Climate Struggles and Ecosocialism
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- Published on Thursday, 27 April 2017 00:00
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1403 .... April 27, 2017
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Climate Struggles and Ecosocialism
The hard right U.S. administration of Donald Trump has widened the terrain of struggle over climate change and, indeed, the entire array of environmental issues facing the ecology of North America and the working class movement. Climate change deniers, big oil executives, and finance capitalists now occupy pivotal positions in an array of state agencies and apparatuses directly impacting these portfolios. Some of the first decisions of the new administration have been to expand pipeline development (of both the Dakota Access and the Keystone XL), further open spaces for fossil fuel extraction, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency. Alongside the continued expansion of the tar sands in Canada, the North American energy superpowers are being pushed further down the path of ‘extreme... energy’ extraction in the pursuit of fossil fuels (something already encouraged by the preceding Obama and Harper governments).
It will be impossible to meet present climate change targets to contain the global warming (and crucial tipping points for the earth's biosphere) in this context. Indeed, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA announced in February that average global temperature was 1.76 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th century average, and the second warmest winter on record (after last year's). NOAA also announced that global carbon emissions reached an all-time high, and measures of CO2 at the Mauna Loa Baseline Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii is now pushing toward 410 ppm. The damage to the Great Lakes cleanup, wilderness protection and endangered species, control of pollutant discharges, and much else from the EPA cuts is not yet clear but potentially of enormous consequence.
In Canada, the Trudeau government immediately shifted the discourse on climate change as an issue that needed to be directly confronted from the ‘acknowledge but ignore’ policy of the Harper regime. But the policy practice with respect to climate change is more notable for its continuities with the Harper period than its break. The administrative processes with the National Energy Board, First Nations consultations on pipelines, and environmental assessments largely carry on as they were. They remain vehicles for negotiating and smoothing-out pipeline expansions and further tar sands development. The last year of struggles -- over Site C, Lines 3 and 9, Kinder Morgan, and Petronas LNG -- are evidence enough of this. As with so much else (Canada's foreign policy on Syria and the Ukraine, Bill C-51, industrial subsidies, trade agreements), the Trudeau government proceeds from the same neoliberal guidebook as Harper.