Climate Justice and Community Renewal

Resistance and Grassroots Solutions

Brian Tokar, Tamra Gilbertson, Brian Tokar, Tamra Gilbertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000049213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal.

The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific islands, experiences of life-long defenders of the land and forests in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and eastern Canada, and efforts to halt the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure from North America to South Africa. They offer various perspectives on how a just transition toward a fossil-free economy can take shape, as they share efforts to protect water resources, better feed their communities, and implement new approaches to urban policy and energy democracy.

Climate Justice and Community Renewal uniquely highlights the accounts of people who are directly engaged in local climate struggles and community renewal efforts, including on-the-ground land defenders, community organizers, leaders of international campaigns, agroecologists, activist-scholars, and many others. It will appeal to students, researchers, activists, and all who appreciate the need for a truly justice-centered response to escalating climate disruptions.

PART I

Climate impacts, extractivism, and land defense

1

The climate abuse of climate inaction

Nnimmo Bassey

The climate alarm could not have been much louder than the Special Report (SR15) that was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018. While the Paris Agreement presented the famous target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or well below two degrees, the special report showed that such a range may actually be political wishful thinking. The Special Report (IPCC 2018) clearly demonstrated that a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels will bring about severe changes compared to current extreme weather events.

Professing a diagnosis is easier than providing a solution, especially when you do not wish to ruffle feathers. Most scientists and laymen agree that although global warming has risen and abated in the past, what has happened since the Industrial Revolution is a vertical climb that shows no sign of reversion. It is also generally agreed that the catastrophic rise is largely systemic, caused by the exploitative economic system that the world is locked into. It is this rigged system that blocks the routes to the needed climate action.

Is it not known that the problem is about the continual burning of fossil fuels that stokes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases? Why is the world reluctant to stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels even though these are known to be detrimental? The answer is simply that the powers-that-be prefer profit to people and the planet. So, business as usual continues, and disaster brings even more profit through displacement of poor people and the grabbing of resources that the poor and the vulnerable are unable to access or return to.

We note that the SR15 report also acknowledges that the carbon-sucking technologies being bandied about are unproven, and we should add that they are equally unregulated. The IPCC report diagnosed the problem and raised the alarm urging politicians and economic leaders to act. However, some of the suggested actions are equally alarming and will likely add more problems for the poor, the unprotected and the vulnerable, in the unfolding climate chaos. The urgency of the crisis could not have been presented in starker terms than by the IPCC.

The world will continue to cringe at the dire prognosis of the report, however, and then go right ahead to dig up more coal, more crude oil and proceed with more fracking. Governments will still dig for coal and destroy forests in the process, despite loud alarms raised by forest protectors such as the ones at the Hambach Forest in Germany (Hambach Forest, n.d.). The Hambach Forest is located close to the city of Cologne and is threatened to be cleared for the expansion of an open pit coal mine. Activists have protected the forest through litigation and by setting up a camp, organizing protests and generally occupying the space to stop the chainsaws. Although the courts have not ordered the protection of the forest, the German government said it would not clear the forest until late 2020.

Meanwhile in Nigeria, the flaring of associated gas remains a thorny issue. In the country’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), the deadline for ending the flaring has been set at 2030, although government had pledged to end the act by 2020 in regulations made in 2018.

An infrastructure project in Nigeria that raises particular concern is a so-called Superhighway project, a 275 kilometer highway proposed to run through the last remaining tropical rainforest from a proposed seaport at Esighi in Cross River State to Katsina Ala in Benue State (EnviroNews 2016). The Superhighway project is estimated to cost N700 billion (about US$2 billion) and the cost would take a hundred years to recover. Many believe that the project is a ploy to harvest trees from the forests and ship them abroad through the proposed seaport – a clearly exploitative neocolonial scheme.

