by Naomi Klein
Similarly, after the British village of Balcombe in West Sussex was the site of huge anti-fracking protests and angry clashes in 2013, a new power company formed called REPOWERBalcombe. Its goal is “to supply the equivalent of 100% of Balcombe’s electricity demand through community owned, locally generated renewable energy”—with financing coming from residents buying shares in the energy co-operative. The fracking fight continues to play out in the courts, but solar panels are already on their way and residents who were originally in favor of oil and gas drilling are joining the co-op, attracted to the promise of self-sufficiency and cost-saving.24 A comparable process is underway in Pungesti, the Romanian farming community fighting fracking. The claims by Chevron’s supporters that gas extraction is the only option for jobs in this poor region of the country forced fracking opponents to put forward proposals of their own—like a community wind farm, a processing plant for the vegetables grown locally, and an abattoir for their livestock, all of which would add value to the livelihoods that are the region’s heritage.
In short, some of the most tangible responses to the ecological crisis today come not from utopian dropout projects, but rather are being forged in the flames of resistance, by communities on the front lines of the battles against extreme extraction. And at the same time, many of those who, decades ago, built alternatives at the local level are finding themselves forced back to the barricades. That’s because many of the most idyllic pockets where the sixties-era dropouts went to build their utopias are suddenly under siege: oil and coal tankers threaten their shores, oil and coal trains threaten their downtowns, and frackers want their land.
And even in places that are lucky enough to have been spared (so far) all these threats, climate change is demolishing the idea that any countercultural pocket can provide a safe haven. In August 2011, that became clear to the organic farmers in Vermont who had pioneered one of the most advanced and sustainable local agriculture systems in North America. Probably most famous is the Intervale, a network of urban farms in Burlington that supplies roughly 10 percent of the city’s fresh food, while at the same time composting its waste and sustainably generating a significant portion of its power. But when Hurricane Irene descended on the state, floodwaters destroyed not only historic covered bridges but as Bill McKibben, a Vermonter and staunch supporter of food localization, said to me shortly after, “It washed away huge amounts of that beautiful local agriculture. The Intervale in Burlington is suddenly under five feet of water. Nothing gets harvested there. There are tons of farms where the beautiful, rich topsoil is now just covered with feet of sand from the river.” He took away from that experience the fact that “If we can’t solve the climate problem, then all the rest of this is for naught.”25
I witnessed something similar, if on a smaller scale, in New York City one year later in the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. While visiting Red Hook, Brooklyn, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods, I stopped by the Red Hook Community Farm—an amazing place that teaches kids from nearby housing projects how to grow healthy food, provides composting for a huge number of residents, hosts a weekly farmer’s market, and runs a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, getting all kinds of produce to people who need it. Not only was the farm improving the lives of people in the neighborhood, it was also doing everything right from a climate perspective—reducing food miles; staying away from petroleum inputs; sequestering carbon in the soil; reducing landfill by composting. But when the storm came, none of that mattered. The entire fall harvest was lost. And the urban farmers I met there—still in shock from seeing so much collective work gone to waste—were preoccupied with the fear that the water that had inundated the fields had been so toxic that they would need to bring in new soil.
In short, dropping out and planting vegetables is not an option for this generation. There can be no more green museums because the fossil fuels runaway train is coming for us one way or another. There may have been a time when engaging in resistance against a life-threatening system and building alternatives to that system could be meaningfully separated, but today we have to do both simultaneously: build and support inspiring alternatives like the Red Hook Community Farm—and make sure they have a fighting chance of thriving by trying to change an economic model so treacherous that nowhere is safe. John Jordan, a longtime ecological activist in Britain and France, describes resistance and alternatives as “the twin strands of the DNA of social change. One without the other is useless.”26
The denizens of Blockadia live and know this. Which is why theirs is neither a movement of negation (no to the miners/drillers/pipe layers/heavy haulers), nor solely of protection (defending cherished but static ways of life). Increasingly, it is also a constructive movement, actively building an alternative economy based on very different principles and values.
They are also learning—in a kind of people’s inversion of the shock doctrine—that one of the most opportune times to build that next economy may be in the aftermath of disasters, particularly climate-related disasters. That’s because recurring mega-tragedies like Superstorm Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan that kill thousands and cause billions in damages serve dramatically to educate the public about the terrible costs of our current system, driving an argument for radical change that addresses the root, rather than only the symptoms, of the climate crisis. In the outpourings of volunteerism and donations, as well as the rage at any whiff of profiteering, these disasters also activate the latent and broadly shared generosity that capitalism works so hard to deny. Not to mention the fact that, as the disaster capitalists well know, these events result in a whole lot of public money being put on the table—an increasingly rare event during times of relentless economic austerity.
