EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

The wall will fall not only between art and industry,
but simultaneously between art and nature also.
This is not meant in the sense of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, that art will come nearer to a state of
nature, but that nature will become more “artificial.”
The present distribution of mountains and rivers,
of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and
of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has
already made changes in the map of nature that are
not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’
practice in comparison with what is coming....
Faith merely promises to move mountains; but
technology, which takes nothing “on faith,” is
actually able to cut down mountains and move
them. Up to now this was done for industrial
purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the
future this will be done on an immeasurably
larger scale, according to a general industrial
and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with
re-registering mountains and rivers, and will
earnestly and repeatedly make improvements
in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the
earth, if not in his own image, at least according
to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear
that this taste will be bad.

— Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Features ISSUE 26 SUMMER 2017

25
Tyrannosaurus
Rex
TRISH KAHLE
EARTH

32
Digging Free
of Poverty
THEA RIOFRANCOS

65
L
  iving, Not Just
Surviving WIND
ALYSSA BATTISTONI

83
The Last Stimulus
73 DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

By Any Means
Necessary 113
PETER FRASE If We Fail
CHRISTIAN PARENTI

FIRE
Departments
FRONT MATTERS CULTURAL CAPITAL

7 9 97 102
The soapbox party lines ways of seeing bass &
superstructure
Letters + Within and Green Islands
The Internet Against Bono Kills
Speaks Capitalism the Planet

11 18
struggle session friends & foes
Neoliberals With Victory Over
Wind Farms the Sun
THE TUMBREL

106 108 111

girondins versailles thermidor
People Make Bill Gates The Eco-
the World Go Won’t Save Us Right’s One
MEANS OF DEDUCTION Round Simple Trick

42 49
the vulgar uneven &
empiricist combined
Everybody’s Make It
Favorite Law Happen LEFTOVERS

46 130
transitions Popular front
Where We Are, We Gave
What It Will Greenpeace
Take, and What a Chance
if We Fail?

133
the cookshop
Planning the Good
Anthropocene
READING MATERIEL

55 59 137 141
dossier field notes the dustbin means & ends
Tell Me What Signed, Sealed, Beware Your Local Food Jacobin Is Dead.
You Really Mean Undelivered Cooperative Long Live Catalyst.
Contributors
cover art by
Kiki Ljung

Marcel Andreu was a member of the
executive board of the Austrian
Young Greens, which were expelled
from the Austrian Green Party in
March 2017.
Kate Aronoff is a writing fellow
at In These Times covering the
politics of climate change and the
Trump administration.
Alyssa Battistoni is an editor
at Jacobin and a phd student in
political science at Yale University.
Alexander Billet is a chief editor
at Red Wedge and blogs
at Dys/Utopian.
Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant
professor of sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania, where
he directs the Socio-Spatial
Carbon Collaborative.
Gareth Dale teaches politics
at Brunel University.
Peter Frase is on the editorial board
of Jacobin and is the author of
Four Futures: Life after Capitalism.
Owen Hatherley is the author
of Militant Modernism and A Guide
to the New Ruins of Great Britain.
Trish Kahle is a journalist and
doctoral candidate in history at the
University of Chicago.
Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial
board of Jacobin.
Branko Marcetic is an editorial
assistant at Jacobin. He lives in
Auckland, New Zealand.
Sarah Nagel lives in Berlin and is
a member of Die Linke.
Angela Nagle is a cultural critic
for the Baffler, Current Affairs, and
Dublin Review of Books.
Christian Parenti is an associate
professor in the economics program
at John Jay College. His books
include Tropic of Chaos:
Climate Change and the New
Geography of Violence.
Leigh Philips is a science writer
and eu affairs journalist. He is the
author of Austerity Ecology & the
Collapse-Porn Addicts.
Thea Riofrancos is an assistant
professor of political science
at Providence College.
Michal Rozworski is a Toronto-based
union researcher and writer.
He blogs at Political Eh-conomy.
Ben Tarnoff writes about
technology and politics, and lives
in San Francisco.
Jonah Walters is a researcher
at Jacobin and a graduate student in
geography at Rutgers University.

Photo Attributions — Page 27 "Leaders Meet For 2017 Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN)" — Mark Metcalfe / Stringer / Getty Images. Page 39
"High Oil Prices Continue To Drive Gas Prices Steadily Upwards" — David McNew / Getty Images. Page 70 "Cove Lake Park was built under TVA (Tennessee
Valley Authority) direction by the Tennessee State Department of Conservation with the assistance of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) on an arm of Norris
Lake. It was initiated as a demonstration of standards appropriate to valley conditions" — Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-
White Negatives, Library of Congress, LC-USW33-015639-ZC. Page 74 "Clouds. No clouds of war these, but peaceful carriers of rains that help broad acres of
Kentucky farmland to bear life-giving crops for the nation's needs" — Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, Li-
brary of Congress, LC-USE6-D-005887. Page 78 "Newt Gingrich Campaigns In Maryland Ahead Of Primary" — Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images. Page 80 "Rain
forest canopy at the Forestry Research Institute Malaysia, showing the effects of "crown shyness" in the Kapur trees (Dryobalanops aromatica)" — Mike Norton /
Wikimedia Commons. Page 84 "Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition: The Ferris Wheel" — C. D. Arnold ( 1844-1927); H. D. Higinbotham / The Project
Gutenberg EBook of Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition. Page 88 "German Electricity Grid Insufficient For New Energy Needs" — Sean Gallup /
Getty Images. Page 92 "Panchgani covered in fog" — JakilDedhia / Wikimedia Commons. Page 102 "Live Earth Sydney — Stage" — Sergio Dionisio / Getty Imag-
es Page 113 "Granite Falls" — Walter Siegmund / Wikimedia Commons. Page 115 "Flooding In Prague" — Pavel Horejsi / Getty Images. Page 116 "Florida Prepares
As Hurricane Matthew Barrels Towards Atlantic Coast" — Mark Wilson / Getty Images. Page 118 "Indonesia Tackles Rising Waters At Jakarta's Sinking City" — Ed
Wray / Getty Images. Page 120 "Freight Train Derailment Causes Train Line Closures" — Robert Cianflone / Getty Images. Page 122 "Rescue And Cleanup Efforts
Continue In Katrina's Wake" — Mark Wilson / Getty Images. Page 124 "Dwejra Bay" — Sascha Steinbach / Getty Images. Page 126 "Flash Flooding In Southern
Utah Kills Over 10 People" — George Frey / Getty Images. Page 128 "Protesters March During The G20 Summit" — Alexander Koerner / Getty Images. Page 138
“Co-op War” Factions Face Off Outside Mill City Foods, Minneapolis, 1976 — Minnesota Historical Society. Page 139 "Good Food Display" — NCI Visuals Online.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

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9 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

FRON T MATT ERS

A healthy start
to a nutritious magazine.
 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAPBOX
Letters
The Fed and You
Congressional testimony from Federal Reserve Chair
Janet Yellen mid-July signaled a shift away from
the central bank’s primary stimulus policy, quantitative
easing. Taking their word, let’s assume for a moment
that the policy (central banks creating liquidity/money by
buying securities like government bonds from banks
with electronic cash to encourage banks to make new loans
and buy new assets, such as equities) has been responsible
for a significant chunk of the recovery in stock markets
since 2009. Since the Great Recession, the major central
banks have purchased some $14 trillion in assets in this
way, massively swelling their balance sheets.
What will happen when the Federal Reserve “normalizes
monetary policy,” slowly easing out of its stimulus
program? If this "corporate Keynesianism" has worked in
the stock markets, the boon to stock values have been
largely captured by elites and top managers. Though many
retirement accounts have recovered lost assets,
the wages of ordinary workers continue to stagnate. But
workers certainly have something to lose if in its
termination it isn't replaced with more bottom-up methods
of injecting liquidity into the economy. One has to
wonder if central banks tapering off their bond purchases
and slowly raising interest rates will have a ripple effect
on stock markets, lowering access to cheap credit for firms.
If so, will shareholders and managers take the losses
out of the hides of their workers?
— Mike McCarthy, Milwaukee, WI
11 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
Arguing the Right
A critical mass of left scholarship has exposed the alt-right
in terms of its origins, development, and purpose.
Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies traces the online back-
story of this movement, while Matthew Lyons and
Alexander Reid Ross have exposed the historical roots of
this ideology. These authors are useful insofar as they
define an evolving political and cultural enemy. But while
knowing your enemy is crucial, we must take an
additional step: learning to systematically shut down
far-right claims.
The front lines of this fight are not only in the streets, but
also in the classroom, the office breakroom, and the
chatroom. The Left cannot abdicate its responsibility to
enumerate, analyze, and debunk alt-right disinformation.
Informed by history, theory, and empirical fact, we can
disprove falsities surrounding immigration, racism,
misogyny, and so-called “cultural Marxism.” This should
be done in plain and uncompromising language.
People will gravitate toward those who know, and can
defend, their own positions against opponents. We
shouldn’t be reticent about getting our hands dirty by
taking on toxic, destructive, but ultimately baseless
arguments. The alt-right has already been described in
various ways: the point, however, is to discredit them.
— Samantha Miller, New York, NY
 THE SOAPBOX
The
Internet
Speaks
They Go Low, We Go Lower
The title of this piece [“Park Menn”]
is the level of pettiness I demand
from this magazine.
— Jonah Feldman, Boise, ID
Have You Heard of Catalyst Yet?
I want journals like Jacobin to exist,
I just don't want the ones that
exist to be Jacobin.
— Julia Golden, Lewiston, ID
jacobinmag.com/store/
This is quite possibly the most
disturbing thing I’ve seen on the
interwebs today ... where can
I get a print?
— Matthew Kern, New York, NY
Scientific Socialism
In an objective sense, the extreme
Left is the center.
— Robert Burns, Chicago, IL
Memeing Is My Business ... and
Business Is Good!
I don’t know how I feel about
Jacobin's ongoing attempts to get
into the meme business.
— Steve Fleet, Toronto, Canada
12
Chill Out, Bro Our Man in Langley
This magazine is a disgrace to the
word “Jacobin” and to Maximilien Neither Washington nor Moscow,
Robespierre. The Supreme Being but International ...
knows you all lack virtue.
jacobin is actually socialism
— Marko Velimir Kobak, Toronto,
— Ralph Singh, Port of Spain,
Canada
Trinidad
On Lena Dunham Endorsing
Jeremy Corbyn
That Doesn’t Make Sense
Can you see you are inside fascism
I don't think even an ira
and cia controls [the] fake left?
endorsement can help him recover
— Arhi Kuittinen, Helsinki, Finland
from this…
— Robert Aitken, Glasgow, Scotland Okay, It Kind of Makes Sense Now
No, But It’s Still Important to Get cia wants things like Jacobin out
Enough Fiber there to stop the momentous
unrelenting success of Marxism-
Is this how Bernie can still win?
Leninism in the US.
— Ian Hinson, Los Angeles, CA
— @FreddyLovesKarl, The Internet
You Get a Car, You Get a Car, You
It’s Called an Iced Mocha Latte
Get a Car, Everybody Gets a Car
Such blatant lies. You’ve been
Revisionist, revisionist, revisionist,
drinking too much of the cia-
none of you are free from
backed Kool-Aid”
revisionism.
— Josh Jackson, Phoenix Suns (?)
— Nicholas Kimsey, Brooklyn, NY
Not Nearly Enough
Noted.
How much did the cia pay to
Stop enabling dirty diaper
publish this?
anarchists!
— Zachary George Najarian-Najafi,
— Alexandra Marsh, Shanghai,
Pelham, NH
China
Ironed, Not Ironic
Ironed t-shirts are communism.
— Ben Martin, Melbourne, Australia
reddit.com/r/socialisthottakes/
whatever gets the kids readin marx
i guess.
— Blake Murphee, Pittsburgh, PA
Maoist Donald Trump
Imperialist KKKontent from a
supposedly socialist magazine. Sad!
— Ian Suchon, Redmond, WA.  
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES BY ALYSSA BATTISTONI

Within and Against

Capitalism

Climate change can seem ill-suited to mass politics. It’s complicated and hard
to understand. Its causes are so embedded in everyday life that it can be
hard to see until disaster strikes. It encompasses the entire planet: decisions
made on one side of the world wreak havoc with people’s lives on the other.
Meanwhile the rich and powerful corporations and people responsible for the
problem run the institutions tasked with solving it.

In fact, it sounds a lot like capitalism.

But for as long as climate change has been on the political agenda, neoliberalism
has been ascendant. Which means the discussion among elites today is filled
with pseudo-solutions to the problem: guilt-laden appeals to individuals to take
personal responsibility for their consumption; green technologies developed
with public funds by private companies that hold the patents; market mechanisms
designed by the industries they ought to be demolishing; executive orders
that propose to keep the tides at bay without causing too much of a fuss. Mean-
while, austerity measures are starving public goods and services just when
we should be expanding them and resurgent nationalist movements are closing
borders as we should be reaching across them.

Those who have the least to lose from global warming are leading us down a road
to disaster that will hit black and brown, poor and working-class people
first and hardest — both the literal disasters that will strike more sharply and
frequently, and the social catastrophes that will follow if right-wing
movements are able to successfully turn understandable fear into xenophobic
reaction while the wealthy retreat to their luxury bunkers.

But the silver lining of the gathering storm clouds is that after years of liberal
vacillation dominating the climate discussion, the tide is starting to turn
left. Whether it can outpace the rising seas is another question.

13 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 PARTY LINES

If capitalism is driving climate change, does that mean we need a revolution

to stop it?

We should hope not. The Left’s vision of radical transformation can seem
like an obvious match for the climate challenge. But the Left remains
historically weak and a return to real power on the scale required isn’t likely
anytime soon — certainly not on the timescale we need to start taking
serious action. We can’t shortcut the long-term project of building socialism —
but nor can we sideline climate action along the way. Otherwise, even in the
best-case scenario, the Left will win power only to manage a state of
increasing climate breakdown.

So no matter how necessary a break with capitalism is, for now we’ll have to
settle for addressing climate change as best we can within it. That means
pushing hard to decarbonize as rapidly as possible in ways that set the stage
for a sustainable socialist society.

We’ll only be able to do that if our movements have a strong anti-capitalist

core. Fortunately, climate movements have been steadily moving left,
foregrounding climate justice and building alliances with communities on the
front lines of both fossil fuel extraction and climate impacts. Indigenous
movements have led the way in waging battles in places like Standing Rock
that have called global attention to the rapaciousness of fossil fuel
companies and articulated connections between the wellbeing of human commu-
nities and the ecosystems they depend on. Socialists must join these
struggles fighting the inequalities that prefigure eco-apartheid while continuing
to build a mass movement fighting to lay the foundations we’ll need
to go beyond fossil capitalism.