Actions by citizens to force governments to be ambitious in their climate action include the use of litigation. An example is the legal action taken by Urgenda, a Netherlands non-governmental organization, which sought to compel the government to cut emissions 25 percent based on 1990 levels by 2020. After a lower court found in favor of Urgenda, the state appealed, insisting that such a decision should be made by parliament. The appeals court at the Hague sided with Urgenda in the case against the Dutch government and declared that the government had a duty to take adequate climate action as a means of protecting the citizens from climate impacts and for securing the human rights (DutchNews 2018). Interestingly the court also discounted the Dutch government’s argument that the carbon being pumped into the atmosphere today will be sucked out in future.

We were told in 2018 that the window for halting the chaotic climate march was a narrow twelve years. The IPCC stated that by 2030, the global emissions of carbon dioxide must be cut by 45 percent from 2010 levels. It is also estimated that by 2050 renewables should provide 85 percent of global electricity. This prognosis ought to reduce anxieties concerning how to meet the energy transition challenge. However, looking at the NDCs of countries just stepping into the fossil fuels extraction business, we see that some of them aim to raise revenues from fossil fuel exploitation to finance their transition to a renewable future. That strategy would require a larger window than the twelve years that the IPCC suggested. It would also mean maintaining business as usual or actually compounding it.

So, what is to be done? When the IPCC says that action must be taken to ensure that the store of carbon in the atmosphere is brought to net zero, what is meant is that the amount of carbon released from excessive consumption and burning of fossil fuels and the like must be equal to the amount of carbon that is captured and stored somewhere, locked in sinks or deflected by some other means. These proposed actions, the hallmarks of market environmentalism, are the real alarm bells that we should wake up to. The idea of net zero emissions sounds like a perfect proposition mathematically, but nature does not operate on the basis of mathematical formulas or hypotheses. Net zero is built upon the illogic of carbon offsetting – a concept that assumes that pollution in one locale can be offset by a natural or artificial mechanism somewhere else. For example, a polluter in North America could pay for the carbon in the trees in a particular portion of the Amazon forest and it would be assumed that this would neutralize the continued pollution by the polluter-cum-carbon-speculator. If that portion of the Amazon gets burnt, as seen in the conflagrations in that forest in August 2019, what would happen to the carbon in the burnt trees? It is obvious that since trees could be lost through logging and fires (intentional or otherwise), the idea of using carbon in trees as a cover for maintaining business as usual is a rather specious device.

And, we cannot forget that about seven million square kilometers will be needed to cultivate so-called energy crops. The more understandable names for those crops are biofuel and agrofuel crops. These are crops grown to feed machines or to provide biomass for some synthetic processes. An uptake of that massive expanse of land away from food crops will definitely bring profit to industrial farmers and promote genetically engineered crops and attendant agrotoxics, while raising global hunger and wider social malaise. Also, more forests will be designated as carbon sinks with the corresponding exclusion of communities from enjoying and managing their common heritage.

It is estimated that up to US $2.4 trillion would have to be invested in energy systems annually and transition from coal-fired plants in the next two decades to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (Mozambique Resources Post 2018). This is at a time that the world cannot raise $10 billion for climate finance.

Polluting and then capturing and locking up pollutants in some carbon prisons is not a new idea. It is a brilliant marketing spin. It allows business as usual, permits climate irresponsibility and delivers heavy cash to the polluters. For example, oil companies that use associated gas to literally scrape the bottom of oil wells will claim they are engaged in carbon capture and sequestration – even though they release the carbon in the first instance by drilling for oil. Companies engaged in geoengineering will don their beautiful badges as climate engineers and work to deploy an array of climate-interfering planetary experiments – including cloud whitening, solar mirrors in the sky and other forms of solar radiation management as well as ocean fertilization. Yes, with net zero carbon targets we can keep cranking up global temperatures but hope that “we have the technologies” to handle the problems. Humankind’s techno-optimism gives policy makers that assurance and also reassures us that the oceans and genetically engineered trees can suck carbon from the atmosphere. It assures them that we can ape volcanoes and release particles into the sky that would block the sun and cool the earth. Suddenly it is as though our planetary systems are not interconnected and one part can be tweaked without a corresponding result elsewhere. But, who would really care if the negative impacts can be deflected on those destined for the slaughter?

