by Patrick Bond
Human Geography, July 2010

Abstract

After roughly two decades of growing activist interest in the climate problem, the deadlocked politics of formal climate change negotiations generated such divisions that a formal global network of radical proponents of ‘climate justice’ emerged. In December 2007, Climate Justice Now! was formed to transcend earlier technicist, market-oriented, insider strategies by environmental NGOs. South Africa is one place where climate justice politics reflected the top-down lack of political will and growing bottom-up anger. The spatial and scalar visions of climate justice activists at both global and local levels are worth considering in detail, given the importance of this work for planetary sustainability and the living conditions of future generations, as well as for transnational activism more generally. Using David Harvey’s insights on crisis and displacement, the article suggests routes of analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances that can be compared between global and local levels, with South Africa as a case study.

1. Introduction

This article draws together lessons from recent global and South African episodes in climate politics which reveal core insights into radical analyses and activism against climate change. Combating greenhouse gas emissions is a formidable challenge, and the first two decades of environmentalist awareness about the coming climate catastrophe obviously did not establish sound principles for social and state interventions. For critics, the scalar and spatial nature of the challenge is rarely strategized explicitly. However, the recent fusion of the ‘global justice movement’ with radical environmentalism may result in a decisive mix of ‘red’ and ‘green’ politics, stretching from local to global scales.

One reason for failure, to date, is the inadequate understanding among most environmentalists regarding capitalist climate imperatives. In turn, this stems in part from their overly generous assessments of global elite bona fides, a mistaken sense of the balance of forces in global-scale negotiations, a naïve belief that market mechanisms can work to solve (rather than exacerbate) the crisis, and a lack of sensitivity to North-South relations. In some cases too, the Big Green groups – especially National Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, World Wide Fund for Nature and the Sierra Club – turned to corporate partners for financial support and, as a result, turned their backs on climate science. ‘I find the behavior of most environmental NGOs to be shocking,’ eminent climate scientist James Hansen recently stated. ‘I [do] not want to listen to their lame excuses for their abominable behavior’ (cited in Hari, 2010). Most prominently, the Climate Action Network, representing Big Green and similarly-minded smaller groups, has long supported emissions markets, to the point that extreme conflicts of interests emerged when Network leaders began earning side profits from the carbon trade (Bond 2009a).

As a result, a movement that became known as Climate Justice (‘CJ’) emerged during the 2000s. It drew inspiration from traditions such as US anti-racist politics associated with environmental justice organizing dating to the 1980s, the incipient radical environmentalism that regularly attempted to break out of stifling United Nations negotiations, and the Global Justice movement that symbolically began in Chiapas with the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and became global in orientation with the Seattle protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) millennial summit. One marker of this new approach was the 2004 founding of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, a loose network largely aimed at building a critique of carbon trading. At the Bali Conference of the Parties in December 2007, the Climate Justice Now! network was launched, and two years later, joined Climate Justice Action (mainly European radicals) as the leading critics of the Copenhagen climate summit. In the wake of Copenhagen, a return of the same forces to Cancun will very likely see a repeat of the elite failure of December 2010, amidst militant protest outside. The same can be expected in South Africa when the Conference of the Parties reconvenes in late 2011.

Interesting new developments should inform CJ politics. The most important are the probable demise of overarching global (and US national) emissions markets as a serious vehicles for mainstream environmentalism, and the emergence of campaigns that relate to both the spatial and scalar challenges of global and local climate politics. The case studies in this article are drawn from South Africa, but similar processes elsewhere bear consideration.

As discussed in more detail below, this shifting-stalling-stealing strategy of powerful Northern actors (and supplicant Southern elite allies) recurs in capitalist crisis displacement (Section 2) in a manner that helps us understand climate negotiations (Section 3). A case study of South African national climate policy is reflective of how intermediate terrain has been won by the global elite, including the specific cases of a World Bank carbon trading project in Durban and a $3.75 billion loan to South Africa’s electricity parastatal Eskom (Section 4). This rounds off the argument that a serious ideology and strategy crossing space and scale will invariably embrace anti-imperialist, eco-socialist politics, and that the roots of this strategy have been planted in the movement now known as Climate Justice (Section 5).

2. Shifting, stalling and stealing through space, time and accumulation by dispossession

The context is crucial. Drawing on David Harvey’s insights into the laws of motion of capital, the climate debate fits well within what might be called a shifting-stalling-stealing strategy at the heart of contemporary capitalism. The three routes correspond to the ways capitalism dealt with its deep-rooted problem of overaccumulation, dating to the 1970s, using what Harvey terms the ‘spatial fix,’ the ‘temporal fix,’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession.’ In the field of political economy, these concepts refer, respectively, to:

• globalization’s ability to shift problems around spatially, without actually solving these problems;
• financialization’s capacity to stall problems temporally, by generating credit-based techniques – including securitization of toxic loans – that permit the purchase of products today at the expense of future arrears and defaults when the upside-down pyramid topples; and
• imperialism’s compulsion to steal from weaker territories via extra-economic extractive systems, variously termed ‘articulations of modes of production,’ ‘primitive accumulation,’ ‘uneven and combined development,’ the ‘Shock Doctrine,’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’.

