The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  In addition, American intelligence services have already made the surveillance of environmentalists and climate activists a top priority. This has been greatly facilitated, on the one hand, by the widening powers granted to security agencies in the “permanent state of emergency” of the post-9/11 era, and, on the other, by the increasing privatization of intelligence gathering in recent years. The latter development has led to the emergence of a “gray intelligence” industry through a “blurring of public and private spying,” and this in turn has made it possible for corporations as well government agencies to infiltrate and spy on environmental groups of many different kinds.

  In short, in the United States climate activists are now among the prime targets of a rapidly growing surveillance-industrial complex. This would hardly be the case if the vast American intelligence establishment were in denial about the reality of climate change.

  The British military posture is similar; this is how a report by an Australian military think tank sums it up: “From mainstreaming climate change into national planning to appointing senior military authorities to lead on climate change within the defence force, the UK and US governments have directed their militaries to rapidly prepare for climate change and its impacts.” The Australian defense establishment is also working hard to coordinate its climate security strategy with the United States and United Kingdom: this posture has been maintained even at times when the stance of the country’s political leadership was denialist.

  5.

  Clearly, despite the deep public divisions in the Anglosphere, there is no denial or division about global warming within the military and intelligence establishments of these countries: to the contrary, there is every indication that their political elites and security structures have tacitly adopted a common approach to climate change.

  But is it conceivable that any branch of government in an “open society” would covertly adopt a posture on a matter of such importance? That surely is not how liberal democracies are supposed to work?

  Or have they ever really worked as they were supposed to? It is in the colonies, as Sartre once said, that the truths of the metropolis are most visible, and it is a fact certainly that the forms of statecraft that Britain used in its colonies were quite different from those of the metropole. This fissure was laid bare as far back as 1788, when Warren Hastings, the former governor of Bengal, was impeached by Edmund Burke on counts that amounted precisely to the charge that Hastings’s statecraft in India represented an affront to the British political system. With Hastings’s acquittal, the split came to be embedded at the heart of the imperial practices of the Anglosphere: through the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the statecraft that England and her settler colonies practiced in their dealings with non-Europeans was of an entirely different order from that which obtained domestically. Outside metropolitan areas, the functioning of power was always guided, in the first instance, by considerations of security. The maintenance of dominance outweighed any other imperative of governance, and it was toward these ends that statecraft was primarily oriented.

  When seen through this prism, it does not seem at all improbable that certain organs of state, particularly the security establishment, would adopt an approach that is quite different from that of the domestic political sphere. Global warming is unique, after all, in that it is simultaneously a domestic and global crisis: a bifurcation of responses is only to be expected.

  Nor is it conceivable that institutions of governance in any contemporary nation could be indifferent to global warming. For if it is the case that “biopolitics” is central to the mission of modern governments, as Michel Foucault argued, then climate change represents a crisis of unprecedented magnitude for their practices of governance: to ignore this challenge would run counter to the evolutionary path of the modern nation-state.

  Moreover, the climate crisis holds the potential of drastically reordering the global distribution of power as well as wealth. This is because the nature of the carbon economy is such that power, no less than wealth, is largely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels. The world’s most powerful countries are also oil states, Timothy Mitchell notes, and “without the energy they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist.” Nor would they continue to occupy their present positions in the global ranking of power.

  This being the case if the emissions of some countries were to be curbed while the emissions of others were allowed to rise, then this would lead inevitably to a redistribution of global power. It is certainly no coincidence that the increase in the consumption of fossil fuels in China and India has already brought about an enormous change in their international influence.

  These realities cast a light of their own on the question of climate justice. That justice should be aspired to is widely agreed; it could hardly be otherwise since this ideal lies at the heart of all contemporary claims of political legitimacy. How such an end could be reached is also well known: an equitable regime of emissions could be created through any one of many strategies, such as “contraction and convergence,” for instance, or “a per capita climate accord,” or a fair apportioning of the world’s remaining “climate budget.” But the resulting equity would lead not just to a redistribution of wealth but also to a recalibration of global power—and from the point of view of a security establishment that is oriented toward the maintenance of global dominance, this is precisely the scenario that is most greatly to be feared; from this perspective the continuance of the status quo is the most desirable of outcomes.

  Seen in this light, climate change is not a danger in itself; it is envisaged rather as a “threat multiplier” that will deepen already existing divisions and lead to the intensification of a range of conflicts. How will the security establishments of the West respond to these threat perceptions? In all likelihood they will resort to the strategy that Christian Parenti calls the “politics of the armed lifeboat,” a posture that combines “preparations for open-ended counter-insurgency, militarized borders, [and] aggressive anti-immigrant policing.” The tasks of the nation-state under these circumstances will be those of keeping “blood-dimmed tides” of climate refugees at bay and protecting their own resources: “In this world view, humanity has not only declared a war against itself, but is also locked into mortal combat with the earth.”

