Daily Archives: March 1, 2015

climate science, democracy, Politics, Preventing Ecocide

Capitalism vs. the Climate: An Interview with Naomi Klein

Leave a comment
The Dark Side of Capitalism: Global Class Warfare

 

By Johnny Finn, reposted from Human Geography, Mar 1, 2015. The full version of this interview with Naomi Klein will appear in Human Geography, vol. 8, no. 1 (2015).

Johnny Finn, Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology, Christopher Newport University

In Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), the activist, journalist, and author lays out an argument that will probably be familiar to many readers of Human Geography. Carbon is not the problem, but rather a symptom of the real problem: global capitalism.

The book begins by laying out the scientific, economic, and political reality of the current situation. She describes the frightening scenarios for 2°C, 4°C, and 6°C warming that foretell calamitous disaster on a scale that humans might not be able to survive. She identifies a global economic order entrenched in extractive carbon-based mass-production and mass-consumption that has led us to this situation. And she outlines a political system in the US, the world’s second larger carbon emitter, which seems not only unable to do anything about carbon pollution, but whose legislative branch is now run by a political party that overwhelmingly dismisses the science of climate change. All this leads her to an interesting and counter-intuitive conclusion: the climate-denying right actually understands exactly what is needed: systemic change that overthrows global capitalism. To the right this is precisely the reason to pretend that global warming is a hoax. But equally wrong are many, if not most on the left who believe that global carbon emissions can be reduced to such a level so as to avoid catastrophic climate change without systemic change.

In the face of all of this, Klein remains optimistic, utopian even. She sees climate change as an impending disaster ripe with opportunity: not just environmental change, but also a significant reordering of the global political, economic, and social order. She writes:

I began to see all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them (p. 7).

As Elizabeth Kolbert recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, it’s “a rather tall order.”

Late last week I had the chance to interview Naomi Klein. During the course of our hour-long conversation I asked her about her seemingly disproportional optimism, about the recent US-China bilateral agreement to reduce carbon emissions, about several key gaps in her analysis, about the politicization of science, and about writing on science and policy as an “activist journalist” (her term). The full interview will be published in the next issue of HG (vol. 8, no. 1) along with reviews of the book by Noel Castree, Juan Declet-Barreto, Leigh Johnson, Wendy Larner, Diana Liverman, and Michael Watts. For now, here are some of the key moments from the interview.

Johnny Finn (JF): I’d actually like to start not with a question about your book but rather with a “historic deal” between the US and China that was announced just a couple of days ago to reduce carbon emissions from both countries throughout the coming years.

Naomi Klein (NK): This deal is taking place in the context of accelerated free trade agreements between China and the US, China and Canada, and other de agreements, markets which are all about liberating the flow of goods and encouraging more consumption. These sorts of baby steps in the right direction are occurring in the context of this unrelenting push for a model of so-called “free trade” that fuels a really wasteful and emissions-intensive form of consumption. We’re still speeding down that highway in the wrong direction and at the same time as there are these small indications in the right direction.

I do think it is significant what Obama does on Keystone in the next little while, because he really has kicked the can down the road in terms of emission reduction targets he has made—all of the hard stuff kicks in when he’s out of office. So something he can do now instead of just talk is say no to the Keystone XL Pipeline. If he doesn’t, then what he’s doing is locking in an infrastructure for a very high carbon energy source that is designed to last for decades down the road and really making his successors work harder. Making it all more unlikely that they will meet even these paltry targets.

JF: Your book struck me as somewhat dialectical, simultaneously terrifying and almost utopian. You lay out these situations for 2° and 4° and 6° warming that on the upper level could foretell the kind of calamitous global disaster that humans might not survive. Add to that the current global economic and political order. And you look at all of this and you see a situation ripe for opportunity, not just for environmental change but also for significantly reordering the global political, economic, and social order. Maybe I’m just a pessimist but while I think there is a lot to your diagnosis, I don’t know… Especially with the time frame we’re working under, can you convince to be an optimist about this?