Climate change more than any other issue demonstrates the need for socialism.
It points to the need for more democratic political control over industry,
technology, and infrastructure; more conscious intention about how we build
our world, why, and for whom.

Embracing conscious planning of wide sectors of the economy and the power
of technology is part of a decidedly “Old Left” vision— but the old hubris
about “mastering nature” isn’t. Our socialism is about creating a sustainable
politics of joy and abundance for the many. Give us bread and roses — and
parks and oceans.

Of course, even those classic demands get more complicated when drought
threatens wheat crops and flower gardens, as forests burn and oceans acidify.
Climate change must be a spur to the Left to think creatively, organize
expansively, and act quickly.

This is an edition about climate change, but climate change isn’t just an issue
to talk about every few years — it has to be at the center of how we mobilize and
organize going forward. From now on, every issue is a climate issue.  █

14 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 FRONT MATTERS A CONVERSATION WITH
STRUGGLE SESSION MARCEL ANDREU
GARETH DALE
SARAH NAGEL

Neoliberals
With
Wind Farms

A few decades ago

Europe’s Green Parties inspired
hope. Today, not so much.

Sprouting up across Europe in the

early 1980s, Green Parties were
styled as non-sectarian, refreshing
alternatives to the largely Maoist
revolutionary left of the 1970s, from
which they drew many former
members. These parties united
frustrated sections of the radical
left with activists from the ecological
and feminist movements in what
seemed like a promising alternative
path to the dogmatism and verbal
radicalism of the post-1968 upsurge.

15 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 STRUGGLE SESSION
In the United States, the country’s
inherently restrictive electoral
system has prevented the Greens
from gaining any meaningful
footholds in elected office, but the
party has, whatever its faults, largely
stuck to the radical ecological
principles it adhered to at its founding.
Yet the German and Austrian Greens
were able to enter their countries’
respective political systems by the late
1980s — and in the German case,
even managed to join a governing
coalition in 1998. Both parties
have since shed their radical veneer
in pursuit of political power and
legitimacy. Their trajectories point
towards the fundamental limi-
16
tations of the “Green” political
approach, suggesting that a set of
floating policies decoupled from
any durable social base or wider social
vision prove an insufficient anchor
for radical politics.
This July, Jacobin contributor Sarah
Nagel convened a conversation
to discuss the origins and futures of
two of Europe’s key Green Parties.
Early Days
Gareth Dale
In Germany, the Greens came
together in the late 1970s as a
coalition of the far left with social
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
Neoliberals With Wind Farms
liberals and a few conservatives. It
was an interesting period for this
kind of formation. You had a fairly
conservative social-democratic
government in office and industrial
struggles were in decline, but
there were many other social move-
ments — against nuclear power,
the women’s movement, and so on.
To some, it seemed that the “old
social movements” with their class
orientation were being replaced
by “new social movements.”
Obviously, environmental issues
involve class as much as labor issues do.
But the divide appeared to reflect
different movement experiences and
cultures, and organized labor was in
 STRUGGLE SESSION
retreat while the new struggles had
the wind in their sails.
The Green Party embodied the hope
that these new movements with
their post-materialist concerns with
peace, identity, and the environ-
ment would define the political arena
more and more. The Greens
wanted to be the political vehicle of
these currents, an anti-imperialist,
feminist party. But in the early 1980s
these movements too were weakening,
and the Greens increasingly oriented
towards parliamentary politics.
They became incorporated as
a normal party, despite their best
efforts to prevent this by organi-
Similar to Germany,
in Austria the Greens emerged out
of two distinct currents: a left
wing and a bourgeois-conservative
one. Environmental questions
were very important in the 1970s
and ’80s. Some connected
them to anticapitalist themes,
while others tied them
to conservative notions like
protecting the “homeland’s”
natural environment.
17
zational innovations, such as a
rotation system for seats in parliament
and collective leadership.
Marcel Andreu
Similar to Germany, in Austria
the Greens emerged out of two distinct
currents: a left wing and a bourgeois-
conservative one. Environmental
questions were very important in the
1970s and ’80s. Some connected
them to anti-capitalist themes, while
others tied them to conservative
notions like protecting the “home-
land’s” natural environment.
The party’s left stood for grassroots
democracy and saw itself as a
mouthpiece for social and ecological
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
Neoliberals With Wind Farms
movements. In this sense, they can be
viewed as the successors to 1968,
though in the context of the gradual
decline of class-based politics.
The Greens entered parliament for
the first time in 1986, but the
party wasn’t fully formed from the
outset. Various groupings
came together, and in the years
after entering parliament,
they had to situate themselves.
In the beginning, grassroots
principles were experimented with,
such as the rotation principle, but
over time the Left began to lose out.
In the meantime, the bourgeois
wing had built ties to local citizens’
movements concerned with issues
like local conservation issues. Their
goal was a “clean, transparent”
political system, but this was a rela-
tively superficial criticism that
failed to move beyond the status quo.
Class Base
Marcel Andreu
By the time the Greens were founded,
the Social Democratic Party
of Austria (spö) had increasingly
detached itself from its working-
class base, in a climate characterized
by neoliberalization and atomization.
The Greens, by contrast, embodied the
model of a small party without
a large apparatus, but with strong
internal democracy. Of course,
the party had few members and little
social base or local roots.
To this day, the Greens primarily draw
votes from well-to-do, urban
milieus. In many states, they tend to
win more support from former
 STRUGGLE SESSION Neoliberals With Wind Farms

conservative voters (övp) than Democrats (in Baden-Wurtemberg Turning Points

frustrated spö voters. They and elsewhere).
are weaker in the countryside, as
It’s worth noting that in the United Gareth Dale
well as among industrial skilled
Kingdom, Green Party supporters Joining a coalition government at state
workers. This was basically always
are often relatively poor — often level in 1980 was one turning point.
the case. What has changed
students or ex-students who cannot This was a major step of the incorpo-
since the 1980s and ’90s is that the
find decent work, especially after ration of the Greens into the system
party has become more attractive
the recession. It’s not unrelated to the and helped to consolidate the party’s
to middle-class voters. The politics
fact that the British Green parties liberal “realo” wing. Next, joining
have grown softer. Many high-
are more left-wing. Schröder’s government in 1998 was
earners with a social conscience vote for
the Greens, almost as a form of charity.

Gareth Dale
The Green Party in Germany is also
dominated by the middle class.
This doesn’t make it unusual — the
same applies to social-democratic
parties. But for social-democratic
parties, the pivotal middle-class
voices tend to be trade union officials,
whereas for the Greens, it is a less
focused mix: public-sector managers
and professionals, charity-shop
owners, software engineers, and so Within two decades,
on. Both types of party are in a sense
led by the middle class, but one has a
the Green Party had become
sustained link to the working class. the opposite of its original
In Germany and Britain, Green Party
program in many respects. They
voters are on average well-educated. had become “neoliberals
In Germany, the Green electorate with wind farms.”
tends to be wealthier — in fact, it is
the richest of any German party.
The stereotype in Germany is of the
squatter in a northern city who
riots each May Day; their squat is then
legalized; they open a shop,
their views on property destruction
soften, and they evolve into a
Green. But in the country’s south,
the Green constituency tends to be
more conservative, and their
regional parties have entered coalition
governments with the Christian

18 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 STRUGGLE SESSION Neoliberals With Wind Farms

decisive. That was the backdrop to
the 1999 decision to back the nato
war on Yugoslavia, a justification
that was framed as liberal humanita-
rianism but in reality spelled the
reassertion of German imperialism.
In that government, too, the Green
support for austerity was consolidated
as well as their toleration of a very
dirty coal industry, the extension of the
nuclear power program, and
restrictions on civil rights. Within
two decades, the Green Party had
become the opposite of its original
program in many respects. They had
become “neoliberals with wind farms.”
in protest against a hydroelectric
plant in 1984. The Greens were not the
major initiator of these protests, but
gained a lot of momentum from them.
They entered parliament two years
later — another decisive step.
The Waldheim Affair, which also
broke out in 1986, finally ended
the long era of silence regarding the
Nazi period in Austrian society, at
the same time that the extreme right
of the Freedom Party (fpö) under
Jörg Haider took over the party and
began attacking the postwar political
system from the far right.
The Greens were not a uniform poli-
tical formation at this point.
There was an electoral list with the
clear intent of getting into parliament.
Alexander van der Bellen became
the party’s public spokesperson and
managed to domesticate and

The party began life during the early

stages of neoliberal ascendancy in
Germany and adapted completely to
that context. In Britain, by contrast,
the Greens were set up by more conser-
vative forces but Labour’s embrace
of neoliberalism allowed the Greens
to occupy the vacated space on
the left. They became known for
progressive views on immigration,
opposition to austerity, renatio-
nalization of the railways, and so on.

Marcel Andreu
In Austria, an initial significant point
in the spread of environmentalist
ideas were the protests against the
Zwentendorf nuclear power plant,
a project pushed through by a Social
Democratic government in 1979.
Ultimately, a popular referendum was
held which decided against the
power plant — to this day, there are
no nuclear power plants in Austria.
The movement to which the Greens
themselves most often refer was
the occupation of the Hainburger Au

19 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 STRUGGLE SESSION Neoliberals With Wind Farms

professionalize the party over the plus. plus stands for “Plattform Did Things Have to End So
next ten years. He is a fairly bourgeois unabhängig und solidarisch” Badly?
politician and made the Greens fit (Independent and Solidary Platform),
for government, and the party joined an independent, multi-party
Gareth Dale
an increasing number of governing electoral platform which unites left-
coalitions under the leadership of his wing forces and strives to remain It was heavily conditioned by a
successor, Glawischnig, in places politically relevant outside of elections parliamentary orientation within a
like Carinthia, Tyrol, and Vienna. as well. A congress is planned for context defined by ascendant
the months after the October elections neoliberalism, but it was not inevitable.
The approach of politics-as-marketing If a clear left strategy within the
to discuss and develop the platform’s
grew more pronounced and the Greens had evolved, toward the labor
political positions and structures.
party failed to develop any plausible
sort of strategy. Van der Bellen’s
2016 presidential campaign was also
important. Here, it became evident
how completely detached the party
functionaries are: his candidacy
was decided on by an executive board,
a body of thirty people. During the
campaign itself, we began to see how
weak the Greens’ local structures are.

The party conducted a patriotic

electoral campaign. This meant
strongly tacking rightwards and a
break with previous positions,
the implications of which were hardly
reflected on within party ranks.
At this point, there are even some signs
of dissolution. Shortly after the
campaign in 2016, strategic debates
began to emerge within the party,
culminating in the expulsion of the
party’s youth section, the Young
Greens, in late March 2017. The
party was simply incapable
of conducting internal debates.

Following the call for snap elections

in October 2017, the Young
Greens began to look at their options
for further political work. We
conducted discussions with various
left-wing forces, including the
Communist Party of Austria (kpö),
leading to the formation of kpö

20 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 STRUGGLE SESSION
movement in particular, their
trajectory could have been different.
Marcel Andreu
I don’t think so, no. But this path is
certainly plausible for a party
without a social basis or a social project.
The Green’s naïve, abstract anti-
institutionalism also failed to provide
a clear concept of how to deal with
institutions and work within them
without becoming coopted by them.
21
The Future
Marcel Andreu
The Austrian Greens’ main project
in recent years has been joining the
federal government. This won’t
work this time, either — in terms of
the numbers, there just isn’t a
realistic governing majority with the
Greens. If they want to survive
the next five years, they will have to
re-orient themselves.
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
Neoliberals With Wind Farms
There is still a left-wing reserve in the
party, albeit one with hardly any
institutional voice. I think the party
left could use the current crisis to
instigate a debate on what the Greens
actually want to achieve in terms of
a broader social vision. The question
is whether they manage to over-
come their political drift and democra-
tize the party.
Our analysis in the Young Greens is
that we need a project in the next
decade in which local politics develops
local roots and, potentially, turns
into a left-wing party project. By
engaging in kpö plus, we’ll
attempt to establish a new political
force to the left of the Greens.
That said, given the likelihood of a
government with far-right partici-
pation following the October elections,
we need all left-wing forces to
engage in resistance. It will require
the energy of all democratic forces.
Gareth Dale
The Green project faces a fascinating
challenge. On the one hand, the
environmental crisis is becoming far
graver than was recognized even
twenty years ago. On the other, the
root cause of the environmental
crisis is capitalism — yet most Green
parties have adapted themselves to
a role as that system’s managers. We
can only hope that anti-capitalists
within Green Parties can develop and
relate to other left-wing movements
to forge eco-socialist coalitions.  █
Translated by Loren Balhorn and
Sean Larson
 FRONT MATTERS
FRIENDS & FOES BY CONNOR KILPATRICK

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ROB PYBUS

Victory Over
the Sun

Postwar America’s
greatest environmentalist
The greatest environmentalist
of postwar America wasn’t a was a labor leader.
scientist or a wonk. He didn’t even
finish high school.