  The outlines of an “armed lifeboat” scenario can already be discerned in the response of the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia to the Syrian refugee crisis: they have accepted very few migrants even though the problem is partly of their own making. The adoption of this strategy might even represent the logical culmination of the biopolitical mission of the modern nation-state, since it is a strategy that conceives of the preservation of the “body of the nation” in the most literal sense: by a reinforcement of boundaries that are seen to be under threat from the infiltration of the pathological “bare life” that is spilling over from other nations.

  The trouble, however, is that the contagion has already occurred, everywhere: the ongoing changes in the climate, and the perturbations that they will cause within nations, cannot be held at bay by reinforcing man-made boundaries. We are in an era when the body of the nation can no longer be conceived of as consisting only of a territorialized human population: its very sinews are now revealed to be intertwined with forces that cannot be confined by boundaries.

  6.

  It goes without saying that if the world’s most powerful nations adopt the “politics of the armed lifeboat,” explicitly or otherwise, then millions of people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere will face doom. Unthinkable though this may appear, such a Darwinian approach would not be in conflict with free market ideology: that is why it has a long pedigree in the statecraft of the Anglosphere. Lest this seems far-fetched, let us recall that this is not the first time that British and American officialdom has had to confront catastrophes brought on by vagaries of climate. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centu
ries, El Niño events caused enormous disruption in India and the Philippines, and as Mike Davis has shown in his remarkable study Late Victorian Holocausts, in dealing with drought and famine, British and American colonial officials consistently placed far greater store on the sanctity of the free market than on human life. In these instances, as with the famines of Mao’s China and Stalin’s USSR, ideology prevailed over the preservation of life.

  Malthusian ideas were also often invoked in the context of famine and starvation in Asia and Africa, as, for example, by Winston Churchill when he said, “Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits.” Although we are unlikely to hear words of this kind in our era, there can be little doubt that there are many who believe that a Malthusian “correction” is the only hope for the continuance of “our way of life.”

  From this perspective, global inaction on climate change is by no means the result of confusion or denialism or a lack of planning: to the contrary, the maintenance of the status quo is the plan. Climate change may itself facilitate the realization of this plan by providing an alibi for ever-greater military intrusion into every kind of geographic and military space. And it is quite likely that this plan commands widespread but tacit support in many Western countries. Significant sections of the electorate probably understand that climate change negotiations may have the effect of changing their country’s standing in the world’s hierarchies of power as well as wealth: this may indeed form the basis of their resistance to climate science in general.

  The refusal to acknowledge these realities sometimes lends an air of unreality to discussions of climate change. There are some who believe, for instance, that considerations of fairness may make people more willing to accept serious mitigatory measures. The trouble with this, in relation to climate justice, is that these measures would affect some far more than others. The geologist David Archer reckons that to reach a genuinely fair solution to the problem of emissions would “require cuts in the developed world of about 80 percent. For the United States, Canada and Australia, the cuts would be closer to 90 percent.” Will an abstract idea of fairness be sufficient for people to undertake cuts on this scale, especially in a world where the pursuit of self-interest is conceived of as the motor of the economy? Let’s just say there is much room for doubt.

  The fact is that we live in a world that has been profoundly shaped by empire and its disparities. Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to carbon emissions. The distribution of power in the world therefore lies at the core of the climate crisis. This is indeed one of the greatest obstacles to mitigatory action, and all the more so because it remains largely unacknowledged. This question will probably be even more difficult to resolve than economic disparities and matters like compensation, carbon budgets, and so on. We do at least possess a vocabulary for economic issues; within the current system of international relations, there is no language in which questions related to the equitable distribution of power can be openly and frankly addressed.

  It is for these reasons that I differ with those who identify capitalism as the principal fault line on the landscape of climate change. It seems to me that this landscape is riven by two interconnected but equally important rifts, each of which follows a trajectory of its own: these are capitalism and empire (the latter being understood as an aspiration to dominance on the part of some of the most important structures of the world’s most powerful states). In short, even if capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action.

  7.

  The cynicism of the politics of the armed lifeboat is matched, on the other side, by the strategy that the elites of some large developing countries, like India, seem to be inclining toward: a politics of attrition. The assumption underlying this is that the populations of poor nations, because they are accustomed to hardship, possess the capacity to absorb, even if at great cost, certain shocks and stresses that might cripple rich nations.

