Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  Nor should we allow the issue of government debt to trick us into thinking the economy lacks the wealth to invest in both mitigation and adaptation. For most of the twentieth century, the top marginal tax rate in the United States was above 50 percent and frequently as high as 90 percent. From 1933, at the start of the New Deal, until 1980, the top rate never dipped below 70 percent. In 1993, Clinton raised the top marginal tax rate from 31 to 39.6 percent; in so doing, he paid down the debt, and by 1998 the federal government was running a surplus.12 If taxes on the superrich were increased, the US government could lower the national debt and have money to invest in clean tech.

  Politics

  Is there political will to make the transition? Alas, no.

  Established corporate interests—the fossil fuel companies and the pampered large banks, for example—do not wish to see downward redistribution of wealth and power, nor the economic annihilation of all the sunk capital that is the fossil fuel economy. Few issues encapsulate this political problem better than the story of the fossil fuel industry’s promotion of climate denialism.

  For twenty years the fossil fuel lobby has funded and organized attacks on climate science. Most prominently, between 1998 and 2008, Exxon donated $23 million in support of the climate denial movement.13 In 2006, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious scientific body, demanded that Exxon stop funding misinformation. The company promised it would, but it continues to do so anyway. In 2009, Greenpeace reported that Exxon gave $1.3 million to organizations with histories of climate change denial, including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Legal Foundation.14

  Another source of climate skepticism is the wealth of the Koch brothers, owners of a huge, privately held conglomerate involved in manufacturing, refining, and distributing petroleum and chemicals, as well as energy, plastics, minerals, and fertilizers. Koch Industries is ranked as the second-largest privately held company in the United States after Cargill, and, not surprisingly, it is ranked among the top ten air polluters in the United States.15 In keeping with the pattern of their investments, the Koch brothers are philanthropists of a hard-right variety, followers of Hayek, and they fund groups that push climate change denial.16 A Greenpeace report found that between 2005 and 2008, Koch-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million to organizations promoting climate denial. This campaign seems to have borne fruit. Pew research polls have found that in 2006, 77 percent of those questioned agreed that there was evidence that the Earth was warming; by 2009, that number had dropped to 57 percent.17

  Resistance North

  Where is the countervailing force? Climate-justice movements in the United States are largely moribund and under attack. In Europe, they are somewhat stronger, though they are under pressure there and have been infiltrated by the police. A recent scandal in Britain revealed that at least fifteen police officers had infiltrated and sabotaged that country’s green movement.18 Nonetheless, grassroots greens in the United Kingdom and Europe have a relatively robust climate-justice movement.

  In the United States, there is also a movement for climate justice, though it is small, and after an upsurge, has suffered setbacks. As Brian Tokar points out, “[a] marked shift in perception began in 2005–6 when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans.” Then came Al Gore’s widely viewed documentary An Inconvenient Truth that was followed in 2007 by the IPCC’s dire and authoritative fourth assessment report “on climate science and its consequences.” The combination of all this momentarily forced climate change to the center of our national discussion.19

  In this context, efforts to create a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol were gaining momentum. Barack Obama was elected, in part, by promising to invest $150 billion over ten years to jump-start a clean-technology industrial revival. And by 2009, a comprehensive international treaty looked possible. Domestically, Democrats began pushing national climate legislation, so-called cap and trade, but these efforts were badly flawed and compromised by corporate lobbies. Beltway-oriented “Big Green” groups tended to see the legislative language as a glass half full, while the more left-leaning “Little Green” groups saw the bills as dangerously inadequate.

  Much of big business—embodied in the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Western Fuels Association, the International Petroleum Institute—pushes back hard against climate legislation. As London’s Guardian reported, by the summer of 2009 America’s oil, gas, and coal industries had increased their antigreen lobbying budgets by 50 percent, “with key players spending $44.5m in the first three months” of that year.20 Comprehensive climate legislation in the United States indeed failed. And that helped undermine the UNFCCC talks in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Cancún the following year.

  In the face of these setbacks some US greens refocused on more local and confrontational strategies. Exemplary in this was the fight against coal during the first decade of this century led by the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, numerous local outfits, and, more recently, Greenpeace. These anticoal campaigns have used mass protest and direct action, like mountaintop occupations, as well as financial and political pressure to halt construction of 130 proposed new coal plants.21

  Other, more media-oriented organizations also exist, like 350.org—the name refers to 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, beyond which dangerous climate change is likely. That group, started by environmental writer Bill McKibben and some of his students at Middlebury College, has done amazing work in educating the global public about the scientific realities of climate change and the idea of thresholds and tipping points. But as Henry Miller says toward the end of Tropic of Capricorn, “It is the essence of symbols to be symbolic.”22 Political power, like economic power, is ultimately made of thicker stuff—bodies, labor, nature, the things and places that bodies have built, and the physical violence that controls bodies.

