How Talking About Climate Change Went from Saving the Planet To Mitigating Suffering
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Kai Heron, writes, teaches and researches at the intersection of contemporary political theory, global political economy, and critical geography with a focus on land struggles, climate struggles, and ecologically regenerative futures at Birkbeck College of the University of London.
Heron recently posted a thread on the how the discourse around the global climate crisis shifted from saving the planet to mitigating suffering and death and how that narrative precludes real opportunities at changing the environment.
Heron writes: “I’ve said this before, but ecological politics today isn’t about ‘saving the planet’ or ‘solving the climate crisis’ as we used to be told. It isn’t even about staying within 1.5C of planetary heating. That’s over. It’s gone.”
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
He continues: “Ecological politics is about limiting how many people die, how many are displaced, how many experience insufferable heat, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it’s about how many species and habitats will be lost forever. This shift in our understanding is important for a couple of reasons. First, it defeats the ‘it’s already too late’ doomer crowd. Yes, it is too late. That’s why we should act. Second, it moves beyond narratives about how we have 12 years, 10 years, or three years, to act.”
“Every decision made today that takes us further away from decarbonization,” Heron concludes. “Like the UK’s decision to pursue fracking, or the US and Europe’s subsidization of fossil fuels and refusal to grant reparations to the periphery, tips the scales towards greater death and destruction.”
Every decision made today that takes us further away from decarbonization, like the UK’s decision to pursue fracking, or the US and Europe’s subsidization of fossil fuels and refusal to grant reparations to the periphery, tips the scales towards greater death and destruction. 4/4
— Kai Heron (@KaiHeron) September 14, 2022
Heron’s framework for understanding the global climate crisis is necessary. The recent ecological fallout that occurred in Pakistan this summer underscores comprehending why it’s urgent.
Vice: “Pakistan, a country of 220 million, contributes less than 1 percent to global carbon emissions but has found itself at the front line of climate change this summer with heatwaves, wildfires, and now devastating super floods in the Indus River, unleashed by melting glaciers in its North and unprecedented monsoon rains in the South.”
The impact of the devastation is magnified because the Pakistani economy is largely dependent on its farms. Millions of vulnerable farm workers and their families live close to the overwhelmed Indus River and its irrigation tributaries. Pakistan has one of the largest irrigation systems in the world and it is fed by the greatest concentration of glaciers outside the arctic. The country has more than 7,200 glaciers and they are melting and flooding the country as global temperatures continue to rise.
Like Das, many of this climate-induced disaster’s victims along the Indus have a tiny carbon footprint. They lead simple lives, probably not very different from their ancestors who lived here more than a thousand years ago. Around the 6th century ruins of a terracotta Buddhist stupa in Mirpurkhas, the homes are basic, often powered by a single solar panel. Das comes from a family of farmers but he got an education and is a government-employed vaccinator. He tells us it’ll take him a few years before he can afford to fix his home – he earns $240 a month – twice the minimum wage here, but he barely makes ends meet.
“The unfolding tragedy in Pakistan is the latest in a long line of forceful reminders that the effects of ecological breakdown are felt first and most violently by those who have contributed the least to it,” Kai Heron, a lecturer at Birkbeck College in London, told VICE World News. “Countries in the imperial core, including Pakistan’s former colonizer, the UK, owe climate reparations to Pakistan to ease its recovery from the disaster and to assist its transition to a post-carbon economy.”
Huber’s Climate Change as Class War has so far been the apogee of the eco-modernist position in a debate that has done much to further the discussion of desirable post-capitalist futures. The book’s emphasis on class struggle, thinking at scale, the state as a terrain of struggle, and the dynamics of transition are valuable contributions. Huber’s Sidecar essay reiterates many of these themes, stressing the need to imagine a green transition rooted in a Marxist study of the ‘historical economic conditions’, rather than abstract utopian speculation.
