Climate Action Upsurge

The Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics

Stuart Rosewarne, James Goodman, Rebecca Pearse

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135071653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

In the late 2000s climate action became a defining feature of the international political agenda. Evidence of global warming and accelerating greenhouse gas emissions created a new sense of urgency and, despite consensus on the need for action, the growing failure of international climate policy engendered new political space for social movements. By 2007 a 'climate justice' movement was surfacing and developing a strong critique of existing official climate policies and engaging in new forms of direct action to assert the need for reduced extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Climate Action Upsurge offers an insight into this important period in climate movement politics, drawing on the perspectives of activists who were directly engaged in the mobilisation process. Through the interpretation of these perspectives the book illustrates important lessons for the climate movement today. In developing its examination of the climate action upsurge, the book focuses on individual activists involved in direct action 'Climate Camps' in Australia, while drawing comparisons and highlighting links with climate campaigns in other locales.

The book should be of interest to scholars and researchers in climate change, environmental sociology, politics, policy and activism.

1Climate Change and Political Agency

Climate change marks as an unprecedented moment, where humankind becomes capable of manipulating global geology. What Paul Crutzen and others have labeled the Anthropocene marks a new chapter in human history (Chakrabarty, 2009; Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). The advent of climate crisis, and the existential threat it now poses, directly raises the question of political agency. The horizon of politics is suddenly extended into millennia, the significance of ‘what is to be done’ magnified into universal planetary scope. In the process, the dialectic of history is radically transformed; the structures on which we have to gain political purchase exist in an entirely different register. People are only beginning to imagine the implications for political community, and for the very practice of politics, as we start to directly experience humanity's collective force in the new climate era. As the sociologist Mike Hulme puts it, ‘we have only tentative understanding of the implications of such a new role and only limited means at our disposal to exercise purposeful, as opposed to inadvertent, agency’ (Hulme, 2010: 1). This book is centred on the question of gaining ‘purposeful agency’ in an era of human-induced climate change.

Climate agency is a directly political matter. Politics encompasses domination and contestation in society and is at the centre of any possibility for ‘purposeful’ agency. The key parameters for climate politics, both as domination and contestation, are set by the logic of global capitalism. Self-evidently we live in a capitalist society and capitalist development is the key contemporary driver of climate crisis. Indeed, the asymmetries of climate change directly reflect capitalism's uneven development – from early industrialisers to today's ‘emerging economies’ – and hierarchies of wealth and accumulation are central to addressing global climate change. The seventy million ‘one per cent', who according to the World Economic Forum now own half the planet, have no immediate interest in addressing the causes of climate change (WEF, 2012: 18). Meanwhile, the seven billion others bear the brunt of climate change, most of them far from the levers of power in the already underdeveloped world, with next to zero responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and no capacity to adapt (Goodman, 2009; Redclift & Sage, 1998; Roberts & Parks, 2007). In the long run we are certainly ‘all in this together', but, as Keynes famously reminded us, in the long run we are all dead. In any case the ‘one per cent’ will always find a new bunker, although as demonstrated by the closure of Wall Street in the face of Hurricane Sandy in November 2012, there may be inconveniences.

More fundamentally, as demonstrated by these asymmetries, the political question of climate change is clearly a question of power and justice. Climate change as such makes visible climate injustice, forcing it onto the political agenda. The question of who is to be the arbiter of our collective climate agency is the key political question of our times. Will humanity's collective force to transform the climate be appropriated by the powerful, against our collective future?

Climate change itself expresses the reflexive logic of ecological domination. It demonstrates what Neil Smith has called ‘the production of nature on a global scale', expressing the dream of centuries of capitalist domination over nature, the ‘idea of control over nature … dreamt each night by capital and its class, in preparation for the next day's labour’ (Smith, 1984: 31). But control comes at a systemic price. The accumulation of capital directly produces the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and drives climate change. Indeed, the capitalist social system produced the steam engine that announced the Anthropocene. The production of climate change, through accumulation, signals the production of nature by the domination of the capitalist world system.

