Climate change
“Emissions inequality” and Jeff Bezos’ houses
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has an estimated net worth in excess of $118 billion, which makes him “the richest man alive,” according to CNN. He owns “a 5.3 acre property in Medina, Washington, another home in Beverly Hills, California, a 30,000-acre ranch in Texas, and apartments in New York.”
But that is not all.
According to the Washingtonian, the richest man alive has been renovating a 27,000-square-foot Washington, D.C. mansion he purchased in 2016 for $23 million in cash. This renovation project, the Washingtonian reports, “includes 25 bathrooms, 11 bedrooms, five living rooms/lounges, five staircases, three kitchens, two libraries/studies, two workout rooms, two elevators–and a huge ballroom.”
In addition to these homes, Bezos also reportedly owns a Gulfstream G650ER private jet, which “burns right around 452.70 gallons of fuel per hour.”
“Our estimations show,” write economists Thomas Picketty and Lucas Chancel in their 2015 study “Carbon and Inequality: from Kyoto to Paris,” that the “top 1% richest Americans, Luxemburgers, Singaporeans, and Saudi Arabians are the highest individual emitters in the world, with annual per capital emissions above 200tCO2e.” The top one percent’s per capital emissions, Picketty and Chancel further find, is “about 50 times world average,” and signifies the level of emission inequality between the extremely wealthy and all other humans.
It is probably safe to say that Jeff Bezos is one of the highest individual carbon emitters on Earth. Moreover, given his 16% stake in Amazon–a high emitting corporation that has, over the last two years, “aggressively courted the fossil fuels industry, landing deals and partnerships with companies like BP, Shell, and Halliburton”–we can assume Bezos’ per capital emissions are greater than 50 times the world average.
This “emissions inequality” between Bezos and the rest of us is truly a reflection, if not a measure, of the wealth gap between the 1% and 99%. As such, it is necessarily inextricable from both national and global economic inequalities.
Even more, however, this emissions inequality is also inextricable from Amazon’s wage policies and labor practices.
How so?
Under Bezos’ watch, for instance, Amazon resisted–for years–raising employees’ hourly wages, even while Amazon was well on its way to becoming a trillion dollar company. As a consequence of this wage suppression, many Amazon employees had to rely on food stamps and other public assistance in order to make ends meet (this is why New York Representative Ocasio-Cortez recently decried Amazon’s “starvation wages”). Though it is true that, after much public pressure, the company in November 2018 finally raised hourly wages to $15 an hour, this modest increase in pay–as Politifact writer Bill McCarthy notes–probably won’t “change things for all employees.” Indeed, some continue to be, and will likely remain eligible for, as well as reliant on, government assistance.
Amazon has also aggressively resisted its workers’ efforts to form unions. For example, when corporate executives got wind that workers at Whole Foods–which Amazon owns–was starting to organize, the company sent to Whole Foods’ Team Leaders a “45-minute union-busting training video” that the company produced for just such occasions (this video was leaked to the press).
Meanwhile, Amazon has paid its CEOs handsomely. This past April, The Seattle Times reported that the company’s CEO pay ratio “was 1-to-58 in 2018.” In 2017, the ratio was 1-to-59. Andy Jassy and Jeff Wilke–the CEOs of “Amazon’s two biggest business units”–each received “total compensation of over $19.7 million.” Amazon’s senior vice president Jeff Blackburn “received $10.4 million,” and “chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky received $6.9 million.” The pay ratio for Wilke, “whose organization includes the warehouses and logistics operations where Amazon’s lowest-paid employees work,” is approximately “1-to-684.”
Because wage suppression and union-busting help to ensure that “an enormous and ever-increasing share of income growth goes to corporate profits and executive pay,” Amazon’s wage policies and labor practices have guaranteed that much of the wealth its workers produce goes to the company’s profits and to its CEOs’ generous salaries and bonuses. In this way, the company’s policies and practices help to produce national and global economic inequality.
Let’s not stop there, however.