Brooklyn native Tony Mazzocchi,

who passed away in 2002, isn’t a
household name — yet. But when a
future socialist society on the other
side of the climate crisis goes looking
for statues to build and parks to
name, he will be at the top of the list.
Today, the afl-cio lobbies
Congress to pass the Keystone xl
pipeline while noted nasa
climate scientist James Hansen, one
of the first to link global warming
to fossil fuels, is repeatedly arrested
for protesting such projects.
And while in 2017, the idea that the
interests between wonky envi-
ronmentalists and jobs-focused trade
unionists would diverge seems like
common sense, it’s only because the
bad guys won.
But it wasn’t a preordained victory.
For nearly a decade in the 1960s and
’70s, environmentalism seemed to
be on the cusp of a popular reck-
oning against the powers of capital.
And it found an ally in the labor
movement which, for a few years,
looked like it might be able
to not only cling to life but find
a way back into the heart of
American society.
Mazzocchi and his union, the Oil,
Chemical and Atomic Workers
International (ocaw), were the
primary muscle behind the 1970
Occupational Safety and Health
Act (osha), signed into law by
Richard Nixon. Looking back on that
victory, which mobilized both labor
and the burgeoning environmental
movement, Mazzocchi said: “We
have demonstrated that an unpopular
idea can be generated into a
powerful political program that’ll
reignite the consciousness of the
American people.”
When the postwar boom was fizzling
out, Mazzocchi — one of the few
officials in the labor movement who
bought into neither Cold
War anticommunism nor business
unionism — wanted to push
harder: “workers should be ready to
learn about the problems of
capitalism.” And in the last decades
of his life, Mazzocchi cofounded

22 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 FRIENDS & FOES
Much like Sanders, Mazzocchi
was a survivor of decades of left retreat —
a Brooklyn Red from another era who,
somehow, managed to stay fighting so that
when the Left was ready, he was there.
the Labor Party — whose 1996
convention saw Jeremy Corbyn
taking the stage in Cleveland to
declare it “one of the most hopeful
and inspiring events I’ve been
to in very many years.” Much like
Sanders, Mazzocchi was a
survivor of decades of left retreat — a
Brooklyn Red from another era who,
somehow, managed to stay fighting so
that when the Left was ready, he
was there. And with the appearance
of the environmental movement,
Mazzocchi saw an opening.
By the late 1960s, industrial firms in
the usa were in panic mode.
A combination of a resurgent libe-
ralism, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,
and Great Society legislation had
turned the public against industrial
polluters like the chemical industry.
Industrial trade groups like the Manu-
facturing Chemists’ Association
had to do something to assuage
public concerns.
The postwar pr that championed
smoke stacks and steel furnaces
as unambiguous symbols of progress,
wealth, and modernity had lost
its ability to convince Americans to
look the other way. National media
coverage of a major oil spill off the
coast of Santa Barbara on
23
January 29, 1969, then a fire on the
Cuyahoga River in Cleveland —
caused by an oil slick — helped drive
home the environmental crisis
caused by a greedy corporate America.
Public relations consultant
Clifford B. Reeves said in 1970 that
environmentalism could become “a
basis for a broad general attack on
the entire industrial system … the
thing that provides a basis for
universal attack against private
business institutions.”
Policy analyst Anthony Downs was
optimistic about the new
environmental movement’s focus on
corporate America, which he saw
as a political strength in 1972: “much
of the ‘blame’ for pollution can be
attributed to a small group of ‘villains’
whose wealth and power make
them excellent scapegoats. Environ-
mental defenders can therefore
‘courageously’ attack these scapegoats
without antagonizing most
citizens.” By 1975, a poll found that
only 15 percent of Americans had
“a great deal of confidence” in
America’s business community, down
from 55 percent just nine years earlier.
Mazzocchi saw an opportunity. The
new environmentalism would be
the natural ally of the labor movement.
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
Victory Over the Sun
But even Rachel Carson’s massively
influential Silent Spring said next
to nothing about the workers
exposed to the chemicals she wrote
about. As Mazzocchi’s biographer
Les Leopold put it: “Carson’s prize-
winning narrative never mentions
the black hole of production, where
thousands are sickened or killed
by multiple exposures. Carson’s
blindness, Mazzocchi recognized,
was fundamentally rooted in class.”
And while consumers could boycott
and raise awareness, only the
workers behind that factory fence —
tens of thousands represented
by Mazzocchi’s union — could shut
it all down.
As Mazzocchi saw it, those chemicals
that poisoned his union’s rank and file
eventually make their way into
communities outside — through the
air, soil, and waterways. The factory
was therefore the demon core of the
environmental crisis. But as a
socialist, Mazzocchi also knew the
job site was a place in which workers
potentially had vast powers even
under capitalism. “It was the workers
in these industries who taught me
that there was a systematic conflict
between profits and health.…
When you start thinking that, when
 FRIENDS & FOES
you start to interfere with the forces
of production, you’re going to the
heart of the beast.”
And he was going to make absolutely
sure the labor movement would be
the ones dealing the death blow. For
Mazzocchi, worker control over
production was environmentalism.
Their fates were intertwined. As
he said in an Earth Day speech to the
ocaw and broadcast on the Today
show in 1970, the environmental
movement needed the labor move-
ment and vice versa.
You can’t be concerned about the
environment unless you’re
concerned about the industrial
environment because the
two are inseparable. After all,
we create the pollutants….
We’ve got to control the plant
environment and we’ve got
to tell the truth about what we’re
doing to the plant environment.
The owners of those plants had to
find a way out — fast. In a fasci-
nating study of corporate America’s
shaping of environmentalism,
lawyer Joe Conley traced a distinct
pattern emerging all the way
back to the 1960s: “The goals of
these programs ranged from
deflecting criticism of environmental
impacts and forestalling new
When the glass recycling movement
took off in 1970, it had all
the appearances of a grassroots movement.
But it was in fact a pr campaign.
24
Victory Over the Sun
environmental laws to promoting Corporate America was in luck — a
voluntary alternatives to regu- nearly identical message of
lation and gaining market share among belt-tightening, moralism, and sacri-
ecologically-conscious consumers.” fice was about to be echoed by a
Democratic administration. And their
In other words, slip off the noose
new president would respond to
that activists wanted to place on
the energy crisis that capped off the
corporate America’s necks and
recession of the 1970s with a message
instead loop it around the public’s
oriented around voluntary cutbacks
shoulders in a phony kind of
and involuntary wage caps.
universalism in which everyone is
to blame for our environmental In 1979, President Carter went on
ills, particularly consumers. television to deliver an outright
declaration of austerity, telling the
When the glass recycling movement
public not to “worship self-indulgence
took off in 1970, it had all the
and consumption” and to “take no
appearances of a grassroots movement,
unnecessary trips, to use carpools or
including a partnership with the
public transportation whenever you
Boy Scouts of America. But it was in
can … to obey the speed limit, and to
fact a pr campaign. The Glass
set your thermostats to save fuel.”
Container Manufacturers Institute
Reflecting on Carter’s inability to pass
and the firm Carl Byoir & Associates
national health care during this
developed it together after years
time, his chief speechwriter was even
of criticism for switching from return-
blunter about the ex-president’s
able bottles to the less expensive
obsession with public sacrifice: “he
no-deposit, one-use-only kind. They
was a moralist, a low-church
launched the campaign a couple
hard-pew Baptist, a devotee of facing
of days before Earth Day at a handful
hard truths and postponing
of collection centers in Los Angeles,
gratification … pay as you go wasn’t
with invitations sent out to local media
enough for him — he believed in
and journalists to come see the
pay before you go.”
new movement unfolding. Recycling
became one of many initiatives If Carter’s intentions were not wholly
to keep the state out of private enter- clear, Paul Volcker — the president’s
prise: turn a bottom-up reckoning economic emissary — announced
against power into a voluntary, to the public that “the standard of
individual project of doing good.
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
 SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME

25 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 FRIENDS & FOES
living of the average American
has to decline.” He then pursued
hawkish anti-inflationary policies
at the expense of employment —
throwing working Americans over-
board to save bondholders.
But when workers heard the ruling
class say “tighten your belts,”
they correctly understood that such a
program was never going to apply
to the wealthy. It would always mean:
lower your expectations. And
accept a worse tomorrow for your
children. The entire history of
the labor movement was clear: it was
the class enemy who told them
to do more with less. In 1980, the
Democrats’ share of the union-
family vote dropped from 63 percent
to 50 percent. Reagan won with
Morning in America while Carter lost
with his Protestant hand-wringing
over decadence and materialism.
Volcker and Carter weren’t environ-
mentalists (nor were they
anti-environmentalists), but their
belt-tightening policies fit all
too neatly with an environmentalism
increasingly focused on consumer
cutbacks. And the corporate drive to
make such regulation a matter of
voluntary consumer choices quickly
made it a middle-class lifestyle,
the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision.
As companies moved jobs over-
seas to cut down on labor costs, it
was all too easy to blame environ-
mentalists and diffuse the power of
the environmental-labor united front.
And as the man who hated work and
loved labor well understood, the
more jobs that were lost, the more the
rank and file would be swayed by
management’s argument that costly
environmental regulations only
risked losing even more. They would
26
then be won over to the reactionary
construction trades viewpoint, who
Mazzocchi once said, only half in
jest, would “pave over the Atlantic
Ocean, if given the chance.”
Only a tiny number of Americans in
the workforce are in labor unions
today, but that destructive cycle —
dwindling jobs, management’s
cost/benefits line, and a liberal envi-
ronmentalism that’s agnostic at
best on labor — has brought us to this
moment. With wages stagnant
since Mazzocchi’s heyday and a labor
movement almost entirely dead in
the private sector, keeping your head
down and doing whatever it takes
not to antagonize management is,
sadly, a rational play by a worker.
Anything to keep the rest of the jobs
from leaving, anything to stop
the bleeding. Just as victory begets
victory, losing spawns an endless
cycle of losing.
A recent Pew poll demonstrated that,
contra liberal messaging, climate
skeptics aren’t generally “more science
illiterate” than most. But, being
Americans, they are less likely to be
represented by a labor union than
the rest of the developed world. This
is a country in which workers are
uniquely dependent on their jobs for
basic rights like health care. Which
also means that they’re uniquely
dependent on their employer staying
in business no matter what the
social or environmental costs. Is it
any wonder that, in the absence of
a strong labor movement and a decent
welfare state, we have ourselves
taken on that same “cost-benefit”
analysis that corporate America
developed in order to beat back environ-
mental regulation a half century ago?
Here is the root of climate skepticism
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
Victory Over the Sun
in America. It’s not provincialism,
stupidity, or Christian apocalypticism.
It’s our uniquely weak labor
movement and our uniquely powerful
capitalist class. And, sadly, our
uniquely inept liberal elite, who —
without a strong labor movement to
keep their eyes on the prize —
turned defeat into victory and
concocted a “Third Way” environ-
mentalism of austerity — not worker
control — right out of corporate
America’s playbook.
After Trump’s election, msnbc
aired a town hall in McDowell
County, West Virginia, in which
one coal miner — sympathetic
to much of the Sanders program —
summarized why he was so
grateful for his job in an industry
shedding them: “I love being a
coal miner … we do it for the money,
we do it for the hospitalization,
for what it gives us.” When asked if
there were other jobs in their
county that paid what coal mining
paid with the same benefits,
would he take them, he and the entire
audience responded with a
resounding yes.
But when Sanders pointed out that
climate change is real and that
no coal miner is responsible (“you
are not my enemy”) the miner on
stage was one of the few who didn’t
applaud. Chris Hayes, the host,
asked him why. The miner answered:
“Climate change? I mean the
world’s been changing for billions of
years … I believe that we could
really rebuild America, not just with
McDowell County of course but
any county and any state that has coal.
I think it should go on until
there’s no more of it left.” While a
popular candidate like Sanders —
 FRIENDS & FOES
A recent study put the total amount
of wealth sitting in tax shelters
at around $21 trillion. Right there is our
ticket out of climate collapse.
an independent socialist — was the stuff
of Mazzocchi’s lifelong dreams,
here was the crisis he saw coming
decades ago.
While liberals might scoff at the
miner’s climate skepticism, here was
someone potentially on board
with a radical, redistributive, and
expensive project to rebuild
America. His insistence that it should
be based on coal in the face of climate
change is simply because no other
project has seriously been on offer.
But the working class must be won
to a left environmentalism. To
weather the coming climate collapse,
we’ll need far more than solar
panels and reduced emissions — the
only kinds of reform we’ll ever get
out of liberalism. We’ll need to do what
capital by definition never can and
put all of our society’s productive forces
to work and say to hell with private
property rights. And there’s no way
to do any of that without winning
the working class over to it all.
The way forward, though, isn’t a
politics of fearmongering or austerity,
no matter how environmentally
justified in either case. In 1913, a
Russian futurist opera entitled
27
Victory Over the Sun premiered in
Saint Petersburg. The reaction was
decidedly negative. But the Bolshevik
avant-garde artist Eli Lissitzky saw
something else, and a few years after
the October Revolution, he adapted
the opera with a cast of mechanical
puppets. “The sun as the expression of
old world energy is torn down
from the heavens by modern man,”
said Lissitzky, “who by virtue of
his technological superiority creates
his own energy source.”
In 2017, we tend to be skeptical of
that kind of techno-utopianism, even
from a Bolshevik like Lissitzky. It
sounds more like the “better tomorrow”
of Elon Musk or Disney’s Epcot than
Sanders or Corbyn.
But why should we let billionaire
techno-utopians or climate denialists
like Trump be the only ones
promising workers a better tomorrow?
That McDowell coal miner might be
skeptical about climate change but
that’s only because those are the cards
(and the economy) capitalism
has dealt him. Instead of trying to get
him to #FuckingLoveScience,
we should be trying to organize him
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
Victory Over the Sun
into a socialist program of full
employment and democratic control
of production to rebuild the country
and the world with an eye on radically
lowering emissions.
And instead of incentivizing private
investment in infrastructure, as
Trump has proposed doing, we should
use the assets of the wealthy to
build genuinely public goods. A recent
study put the total amount of
wealth sitting in tax shelters at around
$21 trillion. Right there is our
ticket out of climate collapse — a
worldwide mobilization to
modernize our infrastructure and
redistribute resources to
those places farthest behind. Ecstatic
expropriation — the opposite of
a grim, moralizing austerity.
So let’s grab those bank accounts
and print the blank check to do it all
and leave the religious doomsaying
to the Christians. Mazzocchi didn’t
live to see his dream of a strong,
revived labor movement leading the
charge against climate change.
But he knew it was the only way
out — both for the planet’s survival
and for a world worth saving.  █
TYRANNO-
SAURUS
REX

TRISH KAHLE

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s

life is intimately tied to US energy
policy and all the social
devastation that comes with it.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 28