The mismanagement of capitalist crises, most spectacularly in 2008-09, included vast taxpayer bank bailouts when the financial bubbles burst. These, in turn, set the stage for another coming round of subprime disasters (next time, sovereign debt defaults combined with commercial real estate) as well as more rapid devaluation of the dollar. No matter how much the shifting, stalling, and stealing, more is required than US Treasury and the Fed have accomplished – but there are limits, now emerging into plain view.

It is a general problem, as we see by retracing several decades. Shifting-stalling-stealing moves are required when capital exhausts options to address periodic over-accumulation crises – such as 1973-75, 1980-82, 1989-92, 1997-2001 and 2007-09, with more to come – through traditional means. These would include classical strategies Marx identified as countervailing tendencies, such as raising the profit rate through work speed-up and intensity (absolute surplus value) or more efficient, capital-intensive production (relative surplus value). But the crises cannot be solved in these ways, because overaccumulation stems from excessive productive capacity and gluts of markets, commodity stocks, labor pools and financial assets unable to achieve deployment in a manner that generates acceptable levels of profit (Harvey 1982). As a result, the traditional strategies have to be augmented by shifting problems around geographically (Harvey’s term is the ‘spatial fix’ – or ‘shifting’); and building up vast debt and blowing speculative bubbles so as to stall crises until later (Harvey’s ‘temporal fix’ – or ‘stalling’). At this stage, capital often needs more routes to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, including the appropriation of non-capitalist spheres of society and nature through extra-economic, imperialist techniques, in the manner Harvey (2003) termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (or, ‘stealing’). Rosa Luxemburg (1951) described this process in The Accumulation of Capital and Naomi Klein (2007) updated the argument in Shock Doctrine. The leading statement from Africa about capital’s tendency to ‘financialization’ as part of this process was restated recently by Ugandan political economist Dani Nabudere (2009) in his Crash of International Finance Capital.

Can the capitalist strategies of shifting, stalling and stealing also inform our understanding of the environmental dynamics associated with accumulation? Core insights drawn from Harvey’s amendments to Marxist theory include the shifting of the geographical framework for climate (with the South and East bearing increased responsibility) as the crisis hits home in the North; the stalling of its resolution through recourse to financial markets – e.g. the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme – no matter how dysfunctional; and ‘stealing’ the right to emit pollutants from the more vulnerable countries of the South. After all, a crucial limit to capitalist political economy is political ecology. Larry Summers arranged Wall Street bailouts in 1995 (Mexico), 1997-98 (East Asia) and 2008-10 (across the world but mainly helping Wall Street) through extreme devaluations visited upon vulnerable countries and people. These hark back to December 1991. At that point, as World Bank chief economist, Summers (1991) wrote (or at least signed a memo written by Lant Pritchett) that ‘The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste on the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,’ and ‘African countries are vastly underpolluted’. The gist of Summers’ analysis and strategy is that the US and other First World ultra-polluters should:

• shift problems associated with environmental market externalities to the South;
• stall a genuine solution to the problems by instead opening up the field of pollution-trading for a future market solution, using financialization techniques and imaginary ‘offsets’ ostensibly aimed at building tomorrow’s sinks so as to mop up today’s dangerous forms of Northern pollution; and
• steal more of the world’s environmental carrying capacity – especially for greenhouse gas emissions – and perhaps pay a bit back through commodification of the air (resorting to mythical carbon markets and offsets) while denying climate debt responsibilities (as the US negotiating team did in Copenhagen, especially chief envoy Todd Stern: ‘The sense of guilt or culpability or reparations – I just categorically reject that’) (Bond 2009b).

This is the basic theoretical and interpretive standpoint that allows us to study power politics in climate negotiations beginning in 1997 and carrying through to 2010.

3. Kyoto-Copenhagen-Cancun

Three simple steps need to be taken to escape the greenhouse-gas governance gridlock among global elites, although United Nations officials, and nearly all the world’s climate negotiators, refuse to take them:

• make dramatic emissions cuts – 45% below 1990 levels in the advanced capitalist economies, within a decade, so as to reduce the temperature rise to less than 1 degree centigrade in line with scientific demands and the calls of climate change victims (World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, 2010);
• acknowledge the vast climate debt the wealthy North owes to the under-emitting South – estimated at $400 bn/year by 2020 (Klein 2009a, Lee 2009); and
• decommission the destructive carbon markets – which have proven incapable of fair, rational and non-corrupt trading (Lohmann 2009).