This transfer of income growth puts into the hands of Bezos and the other high-paid executives more money with which to sustain and expand Amazon’s high carbon-emitting business processes and infrastructure, more money to invest in the company’s fossil fuel projects, more money with which to purchase their personal mansions, New York apartments and private jets – more money, in fact, with which to burn up the earth.
In other words, the power Amazon exerts to hold down its employees’ wages helps to produce not only emissions inequality between the 1% and the rest of us, but also the individual emission privileges and advantages Bezos himself enjoys (and that Amazon’s other CEOs likely enjoy). That $15 an hour helps to make Bezos’ per capital emissions 50 or more times the average.
No doubt all of this is true as well for other companies and CEOs (Walmart immediately comes to mind).
Let’s now frame this problem of emissions inequality from the bottom-up: the hardships that Amazon’s employees suffer on a day-to-day basis–scraping together money for rent, food, childcare, electricity bills, water bills; getting adequate health care for themselves and their children; sending their kids to underfunded and segregated schools; and, working under conditions that are often harsh, stressful and even dangerous–are the conditions upon which Bezos and Amazon’s other executives depend, at least in part, in order to live lifestyles through which they emit more greenhouse gases than most people on Earth will emit in their lifetimes.
These same conditions–produced in part by Amazon’s labor practices–ultimately make Amazon’s workers, and their workers’ families and communities, increasingly more vulnerable to our unfolding climate crisis.
Jim Crow in our Climate Crisis
Critics of House Resolution 109 (H. RES. 109)—the “Green New Deal” (GND) introduced in Congress by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.)—have condemned this nonbinding resolution for its inclusion of aspirations which, in their view, have nothing to do with climate change. In particular, what they find irrelevant are the aspirations that address social and economic inequalities, such as providing “high quality health care” and “affordable, safe and adequate housing” for all.
As objectionable as they find these goals, many critics are more disturbed by the aspirations that address the harms suffered specifically by communities of color as a result of historic and present day systemic discrimination. Though they are willing to acknowledge that communities of color are more vulnerable than whites to the impacts of climate change, Resolution critics—including those who are for the passage of some green new deal (just not this one)—are unwilling to accept that these communities’ past and present experiences of discrimination might have something to do with our climate crisis. Consequently, they reject any attempt to redress these harms through climate change legislation, and suggest that mention of these in H. RES. 109 is good enough reason to reject altogether the resolution.
In response, supporters of H. RES. 109 and of more radical GNDs have noted that the communities most vulnerable to and affected by climate change are the least responsible for creating the climate crisis. Moreover, these same communities (supporters argue) are disproportionately subjected to environmental harms produced by fossil fuel and other toxic industries due to politicians’ discriminatory and industry-friendly industrial zoning decisions, such as those that have produced Louisiana’s infamous–and deadly–Cancer Alley.
While true, these answers neither directly answer critics’ implicit question (e.g., “what does ‘adequate and affordable housing’ have to do with climate change?”) nor do they directly take on critics’ dismissal of climate change as an issue of systemic discrimination.
Because the Resolution’s concern with discrimination is being used to delegitimize the adoption of a just GND, it is incumbent upon advocates to address head-on critics’ concerns. This means actually talking about climate change itself—and extreme weather—not only as created through energy production and use that take place within systems of subordination; but also as an effect of energy systems and industries that reproduce and entrench inequalities.
So, suppose we framed the issue this way:
H. RES. 109 seeks to redress the harms suffered by communities that have been historically denied equal access to jobs, technologies, housing, education, consumer goods, services and energy which have been instrumental in the production and emission of the greenhouse gases (ghg) that are radically altering our climate.
In other words, for most of the 20th century, these communities could not participate equally with the white majority in direct and indirect fossil fuel consumption.
They could not directly and indirectly emit or produce ghgs at the same level as whites, whether through work, consumption of goods and services, use of fossil-fuel intensive technologies, or leisure activities.
Because of systemic discrimination, these communities were excluded from decision-making regarding the creation of energy policy, technologies, and industries, as well as the siting of energy-intensive and petro industries.
