Climate Change, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Public Pedagogies

The Case for Ecosocialism

Mike Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000197952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Umweltökonomie

Climate Change, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Public Pedagogies: The Case for Ecosocialism uses public pedagogy as a theoretical lens to examine climate change emergency and presents a solution to the issue in ecosocialism.

The book addresses the climate's relationship with capitalism and the role of activism in highlighting the climate change emergency. With respect to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Cole assesses the pro-capitalist arguments that this revolution can be considered a progressive force and critiques them from a Marxist perspective. A case is made for ecosocialism, a form of socialism that is informed by feminism, inclusivity and real democracy. Ecosocialism, it is argued, can address climate change destruction and harness the potential fruits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the good of all. The book ends by addressing the other great threat to civilisation alongside climate change, with a postscript providing some final words of warning about the dual perils of climate change and nuclear warfare.

This highly topical book will be of interest to scholars, postgraduate students and researchers, as well as to advanced undergraduate students in the fields of environmental studies, pedagogy, and sociology. It will also appeal to all readers who are concerned with the onward march of climate change destruction.

1
Capitalism and planetary destruction

Activism for climate change emergency

Introduction

This chapter is organised into two sections. In section 1.1, I discuss the relationship between capitalism and planetary destruction, and in section 1.2, activism for climate change emergency. I begin section 1.1 with a brief summary of the agreement made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. I then consider the relationship between capitalism and planetary destruction, focusing on the negative role of certain capitalist world leaders, namely Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Scott Morrison. Next I address the Paris climate change accord four years on: Madrid (COP 25), suggesting that we may be on a trend for total planetary catastrophe. I conclude section 1.1 with a forward look to Glasgow 2020 (COP 26), suggesting that we have a mountain to climb. In section 1.2, after briefly outlining the long history of climate change awareness, the role of activism in fostering climate change emergency is analysed, with reference to Greta Thunberg, and movements inspired by her example, as well as Extinction Rebellion. The case is made that a climate change emergency needs to be declared worldwide, citing a number of factors that seriously threaten the survival of our planet. I move on to a consideration of the relationship between climate change and gender, before concluding the chapter by stressing that it is not just the existence of humankind that is at threat, but also around a million other species.

1.1 Capitalism and planetary destruction

The Paris climate change accord

Climate change public pedagogy got a boost and a stimulus after the Paris climate agreement of 2015 that aimed to limit the global rise in temperature attributed to gases or emissions released from industry and agriculture. Nearly two hundred countries agreed to:

• Keep global temperatures ‘well below’ 2C above pre-industrial levels and ‘endeavour to limit’ them to 1.5C
• At some point between 2050 and 2100, limit greenhouse gases emitted by human activity to the same levels that trees, soil and oceans can absorb naturally
• Review each country’s contribution to cutting emissions every five years
• Enable rich countries to help poorer ones by providing ‘climate finance’ to adapt to climate change and switch to renewable energy

(BBC News, 2019)

Such attempts to promote climate change awareness by overwhelmingly pro-capitalist governments are to be lauded, as are attempts by any other constituencies.¹ However, from a Marxist perspective a critique of the role of the world capitalist system in fermenting climate change extinction is not only necessary, but essential. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018) declared that preventing runaway global warming will require ‘far-reaching transitions in energy, land…and industrial systems’. To even contemplate solving the unprecedented problems that we all face, as Ashley Dawson (2019) argues, ‘we need a carefully planned and democratically administered emergency program for ecological reconstruction’. However, ‘such a program is not remotely reconcilable with capitalism’s imperatives of profit maximization and growth, not to mention private ownership of the means of production’ (Dawson, 2019). In other words, as Dawson (2019) asserts: ‘We need system change to beat climate change’, a slogan that encouragingly for ecosocialists often appears at climate change demonstrations.

As Dawson (2019) explains, following Marxist geographer David Harvey (2010), under capitalism economies must grow at a minimum compound rate of 3 percent to remain healthy. In Harvey’s words: ‘Any slowdown or blockage in capital flow will produce a crisis. If our blood flow stops, then we die. If capital flow stops, then the body politic of capitalist society dies’. Harvey gives the example of 9/11:

This simple rule was most dramatically demonstrated in the wake of the events of 9/11. Normal processes of circulation were stopped dead in and around New York City with huge ramifications for the global economy. Within five days, then Mayor Guiliani was pleading with everyone to get out their credit cards and go shopping, go to the restaurants and the Broadway shows (seats are now available!) and shortly thereafter the President of the United States did an unprecedented thing: he appeared in a collective commercial for the airlines pleading with people to start flying again.