As noted, elites prefer other routes: shifting, stalling, and stealing, three moves we can use to characterize both contemporary economic crisis management and climate malgovernance. The carbon markets assist capitalism in generating all three moves, and it is remarkable that it took more than a decade before a critical mass of opponents emerged after the Kyoto Protocol was formulated. Instead, while Washington’s Big Green organizations initially opposed carbon trading, they were won over in Kyoto. They were joined by European elites, who set up the EU Emissions Trading Scheme along the lines Al Gore had requested in 1997. At that point, Gore falsely promised the US would sign on to Kyoto if it included carbon markets (and which has made him, personally, even more wealthy, as a pioneer carbon market participant). But the route from Kyoto to Copenhagen was one Washington declined to travel, as the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto accords. The Bush regime showed up near the endgame, in Bali in 2007, with a vague commitment to join future post-Kyoto talks, if China and India were compelled to make deep cuts.

Then, in Copenhagen, Washington ‘broke the UN,’ as 350.org leader Bill McKibbon put it, by invoking a WTO-style Green Room strategy of divide-and-conquer (Bond 2009b). In a microcosm of last-minute shifting-stalling-stealing, the Copenhagen Accord brought the US together with the Brazil, South Africa, India and China (BASIC) bloc so that five leaders-of-color – Barack Obama, Lula da Silva, Jacob Zuma, Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao – could cement, for future decades, the untenable profits and lifestyles enjoyed overwhelmingly by white-owned capital and white over-consumers.[1] Process aside, the Accord’s content was nearly universally condemned, for four reasons:

• inadequate emissions cuts imply a catastrophic 3.5 degree centigrade increase in average temperatures by the end of the century, with options for vague ‘pledge and review’ commitments and offsets so that Northern polluters can outsource the cuts;
• no clear sources of financing and explicit commitments to pay the North’s ‘climate debt’ to the South, owed for taking too much environmental space and doing massive climate damage (such as the current 300,000 premature deaths annually, escalating much more quickly as climate chaos worsens beyond 1 degree centigrade)(United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2008);
• the deal’s departure from Kyoto Protocol and Bali Action Plan principles which set out far more ambitious targets for richer versus poorer countries; and
• no legally binding components or compliance mechanisms.

At Cancun, in November-December 2010, we can expect a re-occurrence of the crashed WTO ministerial summit held seven years earlier, in the form of protests outside and a walk-out and consensus-denial by insider elites. For also in Cancun in 2003, a brave African delegation opposed South Africa’s trade minister (Alec Erwin), and withdrew from the WTO summit (Bond 2006). In late 2010, Cancun critics will no doubt include delegates from small islands, a few African countries, and the Bolivarians of Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. They will be supported by tens of thousands of red-green activists outside the Cancun talks, a group far more militant than the 100,000 who marched December 12, 2009 in Denmark. We take up these movements’ strategic options, following a discussion of South African climate politics. This is more than a local case study, for the positions of state and capital on the one hand, and the Climate Justice Now! South Africa network on the other, will also shape global processes given South Africa’s 2011 hosting of the next Conference of Parties.

4. South African elite interests and climate injustice

In part because of South Africa’s vast CO2 emissions – the country’s carbon intensity per capita GDP output is amongst the world’s highest – the Pretoria government occupies an important position in global climate politics. As noted above, Brazil, South Africa, India and China – the BASIC countries – and the United States sponsored a climate deal at Copenhagen in December 2009, condemned by Klein (2009b) as ‘nothing more than a grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters: I’ll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.’ Returning from the meeting, South Africa’s environment minister Buyelwa Sonjica expressed ‘disappointment’ in the Copenhagen Accord that Obama persuaded SA President Jacob Zuma to sign at the last minute on December 18, 2009 (Bond 2010b). It failed on its own terms, as key deadlines slipped by. Moreover, Obama’s gambit meant that the WTO’s notorious divide-and-rule politics – controversially endorsed by South Africa (through Erwin) at the 1999 Seattle, 2001 Doha and 2003 Cancun summits but vetoed by the African delegation at the first and third – would become the norm for UN climate negotiations, to the obvious detriment of climate victims, especially in Africa (Bond, 2006). The cuts in South African emissions promised by Sonjica just before Copenhagen were labeled by Earthlife Africa as a ‘public relations stunt’ because of the ‘fantasy’ baseline projection (Bond 2009b). In reality, emissions cuts promised in Pretoria’s Long-Term Mitigation Scenario will not begin until after 2030.

The failure to prevent government from agreeing to the Copenhagen Accord can be blamed in part upon the weak state of civil society organizing and social consciousness. Amongst major countries surveyed in 2006, only China had a lower awareness of climate change than South Africa. The same problem had been evident when South Africa last hosted a major environmental conference, in Johannesburg in 2002, when the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development did not even consider climate change worthy of discussion.

