by Naomi Klein
This connection between pollution and labor exploitation has been true since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. But in the past, when workers organized to demand better wages, and when city dwellers organized to demand cleaner air, the companies were pretty much forced to improve both working and environmental standards. That changed with the advent of free trade: thanks to the removal of virtually all barriers to capital flows, corporations could pick up and leave every time labor costs started rising. That’s why many large manufacturers left South Korea for China in the late 1990s, and it’s why many are now leaving China, where wages are climbing, for Bangladesh, where they are significantly lower. So while our clothes, electronics, and furniture may be made in China, the economic model was primarily made in the U.S.A.
And yet when the subject of climate change comes up in discussion in wealthy, industrialized countries, the instant response, very often, is that it’s all China’s fault (and India’s fault and Brazil’s fault and so on). Why bother cutting our own emissions when everyone knows that the fast developing economies are the real problem, opening more coal plants every month than we could ever close?40 This argument is made as if we in the West are mere spectators to this reckless and dirty model of economic growth. As if it was not our governments and our multinationals that pushed a model of export-led development that made all of this possible. It is said as if it were not our own corporations who, with single-minded determination (and with full participation from China’s autocratic rulers), turned the Pearl River Delta into their carbon-spewing special economic zone, with the goods going straight onto container ships headed to our superstores. All in the name of feeding the god of economic growth (via the altar of hyper-consumption) in every country in the world.
The victims in all this are regular people: the workers who lose their factory jobs in Juárez and Windsor; the workers who get the factory jobs in Shenzhen and Dhaka, jobs that are by this point so degraded that some employers install nets along the perimeters of roofs to catch employees when they jump, or where safety codes are so lax that workers are killed in the hundreds when buildings collapse. The victims are also the toddlers mouthing lead-laden toys; the Walmart employee expected to work over the Thanksgiving holiday only to be trampled by a stampede of frenzied customers, while still not earning a living wage. And the Chinese villagers whose water is contaminated by one of those coal plants we use as our excuse for inaction, as well as the middle class of Beijing and Shanghai whose kids are forced to play inside because the air is so foul.41
A Movement Digs Its Own Grave
The greatest tragedy of all is that so much of this was eminently avoidable. We knew about the climate crisis when the rules of the new trade system were being written. After all, NAFTA was signed just one year after governments, including the United States, signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio. And it was by no means inevitable that these deals would go through. A strong coalition of North American labor and environmental groups opposed NAFTA precisely because they knew it would drive down labor and environmental standards. For a time it even looked as if they would win.
Public opinion in all three countries was deeply divided, so much so that when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he pledged that he would not sign NAFTA until it substantively reflected those concerns. In Canada, Jean Chrétien campaigned for prime minister against the deal in the election of 1993. Once both were in office, however, the deal was left intact and two toothless side agreements were tacked on, one for labor and one for environmental standards. The labor movement knew better than to fall for this ploy and continued to forcefully oppose the deal, as did many Democrats in the U.S. But for a complex set of reasons that will be explored later, having to do with a combination of reflexive political centrism and the growing influence of corporate “partners” and donors, the leadership of many large environmental organizations decided to play ball. “One by one, former NAFTA opponents and skeptics became enthusiastic supporters, and said so publicly,” writes journalist Mark Dowie in his critical history of the U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground. These Big Green groups even created their own pro-NAFTA organization, the Environmental Coalition for NAFTA—which included the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund—which, according to Dowie provided its “unequivocal support to the agreement.” Jay Hair, then head of the National Wildlife Federation, even flew to Mexico on an official U.S. trade mission to lobby his Mexican counterparts, while attacking his critics for “putting their protectionist polemics ahead of concern for the environment.”42
Not everyone in the green movement hopped on the pro-trade bandwagon: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club, as well as many small organizations, continued to oppose NAFTA. But that didn’t matter to the Clinton administration, which had what it wanted—the ability to tell a skeptical public that “groups representing 80 percent of national [environmental] group membership have endorsed NAFTA.” And that was important, because Clinton faced an uphill battle getting NAFTA through Congress, with many in his own party pledging to vote against the deal. John Adams, then director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, succinctly described the extraordinarily helpful role played by groups like his: “We broke the back of the environmental opposition to NAFTA. After we established our position Clinton only had labor to fight. We did him a big favor.”43
Indeed when the president signed NAFTA into law in 1993, he made a special point of thanking “the environmental people who came out and worked through this—many of them at great criticism, particularly in the environmental movement.” Clinton also made it clear that this victory was about more than one agreement. “Today we have the chance to do what our parents did before us. We have the opportunity to remake the world.” He explained that, “We are on the verge of a global economic expansion. . . . Already the confidence we’ve displayed by ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains of NAFTA for our country look small by comparison.” He was referring to the World Trade Organization. And just in case anyone was still worried about the environmental consequences, Clinton offered his personal assurance. “We will seek new institutional arrangements to ensure that trade leaves the world cleaner than before.”44
Standing by the president’s side was his vice president, Al Gore, who had been largely responsible for getting so many Big Green groups on board. Given this history, it should hardly come as a surprise that the mainstream environmental movement has been in no rush to draw attention to the disastrous climate impacts of the free trade era. To do so would only highlight their own active role in helping the U.S. government to, in Clinton’s words, “remake the world.” Much better, as we will see later on, to talk about light bulbs and fuel efficiency.