There is no question that there are important critiques of degrowth to be made from a Marxist perspective. Whereas Marxism’s critique of capitalism flows from a study of the historically determinate way it realizes value – through the exploitation of labour and the natural world – degrowth instead opts for an abstract critique of ‘growth’ as such. This is more than just a difference of terminology. Degrowth’s simplified conceptual apparatus has obscured the political stakes of a green transition to such a extent that it has been adopted by various irreconcilable traditions: from anti-capitalists to those pursuing a reformist politics of redistribution and reduced consumption. However, by unreflexively aligning Marxism with eco-modernism, Huber obscures Marxist alternatives to degrowth that are not eco-modernist in orientation but that nevertheless strive for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in the pursuit of a liveable planet for all human and non-human life.
At the heart of Climate Change as Class War is the claim that a successful climate politics must win over the majority of the world’s population. As Huber rightly claims, that majority is the ‘global proletariat’ in its myriad of forms: manufacturing labour, service workers, informal workers, agricultural work, unwaged work, reproductive work and more. The issue of how the world’s exploited and oppressed can unite in struggle is of course a crucial one for any left politics. It is all the more striking, then, that Huber does not try to answer it. In a footnote to Climate Change as Class War, Huber explicitly narrows the scope of his study:
My analysis of class in this book will focus mostly on the US context… While there is no justifiable basis for analyzing class in territorial terms – as if particular classes are only contained within national boundaries – a reason for this analytical focus is the simple fact that US political culture is the largest barrier to climate action globally… I will also admit my own scholarly (and personal) expertise is based in American Studies and US politics.
This amounts to an admission of methodological nationalism. If the goal is to appeal to the majority of the world’s population, this should lead to an analysis of the global working class in all its complexity – not the minority of that class living in the US. Moreover, if ‘US political culture’ is indeed one of the greatest stumbling blocks to climate action, this should involve an interrogation of not just the US’s internal political economy but its external role as the world’s leading imperialist power and orchestrator of wars, coups, sanctions, ‘development programmes’, ‘human rights interventions’, assassinations and arms sales that have devastated the world’s working classes and the ecological systems their lives depend on.
A thorough analysis of US class politics should also involve a consideration of how imperial predation in the periphery shapes class interests and struggles in the US. Yet in his critique of climate justice politics, Huber categorically rules out this line of inquiry: ‘climate justice politics often positions the struggle in territorial terms, as a struggle between Global North and Global South, and not as a global class struggle between capital and an international working class.’ He goes on to cite Jason Hickel’s work on value transfers and uneven ecological exchange as an example of a degrowth paradigm that fails to ‘differentiate “income” based on wages versus capital ownership’, writing that such scholars falsely ‘assume all income – whether it flows to capital or labour – is a form of ecological imperialism.’
This approach leads Huber into a false choice between a politics that attends to imperialist domination and one focussed on class struggle. As anti-colonial Marxists such as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin and Sam Moyo have long argued, this is to ignore one of the fundamental issues of working-class politics today: the national self-determination of oppressed peoples. As Enrique Dussel explains, Marx repeatedly intimated in his writings that an analysis of global capitalism must investigate both competitive relations between ‘capitalist nations’, which are defined by ‘dependency’ and the ‘extraction of surplus-value by the stronger capital’, and relations of class struggle, or ‘the exploitation of one class by another, of labor by capital.’
The question, then, is not about whether one is for or against technology – as if this were possible. It is about adopting appropriate technologies and collectively managing energy and food systems at relevant scales. A promising alternative to Huber’s vision lies in an anti-imperialist eco-communism that understands how relations of dependency and uneven ecological exchange devastate ecologies and exploit workers in both core and periphery. Such a politics must do the difficult work of developing strategies of struggle and ecological transition that meet the needs of the exploited and oppressed in the Global North in ways that are compatible with demands for colonial reparations, technology transfers, food sovereignty, land back, the lifting of sanctions, the end of occupations and the atmospheric space to develop freely and independently. This knotty problem can neither be wished away nor delayed until the US working class has won a Green New Deal. Huber is right that capital’s pursuit of profit is a fetter on our collective liberation. What he misses is that eco-modernism similarly fetters a world of flourishing for all.