Moreover, one of the most obvious strategic orientations of the South African government is carbon trading (Bond, Dada and Erion 2009). To illustrate the controversies, in April 2010 the Medupi power plant was proposed by Eskom officials as a potential Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project, in spite of the enormous eco-social resistance that arose to its financing by a World Bank loan (Newmarch 2010). In the same spirit, in 2009, an attempt by Sasol to claim that a gas pipeline investment was ‘additional’ to existing plans (hence deserving emissions reductions credits) was ridiculed by the Johannesburg activist group Earthlife (2009), and did not pass muster in the UN vetting process.

But the most controversial was South Africa’s single largest CDM project, a methane-electricity conversion at Bisasar Road landfill in Durban’s Clare Estate residential neighborhood, which processes 5000 tonnes of solid waste a day. As SA Energy Minister Dipuo Peters explained during a January 2010 visit and formal unveiling of the CDM, ‘As I understand it, the development of this project began as far back as 2002 when the Department of Cleansing and Solid Waste here in eThekwini municipality was approached by the World Bank encouraging the municipality to consider participating in CDM initiatives’ (Bond 2010c).

Durban bureaucrats believed the Bank and marketed Durban methane far and wide. But opposition arose from a local community activist, Sajida Khan, who lived next to the site until she died in 2007 of cancer, a disease she blamed white municipal officials for. The dump had been imposed on the Clare Estate community in 1980, in one of the world’s extreme cases of environmental racism. Many neighbors also succumbed to cancer. Because of Khan’s activism, profiled on the front page of the Washington Post the day the Kyoto Protocol became operational in February 2005, the Bank retreated from Bisasar (it did offer CDM status to two other small Durban landfills in August that year). During the 1990s, Khan organized thousands of her neighbors to call for the closure of the Bisasar Road site but apartheid bureaucrats refused, as did the post-apartheid city manager, Mike Sutcliffe, during the 2000s. [2] He ordered the dump to stay open, contradicting ANC campaign promises in 1994, because Bisasar is extremely well-located and the valley – once a nature reserve – could take many years’ more worth of rubbish before filling up, hence more methane-electricity CDM monies.

For Khan, that meant the Clare Estate community would be forever stuck with waste, stink and toxins. Perfume rods along the fence sickened the air’s smell, instead of cleaning it. Gaps in the thin cement wall separating the dump from Kennedy Road (and thousands of shackdwellers) illustrated how little maintenance support the city provides. The methane-electricity conversion requires burning and flaring, which meant putrid fumes from rotting waste have a much higher level of lethal chemicals and metals. Ideally, Khan argued, the dump should be shut, a municipal ‘zero-waste’ strategy adopted, and methane piped out of Bisasar to a site (for industrial usage) not so densely packed with housing and schools in the immediate vicinity. But that would have cost the city a bit more.[3] Instead, the project went ahead, although due to the international uproar over Bisasar’s explict environmental racism (the subject of a front-page Washington Post report in 2005), the World Bank was compelled to drop out. Khan died in July 2007, of cancer which she believed was brought on by the extension of dumping.

Another South African climate justice campaign – also unsuccessful in the short term – entailed fighting the World Bank’s coal portfolio. On April 8 2010, the Bank Board approved a $3.75 billion loan to the South African electricity utility Eskom, to build the world’s fourth largest coal-fired power plant. The Medupi power station will pump 25-30 megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, more than the output of 115 countries. Paying for Medupi will require a 127% real price increase from 2007-12 for ordinary South Africans (to nearly $0.15/kiloWatt hour). Meanwhile the world’s biggest metals and mining houses – especially Anglo American Corporation and BHP Billiton (itself a beneficiary of twice as much as power as thirty million low-income black South Africans) – had signed ‘Special Pricing Agreements’ during apartheid. They still get the world’s cheapest electricity from Eskom, for less than $0.02/kWh, whereas the overall corporate price is around $0.05/kWh. In exchange for the cheap power, there are very few jobs and economic linkages because locally-sold steel and aluminum cost far more than the same products which are send abroad. Also sent abroad are their vast profits, contributing to the country’s severe payments deficit, which The Economist (2009) magazine found justified the ranking of South Africa as the world’s riskiest emerging market. South Durban activists launched the campaign against the Bank loan on February 16 2010, with a spirited protest at Eskom’s main local branch. South Durban has been an epicenter of protest against fossil fuels, given that the neighborhood hosts the largest and most irresponsible petro-chemical firms south of the Niger Delta. With electricity prices soaring, many more residents in South Durban suffered electricity disconnections. They often reconnect illegally, and as Eskom and the municipality clamp down, the result is more social strife, in a country with what is probably the world’s highest rate of community protest (Bond 2010c).

