https:
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/opinion/we-dont-need-a-war-on-climate-change-we-need-a-revolution.html
THE STONE
By Eric S. Godoy and Aaron Jaffe
Oct. 31, 2016
This year is on track to become the hottest ever recorded, and a growing number of environmentalists are using a particular type of language
in response. Some are calling for a huge “mobilization” to “combat” climate change. In an article in the New Republic in August, Bill
McKi
en, the unofficial spokesperson of the climate movement in the United States, insisted in very literal terms that, we are at war with
climate change.
In the United States, we are familiar with war metaphors; and they are often politically useful. We have been through wars on poverty, drugs,
cancer and even Christmas. In these cases, metaphors are understood as metaphors, but when McKi
en points to te
itory ceded, space
invaded, cultural loss and human suffering, he intends to be taken at face value: “It’s not that global warming is like a world war,” he writes.
“It is a world war.”
War rhetoric serves a valuable function. It stresses the seriousness of the harm, its structural nature and the need to struggle against it. Wars
equire people to sacrifice and to share responsibility for a joint effort larger than individual preferences and comforts. They can also motivate
solidarity: The goal of defeating the enemy orients all activity, and whatever may divide or distract us from achieving that goal must be put
aside. In the rhetoric-bag of political discourse, “war” is a forceful weapon.
McKi
en is one of the most visible and motivating climate activists in North America. He has written an astounding number of influential
articles and books, co-founded an organization leading an international fossil fuel divestment campaign, spoken across the country to full
auditoriums and participated in high-profile protests, some leading to his a
est. Most recently, he called on all of us to unite with the Standing
Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access pipeline. Our goal here is not to attack McKi
en so much as the rhetorical strategy that he, along with
others, have made increasingly popular.
The idea that climate change is a war is inaccurate, and a potentially counterproductive frame for organizing the resistance needed to secure
a habitable planet. By stressing existential threat, war tends to divide the world into allies and enemies, against whom we need to risk all.
McKi
en insists that climate change is “a world war aimed at us all.” But aimed by whom? It is variably polluting industries, tepid or two-
faced politicians, our own political passivity, and even the laws of physics. McKi
en often writes as if nature itself was a bellicose agent.
This approach ignores the environmental movement’s earlier rhetorical and organizational strengths. As a political force, the movement grew
from roots in the nonviolent soil of civil rights struggles, and was radicalized in antiwar protests and resistance against nuclear weapons. This
legacy is not merely historical: it is alive and well in the language and action of ongoing resistance at Standing Rock.
Another problem with deploying such war metaphors is that doing so assumes a distinction between allies and enemies that disguises the
unequal effects felt by “us all.” McKi
en, to his credit, does recognize this.
For instance, he admits that the “first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis.” Here he refers to the world’s
poor, who have contributed only a small amount of the total greenhouse gases while richer countries produce higher ca
on emissions. And
some even benefit from doing so. The affluent enjoy “cheap” fuel and other products of industry, and shareholders profit from such sales.
Meanwhile, the most recent International Panel on Climate Change report notes that the poor and marginalized face greater food scarcity and
price insecurity, and the threat of violent conflict connected to this instability. In actual war, too, the poorest and marginalized often find
themselves on the front lines while the richer are insulated or even benefit; McKi
en himself explains how this was true of United States
industrialists during World War II.
In other words, the first victims are not suffering from the relentless assault of the physical environment alone, but of other humans who
leverage their social position to displace wider costs and extract private benefits. Given McKi
en’s dedication to protests like the one at
Standing Rock reservation, he is well aware of these forces.
We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution
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https:
www.nytimes.com
https:
www.nytimes.com/column/the-stone
http:
www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/science/2016-global-warming-record-temperatures-climate-change.html
http:
www.theclimatemobilization.org
https:
newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii
http:
www.billmcki
en.com/articles.html
http:
www.billmcki
en.com
ooks.html
https:
350.org
http:
www.bam.org/talks/2015/off-and-on-the-climate-movement-and-road-through-paris?alttemplate=mobileevent&date=
http:
www.democracynow.org/2016/3/8/headlines/new_york_bill_mcki
en_among_57_a
ested_over_gas_storage_at_seneca_lake
http:
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/opinion/why-dakota-is-the-new-keystone.html?_r=0
http:
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/north-dakota-oil-pipeline-battle-whos-fighting-and-why.html
https:
www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-ca
on-emissions-says-oxfam
http:
www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf
Humans are already divided into different groups or classes, with relative advantages and vulnerabilities. Climate change exace
ates this
inequality, and our rhetoric ought to reflect this fact and resist false universalizations. Beyond the inherent injustice of disproportionate and
unnecessary suffering, growing environmental inequality tends to the violences of displacement, resource-competition and actual war.