NK: Well I think if I didn’t convince you in the book I probably won’t be able to do so in this phone call. And I think that the book has inspired a range of responses that says a lot about our individual state and where we on the spectrum of hope and despair at any given moment. Which shifts at various times, which is not fixed. I think Americans in particular are in a state of deep despair right now… I can’t convince you or anyone else who really feels that this is hopeless. I am making an argument that the fact that it is this bad is potentially a more powerful tool than any we’re currently using to change a system that needs radical change. I think part of the reason why we all feel so much despair in the face of the American political system is that it is so deeply broken… So it doesn’t matter what you think or what you do, it’s non-responsive, it’s not democratic… I think we feel more despair in the face of climate because it is so incredibly absurd. I mean if we look at what’s happening right now with Keystone, that you can have a political class that’s just so craven that they would put the political fortunes of one senator, in the hopes that Mary Landrieu might do better in her run off, above the interest of the planet. I mean it is so crazy, but yet that is what is happening. And so I think there’s a way that climate sort of heightens what we already know: that this is just an amazingly corrupt system…

If we really believed things are as bad as climate scientists are telling us they are, wouldn’t we have to fight differently? Wouldn’t we have to organize ourselves differently? Wouldn’t we make different kinds of arguments? Wouldn’t the tenor of those arguments be different? […] But I don’t think you should be hopeful in the absence of social movements that are organizing on the scale that they should be organizing. My book is a call for a level of organizing and response that is not happening. So should we be hopeful now? Without that, no, there’s no reason to be hopeful. But should we do what we can to try to change those dynamics and build that movement? Well, that’s the political question of our lives… That’s what makes it different than the threat of nuclear war, which was also an existential threat. That actually required an action, we needed to press a button, someone needed to decide to do it. Whereas with climate change, no one needs to take a decision. We’re already doing it.

 

JF: In a recent article in Salon by Sean McElwee on the resurgence of Marx and Marxist ideas in more mainstream circles, he argues that a major problem for progressives is that many on the left, and especially on the populous left, don’t understand the concept of ideology. He writes that it’s common to hear the left “write and argue as though the entire American political system is controlled by a small cabal of business or political leaders conspiring to fool the masses.” But it’s not that simple, right? In the US we’re beyond just simple consumerism; consumerism is patriotic, and limiting our ability to consume, however recklessly, is framed as and is widely believed to be limiting our freedom. I guess my question for you is this: how do you account for and confront this kind of widespread and deeply entrenched ideology of consumerism?

NK: First of all, it is a relatively recent phenomenon in that there is a tradition of frugality in the United States just a couple of generations back… I think in many ways this ties back to the first book I wrote, No Logo, which was about the elevation of the lifestyle brand and the way that neo-liberalism didn’t just wage war on the public sphere, but as the public sphere shrank and as we became more atomized, the role of shopping in our sense of self and identity increased so that we get to the point where when somebody says, “You can’t shop as much,” it feels like a personal attack, an attack on the self, not a change in behavior that you can adapt to, it feels much more personal. And that’s the success of that lifestyle branding that predates the ‘90s but soared in that period. There’s no doubt that that’s a challenge and that’s why in the book I argue that we won’t win without an ideological battle, that we won’t win without a shift in worldview and values.

And the counterargument is: well there’s no time for that we have to just focus what we can in the short term. But the fact of the matter is this: that’s what we’ve been trying doing for two and a half decades when it comes to climate change. And we’re going backwards. So you know it is possible that going for a leap as opposed to these little baby steps could be a more practical strategy. Which is to say, what is called practical in the mainstream climate discussion, what is seen as serious? It already has a track record of unmitigated failure: it’s more serious to talk about a carbon tax than to talk about having a battle of worldviews, right? Except for what evidence is there that we’re anywhere close to passing a carbon tax? I mean, James Inhofe is going to be Chair of the Senate environment committee. So why not go big? Because this sort of incremental approach is not working. It’s not even delivering the incremental changes that wouldn’t get us there.

JF: One source of tension I felt while reading your book has been kind of the tension between local, bottom-up solutions and approaches and universal, top-down policy prescriptions. On the one hand, for a long time in your work you have argued for decentralization, for more local empowerment. On the other hand you open the book talking about a Marshall Plan for the Earth and other massive, top-down, universal governmental projects. I’m just wondering if you can just talk us through that tension between that universal and local.

NK: Well I do think that are ways of resolving that tension in the way that we design policy, which is why I spend a fair amount of time on what is working about the German transition. I think it is a really good example of how movements can win policy victories, which we need examples of these days. Angela Merkle, she’s not lefty and yet she’s introduced the most ambitious energy transition platform of any non-Scandinavian government in the industrialized world … The design of that energy transition in Germany, it has a bold national plan, bold national targets in terms of what percentage of Germany’s energy is going to come from renewables by which year and a national feed-in tariff program so that it isn’t just local. At the same time, it’s a feed-in tariff program that encourages local ownership, collective ownership, and decentralization of all kind. So I think it’s a good example of how you can reconcile the need or change at scale without resorting to centralized state solutions that often replicate bad patterns of remoteness and unresponsiveness and non-democratic tendencies…

I set out to write a book that accurately diagnosed the problems and could be a tool to weave together different movements, to fight for that next economy and to provide some of the principles that need to animate that next economy. But in terms of laying a blue print for it, I understand why people crave that, but that’s the not the book I intended to write, or that I think I could write. I concede the point that the book is stronger on critiques than it is on what the next economy needs to look like. But politically I really believe that the process of mapping that out, first of all should be specific to different places and should be a democratic process. Maybe that sounds like a cop-out but I really do believe that.