There were a great many other objections to the loan. In Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, community and environmentalist anger at Eskom and the World Bank was due to the coal-fired generator’s eco-social threats, both in the vicinity of Medupi and near the dozens of new coal mines that will feed it. Local ecologies are adversely affected, especially the notoriously degraded water table, as well as the air, land, vegetables and animals due to mercury emissions from coal. Moreover, Eskom’s desire to privatize 30% of generating capacity was explicitly advanced in the loan, leading to opposition from trade unions – especially the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa – and consumers.

In spite of the Bank’s (2010) recent attack on ‘quiet corruption’, backhanders appear to characterize this project. The Bank loan will indirectly fund African National Congress (ANC) ruling party coffers, because the power plant will be built with Hitachi boilers that in turn kick back, at minimum, millions of dollars thanks to a convenient – and utterly dubious (everyone admits) – ANC investment in Hitachi. When the deal was done, Eskom chair (and former environment minister) Valli Moosa was also a member of the ANC’s finance committee. A government investigation released in March found his conduct in this blatant conflict of interest to be ‘improper’. Finally, the matter of historic racial injustice deserves mention. The World Bank’s financing of apartheid began just three years after the 1948 election of the Afrikaners’ Nationalist Party, and included $100 million for Eskom. During that period, the Bank’s money financed electricity to no black households, and instead empowered white businesses and residences (Centre for Civil Society, 2010).

As a result of these critiques, more than 200 organizations across the world, representing communities, environmentalists, labor, churches, NGOs, academics, endorsed a tough statement against the loan. The strong showing for climate justice contrasted with prior South African experiences in which ‘green’ and ‘red’ social forces were split, such as the Johannesburg WSSD in 2002 (Bond 2002). They point to a future of climate justice campaigning that takes advantage of critical international linkages, and that tackles the country’s, and world’s, largest institutions. The ability of South African state and capital to shift, stall and steal using climate-related finance – CDMs or World Bank loans – was not fundamentally altered by the social struggles described above. But the stage is set for future battles that will be even more strongly contested from below.

5. Conclusion: The logic of Charleston-Cochabamba-Caracas

In addition to protesting climate injustice in the case of the World Bank loan to Eskom and South Africa’s main CDM project, as well as at global-scale sites like Copenhagen and Cancun (and no doubt at its 2011 follow-up in South Africa, probably Cape Town), what, then, is the optimal route mapped by the CJ movement? Is anything to be learned from the South African experience in linking a variety of red and green issues within a single campaign?

We can answer in the affirmative if we recall the political-economic logic of CJ, in relation to the way capitalist crisis has unfolded so as to amplify climate injustice (Bond 2010d). To sum up, coming to grips with climate politics requires CJ organizers to:

• halt elite shifting of the problem, by expanding our own spatial and scalar political lenses from the local to the national and global (as was often accomplished in 2000s global justice organizing and activism);
• halt elite stalling by telescoping long-term climatic processes into the present, but without getting so carried away by urgency that we endorse dubious deals (this is one of our most serious challenges because the most adverse impacts are years away for many, and some of the most opportunistic of false solutions are being imposed through rush-job environmental assessments); and
• halt elite stealing – not only of an unfair share of the planet’s environmental space, but also of multilateral political processes – by asking tough questions about mitigation and adaptation, and about climate justice, stressing North-South and class/race/gender power relationships.

We have already explored the terribly adverse balance of forces associated with global governance processes from Kyoto to Copenhagen to Cancun. The last solution to a world-scale problem, after all, was the 1996 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-hole-endangering CFCs. As a result, the CJ movement must not only contest but also circumvent the elites in order to escape their climate cul-de-sac. Such a process starts elsewhere, in unlikely places like Charleston, West Virginia, where the scale-challenge has taken groups like Coal River Mountain Watch and Climate Ground Zero from their localized mountaintop removal protests – including tree-sit microsites – to the state capital, where they locked down at the WV Department of Environmental Protection in June 2009. Their demand was a handover of responsibility from local bureaucrats captured by Big Coal, to the national Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

But simultaneously, the same agency became the subject of intense climate protest, especially in March 2010, because of the EPA’s slovenly attitude towards West Virginia mountaintop removal. Activists blockaded the Washington headquarters entrance, and within days, the EPA issued such a tough ruling – based on water law – that it appears West Virginia mountaintop coal removal may become a practice of the past. But the agency needs more direct action to reverse EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s February 2010 announcement that her agency would delay substantive implementation of its 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ on coal until 2013 (curiously timed to avoid the Obama reelection campaign).

Indeed it is in national state regulation (in the US and every other country) that climate accountability has been most obviously missing. Direct command-and-control regulation of emissions sources – far beyond current EPA plans for imposition of better coal-burning technology – must be higher on the agenda in 2010, since the Senate is unwilling to pass a genuine climate bill. Gridlock in the Senate is rather useful, in this context of adverse power relations. As climate scientist Hansen and activists at Climate SOS and Rising Tide pointed out, the cap-and-trade strategy adopted by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman will do far more harm than good (Leonard 2009). As in Copenhagen, it is better to have no deal than to have a bad deal which locks in a ‘false-solution’ climate strategy, such as the May 2010 Kerry-Lieberman bill.