Domination of nature produces a sharp contradiction or ‘metabolic rift’ between society and nonhuman nature and is ultimately self-destructive (Foster, Clark and York, 2010). Climate change signals the ‘revenge’ of nature, as Engels coined it, demonstrating on a world scale ‘that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst … ’ (Engels, 1953[1876]: 10). Healing the metabolic rift requires a transformative move, for a mutual immersion of society and ecology, where neither dominates the other (see Harvey, 1996). The move can be conceptualised as a process of recognising ecological ‘embeddedness’ (as per Polanyi, 2001[1944]), perhaps to recognise the ‘naturalization of man and the humanism of nature', as Marx put it (Marx, 1964: 104).

The production of climate change is a systemic outcome, but certainly not planned, or at least not before 1988, when it became widely recognised that greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet. But it is also not an accidental agency, of simple carelessness, but rather a product of social-systemic agency. Climate change is not an externally imposed catastrophe, an accident of natural history, but rather a product of the internal contradictions of society. Attempts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to prevent dangerous climate change involve purposive action that, if it is to have any real purchase, must be anti-systemic. ‘Inadvertent’ systemic agency can only be countered by purposive anti-systemic agency.

Current climate policy, in so far as it seeks to rescue ‘business as usual', is by definition pro-systemic and subject to failure. This applies, for instance, to efficiency-focused efforts that seek to reduce the carbon intensity of growth while maximising growth. The contradiction is sharper still with the various ‘end of pipe’ solutions that facilitate increased emissions by creating mechanisms to absorb them or to deflect their effects. Pro-systemic climate policy is by definition a moral hazard that hoists itself on its own petard. The drive to accumulate will always see the hazard realised. As amply demonstrated by the global rush to oil shale and coal seam gas, capitalism is not a moral force, even when it comes to its own long-term survival.

Climate change creates the necessity for purposeful anti-systemic agency. In doing so, it opens the door to a new form of global transformative agency. The climate movement, by definition, is (or must be) an ‘anti-systemic movement', to borrow the terminology used by Immanuel Wallerstein and others to describe socialist and anti-colonial movements, and, latterly, global justice movements (Arrighi et al., 1989;Wallerstein, 2002). As climate change proceeds, the anti-systemic imperative can only be deepened. One can anticipate a simple choice as the various pro-systemic climate policies fail to reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions – between more-of-the-same, with heightened climate disruption and the displacement of many millions of people worldwide, and the alternative of anti-systemic post-capitalist society. As such, a sharp polarisation is likely to emerge between the barbarism of dangerous climate change and the anti-systemic imperatives of climate justice

Writing about the industrial revolution, Rosa Luxemburg posed a similar polarity between ‘transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism’ (Luxemburg, 1916). In the event, the state reformed capitalism, modifying its contradictions through welfarism. But can capitalism outlive ecologism? As O'Connor identifies, the state enabled the labour-capital contradiction to be socialised in a way that gave rise to and complemented a new phase of capitalist accumulation (O'Connor, 1998). He predicts a new process of ecological socialisation to address the capital-nature contradiction, albeit one that only ever provides a temporary resolution of the contradictions within capitalism. But how far can ecologism be achieved within capitalism? There is a radical incommensurability between commodity production for profit and ecological sustainability, and despite the modelling it is hard to imagine how capital accumulation can be maintained in a steady-state or post-growth society (see Jackson, 2009). Those who argue it is possible do so on the basis of extensive state regulation of production, to the extent of rendering capitalism unrecognisable. In this context, ecologism begins to look like a transitional programme for post-capitalism.

The question of how to define an anti-systemic climate movement, and how to produce its praxis in terms of mobilisation, vision and programme, is at the core of this book. We may anticipate anti-systemic climate movements as the necessary outcome of the current situation but how can such a movement come into being? This is at the nub of O'Connor's socialisation process. We argue in this book that experimentations for an anti-systemic climate movement have begun, and that we should be alert to the problems and possibilities this raises. Clearly O'Connor's agenda for ecological socialisation will not arrive fully formed from some supreme strategist. If it is to emerge at all, it will do so from the exercise of movement agency, and in the process of contestation and reflection amongst movement participants that this agency produces.

This book aims to contribute to this process of developing anti-systemic climate agency as a sustained reflection with climate activists on the process of realising agency. Here we investigate whether climate politics is breaking the political mould. To what extent does climate change define a new political era, as well as a new geological era? As humans gain geological agency, what are the implications for politics? We investigate the spectrum of climate mobilisation, finding that the dominant tendency to pragmatic environmentalism is increasingly supplemented, if not displaced, by an emergent climate ‘radicalism'. In the process, climate agency breaks the official straitjacket, and new social forces enter the political arena.