TYRANNOSAURUS REX
S
ecretary of State Rex Tillerson recently
accompanied Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia,
where, alongside some bizarre political theater and
$110 billion in arms sales, plans for a new project unfolded.
ExxonMobil, the oil company Tillerson formerly helmed,
inked a major investment deal with the Saudi Arabia Indus-
tries Corporation (sabic).
Strikingly, the endeavor was not to fund oil field
development in Saudi Arabia with US dollars. Rather,
sabic agreed to finance a new petrochemical complex in
Texas. Though Tillerson promised that he would recuse
himself from any Exxon-related business for one year,
he attended the signing ceremony.
The new plant will open in San Patricio, a rural county
on the Gulf of Mexico with a population of about 64,000.
The project belongs to Exxon’s “Growing the Gulf” ini-
tiative, which will funnel more than $20 billion into the
region’s oil and chemical industries.
The Saudi-Exxon deal highlights how global capitalism
often complicates politicians’ claims that fossil fuel invest-
ments help make the United States energy independent.
How would Trump’s supporters react if they knew that Saudi
money was paying for these new industrial jobs?
So far, government officials and Exxon execu-
tives don’t seem particularly concerned about public
reaction. While many Americans will find the idea
of Saudi investment driving industrial growth in
domestic extractive industries odd, it reflects a new
international order in which the country has become
a major player.
People in Africa might be less surprised: Saudi Arabia
has been engaged in a land grab there since at least 2009,
when King Abdullah launched an initiative for “Agriculture
Investments Abroad” — a policy that aimed to stabilize
the kingdom’s food supply as water shortages made its
earlier program of internal agricultural subsidy untenable.
Abdullah called the initiative “controlled externalization.”
While carried out with heavy government subsidy, the plan,
known as kaisaia, also invited private investors to join in
on building out the empire.
The combination of corporate and state power that
defines the reenergized Saudi imperial project mirrors the
approach of the current American administration, and Til-
lerson’s appointment as secretary of state. In a new world of
colonial land grabs where the United States is no longer as
decisively “on top,” rearticulating the relationship between
29 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
corporate and state power is helping the American ruling
class navigate changing tides.
And along with Russia and China, Saudi Arabia and the
US have another thing in common: in a world on the tipping
point of catastrophic climate change, they are fossil fuel
empires with terrible records on a host of issues, including
land and labor rights.
FOSSIL FUEL EMPIRE
When Tillerson faced the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, ranking member Ben Cardin laid out the hear-
ing’s stakes. “I believe the United States today stands at a
turning point in history,” the senator said:
National power, economic, military, diplomatic is
being redefined and redistributed across the globe.
International institutions, international financial and
economic orders are under distress. Climate change is
causing irreparable harm and creating and leading to
great instability. In many parts of the world, there’s a
view that American power, determination, and, maybe
more importantly, our support for American values is
uncertain.
Meanwhile, US military forces were crossing into Poland
as part of a nato-led effort to secure European borders
against Russia. Some troops remained there, and others
fanned out into the Baltics and elsewhere across Central
and Eastern Europe.
Though continents apart, these two events reflected
increasing concerns about Russia’s ambitions and its role in
the 2016 election. To many, Tillerson’s nomination offered
further evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded
with Russian president Vladimir Putin. After all, Exxon has
a number of long-term investments in Russia’s fossil fuel
industry, including a deal with Rosneft, the Russian state
oil giant, which gives the American company access to tens
of billions of dollars of underground reserves.
Since the confirmation hearing, however, the former
oil executive has transformed from a major point of con-
tention to one of the more reasonable members of Trump’s
cabinet — a hodge-podge of the American right who dis-
agree on everything from trade policy to same-sex marriage.
Nevertheless, he remains a dangerous figure: an enthusi-
astic oil statesman with stereotypical Texas swagger, keenly
aware of the changing balance of international power and
 TILLERSON
almost giddy at the chance to help shape it from a high-
ranking political post.

PERSONIFIES
“[P]eoples and nations are deeply unsettled,” he
explained at the Senate hearing. “Old ideas and interna-
tional norms which were well understood and governed ...
may no longer be effective in our time.” He pointed to the
emergence of Russia and China as imperial powers and to TRUMP’S
challenges to American financial and geopolitical interests
worldwide. PLANS FOR
A NEW
His international vision also darkens the domestic front:
attacks on workers have intensified, and the United States

AMERICAN
has renewed its commitment to a set of environment policies
that can only be deemed fossil fuel suicide.
It’s no accident that Senator Cardin’s opening remarks
evoked both foreign policy and climate change. Statecraft,
which includes securing access to different energy sources, CENTURY.
is forged at the highest levels of government and deeply tied
into our changing climate. Tillerson personifies this link —
he ran a company now synonymous with climate change
“denial, delay, and delusion” and which has demonstrated
an antipathy not only toward the planet and the already mil-
lions of climate refugees but also toward state sovereignty.
Back in January, protesters interrupted Tillerson’s
confirmation hearing, saying that his state department
would “burn the Arctic, ruin the climate, and destroy the
future.” The administration responded by pushing through
the final approval for Energy Transfer Partners (etp) to
drill beneath the Missouri River and complete the Dakota
Access Pipeline, ignoring the Standing Rock Sioux’s treaty
rights and threatening a water source millions of people
rely on.
After a national climate march, Trump announced that
he was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. “I was
elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,”
Trump explained. By evoking Pittsburgh, once one of the
nation’s industrial centers, Trump presented his vision of
the United States as a fossil fuel empire.
Indeed, at that very moment, Interior Secretary Ryan
Zinke was in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (npr),
where he declared that “this is land that was set up with
the sole intention of oil and gas production.” Of course,
the npr belongs to and is still used by many indigenous
Alaskans, such as the Kuukpik and Inupiaq, who are trying
to protect their land from the extractive industries Zinke
and Tillerson are promoting.
Trump’s other cabinet members make the administration’s

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 30

priorities even clearer. Rick Perry, former Texas governor and
board member of two of the companies behind the Dakota
Access Pipeline (etp and Sunoco Logistics), became energy
secretary after promising to abolish the department during
his own presidential campaign.
Before being chosen to lead the Department of Inte-
rior, Zinke opposed fracking regulations on federal lands,
worked to undo the Clean Air Act, and strongly supported
pipeline development. Others, such as Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin and Defense Secretary General James
Mattis, will help enact Trump’s plans to reindustrialize
the nation by accelerating the fossil fuel extraction race in
the nation’s oil and natural gas fields and rebranding the
empire not only as a massive energy consumer but also as an
energy exporter. To accomplish this goal, industrialization
must be made profitable by undoing regulations, crushing
unions, and ignoring indigenous land rights, since a sub-
stantial portion of the nation’s energy reserves sit on current
tribal land holdings.
Though the initial controversy over Tillerson’s nomi-
nation has calmed, the reasons he became a flashpoint have
not disappeared: he personifies Trump’s plans for the United
States at a moment when the global balance of power that
kept America on top is crumbling.
While the Trump administration’s imperial style
looks more like the Bush administration’s “shock and
awe” than Obama’s shadow wars, the United States’
role in world politics has shifted since the early 2000s
as China, the European Union, and Russia have broad-
ened their reach. The world that made Tillerson a
powerful man is not the same as the one that he must now
try to manage.
When Tillerson began his career at ExxonMobil more
than forty years ago, two superpowers dominated the world.
Today, the imperial pecking order is up for grabs, and global
neoliberalism has undermined the promises of decoloniza-
tion by upending national economies that once promised
self-reliance and sovereignty. Fossil fuels still run the world,
but now their use destabilizes it — politically, socially, and
ecologically. As secretary of state, Tillerson represents the
31 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
ruling class’s attempt to reimpose — internationally and
domestically — an old order on a new world.
ENERGY STATES
If American imperialism must reckon with the changing
balance of international power, it makes sense that its ruling
class would turn to the oil industry for inspiration. Compa-
nies like ExxonMobil, after all, have toppled governments
and remade nations right alongside the State Department.
Leading Exxon, as Rex Tillerson did for over a decade,
means dabbling in statecraft.
In fact, both by intention and by accident, ExxonMobil
and other oil companies, like bp and Shell, helped create the
modern nation. As decolonization tore apart old empires,
many formerly colonized nations became petrostates depen-
dent on oil sales — Angola, Chad, and Nigeria, for example.
As anthropologist James Ferguson explains, these nations
tend to be “socially thin”: they lack basic infrastructure
and social services; their political fabric is often ragged, if
it meaningfully exists at all.
In Angola, for example, infrastructure in the vola-
tile countryside is so poor that companies transport their
imported employees to the oil fields by helicopter, com-
pletely bypassing the instability and repression that the
energy economy has wrought — not to mention the Ango-
lans themselves, who are largely excluded from the fossil
fuel industry.
Observers have largely blamed postcolonial petrostates’
failures on the “resource curse” or, more insultingly, on the
project of national independence itself. If the repeated claim
that energy-reliant national economies are prone to political
violence and instability has any truth, it comes from the
fact that, behind the scenes and often out of the public eye,
companies like ExxonMobil helped ensure such an outcome.
Since being sworn in, Tillerson has kept a low pro-
file. He doesn’t need the twenty-four-hour news cycle like
Trump and Steve Bannon do. While in Germany for the
g20 summit, he kept reporters at bay, and in June he quietly
traveled to Mexico. But while his approach differs from
COMPANIES LIKE EXXONMOBIL,
AFTER ALL, HAVE TOPPLED GOVERNMENTS
AND REMADE NATIONS RIGHT
ALONGSIDE THE STATE DEPARTMENT.
some of his White House colleagues, Tillerson still aims
to ramp up American fossil fuel power.
The United States’ oil empire extends all over the world,
from pipelines across the Great Plains to recent efforts
to retake Mosul. Indeed, we should understand Trump’s
promise to “win wars again” as a commitment to empire
building and regime change. Fossil fuels sit at the center
of this vision, as Trump’s comment that the United States
should “take” Iraq’s oil as repayment for the cost of the
American-led occupation shows.
The international ruling class tends to find this kind
of crass expropriation more palatable when it’s “bilateral”
and financialized. That’s why Tillerson’s experience at
ExxonMobil matters so much.
In 1988, Exxon negotiated the landmark
Convention for Exploration, Exploitation, and Transpor-
tation of Hydrocarbons in Chad, which allowed Chevron,
ExxonMobil, and petronas to claim more than a third
of the revenue produced from the country’s oil until 2023.
Even by the standards of other petrostates, the theft of
Chad’s wealth by ExxonMobil was remarkable: Nigeria, for
example, saw only about 10 percent of revenue go to the
oil companies. Further, recognizing that Chad’s volatile
political situation was unfavorable for the long-term capital
investments that oil drilling and export require, Exxon also
secured what became known as a “stability clause.”
According to Steve Coll, author of Private Empire: Exx-
onMobil and American Power, this extraordinary provision
ensured that Exxon would remain outside of the grasp of the
Chadian government. The clause was “strikingly broad — it
could even be interpreted to mean that future governments
... might be prevented from broadening civic freedoms or
permitting unions to organize if such changes raised ...
costs.” Coll points out that it’s “not surprising” that Exx-
onMobil could pen such a deal. After all, the company’s
“1988 net profits of $5.3 billion exceeded by several times
the size of Chad’s entire economy.”
In its most basic sense, state sovereignty is supposed
to mean the ability to control territory, but ExxonMo-
bil’s sheer economic power called Chad’s sovereignty into
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
question less than thirty years after the nation secured
independence from France. Government was reduced to
what Ferguson describes as “the ability to provide con-
tractual legal authority that can legitimate the extractive
work of transnational firms.” The power to legitimize the
contracts was not accompanied by the meaningful ability
to say no to entering into the agreements in the first place.
This asymmetry, so fundamental to modern-day colonialism,
bore remarkable similarity to the process by which Native
Americans were dispossessed of lands through treaties.
Company executives, including Tillerson — who was
working in the international division at the time — seemed
giddy about the possibilities: in Chad, the company had “the
opportunity to put things into place perhaps the way you’d
like to see them carried out from the very beginning.” By
the 1980s, ExxonMobil was battling enormous regulatory
systems in developed nations like the United States. Even
if the company wasn’t held to account for the human and
ecological destruction it caused, the mere existence of reg-
ulatory and legal apparatuses that could be turned against
them represented a threat to the company’s future opera-
tions. In a place like Chad, on the other hand, ExxonMobil
saw a chance to shape the nation around the needs of the
company: as the oil markets went, so did the nation — and
Chad’s government officials knew it.
Exxon also used the World Bank to achieve its goals:
the agency made loans dependent on agreements that oil
revenue would be used to build the social infrastructure that
might stabilize Exxon’s investments. In what can only be
perceived as a return of colonial-era financial ties, control
of Chad’s oil revenue was rerouted through Europe — this
time to London instead of Paris.
These exercises in soft power set expectations for
how the international flow of oil might be managed by
Western capital in the years after the 1970s confrontations
with opec, and they shaped recent history’s flashier oil
interventions, like the wars in Iraq. The line between Exx-
onMobil’s economic power and the United States’ imperial
reach has become murky at best. Depending on the angle
you look from, it might look like ExxonMobil is an arm
32
 TYRANNOSAURUS REX

of the US state; from another, the reverse appears true.

NO ONE COLONIZES INNOCENTLY

Considering the role fossil fuels have played in the United
States’ imperial strategy, we should also consider their
impact on domestic projects, which have always been
deeply intertwined with the international projection of
power.
The outcomes have striking similarities: a dispossessed
indigenous population, high levels of poverty in the regions
that produce fossil fuels, and, with the exception of gains won

DEPENDING ON
through unionization, the creation of socially thin communities
that often lack public services.

THE ANGLE
The recent Bakken field boomtowns — many of which
went bust during the 2015 drop in oil and gas prices — per-
fectly illustrate these domestic impacts. The influx of oil

YOU LOOK FROM, field workers stretched the area’s already weak infrastruc-
ture beyond capacity. Schools and jails quickly became

IT MIGHT LOOK overcrowded. Housing was so scare that families paid

$2,500 a month to crowd into a small trailer. Drug use

LIKE EXXONMOBIL
increased, as did violent crime, often related to alcohol
abuse.

IS AN ARM
Some small towns, like Watford City, North Dakota,
pushed their residents’ basic needs onto the private market,
requiring, for example, that developers pay to extend sewer

OF THE US STATE; lines to properties built for the new workers.