JF: In the recent New York Times review of your book, Rob Nixon describes not only this work, but all of your work—No Logo, Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything—as your anti-globalization trilogy. How do you react to this characterization of being “anti-globalization”?

NK: It’s a bit of a throwback, that term, right? We don’t really use it; you don’t even hear it that much any more. I mean, at the time, we always said it’s not an anti-globalization movement. On the liberal end, it’s an anti-corporate globalization movement and on the left side an anti-capitalist globalization movement, and that remains true. I never even understood the word “globalization,” and I don’t use it as you can see in the book. I talk about this particular model of corporate globalization, which was a pseudonym for corporate liberation movement. So I’ve never liked the term. It’s conflated too many things at once, in a way that was never useful.

[There’s something else that] has come up in a few reviews that I’m a bit confused by. This issue of: Is it anti-neoliberal? Or is it anti-capitalist? A few reviewers have made the claim that the case I’m making is against neoliberalism and not against capitalism. And I think I’m really clear in the book, and I don’t know how I could be any clearer: it’s both. That in terms of the tools that we needed to respond to this crisis when it hit in the late 80s and 90s, were the very tools that were under fire by the neoliberal project: regulation, taxation, the very idea of collective action in society and so on. The advancement of free trade created more barriers. But because we have waited as long as we have, and we now need to cut our emissions as deeply as we need to, we now have a conflict not just with neoliberalism, but a conflict with capitalism because it challenges the growth imperative. So I realize this is a two-stage argument, but it’s both.

JF: In the last 30-35 years both within geography and beyond, a substantial group of researchers, educators, and authors have developed the field of political ecology. It now consists of more than 20 major books, hundreds of academic articles, probably thousands of courses taught around the world, and there’s really no mention of political ecology in your book. Why not?

NK: Well…I think it’s probably a fair enough challenge and I think one of the pitfalls of writing a really interdisciplinary book is that I’m not going to be 100% up on the literature in any of the fields. I was keenly aware of the fact that in every field that I touch on, and I touch on a lot of them, I’m standing on so many shoulders. There’s six pages of acknowledgements and all I can think of are the people I forgot. Part of it, in writing for a popular audience as opposed to an academic audience, is that there’s a constant name checking in academic writing and in popular writing there’s a lot less of it. Just for readability and flow and I think that does run the risk of people feeling unacknowledged, especially when I’m getting all of this popular attention and they haven’t. I feel bad about that if I screwed that up.

 

JF: Another question I think is along the same lines and comes based on a recent Guardian piece that Kate Raworth wrote, suggesting that a better name for the Anthropocene might be the “Manthropocene.” Compared to the number of male scientists who you cite, you cite very few women scientists and researchers. And there are many women doing really important research, especially in the policy realm on climate change. Why do you cite so many men compared to women?

NK: You think that that’s true? I’m not sure. I feel like I was aware of that in the first half of the book. I feel like in the second half of the book that the balance shifts. But I was aware of it in the first half of the book, and I think it’s definitely true in terms of the climate science and in some of the more wonky tax stuff, although I’m always quoting Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin more so than I quote anybody else. Part of it is just there was a certain team of climate scientists who just helped us a lot, and they were all men, that is true and that’s not good. And the geoengineering world is overwhelmingly male.

I think I find the climate debate to be overwhelmingly male dominated even though the field is not. In terms of people who make the most noise, who blog the most, who get heard… Part of what I’m trying to do with this book is make people who don’t feel welcome in this world, feel like they could also talk about climate change. And part of it is it that it’s a very very wonky world. There’s the science side of it but then there’s the policy world, which is just as male-dominated if not more. And even the big green groups. Even though the environmental justice movement is overwhelmingly led by women at the grassroots level, there’s been some very strong analyses looking at how male-dominated the big green groups are. But I would think that a book like mine should try to fix some of that, in terms of who is treated as an expert. I don’t think I did enough. I certainly tried not to replicate that. I think it’s fair enough to say in terms of the climate science that most of the climate experts, besides, Alice, are men, Alice and Penny Chisholm. I did think it’s funny, too, about people who get cited. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle in terms of who gets cited. People worry more about offending men because they tend to have bigger egos.