They were excluded from decision-making bodies at the local, state, and federal level—not to mention from industry board rooms–and thus had no say in how energy would be developed, operated, located, and provided.
They were excluded, by and large, from jobs in energy-intensive as well as in fossil fuel industries.
Until the fairly recent past, they could not enjoy equally the benefits of energy use, consumption and emission in public spaces. Indeed, they could not enjoy equally the benefits of public and private spaces built as energy intensive spaces and created by energy intensive technological processes.
And because of systemic discrimination, these communities could not, and did not, contribute to climate change to the degree that they likely would have done had they been treated as equal under the law.
Communities of color are “disproportionately impacted” by climate change is the consequence of decades of oppressive practices, which makes that disproportionate impact an additional experience of injustice.
Viewed thusly, we could say that Jim Crow, for example, was a system of racial subordination characterized by the exclusion of African Americans from equal participation in the direct and indirect fossil fuel production and consumption that powered the Second Industrial Revolution and the Golden Age of Capitalism (or most of the Golden Age of Capitalism, which began after WWII and ended with the ‘73-‘75 recession). African Americans were excluded from decision-making concerning fossil fuel production and consumption—which is to say, really, that Jim Crow, and segregationist policies and practices throughout the rest of the country, maximized the white majority’s fossil fuel production, consumption and emission. They ensured that the energy industry, systems, and technologies would work for the benefit of whites—and particularly for the benefit of the white middle and upper classes.
We could say that our energy system, our energy industries, our energy technologies, and our energy-intensive infrastructures were built in ways that served and secured white supremacy.
Consequently, the everyday lived experiences by communities of color, of wage and employment discrimination, segregation, separate and unequal schools, and other systemic harms, were inextricable from the ghg production, emission and consumption by which our society was powered and which was beginning to create our climate crisis.
Climate change, in fact, is in part ecological blowback from direct and indirect fossil fuel extraction, production, consumption and emissions as these took place within systems of subordination, both here and abroad. Our extreme weather is blowback from energy systems that were designed and operated in ways that entrenched inequalities (that communities of color are “disproportionately impacted” by climate change is the consequence of decades of oppressive practices, which makes that disproportionate impact an additional experience of injustice).
Times have changed, of course. Communities that have been historically discriminated against now have greater access to, and enjoy greater participation in, our fossil fuel driven economy.
We consume more. We waste more. We emit more.
But we do this, still, in a place where systemic discrimination persists.
House Resolution 109 proposes this: that we create a society where our political, economic, social and energy systems are rooted in justice—where the energy by which this new society is powered is not mobilized, created and designed to reify exclusion or privilege. It rejects the unspoken presumption that we should map onto existing social and economic relations a green energy infrastructure, and thus leave inequalities firmly in place.
In fact, the Resolution proposes that we rethink energy, and our use of it, from the bottom-up.
Though an incomplete and imperfect vision that needs to be more radical, not less, the Resolution at least proceeds from the understanding that dismantling the energy system we have must entail dismantling the hierarchies of power that sustain it and that it reproduces. It is of necessity a healing, reparative project, one that recognizes the harms suffered in the Cancer Alleys throughout our nation by saying “yes” to health care, living wages, adequate housing, good schools, clean air, safe drinking water, good jobs, a just energy infrastructure, and freedom from systemic discrimination. It says yes, of course.
Detractors of the House Resolution and of more leftist GNDs won’t like this analysis at all.
But it does answer their question.
This piece was originally published in Common Dreams, and the ideas expressed I first broadcast in my Patreon podcast, The Wretched of Mother Earth. You can support this show by becoming a patron (for as little as $3 a month)!
Climate Activists Must Organize Like It’s 2099
Though Donald Trump’s Black Friday release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (FNCA) completely backfired–the media relentlessly covered the report, and with devastating detail–Trump nevertheless managed to escape being held to account for what is (arguably) the Assessment’s most damning observation:
“Current trends in annual greenhouse gas emissions, globally, are consistent with RCP8.5.”