With the right kind of public pressure, that money can be marshaled not just to rebuild cities and communities, but to transform them into models of nonextractive living. This can go far beyond the usual calls for stronger seawalls: activists can demand everything from free, democratically controlled public transit, to more public housing along those transit lines, powered by community-controlled renewable energy—with the jobs created by this investment going to local workers and paying a living wage. And unlike the disaster capitalists who use crises to end-run around democracy, a People’s Recovery (as many from the Occupy movement called for post-Sandy) would require new democratic processes, including neighborhood assemblies, to decide how hard-hit communities should be rebuilt. The overriding principle must be to address the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time.
One example of this kind of inverted shock doctrine took place in the rural town of Greensburg, Kansas. In 2007, a super tornado ripped through the area, turning about 95 percent of the town into rubble. As a result of an extraordinary, community-led process that began just days after the disaster, with neighbors holding meetings in tents amid the wreckage of their former lives, Greensburg today stands as a model “green town,” often described as the greenest in America. The hospital, city hall, and school have all been built to the highest certification level issued by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). And the town has become a destination for hundreds of policy makers, anxious to learn more about its low-energy lighting and its cutting-edge green architecture and waste reduction, as well as the wind turbines that earn municipal revenue by producing more power than local residents need.27
Most striking of all, this “living laboratory” is taking place in the heart of an overwhelmingly Republican-voting county, where a great many people are entirely unconvinced that climate change is real. But those debates seem to matter little to residents: the shared experience of tremendous loss, as well as the outpouring of generosity that follow the disaster, have, in Greensburg, rekindled the values of land stewardship and intergenerational responsibility that have deep roots in rural life. “The number one topic at those tent meetings was talking about who we are—what are our values?” recalls Greensburg mayor Bob Dixson, a former postmaster wh
o comes from a long line of farmers. He added, “Sometimes we agreed to disagree, but we were still civil to each other. And let’s not forget that our ancestors were stewards of the land. My ancestors lived in the original green homes: sod houses. . . . We learned that the only true green and sustainable things in life are how we treat each other.”28
Responding to disaster with this kind of soul-searching is profoundly different from the top-down model of the shock doctrine—these are attempts not to exploit crisis, but to harness it to actually solve the underlying problems at their root, and in ways that expand democratic participation rather than the opposite. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became a laboratory for corporate interests intent on capturing and radically shrinking the public sphere, attacking public health and education and leaving the city far more vulnerable to the next disaster. But there is no reason why future disasters cannot be laboratories for those who believe in reviving and reinventing the commons, and in ways that actively reduce the chances that we will all be battered by many more such devastating blows in the future.
From Local to Global Debts
On my first visit to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, the question of how to finance the kind of healthy economy anti-coal activists were fighting for came up often. At one point, Lynette Two Bulls, who runs an organization that teaches Cheyenne youth about their history, told me that she had heard about something exciting happening in Ecuador. She was talking about the call for the international community to compensate the country for not extracting the oil in the Yasuní rainforest, with the money raised going to social programs and a clean energy transition. It sounded like just what was needed on the reservation and she wanted to know: if Ecuador could be compensated for keeping its oil in the ground, then why couldn’t the Northern Cheyenne be compensated for being carbon keepers for their coal?
It was a very good question, and the parallels were striking. Yasuní National Park is an extraordinary swath of Ecuadorian rainforest, home to several Indigenous tribes and a surreal number of rare and exotic animals (it has nearly as many species of trees in 2.5 acres as are native to all of North America). And underneath that riot of life sits an estimated 850 million barrels of crude oil, worth about $7 billion. Burning that oil—and logging the rainforest to get it—would add another 547 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Of course the oil majors want in.29
So in 2006, the environmental group Acción Ecológica (the same group that made an early alliance with the anti-oil movement in Nigeria) put forward a counterproposal: the Ecuadorian government should agree not to sell the oil, but it should be supported in this action by the international community, which would benefit collectively from the preservation of biodiversity and from keeping planet-warming gases out of our shared atmosphere. That would mean partially compensating Ecuador for what it would have earned from oil revenues had it opted to drill. As Esperanza Martínez, president of Acción Ecológica, explained, the “proposal establishes a precedent, arguing that countries should be rewarded for not exploiting their oil. . . . Funds gathered would be used for the [renewable] energy transition and could be seen as payments for the ecological debt from North to South, and they should be distributed democratically at the local and global levels.” Besides, she writes, surely “the most direct way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide was to leave fossil fuels in the ground.”30
The Yasuní plan was based on the premise that Ecuador, like all developing countries, is owed a debt for the inherent injustice of climate change—the fact that wealthy countries had used up most of the atmospheric capacity for safely absorbing CO2 before developing countries had a chance to industrialize. And since the entire world would reap the benefits of keeping that carbon in the ground (since it would help stabilize the global climate), it is unfair to expect Ecuador, as a poor country whose people had contributed little to the climate crisis, to shoulder the economic burden for giving up those potential petro dollars. Instead, that burden should be shared between Ecuador and the highly industrialized countries most responsible for the buildup of atmospheric carbon. This is not charity, in other words: if wealthy countries do not want poorer ones to pull themselves out of poverty in the same dirty way that we did, the onus is on Northern governments to help foot the bill.
