The Violence of Climate Change

Lessons of Resistance from Nonviolent Activists

Kevin J. O'Brien

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781626164352
• eBook ISBN: 9781626164369
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

Climate change is viewed as a primarily scientific, economic, or political issue. While acknowledging the legitimacy of these perspectives, Kevin J. O’Brien argues that we should respond to climate change first and foremost as a case of systematic and structural violence. Global warming is largely caused by the carbon emissions of the affluent, emissions that harm the poor first and worst. Climate change is violence because it divides human beings from one another and from the earth.

O’Brien offers a constructive and creative response to this violence through practical examples of activism and nonviolent peacemaking, providing brief biographies of five Christians in the United States—John Woolman, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez. These activists’ idealism, social commitment, and political savvy offer lessons of resistance applicable to the struggle against climate change and for social justice.

PART I

Climate Change and Nonviolence

1

The Wicked Problem of Climate Change

In December 2015, 196 nations reached an agreement on climate change in Paris. They committed to limit global temperature increase “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”¹ Political leaders and analysts viewed the agreement as a historic success, with US president Barack Obama calling it “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.” Former vice president and longtime climate activist Al Gore was similarly excited: “The transformation of our global economy from one fueled by dirty energy to one fueled by sustainable economic growth is now firmly and inevitably under way.”²

Others viewed the Paris Agreement as a failure that fell pitifully short of what is really required to responsibly address climate change. The journalist and activist Naomi Klein called the agreement “scientifically inadequate” because it lacks binding requirements to actually meet its goals. James Hansen, one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world, whose research informed the targets of 2°C and 1.5°C, called the agreement “just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.”³

Both sets of commentaries are correct. From a political perspective, the Paris Agreement was a dramatic success because it secured widespread, public, and international commitment. From scientific and practical perspectives, however, the agreement is inadequate because it lays out no clear path to meet its own goals; and these goals, even if reached, would leave many of the world’s people and species victimized by the rising seas and unpredictable storms of a changed climate. Paris was both a success and a failure, and which way one sees it depends on what kind of problem one thinks climate change is.

This same ambiguity is true of any conversation about climate change; there is always a great deal up for interpretation. Some facts are clear and incontrovertible—average global temperatures are higher than they used to be, there is less ice and snow at the poles, the sea is rising, and the ocean is increasingly acidic. These are real trends, and their rates are increasing. But the meaning of these facts and what should be done about them can be understood variously through natural science, environmentalism, activism for human justice, economics, politics, and religious traditions. As reactions to the Paris Agreement demonstrate, the same event can be an exciting development for climate politics while it is a disturbing sign for climate justice.

This chapter explores six common perspectives on climate change, assuming that each is valid and has something to offer to an understanding of this challenge. I then suggest a seventh approach, arguing that the privileged citizens of the industrialized world should also learn to see climate change as a case of structural violence. This seventh perspective, which frames the remainder of the book, suggests the potential of calling upon nonviolence to develop a thoughtful, long-term, and faithful response to this problem.

SIX WAYS TO UNDERSTAND CLIMATE CHANGE

Everyone responding to the Paris Agreement in 2015 agreed on one thing: It is not a solution to climate change. Current international policies are, at best, a start along a path in the right direction, and no one pretends that they will reverse the rise of the oceans or undo the damage already done to the atmosphere. Climate change is, in fact, not the kind of problem that can have a simple solution. It is, instead, a “wicked” problem.

In 1973 Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, scholars of urban planning, distinguished between two kinds of problems. “Tame” problems “are definable and may have solutions that are findable.” By contrast, “wicked” problems “are ill-defined” and can never be solved. “At best, they are only re-solved—over and over again.”⁴ Rittel and Weber emphasized that urban planning in the late twentieth century was full of wicked problems. When one is negotiating space and relationships for diverse communities that struggle with unrest and inequity and must adapt to changing values and institutions, one does not finally solve any problem. The challenges are ambiguous, and there are never clear or final solutions.

Climate change is a similarly wicked problem. There is no solution; the climate will be changing because of human activity for many centuries to come. Human beings will be wrestling with and disagreeing about how to respond to this issue for the foreseeable future. That is the nature of a wicked problem.⁵

Wicked problems are also characteristically difficult to define. This aspect of climate change has become clear during the last two decades as scientists, activists, politicians, and academics have developed diverse perspectives and proposals. There is no one definition. Climate change is a scientific problem, an environmental problem, a human problem, an economic problem, a political problem, and a religious problem. Each perspective is important, and none is sufficient by itself. And yet they provide very distinct views of what is happening to the Earth’s atmosphere, what the repercussions will be, and what should be done about it.