What does this mean?
RCPs, or “Representative Concentration Pathways,” are “possible scenarios” scientists use to “evaluate the implications of different climate outcomes and associated impacts throughout the 21st century,” as the FNCA notes. RCP8.5 is the highest scenario, meaning that it “represents a future where annual greenhouse gas emissions increase significantly throughout the 21st century before leveling off by 2100.”
In other words, RCP8.5 is the worst possible scenario. It describes a world in which the global annual temperature will be, by the end of this century, 9°F higher (or more) than it is today.
We cannot survive such a world.
Trump was not held to account for the FNCA’s claim–or, rather, for what the claim suggests about his pro-fossil fuel environmental policies–because it was widely overlooked in news reports and FNCA “take-aways.” Consequently, when the White House bemoaned the fact that the report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario,” the media, the administration’s critics, and even scientists typically offered the retort that the Assessment addresses other scenarios; that it was properly vetted; and, that RCP8.5 was just one possible future we are facing.
In other words, not one mention of the fact that current trends are consistent with the worst case scenario, trends to which we are contributing significantly.
According to research recently published by the Global Carbon Project, the world “is on pace to release a record 37.1 gigatons of planet-warming emissions in 2018, led in large part by China, the United States and India.” Moreover, our nation’s emissions “are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year.”
The environmental policies of the Trump administration–as well as those championed by many state governments–are nothing less than RCP8.5 in the making. In fact, given that these policies have been formulated in the context of an overwhelming scientific consensus concerning climate change, they are an intentional production of accelerating species extinction, extreme weather, climate migration, climate-related social and economic inequalities, water and food scarcity, sea level rise, ecosystem collapse, climate change related illnesses, disease, and death, ocean dead zones, and polluted air.
They are policies at war with all life on earth.
We could say, then, that RCP8.5 is here and now.
And why not? After all, that “extreme scenario” the White House complained about is not something that will appear suddenly, out of thin air, in the year 2100. No, it will unfold, inexorably, through one deregulation after another, one fossil fuel tax break and subsidy after another, one pro-coal conference and promotion after another, until the water inundates our coastal cities, the pollinators die off, the aquifers dry up, and our food supply runs out.
Of course, even as we are in the process of creating a RCP8.5 world, that world is not inevitable. It is not our fate because we can change course.
But for that to be true, not only must we resist and organize; we must also do both like its 2099.
This article was originally published in Common Dreams.
The Colonial Logic of Geoengineering’s “Last Resort”
As panic starts to set in about what little time we have to avert catastrophic climate change, elites have begun in earnest to drum up support for geoengineering fixes – including the fix of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere.
The basic idea behind this relatively cheap, “cost effective” technique is that we could replicate the cooling effect of volcanic disruptions. Like the sulfur emitted by volcanoes, the aerosols would reflect sunlight back into space, and thus briefly spare us from the disastrous effects of rising temperatures caused by our fossil fuel emissions. This “last resort,” advocates say, could ultimately “save the planet” and thus “save humanity” while we figure out how to effectively and cheaply remove carbon from the atmosphere.
One could take great comfort in this aspiration to “save humanity.” After all, it seems we will not, in the time required, rise to the occasion of shutting down petrocapitalists.
However, advocates’ unspoken presumption that all humans would (of course!) want to pursue this “last resort” indicates that a more cynical aspiration is at work, for it is precisely the kind of presumption one makes when one is steeped in the colonial logic that produced our climate crisis.
Indeed, we should pay attention to how freely the champions of sulfur injections (and other equally radical geoengineering fixes) speak the language of the Universal Subject, that creature of colonialism whose benevolent claims about what was best for “humanity” – often framed in the discourse of economic as well as scientific objectivity and rationality – masked His exercise of brute power over non-western people and over Earth herself.
He is speaking to us again now, promising to save “us all” while intending primarily to safeguard western civilization, because western civilization is what He really means when He speaks about “humanity.”