(Harvey, 2010)

Given the finite planetary resource, capitalism’s incessant and unrelenting growth is literally killing us. A recent major report (Waheed et al., 2019) surveying hundreds of scientific studies shows a direct link over the last 50 years between economic growth, energy use and carbon emissions. Waheed et al. (2019) conclude that it is clear that ‘higher energy consumption helps to boost…economic growth but at the cost of environmental degradation’.

Citing think tank Carbon Tracker (2013), Dawson (2019) points out that 80 percent of known fossil fuel reserves need to be kept in the ground if we are to avert temperature rise above 2C. But many of these reserves are controlled by fossil fuel corporations accountable only to investors, and to maintain their value and market share, these companies must continue to extract and sell these reserves and discover new reserves to replace them, since contraction is inimical to growth (Dawson, 2019). Free market solutions and incentives such as carbon taxes, Dawson (2019) concludes, have failed to significantly diminish fossil fuel consumption.²

The negative role of certain capitalist world leaders

Certain capitalist world leaders also play a major role in contributing to climate change disasters. As Somini Sengupta (2019) reported for the New York Times: ‘This is the world we live in: Punishing heat waves, catastrophic floods, huge fires and climate conditions so uncertain that children…[take] to the streets en masse in global protests to demand action’.

She continues, ‘But this is also the world we live in: A pantheon of world leaders who have deep ties to the industries that are the biggest sources of planet-warming emissions, are hostile to protests, or use climate science denial to score political points’:

In Russia, Vladimir Putin presides over a vast, powerful petro-state. China’s state-owned companies are pushing for coal projects at home and abroad, even as the country tries in other ways to tamp down emissions. Narendra Modi of India is set on expanding coal too, even as he champions solar power.

(Sengupta, 2019)

By far the biggest and most dangerous world leaders pursuing public pedagogy and accompanying actions threatening climate change extinction are the presidents of the United States of America and Brazil and the Prime Minister of Australia.

Trump

According to James Ellsmoor (2019), the US Department of Energy, under the climate-denying President of the United States, has started referring to fossil fuels as ‘molecules of freedom’ and specifically natural gas as ‘freedom gas.’ The term may have originated during a visit by US Energy Secretary Rick Perry to the European Union in April 2019, who stated:

Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent. And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.

(cited in Ellsmoor, 2019)

In November 2019, the Trump administration formally began withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement, the only country not signed up to it (Buncombe, 2019). Trump has repeatedly dismissed the existence of human-caused climate change, branding it as a ‘hoax’, while rolling back Obama-era policies aimed at tackling the crisis (Baynes, 2019a). Moreover, most disturbingly, researchers found that between 2016 and 2019 a quarter of all references to ‘climate change’ were removed from federal government websites. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) analysed more than 5,300 pages on the websites of 23 federal agencies and found usage of the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘clean energy’, and ‘adaptation’ had dropped 25 percent since Trump’s inauguration (Baynes, 2019b). EDGI explains the overall strategy:

Rather than cultivating the informational resources necessary to confront climate change, the Trump administration has attempted to remove the topic from federal agency websites, a clear policy indicator in line with withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and revoking the Clean Power Plan.

(cited in Baynes, 2019b)³

‘While prominent political, journalistic, and scientific entities are sharpening the language they use to describe the climate crisis,’ EDGI goes on, ‘we see precisely the opposite from this administration: removal of the term “climate change” and its replacement with less clear language’ (cited in Baynes, 2019b). Chris Baynes (2019a) concludes that Trump’s position puts him at odds ‘with the overwhelming majority of scientists and his own government agencies, which have warned human-caused global warming is on course to have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth’.