A Scientific Problem

From one perspective, climate change is a physical phenomenon that has an impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems. As such, it should be understood scientifically. Scientific measurement is essential to quantify the human impact on the climate. This includes, for example, 9.7 billion metric tons of carbon emitted in 2012, most of it from burning fossil fuels. Careful measurement of contemporary and historical air samples has shown that these emissions change the composition of the atmosphere, which contained approximately 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in 1750 and 400 parts per million in 2015.⁶ Thus, science helps us to understand that we change the climate when we burn fossil fuels to produce electricity, to transport ourselves around the world, and to manufacture the products that make our lives possible.

Scientific analysis also shows the industrialized food system as another driver of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that agriculture is responsible for one-quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.⁷ Modern farming depends upon fossil fuels to make fertilizer, process food, and ship it long distances. Forest land cleared to grow food is another part of the problem, as trees essential to the carbon cycle are cut and burned down so that crops can be grown instead. Industrial meat production has vastly increased the number of cows in the world, and cows release enormous amounts of methane, another climate-changing gas. These are problems that require rigorous scientific analysis to understand.

Scientific models are also essential to determine the atmospheric effects of the gases released by human food, energy, and transportation systems. Chemists explain that these gases all trap heat inside the Earth’s atmosphere, creating a “greenhouse effect” that raises the quantity of the sun’s radiation retained and reduces the amount reflected back into space. Atmospheric scientists measure temperatures and weather patterns and model future trends to determine how the climate will continue to change. According to the IPCC, which aggregates thousands of scientific studies, there has already been an increase in average global temperatures of at least 0.6°C, and, if current consumption trends continue, this could climb as high as 4.8°C by 2100. Alongside such an increase would be more extremes, with longer and more intense heat waves, and more rain in places that already tend to be wet and less in places that tend to be dry. The ocean will become more acidic while also continuing to rise up to 0.98 meter. Glaciers and ice packs will continue to shrink.⁸

Chemistry explains that climate-changing gases do not leave the atmosphere quickly. Atmospheric methane takes more than ten years to degrade. Nitrous oxide takes more than a century. Some of the CO₂ released today will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, contemporary emissions will be changing the climate far into the future. Further emissions of these gases will increase the rate of such change.

We depend upon scientists to quantify and to predict climatic changes. For some, this leads to a hope that scientific research and engineering can also help us begin to solve, or at least address, this problem. For example, the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature increases to 2°C came from scientific research, which also suggests that this limit would only be possible if atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ are lowered to 350 parts per million and kept there. The original source for this number is a scientific article by James Hansen and his colleagues, who used paleoclimatological analysis and models to argue that anything above 350 parts per million would be “too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted.” With characteristic caution, these scientists note that this target should be adjusted “as scientific understanding and empirical evidence of climate effects accumulate.”⁹ This is a scientifically determined goal, which continues to change as science develops and conditions change.

Some activists place even more faith in science by hoping for a technological path to reverse climate change. This could mean research to expand existing technologies, with the increased efficiency of solar, wind, and perhaps nuclear power fueling electricity and transportation infrastructures that could maintain the current standard of living in the developed world without fossil fuels. Other scientific solutions are even more revolutionary, such as proposals for “climate engineering,” which would seek to recalibrate the atmosphere and the Earth’s temperature by altering the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth or capturing CO₂ before it reaches the atmosphere. Most such proposals involve large-scale, global technologies. This requires trust that scientific experts can intentionally manage the atmosphere as a counterbalance to the careless and unintentional changes that have been made so far.

However, no single perspective is sufficient for understanding or responding to the wicked problem of climate change. No one suggests that science and technology can solve the problem of climate change alone, because the questions raised by it are not solely scientific. Any indictment of the industrial world’s lifestyle has moral, socioeconomic, and cultural implications, as also does any decision about transitioning to new energy sources or deliberately changing the atmosphere.¹⁰

An Environmental Problem

Although technological proposals about climate change are increasingly popular, others argue that the problem is most basically about consumption rather than engineering, and so call for fundamental moral and behavioral change. This has been the dominant approach of environmental activists, who see the changing climate as a sign of the faulty relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. In so doing, they present it as an environmental problem, connecting greenhouse gas emissions to other issues of pollution, overconsumption, and the endangerment of other species.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a Witness of Resistance
• Part I. Climate Change and Nonviolence
• Part II. Five Witnesses of Nonviolent Resistance
• Conclusion: What Can We Do?
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author