I think a lot of the most important and wisest voices in the book are women and many of them women of color, like Arundhati Roy and Angélica Navarro, who I start the book with. The film in particular I think does a better job than the book of upending some of these notions of who is an expert.

 

JF: Ok, last question: given how highly politicized that climate change is, especially in the US, and really the strong politicization of everything in American politics right now, are you concerned that your book might simply further the politicization of this issue, that it might actually backfire by making broad based climate action, exactly the kind of climate action that we need, even harder because of the politicization surrounding it?

NK: I get the concern, but I can’t see how it could be more politicized than it already is in terms of how it’s perceived on the right. I mean, the left, liberals are scared of the book. But the right, you know, they already thought this. This is the whole point, but one of the things that’s so frustrating about Obama is that he gets all of the backlash as if he was doing something, as if he was doing something radical. So he may as well! That’s assuming he actually wants to. Given that he gets treated as a socialist when he does the most minor neoliberal reforms, he may as well go a little bit further. I don’t think that the right in the United States could be more convinced that climate change is a socialist plot, so I’m not all that worried about it. The other issue is just that this book is disruptive to the current narrative, but it’s not as if that narrative was working. It’s not as if I’m coming into a movement, a climate movement, that was moving from strength to strength and introducing an argument that could sabotage it. I’m introducing a debate into a movement that is losing, big time, on every front. So, I don’t think we have anything to lose in trying a different approach. There’s a huge amount of fear and I acknowledge that it is risky. If I were doing this 15 years ago or 10 years ago even, I think that that argument would have carried more weight. I’ve said this in other interviews, we tried it their way: pretending we could do this and no one would even notice. And it didn’t work. So let’s try telling the truth and see what happens. SOURCE

* Thanks to Colleen Garrison for her assistance transcribing this interview.

 

RELATED:

Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin

DON’T MUDDLE ENERGY EFFICIENCY WITH REDUCING EMISSIONS

 

 

 

 

Uncategorized

Ecuador: Chevron-Texaco profits from ecocide

Leave a comment

By Coral Wynter, reposted from Green Left, on Mar 1, 2015

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa put his hand into one of these hidden pools and brought it out covered in oil muck.

The huge multinational US oil corporation Texaco operated in Ecuador from 1964 until 1992 (Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001).

The corporation poured 72 billion litres of oil waste and 45 million litres of crude oil over 2 million hectares of land in Santa Elena province — land which included the Amazon rainforest, rivers and agricultural land.

Texaco just poured the oil into ground-connected pipes which just poured oil directly into the rivers and forests.

It is one of the worst ecological disasters in history — 30 times greater than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and 85 times greater than the Gulf of Mexico spill by British Petroleum (BP) in 2010. During the supposed clean up in the provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana, before it left Ecuador, Texaco hid over a thousand different swamps of toxic waste throughout the rainforests, dumping a layer of topsoil over them.

Recently, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa put his hand into one of these hidden pools and brought it out covered in oil muck. Toxic waste is still polluting the groundwater, the rainforest and the atmosphere.

Ecuadoran lawyer Pablo Fajardo explained the legal battle the Ecuador has been fighting for 21 years to the Latin American Social Forum in Sydney on February 7 by Skype.

Another Ecuadorian lawyer, Maria del Mar Gallegos, spoke to Gren Left Weekly about the details of the case against Chevron-Texaco.

What is particularly galling to Ecuadorans is that the corporation could not have legally carried out this degree of contamination in the US. During this same time, Texaco had patented a technology that significantly diminished pollution from oil and gas operations but in Ecuador, Texaco never used it, in order to obtain as much profit as possible.

The company even told the villagers that the oil-contaminated water would make them stronger, that the water was rich in vitamins and minerals. There are over 2000 deaths from cancer, many of them children, related to the oil waste in the rivers. The ratio of cancers in the rural area compared with the urban areas is 3 to 1.

The tribal groups living in the forests used the contaminated water for drinking, to grow food and for washing. They had no other source of water.

Chevron burnt toxic gas, producing huge flames, day and night, during these four decades. Two of the Amazon tribes, the Tetetes and the Sansahuari, have disappeared. Two other tribes, the Cofarestiona and the Siekope, had to migrate away from their land. The rainforest in Ecuador is now called the Amazon Chernobyl.

In 1964, the military dictatorship of Ecuador awarded Texaco-Gulf Consortium a 40-year contract on 1.5 billion hectares of Amazon rainforest, inhabited by indigenous communities. The ownership of the land and the oil wells is complicated but very often the oil companies disrespected the contract and did not pay full royalties and taxes to the Ecuadorian government.