In fact, He believes that saving western civilization is the same as saving Earth, and that Earth is not, in and of itself, worth saving if we are forced to leave fossil fuels in the ground.
That’s the implication, anyway, of His insisting that we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels up to the point where “we” will eventually have to turn to the last resort for “our” survival.
It goes without saying that Others will need to be sacrificed to this greater good.
Indeed, it almost always goes without saying.
The men and women who are trying to sell us the solution of sulfur injections tend to be strangely silent on the fact that these injections would “disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people,” as Alan Robock and other scientists reported in a 2008 paper published the Journal of Geophysical Research (the authors of a more recent study published in Nature Geoscience indicate that while sulfur injections would likely cool the earth, they would also reduce global rainfall).[1]
The effort to resolve our climate crisis in this manner is itself an extension of colonial logic. After all, as Heather Davis and Zoe Todd explain, “colonialism, especially settler colonialism – which in the Americas simultaneously employed the twinned processes of dispossession and chattel slavery – was always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and the atmosphere. It was about moving and unearthing rocks and minerals. All of these acts were intimately tied to the project of erasure that is the imperative of settler colonialism.” If history is any indication, the last resort might very well be western civilization’s final act of colonial violence, exclusion and erasure – first, of the peoples and sentient beings it has always exploited and disregarded; then – and no doubt unintentionally – of western civilization itself.
Earth will survive this madness. It will rend and swallow and churn into fossils bridges and buildings and books and bunkers. It will heal and balance and produce new life forms. Hardly a trace of western civilization will remain, and what will remain, won’t matter at all.
To save ourselves, we cannot resort to technologies that are steeped in the logic of coloniality. Instead, decolonization – along with attendant Earth-healing technologies – must be both our first and last resort. We must be determined to live for one another, not at one another’s expense. We must let go of “humanity” altogether, and refuse to accept as well as live by the premise that western civilization must survive at all costs.
Notes.
[1] See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014): p. 270.
This piece was originally published on 11/9/18 in Counterpunch.
Check out my Patreon podcast, The Wretched of Mother Earth, where I decolonize climate change.
The Bayou Bridge Pipeline’s Entangled Hierarchies of Power
“What arrived in the Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and labor for the production of commodities …From the structural location of an indigenous woman in the Americas, what arrived was a more complex world system…A European /capitalist /military /Christian /patriarchal /white/ heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies.”
– Ramón Grosfoguel
Lately I’ve been struck by a picture of Melinda Tillies, a Louisiana homeowner recently featured in an article by Julie Dermansky in DeSmogBlog.* Tillies is standing in front of her house. In the background (not more than “25 feet away”) is a crane, its arm lifted, ready to plunge into the earth.
Tillies looks into the camera. She appears at once angry, fed-up, resigned, and defiant.
From Dermansky we learn that Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC (BBP), a joint venture between Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) and Phillips 66, is building a pipeline that “will serve as the last leg of a transportation network to move oil fracked in North Dakota (and potentially Canadian tar sands) via the Dakota Access pipeline to Louisiana’s coast for export.”
The crane behind Tillies is digging a trench for that pipeline, and it is BBP’s invasion of Tillies’ neighborhood, as well as the structural damage the company is doing to Tillies’ home, that explains the pained expression we see on her face.
Though one could view a moment like this – the way many often do – as yet another instance in which “capitalism” trumps the urgent need to address climate change, UC Berkeley Professor Ramón Grosfoguel’s critique should give us pause (in his work, Grosfoguel takes issue with a Eurocentric world system perspective that treats social relations as merely “additive elements” to the “capitalist world-system”). It should make us look a bit more deeply at what, exactly, has “arrived” in Tillies’ community and practically on her front porch.
When we do this, a “more complex world system” comes into focus, one that we can describe using a frame similar to the one Grosfoguel employs to frame European colonization of the Americas. That is, we can say that what have arrived in Tillies’ community are primarily “capitalist / [law enforcement] / Christian / patriarchal / white / heterosexual / male[s].” And they are all quite easy to identify.