The significance of the NAFTA signing was indeed historic, tragically so. Because if the environmental movement had not been so agreeable, NAFTA might have been blocked or renegotiated to set a different kind of precedent. A new trade architecture could have been built that did not actively sabotage the fragile global climate change consensus. Instead—as had been the promise and hope of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit—this new architecture could have been grounded in the need to fight poverty and reduce emissions at the same time. So for example, trade access to developing countries could have been tied to transfers of resources and green technology so that critical new electricity and transit infrastructure was low carbon from the outset. And the deals could have been written to ensure that any measures taken to support renewable energy would not be penalized and, in fact, could be rewarded. The global economy might not have grown as quickly as it did, but it also would not be headed rapidly off the climate cliff.
The errors of this period cannot be undone, but it is not too late for
a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade and build this needed architecture now. That doesn’t—and never did—mean an end to economic exchange across borders. It does, however, mean a far more thoughtful and deliberate approach to why we trade and whom it serves. Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system’s goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy intensive than growing it in warmer regions and shipping it by light rail.)45
According to Ilana Solomon, trade analyst for the Sierra Club, this is not a fight that the climate movement can avoid. “In order to combat climate change, there’s a real need to start localizing our economies again, and thinking about how and what we’re purchasing and how it’s produced. And the most basic rule of trade law is you can’t privilege domestic over foreign. So how do you tackle the idea of needing to incentivize local economies, tying together local green jobs policies with clean energy policies, when that is just a no-go in trade policy? . . . If we don’t think about how the economy is structured, then we’re actually never going to the real root of the problem.”46
These kinds of economic reforms would be good news—for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big box stores. And all of these constituencies would be needed to fight for these policies, since they represent the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.
From Frenetic Expansion to Steady States
Challenging free trade orthodoxy is a heavy lift in our political culture; anything that has been in place for that long takes on an air of inevitability. But, critical as these shifts are, they are not enough to lower emissions in time. To do that, we will need to confront a logic even more entrenched than free trade—the logic of indiscriminate economic growth. This idea has understandably inspired a good deal of resistance among more liberal climate watchers, who insist that the task is merely to paint our current growth-based economic model green, so it’s worth examining the numbers behind the claim.
It is Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and one of Britain’s top climate experts, who has most forcefully built the case that our growth-based economic logic is now in fundamental conflict with atmospheric limits. Addressing everyone from the U.K. Department for International Development to the Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists, and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, the spiky-haired former mechanical engineer (who used to work in the petrochemical sector) lays out a rigorous road map for cutting our emissions down to a level that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.
But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope,” he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast. With his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin, an atmospheric physicist and climate change mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson argues that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while emissions ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system.47
They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year—and they need to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance). But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly. Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.’s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that “the only way” negotiators “can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.”48
That is a severe overstatement, yet it underlines Anderson and Bows-Larkin’s point that we cannot achieve 8 to 10 percent annual cuts with the array of modest carbon-pricing or green tech solutions usually advocated by Big Green. These measures will certainly help, but they are simply not enough. That’s because an 8 to 10 percent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 percent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval,” as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.49
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 percent over a period of ten years). Nor did this level of reduction happen beyond a single-year blip after Wall Street crashed in 2008. Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 percent annually, but that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.50
If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows-Larkin describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations.”II51
Now, I realize that this can all sound apocalyptic—as if reducing emissions requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only because we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all—a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another. So what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.52
Rather than pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the economic boat, Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue, the time has come to tell the truth, to “liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable . . . we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.”53
Interestingly, Anderson says that when he presents his radical findings in climate circles, the core facts are rarely disputed. What he hears most often are confessions from colleagues that they have simply given up hope of meeting the 2 degree temperature target, precisely because reaching it would require such a profound challenge to economic growth. “This position is shared by many senior scientists and economists advising government,” Anderson reports.54
In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they “wer
e unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.”55
Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.”56
* * *
Over the past decade, many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of green tech, or the “decoupling” of environmental impacts from economic activity. They paint a picture of a world that can continue to function pretty much as it does now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we can consume away without worrying about the impact.
If only humanity’s relationship with natural resources was that simple. While it is true that renewable technologies hold tremendous promise to lower emissions, the kinds of measures that would do so on the scale we need involve building vast new electricity grids and transportation systems, often from the ground up. Even if we started construction tomorrow, it would realistically take many years, perhaps decades, before the new systems were up and running. Moreover, since we don’t yet have economies powered by clean energy, all that green construction would have to burn a lot of fossil fuels in the interim—a necessary process, but one that wouldn’t lower our emissions fast enough. Deep emission cuts in the wealthy nations have to start immediately. That means that if we wait for what Bows-Larkin describes as the “whiz-bang technologies” to come online “it will be too little too late.”57