In 1993, the local people organised in the Amazon Defence Coalition to demand restoration of the environment and compensation to the people and communities. The government of US puppet Jamil Mahuad signed an agreement in 1998 releasing Texaco from any claims from the Ecuadorian government.

Texaco thought it was off the hook, but this agreement did not release the oil company from its obligations to the people of Ecuador. The Amazon Defence Coalition, not the Ecuadoran government, sued Chevron-Texaco.

In a ten year court battle in New York Chevron-Texaco insisted that the case be transferred to a court in Ecuador. In 2002, the US courts approved the transfer and the company undertook to respect the decisions of the Ecuadoran courts.

Chevron-Texaco thought it was onto a winner. Ecuadoran judges could be easily bribed and it would get a favourable judgment.

In 2003, the Amazon Defence Coalition, representing 30,000 indigenous people, again sued Chevron-Texaco through the Ecuadoran courts. Chevron-Texaco certainly did not foresee the radical change taking place in 2006 in Ecuador with the election of Rafael Correa.

The Amazon Defence Coalition won in 2011, the multinational was found guilty and Judge Nicolas Zambrano ordered Chevron-Texaco to pay US$9.6 billion for the environmental disaster and apologise — within two weeks, otherwise the amount would double.

Chevron refused to apologise and in 2012 the Ecuadoran courts ratified the payment of $19 billion to be used in part for the education and health of the indigenous communities. The decision was upheld in an appeal in 2012 although the amount was reduced to $9.5 billion.

In retaliation, Chevron launched a full-scale attack on the Ecuadorian legal system, saying it had “no value, no validity and that it was eaten up by corruption”. Chevron employed 2000 lawyers and spent an estimated US$2 billion in the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague to force the Ecuadorian State to take over liability for the debt.

Another legal case was launched by Chevron-Texaco, in New York against the Ecuadorian state and all the plaintiffs, including students, activists and even a cartoonist, saying they were all guilty of a conspiracy to defraud and defame Chevron. The Ecuadorian government was included, even though it had never sued Chevron or been a plaintiff in these legal cases.

Chevron used the laws known as RICO, Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organisation, to accuse the Ecuadorian plaintiffs of the conspiracy.

These laws were originally introduced in the US to combat the Mafia.

Chevron won the case in New York in March last year and, as a result, no enforcement of the compensation to be paid to Ecuador can be carried out on US soil. The corporation is totally protected inside the US.

The annual profits of Chevron-Texaco in 2012 were US$26.2 billion, equivalent to US$3 million an hour. At the same time, BP lost its appeal for liability of compensation payouts that will surpass $15 billion for the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Chevron has also employed 20 different media firms to spread lies and misinformation against Ecuador using websites such as TheAmazonPost.com as well as many Google ads to spread biased information slandering the judicial process in Ecuador.

Chevron convinced the US Congress not to renew tariff preferences previously granted to Ecuadorian exporters. Chevron is determined to win complete impunity for the massive damage it caused to the environment through its political campaign to discredit the Ecuadorian government, people and legal system.

Since Chevron now has no investments in Ecuador, the Amazon Defence Coalition has to go to the national courts in other countries to obtain compensation.

Chevron has huge investments in Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Australia. Ecuador is now pursuing the case against Chevron in other countries to embargo its assets. The case was lost in Argentina and the case is waiting to be heard in Brazil but Canadian courts said it would hear the case against Chevron.

This would set a precedent and if successful in Canada, there is a possibility the Ecuadorian people would pursue Chevron’s economic interests in Australia.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted at a conference in Rome in July 1998 and came into force in 2002. The Rome Statute established four core international crimes, which are not subject to any statue of limitations: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.

An environmental lawyer and author, Polly Higgins, is campaigning to have a fifth crime included — ecocide.

She advocates a new approach to preventing the environmental destruction of our planet. She says existing laws have bestowed upon corporations silent rights which take precedence over environmental concerns and argues that nothing less than new international laws will ensure that the enjoyment of those rights is subject to reciprocal responsibilities, duties and obligations towards future generations and our habitat.

Solving the problem at a national level will never work — corporations will simply move elsewhere to continue business as usual.

A win in Canada and acceptance of ecocide as a crime under the Rome Statue would set a precedent for all people living in developing and developed countries who have had their land and water destroyed by mining companies. SOURCE

 

democracy, Politics

The cold, hard facts of climate change are clear

Leave a comment
The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.

 

By Amy Goodman, reposted from the Albuquerque Journal, Feb 28, 2015

President Barack Obama issued the third veto in his more than six years in office, rejecting S.1 (Senate Bill One), the “Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act.” This was the new congressional Republican majority’s first bill this year, attempting to force the construction of a pipeline designed to carry Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. ports in Texas for export.