We find this social thinness in the workplace as well as in

FROM ANOTHER, the infrastructure. In the United States, energy production

tops the list of deadly jobs, with death rates several times

THE REVERSE
higher than the rate for the average American worker —
even considering the general rise in workplace deaths, which

APPEARS TRUE.
began following the Great Recession and peaked in 2014.
Companies often face little or no censure from
oversight agencies following a workplace disaster.
Meanwhile, eroding safety regulations have caused
fatal black lung cases to spike across coal country,
despite the fact that the technology to prevent the
disease has been available for over forty years.
The Trump administration might ax federal agencies
like osha, which is already severely understaffed. Such
underfunding allows companies to cut safety corners,
racking up savings at the expense of workers’ lives and
environmental protection. Meanwhile, deregulation helps

33 33 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

increase oil and natural gas development by lowering the
financial hurdle for initial capital investments. Developing
the nation’s fossil fuel reserves for international export —
especially to countries where the US is vying for influence
with Russia and China — is a Trump administration priority
to build soft power in geostrategic locations like Eastern
Europe.
Moreover, international statecraft and domestic poli-
cies regularly intertwine in the dispossession of indigenous
people from their lands and the brutal repression that fol-
lows when they resist.
During the last half of 2016, the connection between
fossil fuel development and imperial power was put on dis-
play for the world in South Dakota, where the Standing Rock
Sioux attempted to block etp’s Dakota Access Pipeline.
Private security guards and the Morton County sheriff’s
office took turns brutally repressing protesters, arresting
hundreds and attacking water protectors with dogs, water
cannons, and concussion grenades.
Just as ExxonMobil and the World Bank collaborated
to strip the Chadian government of meaningful sover-
eignty, the American state and etp ran roughshod over the
Standing Rock Sioux’s sovereignty and treaty rights. After
all, native self-determination was all that stood in the way
of a pipeline that would sweep oil across the Great Plains
and into the Midwest, where it could be refined for market.
As the oil is pumped away from the Bakken fields, the
vacuum left will be filled with busted boomtowns, life-threat-
ening working conditions, and, in only a matter of time, an
oil spill that will contaminate millions of residents’ drinking
water. All the while, carbon emissions will continue, and
many of the people who fought the pipeline will find their
homes uninhabitable, no longer able to support the vibrant
Native life that once covered the Great Plains.
This tightly woven tapestry of oppression, dispos-
session, and repression represents ExxonMobil’s version
of statecraft, which harnesses national infrastructure
to pipe oil out of the ground as cheaply as possible.
Just ignore the bodies along the way, whether they
are in Chad, Iraq, the Bakken, or the Standing Rock
Sioux reservation.
At the root of these policies lies a basic problem that,
in an era of climate disruption, will shape our lives and
the struggles to come: the social distribution of energy.
Because energy underpins nearly every aspect of life, it has
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
the potential to destabilize the capitalist regime. Energy
makes automation possible and provides higher standards
of living. The question of who controls it and for what pur-
pose opens up questions about the nature of power and
our society.
All of this is, of course, bigger than Tillerson. The United
States is doubling down on a foreign policy designed to
maintain and rebuild a fossil fuel empire at the expense of
developing energy alternatives.
Today, the solar industry employs more people than
the coal industry, and we should make power central to
international energy policy if we want to limit climate dis-
ruption. In other words, the evils of fossil fuel society aren’t
necessary: they are being kept in place while an alternative
sits right in front of us.
Tillerson’s professional life has been intimately tied to
the United States’ energy policies and all the social ills and
political evils they entail. Even as the world is changing,
he — along with the rest of the Trump administration and
most of the bipartisan political establishment — is clinging
to a system that will destroy us.
With Trump in the White House, Tillerson leading the
State Department, and the rest of the right-wing horror
show along for the ride, we can expect American energy
policy to invest its political capital in making the country
even friendlier to fossil fuels.
The coal companies’ mood says it all. The first issue
of the industry journal Coal Age after the election greeted
the new president giddily. Luke Popovich, spokesperson
for the National Mining Association, christened Trump
“coal’s savior.” Editor Steve Fiscor practically salivated as
he lauded Trump’s plan to “unleash an energy revolution.”
The path to this future will have three elements: secure
the land, weaken labor, and dismantle regulations. Only
by cementing anti-imperialism, native sovereignty, and
climate justice as core elements of the class struggle can
we hope to respond and resist Tillerson as well as the state
and industrial power that he represents. 
34
 DIGGING
FREE OF
POVERTY

THEA RIOFRANCOS

In Ecuador, the Left is torn

between urgent development
needs and the costs
of natural resource extraction.
35 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
O
n March 8, 2012, a few hundred marchers
set out from Pangui, Ecuador, a town in the
southeastern Amazon, near the construc-
tion site of the massive, open-pit Mirador Mine. Just
days earlier, a consortium of Chinese state-owned
companies had signed a contract to exploit the mine’s
copper reserves, the first agreement of its kind in the
country’s history.
The demonstrators zigzagged through the southern
Andes, where more mines are planned throughout the
highland wetlands, which supply water to rural farmers
and urban consumers. Reinforcements from the northern
Amazon joined the march along the way, intentionally
traversing the route of crude oil that has for decades flowed
through notoriously faulty pipelines. After a seven-hun-
dred-kilometer trek, on foot and in unwieldy caravans, the
two-week long March for Water, Life, and the Dignity of
Peoples reached its end in Quito, where the state coffers,
voters, and armed forces form the complex of economic
incentives, democratic legitimacy, and military repres-
sion that activists contend keeps the country’s extractive
model in motion.
In their words and imagery, marchers proposed an
alternative model: a post-extractive vision in which the
polity was not a machine that ran on fossil fuels but a plural
collectivity of cultures and ecosystems.
By the time they arrived in the capital city, their num-
bers had swelled to twenty-five thousand.
This expanding throng — anti-mining banners and
rainbow indigenous flags in tow — was just one vibrant
example of a larger trend in global politics of which Ecua-
dorian activists have been a forerunner: the explosion of
anti-extractive movements.
In recent years, this new form of politics has made its
presence known everywhere from the copper deposits of
the southern Amazon to the shale oil reserves of western
Pennsylvania. Communities are fighting the expansion of
the extractive frontier. They’re protesting fracking and oil
pipelines, standing against environmental contamination
and territorial displacement.
Naomi Klein calls this new politics “Blockadia,” and
sees in it the potential to go “beyond extractivism”: the
“barricades of Blockadia,” she argues, are erected not only to
resist socio-environmental destruction but also to demand
democratic control over the conditions of our socio-natural
existence. And crucially, by impeding fossil fuel extraction
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
and environmental destruction, these movements — in
many cases led by indigenous groups — hope to slow cli-
mate change’s advance.
Their presence has been especially prominent in South
America, where the ascendance of Pink Tide governments
and a historic boom in global commodity prices reshaped
the region. When the Left won power in the early 2000s, it
had a robust mandate, programmatic clarity, and, impor-
tantly, the fiscal room to maneuver, thanks to rents from
sky-high commodity prices. As a result, Chávez, Correa,
Kirchner, Lula, and Morales could govern from the left, a
rare feat in any context.
Across the continent, these administrations reasserted
state control over critical economic sectors that neoliberal
politicians had allowed to be run by the dictates of capital,
and made remarkable gains. They reduced poverty and
income inequality, improved health and education out-
comes, and made strides in democratizing the state, bringing
in long-excluded groups.
But in Ecuador, petro-socialism drove a wedge between
the left government and indigenous groups that before Cor-
rea’s rise were amongst the most powerful social movements
in the Western Hemisphere.
Natural resources have long occupied a privileged place
in the Latin American political imagination. In the face of
imperial plunder and capitalist privatization, both populist
groups and nationalist military regimes have held up oil and
minerals as collective property for the people.
In recent years, however, indigenous and environmental
groups have taken a radically different stance. Rather than
demanding oil for the people, they increasingly take aim
at the extractive model itself. The relentless exploitation
of natural resources, they argue, pollutes the environment,
violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on for-
eign capital, and undermines democracy. A post-extractive
economy — not socialized extraction — is their utopian
vision.
The intra-left battle over extraction reached its
most intense pitch in Ecuador. Indigenous groups that
helped pave the way for Correa’s rise by leading the battle
against neoliberalism broke sharply with the government,
interweaving claims to territorial sovereignty with a radical
environmentalism vigorously opposed to new extraction
projects.
The state has been divided in its response. Some state
officials have echoed movement calls for a transition to a
36
DIGGING FREE OF POVERTY
“post-extractive” economy, while others — most notably
Correa himself — have accused anti-extractive activists of
being traitors to the nation and tools of imperialist powers.
THE NATIONAL PATRIMONY
For decades, Ecuador has been a petrostate, dependent on
rents derived from oil extraction and export.
In the early 1970s, amid a global oil boom, the
nationalist Rodríguez Lara military government avidly
promoted newly discovered oil reserves as an anti-
imperialist route to economic development. The junta
established a state-owned petroleum company, invested
in domestic industry, redistributed land, instituted price
controls, and organized peasant cooperatives.
These reforms, combined with boom-fueled growth,
yielded reductions in poverty and improved living
standards. Though this experiment in resource nationalism
was short-lived — declining oil prices and a backlash from
foreign oil companies soon spelled its demise — it left as
its political legacy the recurrent aspiration to reclaim oil
from foreign capital and conjure development from crude.
The arrival of neoliberalism in the early 1980s did
away with the developmentalist approach to natural
resources. Eager to attract outside investment, a series
of governments lowered taxes, weakened environmental
regulation, and opened up new concessions for bids on
exploration contracts. In response, a broad coalition of
popular organizations —most prominently, the national
indigenous federation (the conaie), oil workers’ unions,
and an umbrella group called the Coordinadora de
Movimientos Sociales — fashioned a new radical resource
nationalism. The Rodríguez Lara government’s devel-
opmentalism had been state-heavy and stopped short
of criticizing capitalism; these groups envisioned
democratic, popular sovereignty over the economy and
the extraction that fueled it.
The coalition and its ideology were shaped by the
period’s social conflicts. The conaie was at once a social
movement of indigenous people and a central player in
a broader bloc of the oppressed. One of their chief aims
was to transform an ethno-racially exclusionary state into
a plurinational one. But their alliances with other popular
sector groups induced indigenous leaders to frame social
conflicts in broader terms: as a battle between “the people”
or “the poor” and “the oligarchy.”
37 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
Resources, long stolen by foreign capitalists in collu-
sion with domestic elites, were conceived of as the people’s
rightful heritage, to be owned and managed collectively.
The problem, as they saw it, was not extraction or even
export, but the ownership and regulatory regime that
had funneled the revenues into private coffers, leaving
poverty and underdevelopment in its wake. Rather than
struggling against extraction, conaie’s 1994 political
program reclaimed sovereignty over resources, while also
trying to transform the nature of national sovereignty itself.
Oil workers were also key architects of radical resource
nationalism. In February 2002, the environmental justice
group Amazon Defense Front and the oil workers’ union
(Federation of Ecuadorian Petroleum Workers, fetrapec)
led an eleven-day oil strike in the northern Amazonian city
of Lago Agrio to protest the construction of a privately
owned and operated pipeline (Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados,
ocp).
It wasn’t the first time the union had resisted such pri-
vatization schemes: in the mid-1990s, oil workers launched a
hunger strike to protest plans to put the older, state-owned
pipeline (Sistema de Oleoducto Transecuatoriano or sote)
in private hands, forcing the government to suspend the
initiative. But in 2002, the state met workers with extreme
repression.
In June and August of 2003, members of fetrapec
and cetape (Committee of Petroecuador Workers) flooded
the streets of Quito to protest the threat of oil privatization
under the Lucio Gutiérrez administration. They framed
both the privately owned ocp and oil field privatization
as ‘‘selling out national patrimony’’ and the ‘‘plundering
of resources,” and asserted that “petroleum belongs to the
people, not the imf.”
Around the same time, a contract with Occidental Oil
became another flashpoint. In 2000, Occidental (“Oxy”)
had violated Ecuadorian law by transferring 40 percent
of its economic interest to another oil company without
first receiving ministerial approval, officious behavior that
many protested as the latest corporate encroachment upon
national sovereignty.
In August 2005, residents and local elected officials
launched an eight-day oil strike in the northeastern Ama-
zonian provinces of Orellana and Sucumbíos. Strikers
occupied airports, roads, and oil wells, resulting in hundreds
of millions of dollars in economic losses. They demanded
the termination of the contract with Occidental and the
 nationalization of oil to fund social and economic needs,
and insisted that no more oil contracts should be settled
without Amazonian communities’ and local governments’
consent. Two strains of left social mobilization that would
come into conflict under Correa — nationalist resource
sovereignty and nascent anti-extractivism — were at this

A POST-
point unified in a popular front against neoliberalism.
The Alfredo Palacio government conceded to demands

EXTRACTION
for local investment, but protesters didn’t let up. In the
Amazonian region, ongoing mobilization in Shuar and
Achuar communities alongside non-indigenous farmers

ECONOMY — NOT culminated in protests in Quito against Oxy and a proposed

bilateral free trade agreement with the United States on May

SOCIALIZED 8, 2006. The march — staged “in defense of sovereignty,

natural resources, and national dignity” — received support

EXTRACTION — IS
from the radical environmental group Acción Ecológica, the
conaie, a national umbrella federation of unions (Frente

THEIR UTOPIAN
Patriótico), the oil workers’ union, and the indigenous polit-
ical party Pachakutik. The Palacio government downplayed
the protest but again ultimately met the demonstrators’

VISION. demands. On May 15, 2006, they terminated the contract

with Occidental Petroleum.
Meanwhile, as the oil frontier expanded to new
territories, a new form of resistance to oil was more clearly
taking shape. In Quito and in the northern Amazon, rad-
ical resource nationalism still guided the social movement
response to neoliberal oil policy, and, in the case of the oil
strike and anti-Oxy protests, won concrete political gains.
But, alongside and intertwined with resource nationalism,
indigenous activists in the central and southern Amazon
were expanding their position from a critique of particular
oil companies or ownership structures to a more encom-
passing condemnation of the oil-based development
model. After decades battling logging, agro-industry, and
state-sponsored colonization of highland peoples in the
Amazon, these indigenous groups viewed oil exploration
as yet another threat to their territorial autonomy.
In January 2005, in response to the proposed expansion
of oil extraction to the central and southern Amazon, the
Sarayaku people, and the Shuar and Achuar nations — whose
territory overlapped with new oil blocks — emerged as vocal
opponents of oil extraction itself.
As conflict heightened not only with foreign oil com-
panies but with the state-owned oil company Petroecuador
and state ministers, the presidents of the Sarayaku Asso-
ciation and the Interprovincial Shuar federation (fisch)