However, of greatest importance is that the tide turned against carbon trading in early 2010. The entire carbon trading apparatus – once projected to grow to $3 trillion worth of annual trades by 2020 – is now in question, having failed to cut emissions in the main pilot project, the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Due to overallocation of permits, the ETS will face further declines in price, and the failure of the Copenhagen Accord to confirm financing was a major blow to the market, which crashed by 10% from December 17-21 2009 as it appeared there would be a serious legitimacy deficit. The ETS was itself delegitimized in September 2009 when the UN’s main verification contractor was disqualified for repeated procedural violations, and in December 2009 when Europol discovered that up to 90% of trades in some EU countries were flagrant tax scams (The Telegraph 2009).

The problem lies not only with the particular project, an explicit example of environmental racism. More generally, to make such landfill methane-electricity conversions highly profitable, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol needed to accomplish four things: • impose a cap and reduce emissions so as to generate scarcity (the Protocol didn’t); • thus continually raise the price of carbon (but it fell 60% from peak in mid-2008 to today’s 13 euros/tonne); • thus rapidly escalate emission market trading volume (stagnant at $130 billion/year since 2008); via • the establishment of markets across the rich world (but though Europe has an Emissions Trading Scheme, the US refused entry, Canada also dropped out, and Australia tried last November but gave up) along the way to a post-Kyoto Accord that would build a global market (but the Copenhagen breakdown terminated this vision).

Likewise in Europe, The Guardian reported in January 2010, ‘Banks are pulling out of the carbon-offsetting market after Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets.’ As Anthony Hobley of the law firm Norton Rose put it, ‘We are seeing a freeze in banks’ recruitment plans for the carbon market. It’s not clear at what point this will turn into a cull or a rout’ (Webb 2010).

By March 2010, as the New York Times observed, ‘The concept is in wide disrepute. Obama dropped all mention of cap and trade from his current budget. And the sponsors of a Senate climate bill likely to be introduced in April, now that Congress is moving past health care, dare not speak its name… It was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.’ According to Senator Maria Cantwell (a Democrat from Washington State), cap and trade was ‘discredited by the Wall Street crisis, the Enron scandal and the rocky start to a carbon credits trading system in Europe that has been subject to dizzying price fluctuations and widespread fraud’ (Broder, 2010). An example of new fraud was the Hungarian government’s resale of carbon credits, which when exposed, drove the price of a ton from €12 down to €1 and crashed two emissions exchanges (Pointcarbon 2010). And reflecting the price volatility, futures on the European Climate Exchange crashed five times in the period 2006-2009 (Figure 1).

Figure 1: European Climate Exchange Carbon Futures Index, 2006-09

Somewhat less objectionable than Kerry et al’s efforts on behalf of the fossil fuel and financial industries, was a bill introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell and Sue Collins in late 2009, which some progressive US climate activists are now actively supporting. Yet this effort, the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal Act (CLEAR), is also fatally flawed, because of inadequate emissions cuts (around 8% from 1990-2020), the lingering presence of carbon trading and offsets, the lack of revenues earmarked to pay the US’ fair share of the Climate Debt, its inadequate strengthening of the command/control regulatory mechanisms/mandates for EPA, utility boards and planning commissions, and its nonexistent mandate to assure economic transformation so as to generate new production, consumption, transport, energy and related systems. Also, if CLEAR passes the Senate, the likelihood is that the House will insist on many of the objectionable features of Waxman-Markey (offsets, carbon trading, oil/nuke/agro subsidies, EPA neutering, etc). While a last-gasp effort prior to Cancun may be made, by limiting a carbon market to electric utilities, most observers suggest climate legislation will not pass both houses of the US Congress in 2010. This realization should prevent distraction of activists into the national legislative quagmire, and instead allow more work on more immediate and fruitful strategies.

In contrast to the Capitol Hill quicksand, California provides more radical grassroots insights into jumping space and scale, with Chevron headquarters a special target of the vibrant Movement for Climate Justice-West (the most active group of CJ activists in the US), AmazonWatch, and Global Exchange. Californians and Alaskans who have previously fought to ‘leave the oil in the soil’ – halting offshore drilling and tundra destruction, respectively – will obviously need to remobilize against Obama. Amidst eco-catastrophe from Florida through Texas and beyond, British Petroleum’s April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill is one potential consciousness-raising opportunity for the CJ movement to address the utterly captive character of regulation.

