, did not know what the tar sands were. Most of us had never heard of fracking. There had never been a truly mass march against climate change in North America, let alone thousands willing to engage together in civil disobedience. There was no mass movement
to divest from fossil fuels. Hundreds of cities and towns in Germany had not yet voted to take back control over their electricity grids to be part of a renewable energy revolution. My own province did not have a green energy program that was bold enough to land us in trade court. The environmental news out of China was almost exclusively awful. There was far less top-level research proving
that
economies powered by 100 percent renewable energy were within our grasp. Only the isolated few dared question the logic of economic growth. And few climate scientists were willing to speak bluntly about the political implications of their work for our frenzied consumer culture. All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I have had to race to keep up. Yes, ice sheets are melting
faster than the models projected, but resistance is beginning to boil. In these existing and nascent movements we now have a clear glimpses of the kind of dedication and imagination demanded of everyone who is alive and breathing during climate change’s “decade zero.”

Because the carbon record doesn’t lie. And what that record tells us is that emissions are still rising: every year we release
more greenhouse gases than the year before, the growth rate increasing from one decade to the next—gases that will trap heat for generations to come, creating a world that is hotter, colder, wetter, thirstier, hungrier, angrier. So if there is any hope of reversing these trends, glimpses won’t cut it; we will need the climate revolution playing on repeat, all day every day, everywhere.

Werner
was right to point out that mass resistance movements have grabbed the wheel before and could very well do so again. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that lowering global emissions in line with climate scientists’ urgent warnings demands changes of a truly daunting speed and scale. Meeting science-based targets will mean forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to
forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
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It will also require coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations. And let’s take for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much
to offer in the way of road maps.

The crucial question we are left with, then, is this: has an economic shift of this kind
ever
happened before in history? We know it can happen during wartime, when presidents and prime ministers are the ones commanding the transformation from above. But has it ever been demanded from below, by regular people, when leaders have wholly abdicated their responsibilities?
Having combed through the history of social movements in search of precedents, I must report that the answer to that question is
predictably complex, filled with “sort ofs” and “almosts”—but also at least one “yes.”

In the West, the most common precedents invoked to show that social movements really can be a disruptive historical force are the celebrated human rights movements of the past century—most
prominently, civil, women’s, and gay and lesbian rights. And these movements unquestionably transformed the face and texture of the dominant culture. But given that the challenge for the climate movement hinges on pulling off a profound and radical
economic
transformation, it must be noted that for these movements, the legal and cultural battles were always more successful than the economic ones.

The U.S. civil rights movement, for instance, fought not only against legalized segregation and discrimination but also
for
massive investments in schools and jobs programs that would close the economic gap between blacks and whites once and for all. In his 1967 book,
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
, Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that, “The practical cost of change for the nation
up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. . . . The real cost lies ahead. . . . The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be
realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.”
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And though often forgotten, the more radical wing of the second-wave feminist movement also argued for fundamental challenges to the free market economic order. It wanted women not only to get equal pay for equal work in traditional
jobs but to have their work in the home caring for children and the elderly recognized and compensated as a massive unacknowledged market subsidy—essentially a demand for wealth redistribution on a scale greater than the New Deal.

But as we know, while these movements won huge battles against institutional discrimination, the victories that remained elusive were those that, in King’s words, could
not be purchased “at bargain rates.” There would
be no massive investments in jobs, schools, and decent homes for African Americans, just as the 1970s women’s movement would not win its demand for “wages for housework” (indeed paid maternity leave remains a battle in large parts of the world). Sharing legal status is one thing; sharing resources quite another.

If there is an exception to this
rule it is the huge gains won by the labor movement in the aftermath of the Great Depression—the massive wave of unionization that forced owners to share a great deal more wealth with their workers, which in turn helped create a context to demand ambitious social programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance (programs from which the majority of African American and many women workers were
notably excluded). And in response to the market crash of 1929, tough new rules regulating the financial sector were introduced at real cost to unfettered profit making. In the same period, social movement pressure created the conditions for the New Deal and programs like it across the industrialized world. These made massive investments in public infrastructure—utilities, transportation systems,
housing, and more—on a scale comparable to what the climate crisis calls for today.

If the search for historical precedents is extended more globally (an impossibly large task in this context, but worth a try), then the lessons are similarly mixed. Since the 1950s, several democratically elected socialist governments have nationalized large parts of their extractive sectors and begun to redistribute
to the poor and middle class the wealth that had previously hemorrhaged into foreign bank accounts, most notably Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. But those experiments were interrupted by foreign-sponsored coups d’état before reaching their potential. Indeed postcolonial independence movements—which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources,
whether of land or minerals, as their core missions—were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites).

Even the stunningly successful battle against apartheid in South Africa suffered its most significant losses on the economic equality
front. The country’s freedom fighters were not, it is worth remembering, only demand
ing the right to vote and move freely. They were also, as the African National Congress’s official policy platform, the Freedom Charter, made clear, struggling for key sectors of the economy—including the mines and the banks—to be nationalized, with their proceeds used to pay for the social programs that would
lift millions in the townships out of poverty. Black South Africans won their core legal and electoral battles, but the wealth accumulated under apartheid remained intact, with poverty deepening significantly in the post-apartheid era.
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There have been social movements, however, that have succeeded in challenging entrenched wealth in ways that are comparable to what today’s movements must provoke
if we are to avert climate catastrophe. These are the movements for the abolition of slavery and for Third World independence from colonial powers. Both of these transformative movements forced ruling elites to relinquish practices that were still extraordinarily profitable, much as fossil fuel extraction is today.

The movement for the abolition of slavery in particular shows us that a transition
as large as the one confronting us today has happened before—and indeed it is remembered as one of the greatest moments in human history. The economic impacts of slavery abolition in the mid-nineteenth century have some striking parallels with the impacts of radical emission reduction, as several historians and commentators have observed. Journalist and broadcaster Chris Hayes, in an award-winning
2014 essay titled “The New Abolitionism,” pointed out “the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth” and concluded that “it is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.”
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There is no question that for a large sector of the ruling class at the time, losing the legal
right to exploit men and women in bondage represented a major economic blow, one as huge as the one players ranging from Exxon to Richard Branson would have to take today. As the historian Greg Grandin has put it, “In the realm of economics, the importance of slaves went well beyond the wealth generated from their uncompensated labor. Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution
turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.” In the eighteenth century, Caribbean sugar plantations, which were wholly dependent on slave labor,
were by far the most profitable outposts of the British Empire, generating revenues that far outstripped the other colonies. In
Bury the Chains
, Adam Hochschild quotes enthusiastic slave traders describing the buying and selling
of humans as “the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves” and “the foundation of our commerce . . . and first cause of our national industry and riches.”
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