A broad international coalition has been fighting the project for years. Climate scientist James Hansen, the former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in The New York Times that, if the pipeline gets built, “it will be game over for the climate.”

This vote and veto came as much of the U.S. was gripped by extreme cold weather, with cities like Boston reeling from historically deep snowfall and Southern states like Georgia getting snowed in. Meanwhile, California braces for even more drought.

The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.

Millions of dollars are poured into flashy television “Weather Centers.” Now these sets, with their polished presenters, are being upgraded to “Severe Weather Centers” or “Extreme Weather Centers.” Why not make the link?

As they flash the words “Severe Weather,” why not also flash the words “Climate Change” or “Global Warming?” Why not explain how global warming can actually lead to more snowfall or to, yes, colder weather?

The public depends on broadcasters for most of their news and information, even in this Internet age. How could a drought in California be related to Niagara Falls freezing over thousands of miles away? People aren’t stupid. The daily deluge of sensational weather reporting must include explanations of the deeper changes occurring to our entire planet.

Check out the advertisements that sandwich the newscasts. Often, you are presented with a highly produced, compelling ad describing how clean and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is. But is this really the case?

Look at what happened this month when more than 100 U.S. cities reported record cold: An explosion at an ExxonMobil refinery south of Los Angeles rocked the surrounding area with the equivalent of a 1.4-magnitude earthquake. In West Virginia, an oil tanker “bomb” train derailed and exploded, lighting up the night sky with massive fireballs and forcing the evacuation of two towns.

Beyond these explosions, there are the leaks, the spills, the toxic air pollution that causes epidemic asthma in impacted communities. And all these ill effects of the fossil fuel industry are small when compared with the ongoing destruction caused by worsening, and potentially irreversible, climate change.

The debate over climate change is over. The U.N.’s Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report, written by 800 scientists from 80 countries, that summarized the findings of more than 30,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and concluded:

“Human influence on the climate system is clear; the more we disrupt our climate, the more we risk severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts; and we have the means to limit climate change and build a more prosperous, sustainable future.”

Compare that with the handful of scientists who deny the reality of climate change. One champion among them, Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, received $1.2 million from fossil fuel interests, including oil baron Charles Koch, according to an investigation conducted by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center. Soon is now being investigated by the Smithsonian for possible ethical violations.

Among those for whom the science is clear and the debate settled: the Pentagon. Under the Obama administration, as well as under President Bush before him, the Department of Defense has named climate change as a major threat to national security.

Just when the public needs increased reporting on these issues, some of the largest news organizations are scaling back their climate reporting. The New York Times gutted its nine-person environmental desk in 2013.

No one weather event is proof of climate change, but the trends are clear. Meteorologists, especially those on the television news programs, have a duty to state the cold, hard facts: Climate change is real, it is a planetary threat and there is plenty we can do about it.

SOURCE

 

Activism, democracy, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics

RCMP claim of B.C. anti-pipeline extremists shocks native, environmental leaders

Leave a comment

Report makes ‘false inferences,’ borders on ‘misguided hysteria’

RCMP claim of B.C. anti-pipeline extremists shocks native, environmental leaders
A series of bombings, including of this shed on a gas pipeline near Tomslake, B.C., in 2009, was one of the few pieces of evidence an RCMP report gives to warn of extremists prepared to damage “critical” pipeline infrastructure in B.C. Photograph by: John Lucas , John Lucas/Edmonton Journal
BY PETER O’NEIL, reposted from the VANCOUVER SUN, Feb 25, 2015
OTTAWA — An internal RCMP report’s portrayal of northern B.C. as one of two Canadian regions most vulnerable to violent, anti-pipeline extremists working with aboriginal radicals to sabotage “critical infrastructure” is “absolutely bizarre,” one of B.C.’s most outspoken First Nations leaders said Wednesday.

Stewart Phillip, head of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, has long espoused civil disobedience to defend First Nations rights and was recently arrested during an anti-pipeline protest on Burnaby Mountain.

He expressed shock after being read sections of the report that was obtained earlier this month by the Montreal newspaper La Presse.

The report said New Brunswick, where a half-dozen RCMP vehicles were torched in an anti-fracking First Nations protest in 2013, was the number 1 hot spot in terms of potential violent attacks on the oil and gas industry.

“Aside from New Brunswick, the most urgent anti-petroleum threat of violent criminal activity is in northern British Columbia, where there is a coalition of like-minded violent extremists who are planning criminal actions to prevent the construction of the pipeline.”