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 38

DIGGING FREE OF POVERTY
came out in opposition to oil extraction and declared the
authority of indigenous communities to manage the subsoil
resources in their territory. Their statements invoked the con-
cept of el territorio — the socio-natural space of cultural and
ecological reproduction — that had been forged over
decades of struggle to defend ancestral territory against
the encroachment of state-led colonization efforts, and oil
and logging companies.
These localized oil conflicts laid the foundations for
anti-extractivism. But it was not until Correa came to power
that oppositional social movements would gather under
that banner.
OIL FRONTIERS
On the eve of Correa’s election, the national indigenous
federation was in a rut as the broad popular coalition it
had assembled just a few years earlier began to dissipate
and fragment.
But an anti-neoliberal mood suffused the political field,
and Correa and his new party Alianza País stepped forward
to fill the vacuum, securing a resounding victory in the
second round of the 2006 presidential elections.
Proudly trumpeting its adherence to “twenty-first-
century socialism,” the new administration saw in oil and
large-scale mining the opportunity to deliver on the long-de-
ferred promise of equitable national development. Correa
claimed that his administration constituted a definitive
rupture with “the long night of neoliberalism” and that he
would reassert state control over the economy, particularly
natural resources.
Policy practice, however, proved less radical than rhet-
oric: rather than the outright expropriations that occurred
in mid-century Latin America, Correa’s reassertion of
national power took the form of renegotiated contracts
that increased taxes and royalties. Foreign capital continued
to loom large. Oil financed one-third of the state budget, on
average, but spending outpaced revenues, and the govern-
ment racked up $17.4 billion in Chinese loans.
Relationships with many social movement leaders and
leftist intellectuals — who had supported Correa’s candi-
dacy — soon began to fray. Unlike Bolivia’s mas, Alianza
País was an electoral vehicle, not a movement party, and
intra-left tensions mounted during the 2007­–8 constitu-
tional assembly.
Although the resulting constitution recognized new
39 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
collective rights, the Kichwa concept of buen vivir (living
well), and the rights of nature, the drafting process was rife
with disputes over the scope and content of indigenous
self-determination, and the extractive development model.
Gradually, anti-neoliberal social movements began to dis-
pense with nationalist rhetoric (“resources for the people”)
and adopted a new stance: anti-extraction, full stop.
The 2009 Mining Law was a key extractive sector,
calling into question the collective rights recognized in
the new constitution and galvanizing protests across the
highlands. As the administration increasingly promoted
new extractive projects, justifying them as national devel-
opment, oppositional social movements aimed squarely at
the extractive model, in language and action.
The first three declarations of the resolution adopted at
the conaie’s 2013 Assembly read: “Maintain our political
autonomy and independence from the Government of Pres-
ident Rafael Correa,” “Maintain the unwavering struggle
against the extractivist model,” and “Declare Ecuador ‘Free
of Large Scale Mining’ especially in sources of water and
watersheds.”
Though oil had sparked localized resistance in the past,
the Correa government’s ardent promotion of large-scale
mining — which removes mountains, poisons water, and
dispossesses communities — raised the stakes. For activists,
large-scale mining was a fork in the road: the country would
either continue down the path of extraction, or it would
veer off in a completely new direction, toward both popular
sovereignty and environmental sustainability.
CORREA IN POWER
Anti-extractivism wasn’t just new for Ecuador — it
marked a departure from classic left concerns: the
mode of production, the property regime, the pattern of
distribution, the regulation of the economy, and the means
to development.
At its most unadulterated, anti-extractivism regarded
these concepts and their political targets as not only insuffi-
cient but as guilty of reproducing the developmentalist and
“anthropocentric” pathology that they saw as the essence of
a “Western civilization” imposed via colonialism. Anti-ex-
tractivism radically de-centers human beings in a way that
was prefigured by the new constitution’s recognition of
nature as the subject of rights: crude and ore are protago-
nists; wetlands and mountains moral agents.
IN FEBRUARY 2002,
THE ENVIRONMENTAL
JUSTICE GROUP
AMAZON DEFENSE FRONT
AND THE OIL
WORKERS’ UNION LED
AN ELEVEN-DAY OIL
STRIKE IN LAGO AGRIO
TO PROTEST
THE CONSTRUCTION
OF A PRIVATELY
OWNED AND OPERATED
PIPELINE.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 40

DIGGING FREE OF POVERTY

Anti-extractivism elicited a range of responses from mining, no to gas, no to hydroelectric power, no to roads.
state actors. Some officials reiterated elements of this crit- This is an absurd novelty, but it’s as if it has become a
ical discourse; others dismissed anti-extractive activists as fundamental part of left discourse.… We cannot lose
enemies of the state. But no matter their reaction, they were sight of the fact that the main objective of a country
responding on anti-extractivists’ terms. Anti-extractivism such as Ecuador is to eliminate poverty. And for that
succeeded in reframing the debate. we need our natural resources.
The political power of anti-extractive resistance lay in
Correa’s discourse veered on caricature, but identified real
part in its track record disrupting strategic oil and mining
challenges facing a movement opposed to extraction in all
projects. Extraction’s effects travel to distant locales by air
forms. Radical resource nationalism — which the Correa
and water, and through the complex relationships between
administration redeployed, albeit in somewhat diluted form:
points of extraction and points of consumption, whether
no nationalizations; lots of courting foreign oil and mining
in the form of burned fossil fuel or redistributive social
companies — elevated a mass political subject against a
investment paid for by resource rents. So activists resisted
widely despised figure, the foreign capitalist.
it at every level.
It dramatized the resistance to neoliberalism and solid-
Their critique of extraction also touched an ideological
ified a popular sector coalition, tying together groups with
nerve with the leftist government.
distinct histories of struggle: indigenous organizations,
For some state officials, the anti-extractive critique
labor unions, urban movements. It called for concrete
dovetailed with their goal of a “post-extractive” economy:
changes in the structure of ownership and regulation,
reducing reliance on low value-added primary exports
framing these as necessary to address the unmet needs of
and replacing them with research and ecotourism sectors.
the people. Its narrative structure was progressive and tele-
Another, more powerful, set of actors was less sympathetic.
ological, promising a bright future of reclaimed sovereignty
Summoning nationalist, anti-imperial language, these fig-
and widespread prosperity.
ures argued that opposition to extraction was tantamount
The narrative of anti-extractivism, on the other hand,
to treason.
is more complicated. Many indigenous and environmental
This latter group went so far as to criminalize protest:
activists declare their opposition to extraction, but rarely
during its tenure, the Correa administration pursued legal
define its limits: does small-scale mining count? Industrial
action against roughly two hundred people for participating
agriculture? And how about an alternative vision? Proposals
in anti-extraction demonstrations. And in December, the
often amount to a pastiche of imagined pre-colonial pasts
outgoing government instituted a state of emergency in
and nebulous extraction-free futures.
the Amazonian province of Morona Santiago — the site
Despite the difficulty of building a mass movement
of a mining camp occupation — and ordered the military
around resistance to the extractive model, anti-extractivism
and police to raid indigenous Shuar communities near a
has delivered social movements concrete victories, and
large-scale mining project, forcing residents to flee into
upended accepted notions about collective action.
the mountains.
Several campaigns have forged urban-rural coalitions
The battle was reflective of a fight within the Left to
and in the process rescaled who counts as “directly affected”
define what a progressive development model in the Global
by extractive projects. Inhabitants of Cuenca, Ecuador’s
South should look like. In a 2012 New Left Review inter-
third largest city, have joined campesino activists (often
view, Correa made the case for including extraction as part
organized in community water councils) in the rural
of that vision.
highlands living just outside the municipal lines to resist
It is madness to say no to natural resources, which mining projects that would affect their shared water supply,
is what part of the left is proposing — no to oil, no to which irrigates dairy and vegetable farms and serves urban

41 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

residents. The anti-mining mobilization has helped stall
development of the planned Quimsacocha gold mine, one
of the government’s five “strategic” mining projects.
In 2013, a network of activists across the country
mounted an impressive campaign to prevent oil extraction
in the Yasuní National Park. The administration had previ-
ously adopted a civil society proposal to forgo oil extraction
in the park, in exchange for $3.6 billion in sustainable devel-
opment donations from the international community (a bid
to pay back the “ecological debt” that the Global North
owes the Global South after centuries of resource plunder).
When the government failed to attract enough dona-
tions, Correa pushed ahead with the previously shelved plan,
sparking the formation of the activist network yasunídos.
The campaign drew huge protests in major cities far from
the sites of extraction. Though they failed to stop Correa’s
about-face, the resistance reached a scale — both in numer-
ical size and territorial expanse — comparable to the large
protests against Occidental Petroleum and free trade in
2005 and 2006.
At the same time, the resistance at Yasuní also high-
lighted one of the anti-extraction movement’s central
challenges: how to mobilize the majority of poor Ecua-
dorians, who don’t experience the direct effects of oil
and mining projects and who enjoyed real gains under
Correa. For many of them, the calculation is clear: sup-
port the economic goose that bequeathed long-denied
material benefits. Hence his administration’s consistently
high approval ratings and electoral victories — including
in the April presidential elections in which Cor-
rea’s former vice president, Lenín Moreno, defeated
banking magnate Guillermo Lasso.
A creative response to the extractive model might
emphasize that it not only causes environmental destruc-
tion but has also produced new forms of inequality and
private enrichment. Paradoxically, the availability of
easy resource rents during the boom enabled the Correa
administration to govern from the left by increasing
social spending without radically transforming power
relations. Today, land tenure remains highly unequal,
and oligarchic business groups dominate large swaths of
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
the economy. Cash transfers have put oil money in the
pockets of the poor, but private firms reap the profits as
soon as they spend it.
The collapse in oil prices triggered a decline in resource
rents, which then forced the government to make massive
cuts to social spending and state pensions. At the same time,
the expansion of oil and mining has stoked the country’s
debt to China, reinforcing its geopolitical dependency.
The benefits that Correa’s government delivered to
the poor were real. But they’ll always be in jeopardy under
the present development model, where the web of class
relations is left virtually untouched.
COMPETING VISIONS
In 1994, as massive mobilizations against neoliberal land
reforms roiled the country, the conaie outlined a vision
for a “Planned Ecological Communitarian Economy.” Two
decades later, “socialism” and “anti-extractivism” have
come to represent distinct, perhaps inimical, political
positions.
Socialism in Correa’s usage meant state investment and
spending in the pursuit of national development that essen-
tially left intact existing class relations. Anti-extractivism
referred to the radical defense of particular territories against
extraction that didn’t mobilize a broad social bloc of the
oppressed, including, critically, the majority not directly
affected by extractive projects.
Lost in this internecine dispute is the radical promise
of twenty-first-century socialism: that ordinary people can
exert collective, democratic control over the conditions of
their existence. Such a program could demand both the
redistribution of oil and mining revenues and a transition
away from the very extractive model of accumulation that
generates those revenues. But doing so would require con-
fronting the political and economic forces that profit from
the status quo, including foreign oil and mining firms, large
landowners, and oligopolistic business groups.
In Ecuador, both left populism and anti-extractivism
were forged in the crucible of anti-neoliberal struggles.
In its drive to privatize and marketize social life,
42
DIGGING FREE OF POVERTY

capital provoked a counter-movement that transcended

defensive resistance and began to imagine a radically
different world: communitarian, ecological, plurinational,
democratic. This counter-movement drew its power from
its unity across social divides.
Tragically, it was only after a left government took
power that socialism became untethered from environ-

MANY INDIGENOUS
mentalism and that the basic needs of the masses were
counterposed to indigenous collective rights and an uncon-

AND ENVIRON-
taminated environment. This false dichotomy — the
positing of socioeconomic and environmental justice as
mutually exclusive — reflected historical circumstances

MENTAL ACTIVISTS but was not inevitable. Rather, it was shaped by a series of
strategic decisions made by the Correa government and

DECLARE THEIR social movement leaders in the heat of political conflict.

In the face of gaping inequality and deepening ecolog-

OPPOSITION TO
ical crisis, governing from the left is a daunting task. But
continuing existing models of natural resource extraction

EXTRACTION,
won’t put us on the road to economic democracy and
collective emancipation.  █

BUT RARELY DEFINE

ITS LIMITS.

43 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 M EANS O F
D E DUCT IO N

We got more graphs

than Ross Perot.
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY
THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST MARCO MICCICHÈ

Today, everybody’s favorite policy

Everybody’s for combating greenhouse gas

emissions is “cap and trade,” the
shorthand for a larger system of

Favorite Law carbon emissions trading.

It works like this: countries are each

permitted, via international
Cap and Trade programs have treaty, to emit only a certain amount
proliferated, but global emissions of carbon. They then enforce these
continue to climb. limits by allocating carbon emissions
credits to their big emitters — by
auctioning them off or selling them
outright. In that way, the thinking
goes, emitting carbon can carry a
cost more literal than the collective
cost of global warming.

Number of implemented initiatives

6 7 7 8 8 9

< 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% ~ 4%

23.3 billion tons in global

CO2 emissions

1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005

1% share of global greenhouse gas emissions under cap and trade

schemes

45 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST
It seems a simple enough idea. If
natural resources can be monetized,
why not the pollutants they unleash?
Why not turn the market, with its
complex system of incentives and
disincentives, to the task of regu-
lating fossil fuel emissions? The invisible
hand could save the world.
If only this were sufficient, we might be
in pretty good shape. Viewed in
one light, perhaps the rosy glow of the
liberal worldview, this seems like a
pretty stellar solution. But seen in the
cold light of day, it’s clear that
carbon trading is woefully insufficient.
While cap and trade policies have
10 15
~ 4% ~ 4.75%
2007 2009
1% share of global greenhouse gas emissions under Chinese ETS
46
Everybody's Favorite Law
proliferated around the world, by giving big emitters an easy out.
greenhouse gas emissions are still at Instead of making the big,
alarming levels. risky investments necessary to ditch
carbon-intensive technologies
What's worse, energy derived from
outright, they can simply purchase
fossil fuels still accounts for about
cheap offset credits from other
80 percent of total global energy
countries, deferring the vital work of
consumption — actually a slight
building a carbon-free future.
increase from pre-1995 levels, before
carbon trading began in earnest. But as the caps get tighter, won't the
price of carbon credits climb,
Cap and trade doesn’t disciple capital;
forcing more permanent solutions?
it coddles it. It does alarmingly little
You would think. But energy-intensive
to force a sharp break from fossil fuel
enterprises, with the collaboration
dependence. In fact, it actually
establishes barriers to the comprehen-
sive zero-carbon transition we need
20 31 36 40
36.2 billion tons in global
CO2 emissions
~ 5% ~ 10% ~ 11.5% ~12.5% / 22.5%
2011 2013 2015 2017
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
 THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST
of their governments, have spent the
decade or so since the Kyoto
Protocol keeping the price of carbon
credits artificially low — many
times cheaper than they'd need to be
to actually incentivize investment
in green technology.
Each year, a steady stream of new
offset credits is imported into
the global market via the UN's Clean
Development and Joint Imple-
mentation Mechanisms. In rapidly
industrializing countries like
China, new hydroelectric plants and
other pieces of supposedly "clean
A Hot Market
The European Union Emission Trading System has encouraged
thousands of intra-corporate transactions.
Trading volumes in EU emission allowances (in millions of tons)
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
47
development" — which may tick
the boxes on a UNFCCC checklist,
but often have devastating local
effects — generate a steady supply of
cheap carbon credits to vend
to big emitters in the Global North.
Even if carbon credit prices were to rise
(which seems unlikely, considering
the hostile reaction of countries like the
US and Canada to the possibility
of stricter caps), there are plenty of
wealthy companies who have
been hedging their bets, stockpiling
credits during the post-Kyoto
boom years. With those hoarded
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
credits in the mix, it could be a very
long time before the scale tips
towards new technology investment.
Cap and trade won’t save us.
We need more. We need to launch a
political challenge capable of
forcing a definitive break from fossil
fuel extraction — and that means
exerting enough power over capital
that we can force them to abandon
profit-making opportunities by
destroying and replacing carbon-
dependent infrastructure, all while
leaving the oil in the ground.
94
460
998
2327
5410
5631
6713
7903
8715
8330
6677
 THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

8 Largest Emissions
Carbon Fat Cats Credits Holders
Surplus EUAs ( millions/
Cap and Trade schemes have provided emissions credits)
an opening for profiteering by
allowing large companies to hoard
~ 7.75 million emission credits
emissions credits.
~ 3.875 million emissions credits
il li o n Arcelo
nt 1 2.5 m rMitt
al
me 97.
Ce 2m
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La
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29.
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23.1
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16.6 m i l li
19.9
roup on
Riva G

48 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY
TRANSITIONS MARCO MICCICHÈ

Where We Are 2006 The Tuni-Condoriri glaciers, which

provide water for the cities of El Alto
and La Paz in Bolivia, lose 39% of
their surface area, compared to 1983 measurements —
a shrinkage rate of 0.24 sq km per year.