One thing we all share is that we secure existence in and through a relationship with our environment — all living things do. In recognition of
this fact, Marx thought of the human body as part of the natural world and called nature an extension of our bodies. Following Marx,
contemporary theorists like Jason Moore and John Bellamy Foster describe our changing, and dangerously unstable metabolic relationship
with nature. Humans are a unique species in that we form complex relationships to regulate this metabolism as we produce our food, water,
shelter and more robust needs.
As these relationships are organized today, and as the climate changes, the affluent can afford an increase in food prices, ship in bottled wate
during droughts and relocate businesses and homes when the seas rise, while those without access to such privileges have fewer options and
disproportionately suffer.
What would winning a “war” against climate change even look like? McKi
en suggests a huge mobilization to produce green technologies,
solar panels, wind tu
ines and electric cars. He cites the public seizure and transformation of private factories during World War II that
enabled the United States to produce bombers and other instruments that helped win the war.
Certainly greener technologies can help, but solar panels won’t purify Flint’s lead-ridden water or lower asthma rates in the Bronx, some of
the highest in the country because of the proximity to trucking lanes. Technology alone can’t address the environmental injustice
disproportionately confronting minorities. However, if we understand that the enemy is not our physical environment, but the unjust social
elations that allow some to gain at the expense of and risk to others, then technological solutions can be a part, but only a part, of the plan.
Crucial to this plan is gaining social control over the private, exploitative and even i
esponsible direction of the human-nature metabolism.
For this reason, Naomi Klein has called for solutions that go beyond the technological. She emphasizes, not just green energy, but also “people
power.” Her most recent book and film, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” feature a number of grass-roots movements
esisting the forces that threaten people’s relationships with their environment — sometimes even in the name of “green” solutions, such as
hydroelectric dam projects. We want to follow Klein’s lead in shifting the conceptual focus from technologies of power to relations of power.
Despite his recent rhetoric, McKi
en follows a similar course.
We urgently need to motivate action, but given the ambiguities and dangers su
ounding war rhetoric, we need better orienting language.
Perhaps, as some have suggested, “revolution” is the better path.
While world wars aim to decimate enemies and their capacities for violence, “revolutions” aim to transform violence and oppression by
empowering people. Instead of a war against physics, a revolution in the control and direction of climate, natural resources and energy policy
could enable democratic participation to redress past harms and guide environmental goals of the future. Such a revolution would affirm the
ight to a clean, healthy environment for all people; it would transform the relationships that regulate our metabolism with nature,
elationships that now allow some to profit by denying this right to others. Solar panels alone won’t transform these relationships and secure
this right.
McKi
en wo
ies that if the United States does not take the lead, China, already a significant developer of renewable energy, would win the
enewables race. In this way American exceptionalism and national chauvinism lurks beneath the surface of so many universalist stances.
Like the arms races and technology gaps characteristic of the nearly catastrophic Cold War, such a national frame reinforces an us-versus-
them mentality which reduces rather fosters much needed international coordination and popular organization. After all, even if we stop
emitting today or if our renewable sector takes the lead, the world will continue to warm. A wider vision of global cooperation in which China,
the United States and so many others work hand in hand to confront the global environmental challenges should supplant the na
ow focus on
American leadership. But is this likely within the context of nationalist war rhetoric?
“Revolution” can be just as motivating as “war,” but a green revolution would center the human-nature metabolism over and against the drive
for profits. It would answer the question McKi
en leaves open, namely, how we get from green technology to more just ecological and social
elations.
In this light, Exxon and its climate science obfuscation is not so much an enemy as a paradigmatic symptom of the worst kinds of behavio
generated by profit-driven systems. The enemy is the violence perpetrated by racial, gendered, political, juridical and existing economic
metabolisms with nature. Their exploitative organizations would remain unconcerned with climate justice even if the nation were mobilized to
mass produce solar panels and wind tu
ines. In other words, Climate change demands not only a race to develop and deploy new energy
technologies, but a revolution to democratize all forms of power — fossil fuels, wind, solar, but most important, economic and political power.
http:
time.com/4024210/climate-change-migrants
https:
www.thenation.com/article/how-resource-scarcity-and-climate-change-could-produce-global-explosion
http:
science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6304/aad9837
https:
www.versobooks.com
ooks/1924-capitalism-in-the-web-of-life
http:
monthlyreview.org/product/marxs_ecology
http:
www.nyenvironmentreport.com/the-
onx-is-
eathing
http:
transformdonttrashnyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Final-draft-v3_TDT-Air-Qual-Report_Clearing-the-Air-1.pdf
https:
thischangeseverything.org
http:
monthlyreview.org/product/marxs_ecology
https:
insideclimatenews.org/content/Exxon-The-Road-Not-Taken
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