To explore these emergent horizons of climate politics we focus on a brief upsurge of climate ‘radicalism’ in the late 2000s. We directly engage with the upsurge in Australia, a strategic vantage point as a rich country reaping the benefits of the coal and gas boom. We chart both possibilities and pitfalls revealed by the upsurge, both internationally and in Australia, interpreting it as a prefigurative moment for an anti-systemic climate agency.

We ask what social forms are created by climate movements and in what ways familiar collective-action problems, such as the ethics and politics of resistance, are changed in the age of climate crisis. We find movements constructing agendas to produce mobilisation, but also, on the flipside, a tendency to despair and demobilisation, raising the spectre of securitised responses and unilateral experiments with geoengineering. In this context it is noteworthy that, in the face of demobilisation, some key movement intellectuals such as George Monbiot in the UK and Tim Flannery in Australia joined the USbased James Hansen and James Lovelock in arguing that nuclear energy may offer the only viable means of buying time for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (see Flannery, 2006a; Hansen, 2009; Lovelock, 2004; Monbiot, 2011). Setting aside the option of pro-systemic action, we treat this period as a laboratory where many approaches and demands for anti-systemic climate agency were created and trialed. In the period of mobilisation we account for, we document how activists developed anti-systemic or ‘radical’ approaches against the pragmatism of NGOs and governments, sustaining activism against elite capture of the climate debate.

Inverting pragmatism and radicalism?

The identified relationship between climate radicals and climate pragmatists replicates a broadly identified divide in modern politics between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘fringe'. That divide has its origins in the emergence of nation states, which for the first time enabled mass social movements to make demands in the name of society as a whole. Articulated in relation to state power, social movements were defined in a spectrum from reform to revolution (Tarrow, 1998). The reform-revolution dichotomy became a key political tension, beginning with the diagnosis of social problems – as either contingent, and hence subject to reform, or systemic and entrenched in structural power. The same bifurcation informs much theoretical investigation of social movements in the political process. For Manuel Castells, for instance, social movements can make appeals to the authorities that promote ‘legitimation’ identities; alternatively they can promote ‘resistance’ or ‘project’ identities that challenge legitimacy structures (Castells, 2004). The idea of a ‘project’ identity is particularly rich as it suggests an agenda and capacity to not simply oppose the existing order, but to ‘project’ an alternative. The distinction also surfaces in Fraser's distinction between social movements that seek ‘affirmation’ of their status from power-holders, and those that pursue transformative agendas designed to overturn the power structure (Fraser, 1995). The distinction is between movements that seek reform in relation to a given set of constraints and those that seek to break those constraints.

In climate politics we find a similar bifurcation, and we ask if it has been realigned and reordered by the Anthropocene. Our proposition, or rather provocation, is that the Anthropocene inverts the pragmatism-radicalism bifurcation. Under climate change, ‘realism’ becomes utopian, and the ‘utopian’ fringe becomes the new realism. Pragmatism becomes an impossible demand, upending Bismark's definition of politics as the ‘art of the possible'.

Climate radicals, as we shall see, seek to apprehend climate change in its full implications. They are aware that dangerous climate change is already upon us, and that catastrophic climate change is already built into even the more optimistic scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions. They take the warnings of climate scientists seriously and seek responses that address its root causes – for instance, through programmes for sufficiency. In this respect, we suggest, climate ‘radicals’ aim for a realistic reflexivity. They pragmatically apprehend the challenge and seek to produce responses that have a realistic chance of delivering climate stability. Climate pragmatists also accept the climate science, but fail to calibrate their response to the challenge this poses. Less pessimistic scientific assessments are referenced to demonstrate the effectiveness of policy confined to existing parameters. The utopian visions of global carbon markets, carbon capture and storage, or clean coal, for instance, gain traction as they promise ‘end-of-pipe’ decarbonisation within the existing status quo. These unrealistic models are promoted, and grossly overstate the capacity to ‘delink’ economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions. The fantasies gain a hold on the elite imagination, including through the United Nations.