2008 Massive ice chunks

separate from
Greenland’s Petermann
Glacier and there are significant ice
shelf breakups in Antarctica.

2010 European summer begins 10 days

earlier than expected. Rates of
“one-in-a-thousand” heat days — days
in which populations are subjected to potentially lethal
temperatures — reaches 500% of pre-industrial levels.

2015 India experiences its worst heatwave

ever recorded. 2,300 people die.

36 million people in Eastern and Southern Africa face

hunger because of crop failure due to extreme heat
and inadequate precipitation.

Ethiopia faces its worst drought in recent history.

2016 Wildfires in Fort McMurray, Alberta,

Canada burn 590,000 hectares,
destroy roughly 2,400 buildings and
homes, and cause over $9 billion in damages. The fires
lead to the costliest evacuation in the country’s history.

The Fijian government begins relocating 64 villages

due to the impacts of sea level rise. A further
830 villages are deemed at high risk and may face
relocation.

The indigenous village of Shishmaref in Alaska holds a

plebiscite on the question of rising sea levels — village
residents decide to relocate.

Flooding in China kills more than 833 people,

destroying upwards of 400,000 homes and displacing
more than 6 million people.

49 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 TRANSITIONS

What It Will Take

2020 20% RENEWABLE ENERGY

Greenhouse gas emissions peak.

2025 50% RENEWABLE ENERGY

All new building construction carbon-neutral or

negative.

2030 80% RENEWABLE ENERGY 2040 95% RENEWABLE ENERGY

Extensive carbon capture/carbon Most regions reach zero emissions.

sequestration technologies are
implemented at a variety of scales,
to hold atmospheric concentration
of CO2 at 430 ppm. 2050 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY

Carbon capture/carbon sequestration technologies

intensified to slowly reduce atmospheric CO2
concentrations below 430 ppm.

50 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 TRANSITIONS
What If We Fail?
2050 The slowdown of the jet stream —
and its resultant meandering — takes
a dramatic toll on Northern
Hemisphere countries, where extreme cold and
winter weather events intensify.
2070 Corn yields in Africa drop by
half (compared to 2000 levels).
Corn yields in Midwestern United States drop
by a third (compared to 2000 levels).
2080 Glacier collapse
reaches dire levels.
Ice-free summers in the
Arctic become increasingly likely.
51
2040 Glaciers in the Andes, the Himalayas,
New Zealand, and the Southern Alps
lose significant mass.
2060 Large scale coral reef die-offs, due
to coral bleaching eliminates or
severely threatens the livelihoods
of 500 million people worldwide, along with goods
and services worth $375 billion each year.
Dramatic seasonal dry spells over wide areas
of the world. River flows decline by as much as a
third worldwide.
Rates of “one-in-a-thousand” heat days, already
1000% of pre-industrial levels, double again.
2100 The European summer begins arriving
in March, approximately 20 days
earlier than in pre-industrial times.
Much of southwest Asia — including almost all of the
Persian Gulf, with its glittering megacities — becomes
uninhabitable without permanent air conditioning.
The Arctic summer is ice-free.
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY
UNEVEN AND COMBINED MARCO MICCICHÈ

In many ways, it’s easier to imagine

Make It Happen
a postindustrial wasteland than
a political force capable of solving
our social and ecological crises.
But a carbon-neutral future is within
reach, if we fight for it.
A transition to clean energy doesn’t
It will take big changes in the
economy. Hundreds of thousands have to come at workers’ expense.
of workers will have to transition
into new jobs as the energy sector
is reorganized. Donald Trump
may think such a transition
the transition to a clean economy workers themselves can exert some
is impossible — after all, he spent
doesn’t have to come at the expense control over the process.
much of last year crisscrossing
of good jobs for working people. In
America’s energy-producing regions Here’s one proposal for how the
fact, a clean energy transition
denying the gravity of global United States electrical grid could
could actually be one source of
warming and bleating about the buck its reliance on fossil fuels and
salvation for the disinvested
sweet smell of burning coal. But be 100 percent renewable by 2050.
heartland, especially if energy

B.A.U. (2.621 TW)

MA ND
PR OJ EC TE D US DE
(2.400 TW) NET POWER EDUCTION
99% FROM CONVERSION
95% OF FF COMBUSTION TO WWS
80% ELECTRICITY SUPPLY (0.849 TW)

50% END-USE EFFICIENCY (0.181 TW)

20%
100% (1.591 TW)
US POWER SUPPLY

WAVE + TIDAL
FOSSILS ONSHORE WIND (30.92%) (0.51%)
+
NUCLEAR

OFFSHORE WIND (19.08%)

UTILITY-SCALE SOLAR (38.03%)

ROOFTOP PV SOLAR (7.22%)

HYDRO (3.01%)
GEO (1.25%)
2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2040 2050

Jacobson, et al. 2015. “100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector
energy roadmaps for the 50 United States.” Energy & Environmental Science.

52 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 ALABAMA 57,095

53
ALASKA 24,423

ARIZONA 63,825

ARKANSAS 38,570

CALIFORNIA 413,097

COLORADO 76,576

CONNECTICUT 34,194

DELAWARE 8,922

FLORIDA 173,635

GEORGIA 95,086

HAWAII 13,599

IDAHO 14,746

ILLINOIS 138,722

INDIANA 71,464

№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017

IOWA 29,899

KANSAS 42,836

KENTUCKY 62,687

89,700
259,400
73,900
806,300
LOUISIANA 134,860

MAINE 12,446

energy jobs
MARYLAND 54,286

Coal mining
MASSACHUSSETS 64,380

Breakdown of lost

Petroleum refining
MICHIGAN 99,191

MINNESOTA 56,345

MISSISSIPPI 39,126

Coal/gas power plant operation

MISSOURI 59,914

Oil and gas extraction/production

54
MONTANA 16,202

NEBRASKA 23,343

NEVADA 27,589

NEW HAMPSHIRE

171,500
2,448,300
58,870
1,160
13,662

NEW JERSEY 90,836

NEW MEXICO 41,674

Other
NEW YORK 187,203

NORTH CAROLINA 94,223

NORTH DAKOTA 26,690

OHIO 123,109

Coal and oil transportation

OKLAHOMA 95,445

Nuclear power plant operation

Uranium extraction/production
OREGON 36,020

PENNSYLVANIA 158,788

RHODE ISLAND 9,892

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

SOUTH CAROLINA 48,132

SOUTH DAKOTA 8,028

TENNESSEE 63,345

571,429
Jobs Lost in the Transition

TEXAS 571,429
UTAH 37,942

VERMONT 6,455

VIRGINIA 83,707

WASHINGTON 67,603

WEST VIRGINIA 53,862

WISCONSIN 54,168

WYOMING 40,009
 +123,480 180,575 ALABAMA

55
+5,339 29,761 ALASKA

+3,911 67,736 ARIZONA

+35,798 74,368 ARKANSAS

+45,039 458,135 CALIFORNIA

-6,040 70,536 COLORADO

+27,955 62,149 CONNECTICUT

+5,822 14,744 DELAWARE

+139,175 312,809 FLORIDA

+124,929 220,016 GEORGIA

-1,120 12,478 HAWAII

+8,837 23,584 IDAHO

+53,675 192,396 ILLINOIS

+96,277 167,742 INDIANA

№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017

+53,121 83,020 IOWA

-425 42,411 KANSAS

Jobs created
Jobs created

minus jobs lost

+127,195 189,882 KENTUCKY

+183,040 317,900 LOUISIANA

+18,706 31,152 MAINE

+33,164 87,450 MARYLAND

+27,060 91,440 MASSACHUSSETS

10,814
312,368
655,927
energy jobs

+48,869 148,060 MICHIGAN

+19,447 75,792 MINNESOTA

Breakdown of new

+102,310 141,437 MISSISSIPPI

+24,345 84,260 MISSOURI

Wave device
Onshore wind

Offshore wind
56
+3,273 19,475 MONTANA

+15,196 38,539 NEBRASKA

+9,008 36,597 NEVADA

+2,437 16,099 NEW HAMPSHIRE

274,733
375,963
469,008
363,640
2,323,800
3,529
4,319
37,103

+53,819 144,655 NEW JERSEY

-11,126 30,548 NEW MEXICO

+82,216 269,419 NEW YORK

CSP plant

roof solar
Solar plant

+68,652 162,875 NORTH CAROLINA

Geothermal

Tidal turbine

Solar thermal

+3,628 30,318 NORTH DAKOTA

Hydroelectic plant

Residential roof solar

+94,677 217,785 OHIO

Commercial/government

-28,579 66,866 OKLAHOMA

-221 35,799 OREGON

+228,337 387,124 PENNSYLVANIA

+3,356 13,248 RHODE ISLAND

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

+50,687 58,473 SOUTH CAROLINA

+6,930 14,958 SOUTH DAKOTA

+134,748 198,093 TENNESSEE

-67,119 504,310 TEXAS

+3,902 41,844 UTAH

-2,953 3,501 VERMONT

+63,434 147,141 VIRGINIA

-4,449 63,153 WASHINGTON

+20,377 74,239 WEST VIRGINIA

+30,490 84,658 WISCONSIN

Green Jobs Created in the Transition

-16,472 23,537 WYOMING
R EAD I N G M ATER IEL

We read things you shouldn’t

read, so we can tell you
what to read.
READING MATERIEL
DOSSIER EUPHEMISMS

*This is not a real thing

Tell Me What
You Really Mean

pr dollars at work.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 58

 DOSSIER Tell Me What You Really Mean

* If you break it,

do you really
have to buy it?

* “Accidental”
emissions from
broken equipment,
you know, the
kind of refugees
capitalists like

*An oil rig with

solar panels on it.

*Waste products to irrigate your organic produce.

59 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 DOSSIER Tell Me What You Really Mean

* Routine violations of
emissions standards

Occurring

Naturally

Radioactive

Material

* Shit is on Fire

* Make
mountaintops
great again

60 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 READING MATERIEL
FIELD NOTES

Leonardo DiCaprio speaks at the United Nations Signing Ceremony for the Paris Agreement climate change accord — Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Since the establishment of the United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Signed, Sealed,
Change (unfccc), world leaders
have gathered repeatedly to sweat out the Undelivered
big questions in climate-controlled
conference rooms. Unfortunately, these
diplomatic efforts have consistently
been hindered by the outsized power of the
largest emitters to shirk emissions
reduction obligations.

But at their best, these climate conventions Everybody loves a good treaty.
have demonstrated that international
cooperation in the face of global catastrophe
is more than a pipe dream — in fact, it’s
the only way forward.

62 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 READING MATERIEL Signed, Sealed, Undelivered
FIELD NOTES

UN Framework
Convention on
negotiated among
All member states of
signed by 165
ratified by 197
adopted 05 / 09 / 1992
took effect 03 / 21 / 1994
Established a permanent forum for addressing
climate change issues and enforcing international
Common but
Climate Change
(UNFCCC)
the United Nations, plus a
few additional parties
climate accords.
Differentiated
Responsibilities
( including Palestine) Convened an annual meeting (Conference of
Parties, “COP”) to take place in a different city each
year, to assess progress in meeting greenhouse gas
reduction and harm mitigation goals.

Kyoto Protocol notable abstainers signed by 85 adopted 12 / 11 / 1997

(COP-3) Canada (withdrew in 2012) parties 192 took effect 02 / 16 / 2005 A Guide to the
USA ( never ratified)
Kyoto Protocol
Stated unequivocally that the United States should not
become a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol. (Too hard
on rich countries, too soft on poor ones.)
Byrd-Hagel introduced by yes votes 95 passed 07 / 25 / 1997
The Kyoto Protocol sought to reduce
Resolution Senators Chuck Hagel no votes 0 “[T]he Senate strongly believes that the proposals
worldwide emissions by limiting greenhouse
(R-NE) and Robert (US Senate) under negotiation [...] could result in serious harm to
gas usage in the already-industrialized
Byrd (D-WV) the United States economy, including significant job
Global North, while providing incentives for
loss, trade disadvantages, increased energy and
Global South nations to industrialize
consumer costs, or any combination thereof.”
sustainably. It was a significant milestone in
Doha total nations ratified binding commitments binding commitments
climate change diplomacy, by far the
Amendment 66 (as of 2016) 37 (Australia, Belarus, that have ratified 7
most ambitious of binding treaties restricting
28 EU member states,
greenhouse gas emissions.
Iceland, Kazakhstan, needed for amendment
Liechtenstein, Norway, to take effect 144 Establish second round Kyoto targets: 2013–2020. It’s also one of the only such treaties to
Switzerland, Ukraine) (These have not taken effect.) have had appreciable effects. It has contributed
to a measurable, though still relatively
paltry, decrease in worldwide greenhouse gas
emissions — though the collapse of several
Soviet industrial economies in Eastern Europe
Copenhagen negotiated among adopted 12 / 18 / 2010 Intensified the emissions reductions mandated certainly helped spike the protocol’s numbers.
Agreement Brazil, China, India, took effect Non-binding by the Kyoto Protocol by introducing voluntary
(COP-15) South Africa, and USA emissions reduction pledges.