This, of course, is the core of the argument for the existence of a “climate debt”—the same argument that Bolivia’s climate negotiator, Angélica Navarro Llanos, had laid out for me in Geneva in 2009, helping me to see how climate change could be the catalyst to attack inequality at its core, the basis for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”31 The math behind the argument is simple enough. As discussed, climate change is the result of cumulative emissions: the carbon dioxide we emit stays in the atmosphere for approximately one to two centuries, with a portion remaining for a millennium or even more.32 And since the climate is changing as a result of two-hundred-odd years of such accumulated emissions, that means that the countries that have been powering their economies with fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution have done far more to cause temperatures to rise than those that just got in on the globalization game in the last couple of decades.33 Developed countries, which represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population, have emitted almost 70 percent of all the greenhouse gas pollution that is now destabilizing the climate. (The United States alone, which comprises less than 5 percent of the global population, now contributes about 14 percent of all carbon emissions.)34
And while developing countries like China and India spew large (and rapidly growing) amounts of carbon dioxide, they are not equally responsible for the cost of the cleanup, the argument goes, because they have contributed only a fraction of the two hundred years of cumulative pollution that has caused the crisis. Moreover, not everyone needs carbon for the same sorts of things. For instance, India still has roughly 300 million people living without electricity. Does it have the same degree of responsibility to cut its emissions as, say, Britain, which has been accumulating wealth and emitting industrial levels of carbon dioxide ever since James Watt introduced his successful steam engine in 1776?35
Of course not. That is why 195 countries, including the United States, ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, which enshrines the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” That basically means that everyone is responsible for being part of the climate solution but the countries that have emitted more over the past century should be the first to cut and should also help finance poorer countries to switch to clean development models.36
Few dispute that climate debt is an argument with justice and international law on its side. And yet Ecuador’s attempt to put that principle into practice in the forest has been fraught with difficulties and may well fail. Once again, being right, and even having rights, is not enough on its own to move the rich and powerful.
In 2007, the center-left government of Rafael Correa took up the Yasuní proposal and championed it, albeit briefly, on the world stage. Inside Ecuador, the Yasuní-ITT initiative, as the plan is known (named for the coveted Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini oil fields inside the park), became a populist rallying cry, a vision for real economic development that did not require sacrificing some of the most cherished parts of the country. A 2011 poll found that 83 percent of Ecuadorians supported leaving the Yasuní’s oil in the ground, up from 41 percent in 2008, a measure of how quickly a transformative vision can capture the public imagination. But contributions from developed countries were slow to arrive (only $13 million of a $3.6 billion goal was raised), and in 2013 Correa announced that he was going to allow drilling to begin.37
Local supporters of the plan, however, have not given up and Correa’s backsliding has opened a new Blockadia front: protestors opposing drilling have already faced arrests and rubber bullets and, in the absence of a political solution, Indigenous groups are likely to resist extraction with their bodies. Meanwhile, in April 2014, a coalition of NGOs and cit
izen groups collected more than 750,000 signatures calling for the matter to be put to a national referendum (at the time of publication, it seemed that Correa was determined to block the vote and push ahead with drilling). As Kevin Koenig, Ecuador program director at Amazon Watch, wrote in The New York Times, “Though the government should be held to account,” this is not all Correa’s fault. “The stillbirth of Yasuni-ITT is a shared failure.”38
This setback, moreover, is a microcosm of the broader failure of the international climate negotiations, which have stalled again and again over the central question of whether climate action will reflect the history of who created the crisis. The end result: emissions keep soaring way past safe levels, everyone loses, the poorest lose first and worst.
Giving up on real solutions, like the imaginative one first proposed to save the Yasuní, is therefore not an option. As with Indigenous land rights, if governments are unwilling to live up to their international (and domestic) responsibilities, then movements of people have to step into that leadership vacuum and find ways to change the power equation.
The right, as usual, understands this better than the left, which is why the climate change denial crowd consistently claims that global warming is a socialist conspiracy to redistribute wealth (the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner likes to say rich countries are being “extorted” by the poor).39 Climate debt is not extortion but climate change, when fully confronted, does raise some awfully thorny questions about what we in the wealthy world owe to the countries on the front lines of a crisis they had little hand in creating. At the same time, as elites in countries like China and India grow ever more profligate in their consumption and emissions, traditional North-South categories begin to break down and equally tough questions are raised about the responsibilities of the rich and the rights of the poor wherever they happen to live in the world. Because without facing those questions, there is no hope of getting emissions under control where it counts the most.