“It’s absolutely bizarre, bordering on misguided hysteria,” Phillip said after being read several passages from the 44-page document, titled Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry and stamped “Protected … Canadian Eyes Only.”

The report’s author appeared to be trying to link mainstream environmental groups like Tides Canada, which receives considerable funding from U.S. trusts, to individuals and groups who have threatened criminal “direct action” to stop Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat and Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion to Burnaby.

“There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed, anti-Canadian petroleum movement, that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists, who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,” states the January 2014 report that was prepared by the RCMP’s Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team.

The report said the extremists advocate the use of “arson, firearms and improvised explosive devices,” and “some factions” have “aligned themselves with violent aboriginal extremists.”

The report even raises the spectre of two of the most ghastly acts of domestic terrorism in modern history — the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, including young children at a daycare, and a lone gunman’s 2011 rampage in Norway that left dead 77 people, most of them teens picked off one by one at an island youth camp.

“As seen in Oklahoma City in 1995 and in Norway in 2011, continued vigilance is essential since it remains possible that certain groups — or even a lone individual — could choose to adopt a more violent, terrorist strategy to achieve their desired results.”

Phillip said he’s never met anyone prepared to engage in criminal activity since his association with the B.C. environmental movement began in the 1970s.

“Every day when you turn on the television, you witness insane acts on the part of disturbed people,” he said. “But to suggest there’s a very well-organized jihadist-style network out there that’s a threat to the Canadian public — in my experience this is absolutely not the case. I hate to say this, but this is Canada. Excuse me?”

He said First Nations fighting to protect the environment have strong allies across Canada, as well as the force of several Supreme Court of Canada judgments supporting their claims.

“If I were to move in that direction (towards recommending criminal acts), I think we’d quickly alienate the vast majority,” of their supporters across Canada.

The report presents little evidence of extremist anti-energy industry violence in B.C., just the series of mysterious natural gas pipeline bombings in northern B.C. in 2008 to 2009, and a 2014 Georgia Straight article quoting activists hinting at their support for unlawful actions to stop Northern Gateway.

Environmental groups have also expressed shock over the report’s assertions about violence, as well as the author’s tone of skepticism about climate change science.

“The false inference in the leaked RCMP document that Tides Canada’s charitable work across the country is somehow situated in the murky world of terrorists and imagined criminal activity would be laughable were it not so concerning,” Tides Canada president Ross McMillan said in an email.

He said Tides will write to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson to “to express our grave concern that the RCMP could pen a report so steeped in misconceptions — from questioning the scientific consensus on climate change to besmirching legitimate and important non-profit organizations in Canada.”

The RCMP document has caused the federal government some communications challenges in connection with its current bid to get Bill C-51 through Parliament.

The controversial and sweeping bill, aimed at giving security forces and especially the Canadian Security Intelligence Service more powers, targets activity that “undermines the security of Canada,” including “interference with critical infrastructure.”

The bill also says the legislation does not target “lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression.”

That has rung alarms among environmentalists and civil libertarians fearing that CSIS could use the legislation to go after people arrested for civil disobedience that is illegal but not criminal.

Spokesmen for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney and the RCMP both issued statements Thursday rejecting the notion the government is targeting the mainstream environmental movement.

“The RCMP is only interested in those who are or could be violent extremists,” said Blaney spokesman Jean-Christophe de Le Rue.

RCMP Sgt. David Falls said the force has a mandate to investigate criminal threats, “including those to critical infrastructure,” but doesn’t monitor or “focus on” environmental groups.

“The RCMP respects and protects the right of Canadians to participate in lawful protest activities in accordance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

[email protected]

Twitter.com/poneilinottawa

 

Cultural Ecocide, democracy, Ecocide ALert, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics, Preventing Ecocide, racism

Missing and murdered: What it will take for indigenous women to feel safe

Leave a comment
"Searching for a way to feel safe daily is something that has been elusive for many indigenous women," say Christa Big Canoe and Melina Laboucan-Massimo. PHOTO: A march for missing and murdered indigenous women in Edmonton.
“Searching for a way to feel safe daily is something that has been elusive for many indigenous women,” say Christa Big Canoe and Melina Laboucan-Massimo. PHOTO: A march for missing and murdered indigenous women in Edmonton. (CBC)

 

By Melina Laboucan-Massimo and Christa Big Canoe, reposted from CBCNews, on Mar 1, 2015

With almost 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW) in Canada, searching for a way to feel safe is a daily reality and something that has been elusive for many indigenous women.

As an indigenous woman and lawyer that provides legal representation to women who are victims of crime, and families who have lost loved ones, there are days where it is hard for me (Christa) to see light at the end of the tunnel. Working with families who experience that level of loss is humbling and difficult work on a good day.