In particular, they are the officers, shareholders, workforce and contractors of ETP and Phillips 66; the Louisiana state representatives who have facilitated BBP construction; the executives and employees of the banks that extended credit for BBP; the faculty and Advisory Council members of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies; Louisiana’s law enforcement apparatus; members of the U.S. Congress who serve fossil fuel interests; and, of course, the President himself, with his “DRILL BABY DRILL” energy policy.
These men (as well as the women and people of color who accompany them) have descended upon communities all along the pipeline’s path, carrying with them the entangled “hierarchies of power” in which they are, to varying degrees, collectively invested.
Tracking Grosfoguel’s analysis, these hierarchies (listed separately for convenience) include:
A class hierarchy that privileges the wealthy.
BBP will add significantly to the coffers of an already wealthy elite while it will disproportionately burden Louisiana’s poor and working class people and their communities. Unlike the latter, the more affluent are not subject to the kind of spatial invasion Tillies’ suffers – which means they don’t have to live in fear of emissions leaks close to their homes, eminent domain, property damage, and other harms to which BBP feels entirely at ease subjecting poor and working class people.
A racial hierarchy that privileges whites.
It should come as no surprise that the pipeline not only disproportionately burdens poor and working class people, but also Louisiana’s communities of color. If completed, it “will carve up 11 parishes in Louisiana and cross 700 bodies of water, including Bayou LaFourche, a critical reservoir that supplies the United Houma Nation and 300,000 residents with drinking water.” Moreover, the pipeline passes “near the historic and predominately black community of St. James,” which is already exposed to myriad environmental harms perpetrated by various toxic industries deliberately sited in this area (the BBP was itself able to secure from the state a coastal use permit without having to consider the environmental impact of the pipeline on St. James parish).
A gender hierarchy that privileges males.
Not only are ETP and Philips 66 dominated by white men, but so also are the other institutions that are backing the pipeline. For example, of Louisiana’s elected officials, 67% are white men, who make up only 29% of Louisiana’s population (in contrast, women of color, who make up 21% of the population, constitute only 5% of Louisiana’s elected officials). Many of these elected officials are recipients of fossil fuel industry largess.
A “media /informational hierarchy” where the primarily white male power structure has control over the means of “media production and information technology” to make its point of view “enter media networks,” which then privilege that point of view.
The mainstream media have generally failed to cover pipeline resistance, the environmental hazards of fossil fuel production, environmental racism, and climate change. This is no less true of mainstream media in Louisiana, the effect of which is to shield fossil fuel interests, and their apologists, from scrutiny and critique.
Though Tillies’ fight with BBP to get compensation for the damage done to her home did receive local media attention, the media presented that fight as primarily an individual struggle disconnected from the wider harms (mentioned only briefly) caused by pipeline construction in Louisiana – including climate change.
A system of political-law enforcement-private security organizations controlled by white men.
The primarily white male Louisiana House of Representatives this past spring introduced and then passed legislation that criminalizes the activities of groups that protest the extraction, transport, and burning of oil and gas. This legislation they adopted specifically to quash BBP resistance. Three anti-BBP activists have just been chargedunder this law. While protesting in Louisiana’s public waterways, they were “abducted” by ETP’s private security, which then turned the activists over to police.
Lest the gravity of this isn’t clear: the company’s private security abducted citizens who were lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights in a public space. Rather than questioning the abduction, the police charged the activists with violating Louisiana’s new anti-First Amendment rights law.
This abduction should remind us of the fact that ETP used TigerSwan, a private security firm, to oversee protection of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Employing “military-style counterterrorism tactics”against the Water Protectors, TigerSwan infiltrated the Water Protectors’ camps, conducted aerial surveillance, and used social media to execute a “counterinformation campaign” against those protesting the pipeline – all with the blessing of the state.