Everywhere, organizers can find excellent local climate change targets to raise consciousness and effect emissions cuts, with direct action against major greenhouse gas sources or large-scale corporate fossil-fuel consumers. Two particularly good sites for climate activists are, first, the public utility commissions which control pricing and electricity generation techniques (and hence coal-fired and nuclear power plants); and second, the municipal or regional planning commissions which give the go-ahead to suburban sprawl and all manner of other climate-threatening projects.

This brings us to the global scale, where at a landmark conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia from April 19-22 2010 (Earth Day), more than 30,000 Bolivarians led by host Evo Morales and grassroots indigenous, community, feminist, and environmental movements were joined by genuinely solidaristic environmental, social, labor and NGO forces. This meeting set in motion a much more serious transnational CJ approach, based not upon the illusion that the UN will address the climate crisis anytime soon, but instead upon more serious, pragmatic strategies. These can come only from a much richer merging of social and ecological rights discourses (for what such narratives are worth), and choices of unifying targets (such as fossil fuel companies, carbon traders, and the World Bank).

Meanwhile, from Caracas, the ‘Fifth International’ began slowly gathering steam, and could become the crucial meeting ground between red-green activists on the one hand, and on the other, the region’s petro-socialists (e.g. Hugo Chavez) and petro-Keynesians (e.g. Rafael Correa). At issue is whether the latter can face up to contradictions in their own political ecologies, because in one of the world’s most important sites of struggle, Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park in the Amazon, an official presidential threat has been made that oil drilling will commence in June 2010, unless countervailing pressure by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and Accion Ecologica is successful.

The situation elsewhere in Africa is similar, since so many of the extractive industries are the sole beneficiaries of electricity grid expansion. Red-green campaigns aim to ‘leave the oil in the soil’ and ‘the coal in the hole,’ exemplified in Nigeria where Delta activists have intimidated oil companies through both non-violent and armed struggle. In the former category, Environmental Rights Action in Port Harcourt insists on an end to extraction and exploration on grounds of the climate threat, and the descendants of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni movement comrades won a precedent-setting out-of-court-settlement with Shell in June 2009 that may scare off other oil firms. In the latter category, even after an amnesty in 2009 had a divide-and-conquer effect, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) continued to kidnap foreign oil workers, demanding they vacate the Delta for good.

After a combined struggle of this type, Shell was evicted from Ogoniland in June 2008, 13 years after the company arranged for Saro-Wiwa’s execution, and a year later, Saro-Wiwa’s family (and those of eight others executed at the same time) won $15.5 million from Shell in an Alien Tort Claims Act case settled out of court, a large amount of which was recommitted to movement building. An estimated 1.5 million tonnes of oil have spilled since Delta drilling began in the late 1950s, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill each year, costing more than $5 billion in annual environmental damage. In his closing statement at the trial prior to his execution, Saro-Wiwa demanded that Shell vacate the area: ‘The military dictatorship holds down oil- producing areas such as Ogoni by military decrees and the threat or actual use of physical violence so that Shell can wage its ecological war without hindrance.’ At the time, Shell executives met with the Nigerian High Commission in London, stating that if the ‘Ogoni virus’ spreads to other areas in the Delta it would be the end of the oil business. In court, the plaintiffs had alleged that Shell hired Nigerian police for internal security; that Shell purchased vehicles and arms for the military; that Shell requested military support to build a pipeline through Ogoni land; that Shell assisted and financed the Nigerian military to repress the resistance of the Ogoni people; and that the firm participated in the arrest of Saro-Wiwa and others on fake murder charges and bribed witnesses to produce false testimony (Bond and Sharife, 2009).

Most remarkably, rather than letting such destruction rest at the scale of the local, the Port Harcourt NGO Environmental Rights Action (ERA) led the climate justice movement in Nigeria, West Africa and globally at Copenhagen to a much deeper critique of ecological responsibility. In opposition to the shifting, stalling and stealing that characterizes economic and environmental commodification in their own region, and in relation to world financial and oil markets, ERA and its visionary leader Nimmo Bassey jumped scale to demand that the oil be left in the soil and under the Gulf of Guinea water, given the threat to the planet. It has been estimated that only 20 per cent of the Niger Delta’s oil is being extracted, thanks largely to the Mend insurgency.

Jumping to the global scale, the Climate Justice Now! network has shown a conceptual ability to confront world capitalism’s shifting, stalling and stealing with demands for Northern accountability for emissions, for decommissioned carbon markets so as to avoid the stalling of emission cuts, and for climate debt payments to reimburse the stealing associated with the North’s externalization of its emissions. Recall the five demands made in Bali, in December 2007:

• reduced consumption;
• huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation;
• leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy;
• rights-based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and
• sustainable family farming, fishing and peoples’ food sovereignty.