Towards the end of 2019, Greta Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, prompting Trump (who was hoping to get the award himself) to tell her to ‘chill out’ and ‘work on her anger management problem’, adding that she should ‘go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend’ (cited in Wood, 2019). He had previously responded sarcastically to her UN speech saying, ‘She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see’ (cited in Wood, 2019). Thunberg once replied to those whose public pedagogies of hate are directed at her: ‘When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning’. She went on, ‘I have Aspergers and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And – given the right circumstances – being different is a superpower’ (cited in Wood, 2019).⁴

In January 2020, Trump attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos,⁵ and was involved in what Tim Cohen (2020) describes as ‘surely one of the most bizarre non-confrontational confrontations in history’, with a president of the United States and a young Swedish woman going

toe-to-toe, without mentioning each other’s names, without a meeting, and without any overt acknowledgement of each others’ argument. Together they symbolise the distance between climate activists and the bastions of political power.

(Cohen, 2020)

In an audience that included Thunberg, Trump declared, ‘We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse’, dismissing climate activists as fearmongering ‘prophets of doom’ who will cripple global economies and strip away individual liberties in what he described as a misguided mission to save the planet. He compared them to people who predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the ’70s, and an end of oil in the ’90s:

These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives. We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty.

(cited in Cohen, 2020)

In a different panel, Thunberg responded: ‘The facts are clear, but they are still too uncomfortable. You just leave it because you think it’s too depressing and they will give up. But people will not give up. You are the ones who are giving up’ (cited in Cohen, 2020). She argued that planting trees is good (Trump had promised to plant one trillion trees) but not enough; we need zero emissions (Cohen, 2020) (Just after Trump left Davos, it was revealed that BP had successfully lobbied in favour of Trump’s decision to dilute a landmark environmental law, making it easier for new major infrastructure projects, such as oil pipelines and power plants, to bypass checks – Ambrose, 2020).

Thunberg was right to point out at Davos that from a ‘sustainability perspective, the right, the left and the centre have all failed’ and that no ‘political ideology or economic structure has been able to tackle the environmental and climate emergency and create a cohesive and sustainable world,’ but, as will be argued in the last chapter of this book, wrong to claim that ‘it’s not about politics’ (cited in Cohen, 2020). That no political ideology or economic structure has been able to solve climate change does not mean that it cannot. In the next two chapters, I will make the case that ecosocialism is the only way that we can both save the planet and harness the technological fruits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the good of all.

Bolsonaro

Valdillene Urumon points out that during his election campaign, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro promised to divide up indigenous lands: ‘That’s why the ranchers voted for him. But we don’t want to share our land’. She was talking to The Guardian’s Latin American correspondent Tom Phillips, as a fire continued to rage near her village (Phillips, 2019a). As Phillips explains, a ‘2,000km road and river odyssey in Brazil reveals consensus from all sides: Bolsonaro has ushered in a new age of wrecking’. Phillips is witnessing ‘an inferno: a raging conflagration obliterating yet another stretch of the world’s greatest rainforest…a catastrophic blaze…[in the jungle] perhaps two miles long’. Statistics produced by Brazil’s own space institute – whose director was sacked in August 2019 after clashing with Bolsonaro – show the deforestation surged a Manhattan-sized area lost every day in July of that year (Phillips, 2019a).

The Guardian travelled nearly two thousand kilometres by road and river through two of the Amazon states worst affected by the fires, Rondônia and Amazonas. Along the way, indigenous leaders, wildcat goldminers, environmental activists and government officials were agreed that Bolsonaro’s stripping back of protections and anti-environmental rhetoric had contributed to the scale of the fires, more than 30,000 in August 2019, alone (Phillips, 2019a). The delight of the goldminers and those who sell to them contrasts with the growing despair of many forest dwellers whose lives were previously upended in the 1960s when Brazil’s military dictatorship bulldozed roads through the Amazon (Phillips, 2019a).

Bolsonaro’s actions are made all the worse by the fact that the Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization would cease to exist beyond scattered tribes, here and there (Hunziker, 2019a). The Amazon is beginning to become an ‘emitter of carbon’, the same as coal power plants. This is no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Capitalism and planetary destruction: activism for climate change emergency
• 2 The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR): capitalist defence and Marxist critique
• 3 Saving the planet and harnessing technology for the good of all: the case for ecosocialism
• Postscript: one hundred seconds to midnight
• References
• Index