Established “simultaneously in time and space” throughout the pipeline project, these and other entangled global hierarchies (e.g., sexual, ecological, spiritual, pedagogical) are what everyone in the pipeline’s path – from Louisiana to North Dakota – is up against. They are what all of us are up against in our fight to keep fossil fuels in the ground, the fact of which a focus solely or primarily on capitalism does not fully capture because, as Grosfoguel makes clear, capitalism is “only one…constellation of power” entangled “with other power relations.” Indeed, it does not fully capture how critical are these pipelines to these other hierarchies of power, or just how much the reification of these hierarchies are part of what produced climate change.
What we need, then, is “a new language” (again, Grosfoguel) to account for what we see from Tillies’ front yard, a language that does not reduce the struggle before us to a solely anti-capitalist struggle. Of course, with this new language must come new models and methods of resistance. These must be able to recognize, name, and then dismantle, the more complex world system that the pipelines, and ultimately climate change itself, both embody and express.
*Photograph is copyrighted by, and reprinted with permission from, Julie Dermansky.
This article was originally published in Counterpunch.
My new book is out! The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe (2018)
The Workers Left Behind by the DNC’s Fossil Fuel Resolution
“By passing a resolution grounded in the just transition framework, the DNC can cynically present itself as speaking for all workers even as it embraces the companies responsible for the conditions that have harmed a broad swath of working people unattached to the fossil fuel industry. At the same time, it can ignore the urgency of transition for a whole range of workers who are in need of a just and accelerated response to climate change.”
Read my newest article now at Common Dreams.
What tipping point are we waiting for? On heat waves and climate resistance
Every “extreme weather event” that occurs without a powerful, on-the-ground climate activist response is a lost opportunity. In particular, it is a failure to seize the event as a moment to drive home the insanity of our representatives’ inadequate response (or lack thereof) to climate change.
In “Hurricane Mobilizations and ‘the Fierce Urgency’ of Climate Change,” I argued that we should “answer – with orchestrated national mobilizations unsurpassed in growth, force and intensity – the call of every record-breaking hurricane that forms in the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.”
We should do no less for other extreme weather events, like the recent scorching heat wave that brought record-setting temperatures across the globe, from Siberia to Los Angeles, and that killed 70 people in Quebec alone.
These extreme weather events are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we are in a state of crisis. We are gradually approaching, and will likely exceed, a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures. In fact, we will likely exceed the 2°C warming limit championed in the Paris Accord. And given the Trump Administration’s commitment to the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, we will likely pass crucial tipping points that will result in runaway climate change.
Truly, these extreme weather events are calls to radical action.
Why, then, aren’t we overwhelming “our cities, our state capitols, our federal agencies, our Congress, our White House, our corporations, our highways, our railroad tracks, our refineries with increasing waves of marches, canvassing, teach-ins, sit-ins, blockades, strikes, die-ins, occupations” – every single time a record-setting event occurs?
Why just the single march, the grand event, disconnected from the now-regular occasion of a one-hundred year flood, a triple-hurricane, a ravaging wildfire, a 117° day in Los Angeles – all of which, by the way, the press deliriously covers (unlike the grand event)?
Why aren’t we treating the radical nihilism of our climate denying representatives and economic elites with the resistance it deserves?
What tipping point are we waiting for?
(This article originally appeared in Counterpunch).
My new book is out! The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe (2018)
On David S. Buckel and setting ourselves on fire
“The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963,” explained the Venerable monk Thich Nhat Hanh in his June 1, 1965 letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., “is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand.”
To King’s “Western Christian conscience,” the practice of self-immolation was indeed incomprehensible. Therefore, King “turned to” Thich Nhat Hanh (whom he considered a friend) for help in understanding this practice, which to King appeared to be suicide driven by despair about our nation’s war on Vietnam. “The Press spoke then of suicide,” Hanh continued in his letter, “but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.” Steeped in their Buddhist practices, the nuns and monks who burned themselves thus performed an “act of construction” rather than “an act of destruction,” Hanh wrote, because to die in this way is “to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people.”