  This may not be as delusional as it sounds. It is not impossible, for instance, that in dealing with situations of extraordinary stress the very factors that are considered advantages in coping with extreme weather—education, wealth, and a high degree of social organization—may actually become vulnerabilities. Western food production, for instance, is dangerously resource intensive, requiring something in the range of a “dozen fossil fuel calories for each food calorie.” And Western food distribution systems are so complex that small breakdowns could lead to cascading consequences that culminate in complete collapse. Power failures, for instance, are so rare in advanced countries that they often cause great disruption—including spikes in rates of crime—when they do occur. In many parts of the global south, breakdowns are a way of life, and everybody is used to improvisations and work-arounds.

  In poor countries, even the middle classes are accustomed to coping with shortages and discomforts of all sorts; in the West, wealth, and habits based upon efficient infrastructures, may have narrowed the threshold of bearable pain to a point where climatic impacts could quickly lead to systemic stress.

  Acclimatization to difficult conditions may itself produce certain sorts of resilience, especially in regard to one of the most immediate effects of global warming: extreme heat. Thus, for instance, the European heat wave of 2003 resulted in forty-six thousand deaths, while the 2010 heat wave in Russia had an estimated death toll of fifty-six thousand. These figures are far in excess of the toll of the 2015 heatwave in South Asia and the Persian Gulf region which registered heat index readings of as much as 163 degrees Fahrenheit (72.8 degrees Celsius). Moreover, ties of community are still strong through the global south; people who are completely cut off from others are relatively rare. This too is a safety net of a kind: recent experience shows that the absence of community networks can greatly amplify the impact of extreme weather events. After the 2003 heat wave in Europe, for instance, it was found that many of the dead were elderly people living in isolation.

  In short: the rich have much to lose; the poor do not. This is true not just of international relations but also of the internal structure of the developing world, where the urban middle classes have a carbon footprint that is not much lower than that of the average European. However, it is not the middle classes and the political elites of the global south that will bear the brunt of the suffering but rather the poor and the disempowered. This too is a brake on effective progress in climate negotiations in that it reduces the incentive to compromise: the belief that they are not gambling with their own lives is, no doubt, just as important a factor for the political elites of the developing world as it is for their counterparts in the West. It is therefore not totally unrealistic to assume that poor countries may be able to force rich countries to make greater concessions merely by absorbing the impacts of climate change, at no matter what cost.

  These considerations are, as I have noted, just as cynical as those that underlie the politics of the armed lifeboat. Yet, it is hard also to determine what an ethical strategy might be for poor countries like India. Should they perhaps abandon the quest for Western-style prosperity, so that a greater number will survive to take the struggle for justice forward in some uncertain future? But this would require the abandonment also of the project of “modernization” that was often implicit in decolonization: it would put a freeze on a system of colonial-style inequality.

  In any case, who could possibly make a convincing case for the poor to make sacrifices so that the rich can continue to enjoy the fruits of their wealth? To do so would be an acknowledgment that the ideas of equality and justice from which the dominant political imaginary draws its legitimacy have never been anything other than grotesque fictions, designed to secure exactly the opposite of those professed ends. This perhaps is why such a case is never explicitly made but only implied by euphemistic exhor
tations that urge poor countries to take a “different road to development” and so on.

  Take the use of coal. Much concern has been expressed in the West about coal plants in India. Yet, analysts have calculated that “in 2014 the average Indian accounted for around 20 per cent of the average American’s coal consumption and around 34 per cent of those from the OECD.” The logical and equitable response might be for the United States or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to shut down one of their coal plants every time a new plant is commissioned in India, until a convergence occurs. But this is, of course, highly unlikely to happen.

  This then is another way in which the terrain of global warming has been shaped, not just by capitalism but also by empire: the impetus for industrialization in much of the world was a part of the trajectory of decolonization, and the historical legacy of those conflicts is also embedded in the context of climate change negotiations. The end result is that these negotiations now resemble a form of high-stakes gambling in which catastrophe is the card that is expected to trump all others.

  8.

  In the annals of climate change, 2015 was a momentous year. Extreme weather events abounded: a strong El Niño, perching upon “the ramp of global warming,” wrought havoc upon the planet; many millions of people found themselves at the mercy of devastating floods and droughts; freakish tornadoes and cyclones churned through places where they had never been seen before; and extraordinary temperature anomalies were recorded around the globe, including unheard-of midwinter highs over the North Pole. Within days of the year’s end, 2015 was declared the hottest year since record-keeping began. It was a year in which the grim predictions of climate scientists assumed the ring of prophecy.