As an indigenous and environmental activist, there are days when concern over basic things like clean drinking water and clean energy should be at the top of mind for me (Melina) but they are not. The loss of my beloved sister Bella can be too much to handle.

Bella Laboucan-McLean
Bella Laboucan-McLean, from Sturgeon Lake Cree First Nation in Alberta, fell 31 storeys at a condominium in downtown Toronto on July 20, 2013, a death police consider suspicious. (Provided by It Starts With Us-MMIW)

A year and a half after the loss of Bella, there are little to no answers in the unsolved case. My sister’s death is still undetermined and there are many suspicious clues.

It is difficult to not keep asking: “What is happening with the investigation? How did Bella die? Did she suffer? Why are the police not doing more?”

These are the types of questions that families experiencing loss have to reckon with on a daily basis. To have those questions deemed as unimportant by the federal government is offensive. There will be no progress without acknowledgement. There is no peace without justice.

Canada’s failure to value indigenous women’s lives

For both of us it is disheartening to listen to rhetoric from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government about how MMIW and a national inquiry into the issue is unimportant.

Harper would have the public believe that “We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime.”

The Canadian public has heard (in an interview on Dec. 17, 2014) the prime minister saying, in response to a question about whether the government was considering a national inquiry: “it isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest.”

Well, if honesty matters, then it should not surprise the federal government or the prime minister that indigenous people are literally at wits end about their treatment and Canada’s failure to value indigenous women’s lives.

This past Thursday a report from the Legal Research Strategy Coalition was released. The report reviewed 58 studies and the key findings and recommendations from those studies.

Shockingly, researchers found that only a few of over 700 recommendations in these reports have ever been fully implemented. This report demonstrates that the government’s stance that MMIW is not a sociological phenomenon is wrong.

This report demonstrates decades-long inaction by the government to even start to adequately address the systemic and structural violence against indigenous women and girls.

What is needed now is actions based on the many findings and recommendations from the various studies.

What is also needed is an acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation and there is no better way to do this than through a public forum such as a national inquiry.

The government should legitimize the concerns of indigenous families and their fears for safety and not continue the victim-blaming. The government should also recognize that the issue is not as simple as a series of crimes but instead acknowledge that this violence is widespread across Canadian society — that this is not solely an indigenous issue.

Families need to play key role

An inquiry does not require a re-invention of the wheel. Moving forward with the knowledge from previous studies, inquiries and commissions will assist in creating a mandate that has meaning, that is actionable as well as accountable to the families of MMIW.

Families and survivors of those who have lost loved ones also need to have a key role in the formulation of what the inquiry should address.

We both see the connection between the root causes of violence to indigenous women and the loss of land, indigenous territory and access to a clean and healthy environment — necessary for the well being of all.

A failure to recognize the connection between racism and colonial legacies means that most Canadians do not understand the root causes leading to MMIW. This is not a popular position. It is not easy to hear that atrocious law, policy and attempted assimilation continues to resound over and over again for indigenous people.

The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights released a report on murdered and missing indigenous women last month. It documented how “the police have failed to adequately prevent and protect indigenous women and girls from killings, disappearances and extreme forms of violence, and have failed to diligently and promptly investigate these acts.”

When the most vulnerable are not protected and indigenous women are five times more likely to die a violent death — what does this say about our society?

 

‘Public awareness needs to be increased but most importantly indigenous women and girls need to walk in peace and safety.’- Christa Big Canoe & Melina Laboucan-Massimo

 

Every Canadian needs to pay attention and listen to what the federal government is saying or doing, but also, more importantly, what they are not doing. Every Canadian needs to make their own commitment to action that addresses systemic violence against indigenous peoples.

If roundtables solely lead to more roundtables than not enough is being done and meaningful change is not being enacted — especially when there is severely limited participation and a lack of inclusion of the families of MMIW in the process.

If any step of an inquiry is not led by and for families — including the allocation of adequate time and resources for each of the 1,200 families to seek justice for their family members — then it will not be meaningful or effective.

An inquiry needs to be called that is accountable to those it affects the most. Public awareness needs to be increased, but most importantly indigenous women and girls need to be able to walk in peace and safety. SOURCE

Christa Big Canoe is Anishinaabekwe and a member of the Georigina Island First Nation. She is a lawyer, working with the Legal Advocacy Director of Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, and is the legal representative for the Laboucan family in relation to the July 20, 2013 death of Bella Laboucan-McLean.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo is a member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation. She currently works as a tar sands climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace and is completing her master’s degree in indigenous governance. Her sister Bella’s death remains unsolved.