No matter that the CJN!’s component movements are disparate; so too are the forces that moved from sophisticated critique of carbon trading in South Africa to a broad-based campaign against the World Bank’s largest project loan, that shook the energy establishment. These are the kinds of organizations and arguments that link spatio-temporal resistances amongst diverse eco-social forces during a period of austerity, civil society weakness, and repression. The agents of social and environmental change can take advantage of neoliberalism’s still-discredited ideological status and demand from the next global and national negotiations a strategy for justice, not one based upon commodifying carbon.

But to do so the CJ activists still need to generalize an innovative critique, one that emerged over time as the global emissions trading strategy rose from birth in 1997, peaked in 2008, and attempts a last-gasp resurrection after the economic crisis and climate negotiations breakdown. The frenzied failure of elite climate politics stretching narrowly, in 2009-10, from the UN to the US Senate and G20 in June 2010 should make bottom-up alternatives much easier to advocate, including globally-coordinated actions against destructive projects (such as the World Bank’s loan in South Africa). In addition to the Cancun version of an alternative climate summit, the Dakar World Social Forum in early 2011 is an additional sites in which to share the lessons and build wider alliances, aiming towards a much more decisive showdown in South Africa in December 2011.

From the wider, deeper, and increasingly common critique of the Kyoto-Copenhagen-Cancun cul-de-sac, will come more confidence in the types of analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances associated with CJ politics. The challenge is to aggregate experiences from the Charlestons of the world, so as to move into alignment with the Cochabamba conference, and in turn, to generate a formidable red-green force uniting radical governments and the popular movements that will keep them accountable within global-left initiatives such as represented by Caracas’s Fifth International. The case of South African national interactions in the global climate negotiations reinforces a sense of how the politics of scale and space can be distorted, so that policies patently against the interests of a country’s mass-popular constituencies are adopted. But likewise, South African CJ politics from below suggest ways forward that, while not yet sufficiently strong to declare victory, really do offer the only hope for the way forward.

References

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Gallagher, E. (2009), ‘The Pitfalls of Manufacturing a Market: Why Carbon Will Not Just Sit Down, Shut Up, and Behave Like a Proper Commodity’, New American Contract Policy Paper, Washington, New America Foundation.

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[1] Tellingly, amongst the first groups of rural Africans to be fatally affected by the extreme climate change that the Copenhagen Accord locks in, are the Luo people of Kenya and the Zulu of KwaZulu-Natal: Obama’s and Zuma’s closest kin. Nine of ten African peasants will not be able to produce if the 2 degrees centigrade mark is breached this century, according to UN experts (Pachauri, 2007).

[2] In 2008, Sutcliffe was granted two major honors by the American Geographical Association, reflecting the extraordinary conceptual distance between Ohio State University – from where they were proposed (and from where Sutcliffe received his PhD) – and Durban. Critics of Sutcliffe point to his refusal to grant permissions for nonviolent protest marches, championing of a new World Cup stadium costing hundreds of millions of dollars (in spite of a perfectly functional stadium operating next door), dogmatic (and failed) bus privatization, attempted closure of a century-old Indian market to put up a shopping mall at Warwick Junction, unending subsidies given to pet projects at the harbor and the International Convention Centre, controversies over the rejection of the ‘Blue Flag’ beach program to assure safe sea water, promotion of the economically dubious Dube Trade Port, and adoption of an economic development strategy reliant upon sports tourism – including Olympic Games bids – in an age of climate change, stadium and airport white elephants, and fast-rising air travel taxes.

[3] The adverse consequences of Durban waste strategies are not limited to Bisasar Road. In the Indian-African suburb of Chatsworth, the Bul Bul Landfill emits toxic fumes, and in October 2009, a particularly bad eruption left more than 100 nearby schoolchildren hospitalized. According to Lushendrie Naidu of the Dumpsite Action Committee, ‘We are protesting, demanding the dump be closed. For the past five years, chemical waste has been stored at Bul-Bul, yet there is no disaster management plan.’ Instead of a sensible disposal strategy, Durban’s bureaucrats are turning to waste incineration, using the energy/climate crisis as an excuse, and borrowing outmoded technology from Oslo. Yet as one official Norwegian document concedes, ‘Incineration and landfill are seen as the least desirable forms of waste management and represent the last resort within Oslo’s strategy.’ Because the super-carcinogenic chemical dioxin is produced in the process, the Norwegian group Aksjon Steng Giftfabrikken demanded that the two Oslo incinerators be closed. Yet Durban Mayor Obed Mlaba announced in the September 2009 city’s newsletter, ‘Residents of Oslo in particular, are generating electricity directly from solid waste. The way it’s done is that waste is simply fed into some transformer machine, where it is literally burned with the end product being electricity. Well, the good news for you and I is that we could soon have the same method right here on our doorstop. Once available, it would perfectly complement the methane-based power process,’ putting Durban ‘well on track to playing its part in curtailing global warming through the reduction of greenhouse gas emission into the atmosphere.’ The reality is much more dirty, dangerous and destructive (Bond, 2010c).