More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Naomi Klein
Read between
May 30 - July 29, 2020
“Let’s put aside the science and talk about the ethics,” he says, clearly upset. “I come from Africa and I don’t like what I’m seeing with precipitation.”I Indeed, one of the society’s own reports on geoengineering acknowledges that Solar Radiation Management “could conceivably lead to climate changes that are worse than the ‘no SRM’ option.”8
Just as bankers take greater risks when they know governments will bail them out, the fear was that the mere suggestion of an emergency techno-fix—however dubious and distant—would feed the dangerous but prevalent belief that we can keep ramping up our emissions for another couple of decades.
Is the human that gave us the climate crisis capable of properly/safely regulating SRM? • In considering SRM regulation, are we not in danger of perpetuating the view that the earth can be manipulated in our interests? • Don’t we have to engage with these questions before we place ourselves in the triangle? When the groups come back together to discuss their triangular mind maps, these questions are never acknowledged, let alone answered. They just hang on the wall of the lecture hall as a sort of silent rebuke.
If we respond to a global crisis caused by our pollution with more pollution—by trying to fix the crud in our lower atmosphere by pumping a different kind of crud into the stratosphere—then geoengineering might do something far more dangerous than tame the last vestiges of “wild” nature. It may cause the earth to go wild in ways we cannot imagine, making geoengineering not the final engineering frontier, another triumph to commemorate on the walls of the Royal Society, but the last tragic act in this centuries-long fairy tale of control.
The ancients called this hubris; the great American philosopher, farmer and poet Wendell Berry calls it “arrogant ignorance,” adding, “We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.”II, 24
This is not some minor side effect or “unintended consequence.” If only some of these projections were to come true, that would transform a process being billed as an emergency escape from catastrophic climate change into a mass killer in its own right.
If Pinatubo was the only large eruption to have been followed by severe and life-endangering drought, that might not be enough to draw clear conclusions. But it fits neatly into a larger pattern. Alan Robock, a leading expert on the effect of volcanoes on climate, points in particular to two other eruptions—Iceland’s Laki in 1783 and Alaska’s Mount Katmai in 1912. Both were sufficiently powerful to send a high volume of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and, like Pinatubo, it turns out that both were followed by a series of terrible, or badly worsening regional droughts.
So we are left with a question less about technology than about politics: does anyone actually believe that geoengineering will be used to help Africa if that help could come only by putting North America at greater risk of extreme weather?42
though slamming the door on any kind of knowledge is always wrenching, it’s worth remembering that we have collectively foregone certain kinds of research before, precisely because we understand that the risks are too great. One hundred and sixty-eight nations are party to a treaty banning the development of biological weapons. The same taboos have been attached to research into eugenics because it can so easily become a tool to marginalize and even eliminate whole groups of people.
the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.
It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.
Rule No. 1 on encounters with arbitrary power: do not show how incredibly pissed off you are.
Saro-Wiwa stated that the Nigerian state “will have to shoot and kill every Ogoni man, woman and child to take more of their oil.”28 To this day, oil production has ceased in Ogoniland—a fact that remains one of the most significant achievements of grassroots environmental activism anywhere in the world. Because of Ogoni resistance, carbon has stayed in the ground and out of the atmosphere. In the two decades since Shell withdrew, the land has slowly begun to heal, and there are tentative reports of improved farming output.
Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable. And for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacked political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class.
What is clear is that fighting a giant extractive industry on your own can seem impossible, especially in a remote, sparsely populated location. But being part of a continent-wide, even global, movement that has the industry surrounded is a very different story.
a report commissioned by the Alberta Energy Regulator recently found a “marked reluctance to speak out” in the medical community about the health impact of the tar sands, with several interviewees pointing to Dr. O’Connor’s experience. (“Physicians are quite frankly afraid to diagnose health conditions linked to the oil and gas industry,” concluded the toxicologist who authored the report.)
“The oil industry always says there is 0 percent chance of their oil hitting the shores, but with BP, we saw that it did. Their projections are always wrong,” he said, adding, “They are always talking about ‘fail-proof’ but with Kalamazoo we saw they couldn’t turn it off for hours.”83
If it seems like there are more such spills and accidents than before, that’s because there are. According to a months-long investigation by EnergyWire, in 2012 there were more than six thousand spills and “other mishaps” at onshore oil and gas sites in the U.S. “That’s an average of more than 16 spills a day. And it’s a significant increase since 2010.