The inversion of pragmatism and radicalism reflects the transformative impact of climate change on political agency. Climate politics changes the definition of political agency, situating it in the long view of what Chakrabarty calls ‘species history'. He captures the phenomenological and political challenge climate change poses by eliciting what he argues is our dual ontology as geological force and political agents. Human agency producing climate disruption operates at the level of species. Collectively we have become a geological force. Chakrabarty argues that this side of our ontic being is ‘justice-blind', and a limit to social action (Chakrabarty, 2012: 14).He argues that whilst we will always be concerned with questions of justice, our new-found geological agency is a new register through which societies must simultaneously come to know themselves.

With regard to politics, the challenge for social movements is to materialise the climate problem beyond apolitical abstractions. The universal urgency of climate crisis, and the necessity to act on the causes of climate change, has the effect of enveloping and subsuming all political antagonisms. Some have characterised the result as a form of ‘post-politics', where the metaimperative cancels out political identification and the political process (Catney & Doyle, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2010). Erik Swyngedouw argues that climate politics is a frontier of post-politicisation, constituted through populist apocalyptic rhetoric, and the invention of an asocial universal enemy in CO2. The political outcome is the advent of techno-managerialism and marketised climate policy effecting the commodification of the atmosphere. Mainstream ‘climate governance’ has cemented scientific and economic authority in a new class of carbon managers convening complex and opaque carbon markets. Whilst this narration of climate politics holds all too often, we argue that Swyngedouw offers an overdetermined account of the social dynamics of climate politics. Others have pointed out that recourse to a former ‘properly political’ time is unsubstantiated, and a grounded analysis of the social-movement response to climate change is missing in this thesis. Swyngedouw seems unaware of the array of climate subjects emerging in activism of various stripes, particularly the politics of ‘climate justice’ (see Chatterton et al., 2012; Urry, 2011).

As a counterpoint, we argue for a engaged investigation into the sites of resistance. Certainly, the meta-political logic visible in climate politics reflects the scope of the challenge. The resort to the post-political, though, is not a foregone conclusion. Rather, it is a predictable response to what is an overwhelming challenge, reflecting the difficulty expressed by Chakrabarty, of translating the ‘long view’ into the immediate contexts of political claimmaking. The problem this poses is profound. How can a demand for ‘system change not climate change’ be translated into a coherent political programme that can be brought into effect against the prevailing order? The task, one may say, is a uniquely challenging one, although it may be compared with other world-historical transformations, such as from autocracy to social democracy or from imperialism to post-colonialism.

In this book we find ‘radical’ climate activists directly engaged in the struggle to produce a realistic politics of climate change, one that meets the challenge of climate science in ways that cannot be dismissed. We find this challenge can be overwhelming, and that activists tend to lapse into the metapolitical realm and into individual or ‘community’ actions, avoiding the question of society-wide transformation. The result can be a default into pragmatism, of accepting what is presented as the official solution as ‘better than nothing', whilst being aware that it is inadequate and in fact counterproductive. Here the temporal gauntlet can breed despair and demobilisation. The narratives in this book track these efforts at constructing an adequate climate politics, one that could be adequate to climate science, and the difficulties activists encounter along the way. Indeed the precipitous rise and fall of the ‘radical’ climate upsurge bears out this political difficulty. At one level it reflects a wilfull reluctance to engage the state; at another level, and much more fundamentally, it reflects the underlying difficulty of constructing a state response that is capable of addressing the deep social contradictions that drive climate change.

We do not want to suggest, though, that this is an impossible task. Anthropogenic climate change is a product of capitalist society and, as something created by human society, in principle it can be reversed. What humans are responsible for, they can correct, provided there is sufficient political will and capacity. O'Connor understands this as a ‘socialisation process’ which sees a regrounding of the logic of accumulation, especially through state action, to recreate a stable climate. The difficult question is one of capacity, as arguably accumulation by definition produces ecological degradation (Foster, 2002). Even efficiency gains only offer limited respite as the drive for profit growth draws on any available extra capacity made available through delinking efforts (the so-called ‘Jevons Paradox'). Efficiency efforts in this respect can tend to backfire, or even become counterproductive, as they enable further throughput. In a system driven by the profit margin, rising efficiency and falling emissions intensity of growth enables more growth and more emissions, not less.

Here we arrive at the central dilemma of climate politics. Developing climate policy that can have a reasonable chance of gaining...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acronyms
• 1 Climate Change and Political Agency
• 2 Climate Pragmatism
• 3 Climate Radicalism
• 4 Living in Climate Crisis
• 5 Hope
• 6 Direct Action
• 7 Alternatives and Policies
• Conclusion
• References
• Index