  Resistance South

  Act One

  It was late May 2005, and Bolivia was in the grip of massive multi-week-long protests—the people, most of them Quechan and Aymaran Indians, wanted Bolivia’s natural gas industry to be nationalized. A general strike had been called. And now, a huge march was descending from El Alto to La Paz. The protesters were trade unionists, miners, teachers, and landless peasants. Their destination was the Congress and Presidential Palace, in front of which stood serried ranks of riot police.

  As they approached, the marchers smashed out the windows of the few minibuses that had ignored the movement’s strike order. When they met the police lines, some miners tossed small charges of dynamite. Windows shattered up and down the block; police fell back and blocked the blasts with their Plexiglas shields, then answered with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. Back and forth the battle went continued for three weeks. With La Paz and most of Bolivia’s other major cities blockaded, food and fuel ran low; buses and taxis sat stranded. Protesters occupied several gas fields and a pipeline station. It had been five hundred years of theft and abuse, the indigenous people of Bolivia wanted justice.

  Act Two

  Six months later I was back in Bolivia. Awakening in a shabby La Paz hotel after a long night flight, I turned on the TV. To my surprise, onscreen sat Raul Prada, a short, thickset Marxist intellectual with permanently bent eyeglasses. The last time I’d seen Prada he was in the streets dodging tear gas with the masses. Now an adviser to President Evo Morales—yes, president, what a difference a year makes—Prada was explaining why the government had nationalized a big part of Bolivia’s natural gas industry.

  There were other changes as well. Morales had promised to go beyond gas, announcing plans to renationalize mining and forestry and to confiscate and redistribute unused ranch lands, boost the minimum wage, and increase spending on health care. And after decades of IMF-imposed austerity, one of the new government’s earliest acts was to allow the expiration of a three-year financing deal with the Fund—effectively kicking it out of Bolivia.

  In
a chilly drawing room of the presidential palace, I met with Vice President Álvaro García Linera. Only forty-two years old, he had a résumé that included stints as a guerrilla fighter, prisoner, powerhouse author, and intellectual. “Transnational corporations are welcome in Bolivia,” explained the boyish VP. “But they will not dominate the economy. They should expect to pay taxes and submit to reasonable environmental and social regulations. But they will still make profits.” As García Linera explained, all that the state could do was impose equilibrium and a minimal humanity on the savageness and chaos of Bolivian capitalism and grow the economy with a progressive and greenish version of Keynesianism. Many industrialists in La Paz—the owners of construction-supply companies, potato chip factories, and small foundries, the “national bourgeoisie,” if you will—came to see the virtues of this strategy. And within the confines of this realism, Bolivia gropes toward a new model of a mixed economy.23

  Act Three

  By 2010 Bolivia was again in the news, this time because it was hosting the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in anticipation of the COP 16 meeting to be held in Cancún that December. The year before, Bolivia’s delegation had worked tirelessly with the G77—the main group of seventy-seven poor and developing countries from the Global South—to achieve deep emissions reductions and a robust transfer of capital and technology to the Global South as part of a binding treaty. Instead, COP 15 was marked by what John Vidal called “fantastically pompous speeches about being green” and produced a merely nonbinding, elite-negotiated “accord.” The accord recognized, as one report put it, “the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2°C” but did not mandate emissions reductions or North-to-South aid to assist with adaptation .24

  As COP 16 wrapped up in Cancún, the quest for a binding agreement had collapsed. Instead, the world was now wrangling over the voluntary “accord” rather than a binding treaty. When added up, all the voluntary (thus unlikely) emissions reductions pledged by the largest economies still allowed the average global temperature to rise by 3.2°C, even though the IPCC sees a 2°C increase as the outer limit of safety. Even a 2°C increase could be too much and cause runaway climate change.

  The only country that refused to go along with this charade was Bolivia. Their lead negotiator—the stern and intense Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solon—laid out his country’s position in the Guardian. In explaining his “obligation to set aside diplomacy and tell the truth,” Solon wrote:Many commentators have called the Cancún accord a “step in the right direction.” We disagree: it is a giant step backward. The text replaces binding mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with voluntary pledges that are wholly insufficient. These pledges contradict the stated goal of capping the rise in temperature at 2°C, instead guiding us to 4°C or more. The text is full of loopholes for polluters, opportunities for expanding carbon markets and similar mechanisms. . . . We feel a deep responsibility not to sign off on any paper that threatens millions of lives.25