It’s the salmon that connect the streams to the rivers, the river to the sea, the sea back to the forests. Endanger salmon and you endanger the entire ecosystem that depends on them, including the Heiltsuk people whose ancient culture and modern livelihood is inseparable from this intricate web of life.
When the panel members looked out the van window, they evidently saw little more than a stereotypical mob of angry Indians, wanting to vent their hatred on anyone associated with the pipeline. But to the people on the other side of the glass, holding their paddles and fish paintings, the demonstration had not primarily been about anger or hatred. It had been about love—a collective and deeply felt expression of love for their breathtaking part of the world.
the real problem is not that trade deals are allowing fossil fuel companies to challenge governments, it’s that governments are not fighting back against these corporate challenges. And that has far less to do with any individual trade agreement than it does with the profoundly corrupted state of our political systems.
The insistence on this right to have a say in critical decisions relating to water, land, and air is the thread that runs through Blockadia.
“The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interests of financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society profit is more important than life.”
“the ingredients of resilience” are “overlapping social and civic circles, filled with people who, by virtue of living in close proximity and sharing common spaces, know and take care of each other. The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project—it’s a survival strategy.”58
“Right now the Canadian and British Columbia governments are using our land and our resources—Aboriginal and Treaty Rights—as collateral for all the loans they get from Wall Street,” Manuel said. “We are in fact subsidizing the wealth of Canada and British Columbia with our impoverishment.”4
These rights are real and they are powerful, all the more so because many of the planet’s largest and most dangerous unexploded carbon bombs lie beneath lands and waters to which Indigenous peoples have legitimate legal claims. No one has more legal power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream whose treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the rush to drill under the Arctic’s melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods
...more
Without Indigenous groups raising the human rights stakes in this battle, it’s a victory that might never have taken place.17
As the Indigenous rights movement gains strength globally, huge advances are being made in recognizing the legitimacy of these claims. Most significant was the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007 after 143 member states voted in its favor (the four opposing votes—United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—would each, under domestic pressure, eventually endorse it as well). The declaration states that, “Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive
...more
Indigenous rights—if aggressively backed by court challenges, direct action, and mass movements demanding that they be respected—may now represent the most powerful barriers protecting all of us from a future of climate chaos.
If enough people demand that governments honor the legal commitments made to the people on whose land colonial nations were founded, and do so with sufficient force, politicians interested in reelection won’t be able to ignore them forever. And the courts, too—however much they may claim to be above such influences—are inevitably shaped by the values of the societies in which they function. A handful of courageous rulings notwithstanding, if an obscure land right or treaty appears to be systematically ignored by the culture as a whole, it will generally be treated tentatively by the courts.
...more
Red Cloud tells his students that deriving energy in a way that heals and protects the natural world is not just about employment. It’s a continuation of “what the ancestors shed blood for, always fought for—the earth.” And he says he is training them not just to be technicians but to be “solar warriors.”15
under this plan, the Navajos—not an outside multinational energy company—would be the owners of the power they produced and sold to the grid. And the money generated would be able to support traditional economies, such as Navajo weaving. That is what made the plan different: this time, the arrangement would be nonextractive in every sense—the poisons would stay in the ground, and the money and skills would stay in the community.17
Part of the job of the climate movement, then, is to make the moral case that the communities who have suffered most from unjust resource relationships should be first to be supported in their efforts to build the next, life-based economy now.
The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in turn, increases suspicions in the investment community that fossil fuel stocks are overvalued. The benefit of an accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy from the start, is that it has the potential to turn the screws on the industry much tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is
...more
The overriding principle must be to address the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time.
The Yasuní plan was based on the premise that Ecuador, like all developing countries, is owed a debt for the inherent injustice of climate change—the fact that wealthy countries had used up most of the atmospheric capacity for safely absorbing CO2 before developing countries had a chance to industrialize. And since the entire world would reap the benefits of keeping that carbon in the ground (since it would help stabilize the global climate), it is unfair to expect Ecuador, as a poor country whose people had contributed little to the climate crisis, to shoulder the economic burden for giving
...more
Developed countries, which represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population, have emitted almost 70 percent of all the greenhouse gas pollution that is now destabilizing the climate. (The United States alone, which comprises less than 5 percent of the global population, now contributes about 14 percent of all carbon emissions.)34
Climate debt is not extortion but climate change, when fully confronted, does raise some awfully thorny questions about what we in the wealthy world owe to the countries on the front lines of a crisis they had little hand in creating.