Africa’s vulnerability

Considering that Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions and that increased climate impacts would already spell catastrophe for the people and the environment, the urgency of the situation cannot be overstressed. With much of the continent facing water stress and with intensified cycles of drought and floods, the continent will be in dire straits.

The cost of inaction or bad action is extreme. Temperature increases will make it impossible for certain crops, including maize, rice and wheat to be cultivated. Millions more will be hit by flooding. The sea level will rise and coastal erosion will be more dramatic. With the suite of negative changes, the tide of climate refugees will rise.

The voluntary NDCs of the Paris Agreement are clearly not the solution. It is time for nations to step up and accept legally binding emissions reduction based on historical and current carbon emissions. The alarm has been sounded. There is no more time to sleep.

The increasing spate and distribution of extreme climate events have underscored the need to understand the phenomena from a justice perspective. This enables us to examine the cause and effect of the crisis as well as the responses. The cyclones that swept the African and Indian coasts of the Indian Ocean in 2019 offered real alarm bells, not just because of the accompanying fatalities but because of the frequency, spread or coverage.

Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Malawi between 4 and 21 March 2019. Shortly afterwards Cyclone Kenneth hit Mozambique and Tanzania and also affected Madagascar, the Seychelles, Malawi, Comoros and Mayotte (21–29 April 2019). This was followed a couple of weeks later by Cyclone Fani which hit the eastern coast of India.

More than 1,000 lives were lost in Cyclone Idai and fifty-two more lives were snuffed out by Kenneth which made a record of being the strongest cyclone to batter Mozambique and the first cyclone to hit Tanzania (Fitchett 2019). While Idai earned the record of being the costliest cyclone in the region with damage estimated at $2 billion, Kenneth chalked up damages adding up to $100 million (Aon 2019, 6; World Bank 2019). The fact that the cyclone went so far north as to reach Tanzania indicates that we may have entered a phase where climate events such as these may reach areas hitherto considered safe from their impacts.

Warming ocean surface temperatures have been suspected as being the reason why the storms are getting stronger. These tropical storms are triggered when surface temperatures reach 26.5 degrees Celsius and the fiercer ones happen when ocean surface temperatures reach 28–29 degrees (Fitchett 2019). With rising temperatures, rising sea levels and increasing ocean acidification, it is clear that greater dangers lie ahead. Ocean acidification harms coral reefs globally and that reduces the carbon absorption capacity of the oceans.

Coastal communities exposed to storms and other human-made impacts are experiencing increasing coastal erosion and loss of infrastructure. Industrial activities, such as canalization for movement of equipment and the search for cheap energy sources have led to the destruction of mangrove forests, including in the Niger Delta region. These have compounded effects of destroying marine ecosystems and increasing the vulnerability of exposed coastal communities. Mangroves are spawning grounds for fish species and also serve as coastal barriers to raging waves.

In Nigeria, and in much of West Africa, climate hazards meet vulnerability through coastal erosion at the south and desertification in the northern fringes beneath the Sahara Desert. The combination of those hazards and vulnerability inevitably result in disasters at a variety of levels. These include loss of agricultural land, water stress and loss of livelihoods. Internal and external migration is part of the responses of impacted populations to escape the unfolding climate disasters. These migrations result in conflicts regionally and internationally.

Deflected climate actions

The deflection of climate action toward the indefinite future has been the major approach of climate negotiators from countries of means at meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Rather than negotiate on how to wean the world from its fossil fuels addiction, efforts are spent on how to offset or mitigate climate impacts. Apart from simply being an avoidance of real action, carbon offsets offer polluters the freedom to pollute while asserting that their pollution does not count. This is the same climate accounting system that permits fossil fuel companies like Shell to claim that their emissions management plans align with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Since the blatant elevation of voluntary emission...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Climate justice and community renewal: an introduction
• PART I: Climate impacts, extractivism, and land defense
• PART II: Reclaiming community: toward a livable future
• Conclusion: connecting climate change resistance, disruption, and survival
• Index