  And so it was that in five years, protest on the streets of La Paz had become protest on the world stage. Had the democratic revolution in Bolivia translated into substantial forward movement in the international arena? No. But Bolivia’s commitment to a progressive politics of climate mitigation provides bold and vital leadership that would otherwise be lacking. Even the once plucky Maldives, having entered into secret negotiations with the United States for aid money, essentially retired from the field and endorsed the lame Cancún agreement. At the same time, the United States cut $3 million in aid to Bolivia because of the Andean nation’s efforts to oppose the voluntary and inadequate accord. The US government pressured European countries to do the same.26

  In essence, Bolivia is attempting to confront the catastrophic convergence by addressing the problems through which climate change articulates itself. If there is to be more progress on an international agreement that mitigates emissions and funds adaptation, it will be in large part by thanks to the brave example of impoverished and landlocked little Bolivia. That a country so poor, so underdeveloped, economically marginalized, fettered by widespread illiteracy, disease, and hunger, its politics for so long stunted by racism, exploitation, and dictatorship, could organize itself, avoid civil war, proceed toward a new path of mixed economic development, begin to take environmental issues seriously, and then to bring all of this to the international stage with dignity, is a feat of absolutely heroic and epic proportions.

  Mitigation Now

  A burdensome, if obvious, realization hit me while writing this book. Peaceful, progressive adaptation versus bad, violent adaptation is a difficult choice, but it is a struggle that is itself predicated on robust mitigation. Without mitigation, we run the very real risk of unleashing a process of self-fueling, runaway climate change to which there can be little successful adaptation.

  As discussed earlier, scientists believe that stabilizing the climate system requires that we return to an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of less than 350 parts per million. The extremely bad news—we are now at 390 parts per million. The World Meteorological Organization has determined 2010 to have been one of the hottest ever recorded. And all year, extreme weather battered the Northern Hemisphere. Add to this the steady drip of new scientific reports on the degraded state of the world’s oceans, ice packs, and forests. The IPCC says rich countries like the United States must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and thereafter make precipitous cuts to almost zero emissions.

  If we don’t act now, average global temperatures will likely increase by much more than 2 degrees Celsius and that will likely trigger a set of dangerous positive-feedback loops that will unleash self-compounding, runaway climate change. For example, if the permafrost of the arctic keeps melting, and the massive stores of methane (CH4) contained beneath it are released, global warming will accelerate radically because methane “is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.”27 At the moment, these vast stores of methane remain locked up under ice, beneath the tundra and ocean floor. But this frozen lid of mud is melting, threatening a rapid warming with attendant rises in sea levels, devastated agriculture, and social chaos.

  As this book goes to press in 2011, very little mitigation is under way. The core problem in the international effort to cut emissions is fundamentally the intransigence of the United States: it failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and has played an obstructionist role at subsequent negotiations. Domestically, progress has been just as frustratingly slow despite wide public support for environmental protections. As of this writing, no climate legislation has been passed in the United States. We have no price on carbon, nor any program of robust investment in clean technology. Even the minimal production tax credit for clean energy generated by solar, wind, and hydro power has not been locked in as a long-term commitment. As a result, private investment in clean tech moves forward only in fits and starts.

  China, on the other hand, now the world’s second-largest economy and largest greenhouse gas polluter, is moving ahead with a robust and fast-growing clean-tech industry—that is to say, with mitigation. The Chinese wind sector has grown steadily since 2001. In 2009, the sector grew by 113 percent, according to the World Wind Energy Report. This growth is the result, in part, of robust government support: China has invested $200.8 billion in stimulus funding for clean tech. Estimates of US stimulus funding for clean technology range from $50 to $80 billion.28

  The EU is also moving forward to create a regional supergrid and plans to spend 1 trillion euros in doing so.29 Germany and Portugal, in particular, are moving aggressively to expand their already quite large clean-tech sectors. Action in the core industrial economies is essential because only they have the infrastructure that can propel the clean-tech revolution and transform the world economy.

  Pathways Forward

  Despite US political sclerosis and fossil fuel fundamentalism, there are paths forward
. First and foremost, there is the Environmental Protection Agency. Thanks to the pressure and lawsuits of green activists, the EPA is now obliged to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If the EPA were to act robustly, it could achieve significant and immediate emissions reductions using nothing more than existing laws and current technologies.

  According to Kassie Siegel at the Center for Biological Diversity, “The Clean Air Act can achieve everything we need: a 40 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions over 1990 levels by 2020.”30 The two most important things the EPA could do are to halt any permitting of new coal-fired power plants—about fifty new plants are seeking approval as this book goes to press—and to force all existing coal-fired facilities to switch to natural gas. This “fuel switching” requires little to no retrofitting of most existing power plants. If that happened, total non-vehicle US emissions would be reduced by 13 percent or more in a matter of a year or two, say various experts. As a fuel, natural gas is generally half as polluting as coal. But in the case of old, inefficient coal-fired plants, switching to gas can reduce emissions by as much as two-thirds.