It’s the fast-rising economies of the Global South—with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa leading the pack—that are mostly responsible for the surge in emissions in recent years, which is why we are racing toward tipping points far more quickly than anticipated. The reason for this shift in the source of emissions has everything to do with the spectacular success multinational corporations have had in globalizing the high-consumption-based economic model pioneered in wealthy western countries. The trouble is, the atmosphere can’t take it.
starting two centuries ago, coal helped Western nations to deliberately appropriate other people’s lives and lands; and as the emissions from that coal (and later oil and gas) continually built up in the atmosphere, it gave these same nations the means to inadvertently appropriate their descendants’ sky as well, gobbling up most of our shared atmosphere’s capacity to safely absorb carbon.
the United States’s share of global emissions cuts needed by the end of the decade might be something like 30 percent (the largest of any single country). But not all of those reductions would need to be done at home—some could be met by financing and otherwise supporting the transition to low-carbon pathways in the South. And according to the researchers, with every nation’s share of the global burden clearly defined and quantified, there would be no need to rely on ineffective and easily gamed market mechanisms like carbon trading.50
As John Lamkin, a fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, put it: “Any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn’t have a chance.”5 Unlike the oil-coated pelicans and sea turtles, which were being featured on the covers of the world’s newspapers that week, these deaths would attract no media attention, just as they would go uncounted in the official assessments of the spill’s damage. Indeed, if a certain species of larva was in the process of being snuffed out, we would likely not find out about it for years—until those embryonic life-forms would
...more
when clusters of infertility and infant illness arise, they very often are the first warning signs of a broader health crisis.
These kinds of infant health impacts—and much worse—are all too familiar in communities that live in closest proximity to the dirtiest parts of our fossil fuel economy. For instance, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, which is located just south of the industrial city of Sarnia in southern Ontario, has been the subject of intense scientific scrutiny because of its “lost boys.”
Mossville is a textbook case of environmental racism: founded by freed slaves, it was once a safe haven for its residents, who enjoyed comfortable lives thanks in part to the rich hunting and fishing grounds in the surrounding wetlands. But beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, state politicians aggressively courted petrochemical and other industries with lavish tax breaks, and one giant plant after another set up shop on Mossville’s doorstep, some just a few hundred feet from the clapboard homes. Today, fourteen chemical plants and refineries surround the town, including the largest concentration
...more
As a culture, we do a very poor job of protecting, valuing, or even noticing fertility—not just among humans but across life’s spectrum. Indeed vast amounts of money and cutting-edge technology are devoted to practices that actively interfere with the life cycle. We have a global agricultural model that has succeeded in making it illegal for farmers to engage in the age-old practice of saving seeds, the building blocks of life, so that new seeds have to be repurchased each year. And we have a global energy model that values fossil fuels over water, where all life begins and without which no
...more
Just as was feared in the early days of the spill, one of the most lasting legacies of the BP disaster may well be an aquatic infertility crisis, one that in some parts of the Gulf could reverberate for decades if not longer.
We are used to thinking about extinction as a process that affects a species or cluster of species of every age group—the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs, or the way that our ancestors hunted a range of animals until they were all gone. And we still extinguish species that way, of course. But in the age of fossil fuels, we can render the earth less alive by far more stealthy means: by interfering with the capacity of adults to reproduce in the first place, and by making the first days of life simply too difficult to survive. No corpses, just an absence—more handfuls of nothing.
when humans started planting single crops that needed to be replanted year after year, the problem of fertility loss began. The way industrial agriculture deals with this problem is well known: irrigate heavily to make up for the fact that annual plants do a poor job of retaining moisture (a growing problem as fresh water becomes more scarce), and lay on the chemicals, both to fertilize and ward off invasive pests and weeds. This in turn creates a host of new environmental and health problems, including massive aquatic dead zones caused by agricultural runoff.
Many traditional agricultural societies have developed methods to maintain soil fertility despite planting annual crops. The maize-growing cultures of Mesoamerica, for example, allowed fields to lie fallow so they could regenerate and incorporated nitrogen-fixing legumes such as beans into mixtures of crops grown side by side. These methods, which mimic the way similar plants grow in the wild, have succeeded in keeping land fertile for thousands of years.