This letter came to my mind when I heard that David S. Buckel had doused himself in gasoline and then set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park last Saturday. Like the Buddhist monks and nuns about whom Hanh wrote, Buckel, too, wrote letters in which he explained why he self-immolated, letters he sent to the press and to the police. “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” he wrote. “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels and many die early deaths as a result – my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
Though he fought so ardently in the courts for what seemed, just two decades ago, impossible to achieve–the right of LGBTQ people, like me, to marry–David Buckel looked upon our climate politics and determined that, unlike the case of LGBTQ rights, litigating climate change would not be enough. It would not be enough, that is, to save us from climate catastrophe. Given his choice of protest, Buckel clearly believed as well that nothing we are doing now will save us from catastrophe.
So like the Buddhist nuns and monks of the Vietnam War era (Buckel actually likened his protest to that of Tibetans who self-immolated to protest the Chinese occupation of their country), Buckel set himself on fire. He set himself on fire to alarm us, to awaken us, to move our hearts, and to call our attention to the suffering we are causing because we continue to burn fossil fuels. He set himself on fire so that we would see ourselves, and our planet, on fire.
Yet, Buckel also set himself on fire because he held us in hope–hope that, as witnesses to his death, we would take action that actually reflects the scale of the environmental crisis we are facing. “This is not new,” Buckel said of his protest, “as many have chosen to give a life based on the view that no other action can most meaningfully address the harm they see. Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded actions, and help others give a voice to our home, and Earth is heard. I hope it is an honorable death that might serve others.”
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After he explained to King the meaning of the nuns and monks’ self-immolation, Thich Nhat Hanh turned his full attention on King himself. “I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself cannot remain silent…You cannot be silent since you have already been in action and you are in action because, in you, God is in action.”
Speaking to his friend, Hanh made clear to King that ultimately what he needed to grapple with was not the fact that the monks and nuns burned themselves. Instead, King needed to come to terms with the fact that he and other well-meaning people looked upon the suffering our government inflicted upon the Vietnamese people and nevertheless remained silent. Though King had been “engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights,” he was relatively quiet concerning the war on Vietnam, and so Hanh’s words were a gentle rebuke. Two years would pass before King would finally stand up and, in his own words, “break the betrayal” of his “own silences and…speak from the burnings” of his “own heart” regarding our nation’s war on Vietnam.
And speak he did.
“These are the times for real choices and not false ones,” King declared in his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” “We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”
David Buckel decided on the protest that best suited his convictions. While we might declare, in spite of Buckel’s explanation, that his act is incomprehensible; and while we might get caught up in debates about whether or not his self-immolation was wrong-headed or dangerous or crazy or ineffective or brilliant, all of that is of no matter. In the end, we have to look at ourselves. We have to attend to our own silences or, rather, our relative quiescence in the face of what we are doing to one another, to other beings, and to our planet–silences that equal death, as Buckel’s burning body proclaimed. Moreover, if we are to survive our own folly–if we are to avoid setting ourselves on fire–then we will need to break, finally and decisively, the betrayal of our own silences. We will need to protest with as much conviction as our climate crisis demands.
This post originally appeared in Counterpunch.
The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe
“Let’s just assume our grandchildren are fucked.”
My new book is out.
Inspired by Sogyal Rinchope’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Leela Fernandes’ Transforming Feminist Practice, The Wretched of Mother Earth is a mixed-genre Buddhist, feminist, post-colonial, anarchist manifesto about climate change that is also a meditation on dying and death. It is a work in which I argue that if we hope to save ourselves from climate change catastrophe, we must face not only the prospect of human extinction; but also we must radically confront what produced the climate crisis in the first place: the “colonial power matrix” and our deadly attachments to it.
“This [book] is an invitation to experience the transformative power of heartbreak that weaves a healed earth community out of the raw material of grief and fear.” ~Stephanie Van Hook, Metta Center for Nonviolence
Good, bad, or ugly: I invite your reviews of my recent work.
The Wretched of Mother Earth is an ebook that you can order for $4.99 at Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), Barnes & Noble (NOOK), 24 Symbols, Playster, and Kobo.
Coming in from the Cold 