Paris Agreement negotiated among signed by 195 adopted 12 / 12 / 2015 Limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C above
(COP-21) 196 states ratified by 151 to take effect 2020 pre-industrial levels. Limit global CO2 emissions
notable abstainers to 40 gigatonnes by 2030.
United States

63 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 64

 FIELD NOTES Signed, Sealed, Undelivered

Common but Differentiated Responsibilities

A Guide to the Kyoto Protocol (continued) "Flexibility Mechanisms"

1. International 2. Clean Development 3. Joint

“ghg emissions — a new commodity. was created — emission reductions. Because carbon Emissions Trading Mechanism Implementation
With ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, emitting green- dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas, people speak
house gases over a set limit entails a potential cost. simply of trading in carbon. Carbon is now tracked
Conversely, emitters able to stay below their limit hold and traded like any other commodity.” 
assigned amount units Certified Emissions Reduction Unit Emissions Reduction Unit

currency
something of potential value. Thus, a new commodity — unfccc, 2007.
(“carbon credits”). (CER) = -1 ton of CO2 equivalent (“ERU”) = -1 ton of CO2 equivalent

Removal Units (RMUs) = -1 ton

of CO2 equivalent.
How It Works
— — —

unfccc subdivided all countries into three categories
(Annex I and Annex II and non-Annex I).
Annex I includes all oecd (i.e. developed) countries, plus
fourteen “Economies in Transition” (former Soviet nations).
Annex II includes only oecd countries.
Non-Annex I countries are further subdivided into Least
Developed Countries (ldc), Small Island Developing
Countries (sid), and Other.
The objective of the protocol is to lower greenhouse gas
emissions worldwide without hobbling development in
non-Annex I countries.
Annex I and Annex II countries are obligated to reduce
four greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous
oxide, and sulfur hexafluoride), plus two ozone-depleting
gases (hydrofluorocarbons and perflurocarbons), by
5 percent against 1990 levels.
process
Non-Annex I countries are, in some cases, actually Each nation is assigned a number
allowed to increase their emissions to certain thresholds. of carbon credits; this places a cap
But more importantly, they can attract direct investment on that nation’s emissions. If one
from Annex I countries by selling off sustainable nation anticipates exceeding this
development units “as carbon credits”. cap, however, they may purchase
surplus carbon credits from other
This, the authors of the Protocol imagined, would allow
( lower-emitting) nations.
ldcs and other non-Annex I countries to meet develop-
ment goals while remaining in good standing as parties to
Nations may also earn additional
the Protocol.
carbon credits in the form of
It also allowed Annex I countries to purchase carbon credits “Removal Units” (RMUs), by
from non-Annex I countries to offset their own emissions. implementing offset projects ( like
reforestation), which absorb
carbon. They may then bank these
credits for resale, or use them to
offset their own carbon emissions
in excess of allowances.
Percent of global CERs by country (October 2012)
— —
Annex I countries may offset their
own emissions by purchasing CERs
from developing countries.
Developing countries earn CERs
(from UNFCCC) by implementing
“sustainable development”
projects — these may take the form
of energy upgrades (switching
from coal to solar) or carbon
sequestration ( i.e. reforestation)
projects.
They may then sell these CERs
to Annex I countries to offset the
cost of the project.
Annex I countries can invest in
carbon reduction projects in other
countries (especially post-Commu-
nist “Economies in Transition”),
where discontinuing carbon-emit-
ting processes (and implementing
carbon-saving ones) is cheaper.
ERUs are awarded to investor
countries proportionally,
according to their investment.

outcome
china 59.9 mexico 1.6 argentina 0.9 An international market for carbon — Massive OECD investment in EITs,
• Reduced ghg emissions 4.2 percent (on average) for india 14.7 chile 1 brazil 7.2 credits, ripe for profiteering. Predictably, large countries with especially in infrastructure. The
the 2008-2012. s. korea 9.1 other 5.4 ambitious developmental creeping sense that “sustainable
programs have been able to development” projects are more
• doha amendment – introduced a second period Some wealthy Annex I countries are able to “meet”
corner the market on CERs. about generating ERUs for foreign
of eight years, with intensified commitments their reductions requirements simply by buying up
big-emitters than promoting
(“pledges”): average 18 percent below 1990 levels. CERs, without accomplishing significant reductions to
development at home.
(Very few countries have ratified, so it has not taken their own emissions.
effect.)

65 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 66

67 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017
 Living, Not Just
Surviving
ALYSSA BATTISTONI

Working-class movements
must place social and ecological
reproduction at the heart of
their vision of the future.

68 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

69 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017
 W
hen Donald Trump announced plans
to pull the United States out of the Paris
Climate Accord this June, liberals cried
doom. Venture capitalist and Tesla ceo Elon Musk finally
resigned from Trump’s economic advisory council. Goldman
Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein took to Twitter for
the first time to express his disappointment, while former
ambassador to the un Samantha Power tweeted that it was
“the end of the American Century.” Spotting an oppor-
tunity, French president Emmanuel Macron, vying with
Justin Trudeau for global leader of The Resistance, vowed
to “make our planet great again.”
From their perspective, the decision appeared a radical
shift in climate policy undertaken by the mercurial and
proudly ignorant Trump — the opposite of the cool-headed
wonkery espoused by Barack Obama, who had declared
climate change a “genuine existential threat” (at a private
fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard). But the decision marked
the outgrowth of Obama’s efforts to address climate change
while avoiding politics.
In true technocratic fashion, Obama sought a fix
through executive orders, administrative measures, and elite
international negotiations. His Clean Power Plan relied on
the power of the presidency to reduce emissions by further
regulating power plants and raising fuel standards using the
Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.
In his final year in office, he made much of brokering an
international agreement at the cop 21 in Paris — the first
global climate agreement since Kyoto in 1997.
But his achievement was overstated, and so was liberal
panic over its demise. The agreement fell far short of what
climate scientists and activists alike agree would be neces-
sary to avoid a dangerous 2˚c or higher warming — not least
because Obama himself had pushed for it to be non-binding.
Even implementing the set of commitments made in Paris
would have required sustained political action, regardless
of who controlled the Oval Office.
Paradoxically, Obama also got more blame for regula-
tory attempts than he probably deserved. Stricter emissions
regulations are just one reason the demand for coal has
been declining: activists have campaigned for the closing of
coal-fired power plants and the prices of both solar power
and natural gas have been plummeting. But Obama pro-
vided a convenient scapegoat for coal country’s continued
decline — after all, he’d done little to alleviate the crisis of
unemployment and need in places once dependent on the
resource. The path was clear for someone like Donald Trump
70 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
to run on a platform of bringing mining jobs back — even
if he had no actual way of doing so.
The desire to move more quickly than the current state
of Congress allows is understandable — we’re rapidly run-
ning out of time. But climate change is too major an issue to
address with tweaks and nudges. Serious action on climate
can’t avoid politics — it has to confront it head on.
Trump isn’t the first to exploit tensions between
workers and environmentalists, and he’s unlikely to be the
last. In response, the Left needs to offer a program that
reveals those tensions as a false choice, one offered on cap-
ital’s terms. We can do that by offering a climate plan that
improves people’s lives in ways they can understand and that
they’re willing to fight for. That doesn’t mean just focusing
on workers in the most traditional vestiges of the fossil fuel
economy, though, or even on the kinds of green-energy and
infrastructure jobs typically offered as replacements. Rather,
it means organizing the working class as it exists today —
the nurses and teachers, care workers and service workers
who are already doing the work that will be foundational
to a low-carbon society oriented toward the flourishing of
all, and who can lead the way to a future whose glory can
last a lot longer than thirty years.
What would that society look like? In general, it will
mean less work all around. But the kind of work that we’ll
need more of in a climate-stable future is work that’s ori-
ented toward sustaining and improving human life as well
as the lives of other species who share our world. That
means teaching, gardening, cooking, and nursing: work
that makes people’s lives better without consuming vast
amounts of resources, generating significant carbon emis-
sions, or producing huge amounts of stuff.
As it turns out, it is also work that a growing number
of people do. “I was elected to represent the citizens of
Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump famously said in his speech
announcing the withdrawal. It was a clear signal to his
supporters in the Rust Belt — the only problem is that
Pittsburgh hasn’t been a steel town for decades. Most jobs
today are not in coal, steel, or manufacturing, but what’s
often known as “eds and meds”: health care and education.
Pittsburgh illustrates a broader trend: though the
hard-hat vision of the working class retains a surprisingly
tight grip on political imagination, the fastest growing sec-
tors of the economy are in industries characterized by “pink
collar” labor — nursing, teaching, service work. Green jobs
boosters often note that there are more jobs in solar-panel
installation than coal mining these days — but there are
 LIVING, NOT JUST SURVIVING

The hard-hat vision of the working

class retains a surprisingly tight grip
on political imagination, but the
fastest growing sectors of the economy
are in industries characterized
by “pink collar” labor.

71 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 also more teachers, home health aides, and child-care pro-
viders. These jobs are done disproportionately by women,
immigrants, and people of color.
Organizing these workers would be the way forward for
socialists under any circumstances. Under the dire circum-
stances we face, insisting that the work they do is crucial not
only to a just and decent society but an ecologically viable
one is the way to win back our future. Labor movements in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries insisted that workers
had built the world in the most literal sense. The labor
movement of the twenty-first century needs to foreground
the workers who will make it possible for us to live in it.
To put it plainly: pink-collar jobs are green jobs.
Of course, while there are synchronicities between
ecological imperatives and feminized labor, they aren’t
necessarily aligned. Care work may be low-carbon — but
that doesn’t mean the industries which rely on it are. Hotel
workers, for example, are highly unionized, but the hotel
industry, reliant as it is on frequent flyers, would suffer
without fossil fuels.
Las Vegas, for example, is leading the way in service-
worker organizing, but it’s hardly a model for an ecologically
sustainable world. Organizing fast food and retail workers is
likewise critical, but McDonald’s and Forever 21 aren’t much
more ecologically defensible than ExxonMobil. Sometimes
that will mean transformations in the way work is organized;
often it will mean simply doing less of it. That should be the
case even for jobs that aren’t as heavily resource-intensive:
care work can be rewarding — but it can also be tedious,
boring, emotionally taxing, and physically straining.
Meanwhile, transitioning to an economy centered
on social reproduction will require a real reckoning with
the ways that the work of serving others has been shaped
by gender and race. There may be jobs making beds and
washing the elderly, but that doesn’t mean that the mostly
male workers who have spent decades working in factories,
on oil rigs, or in coal mines will be able, or willing, to do
them. But they might be more likely to do so if the work
of social reproduction were better paid and recognized.
In the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, sanita-
tion workers (crucial to any eco-socialist society!) famously
declared “I Am a Man,” while demanding better wages and
better working conditions. In doing so, they challenged
a system of segregated labor that had left them to do the
dirtiest work, insisting on both social equality and mate-
rial gains. Reorganizing social reproduction more broadly
would require a similar challenge to the status of work
72 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
that’s traditionally been done by women, and especially
women of color.
That is to say, facing climate change will require the
building but also the transformation of working-class
movements. Italy’s 1970s autonomist movement provides
a helpful perspective: as hikes in the cost of living spiraled
above the pace of wage increases, working-class commu-
nities recognized that the struggle had to be continued
outside the factory. They fought to reduce the cost not only
of necessities like rent, transportation, and groceries, but
luxuries like the opera; they squatted disused buildings and
made them into community centers, imagining libraries,
clinics, gyms, and theaters in places where such amenities
were nowhere to be found. They insisted that working-class
people, too, had the right to a good quality of life.
Yet autonomist projects, though often organized in
conjunction with radical wings of labor unions, tended to
be sporadic and piecemeal in implementation. By the 1980s,
they had mostly disintegrated.
Today, stagnant wages and a rising cost of living are
likewise making both necessities and luxuries unaffordable
for most. Class struggle in the era of climate change isn’t
just in the Ninth Ward after Katrina or the Rockaways after
Sandy — it’s in the rhythms of daily life. It’s in nursing
homes and schools, on the bus and in the street. The con-
temporary challenge, then, is to take up autonomist fights
over social reproduction — but to carry them forward on a
more institutional level while also extending them beyond
the factory and the social to a new level: the ecological.
That process is already underway. As Nancy Fraser
argues, “if you put together struggles for a shorter work-
week, for an unconditional basic income, for public
child-care, for the rights of migrant domestic workers and
workers who do care work in for-profit nursing homes, hos-
pitals, child-care centers — then add struggles over clean
water, housing, and environmental degradation, especially
in the global South — what it adds up to … is a demand for
some new way of organizing social reproduction.”
Organizing reproduction in a new way means making
the work of our daily survival less onerous and more pleasur-
able. It means creating and maintaining spaces of communal
luxury and collective leisure — lush public parks and gar-
dens, beautiful spaces for recreation and relaxation, art and
culture accessible to all. It means not only building housing
in dense urban centers but making sure working-class people
can actually afford to live there; it means supporting more
public transit not only in cities but in the sprawling suburbs
 LIVING, NOT JUST SURVIVING

Cove Lake Park was built under TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) direction by the Tennessee State Department of Conservation with the assistance of the CCC
(Civilian Conservation Corps) on an arm of Norris Lake. It was initiated as a demonstration of standards appropriate to valley conditions ­­— Office of War
Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress), between 1935 and 1944.

73 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 where a growing number of working-class people live and
in the rural communities where isolation exacerbates social
and economic crises. It means addressing the labor shortages
at the heart of the rural crisis of care. It means programs
like universal health care and free college that simultane-
ously expand access to public goods and the scope of the
low-carbon economy.
The New Deal had elements of such a future in the
Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc), which put young men
to work creating and maintaining national parks, and the
Federal Art, Music, Theater, and Writers’ Projects, which
provided grants to support a wide range of artists. These
kinds of programs, combined with the social-welfare pro-
grams of the Great Society, would make for a society that
provides both the necessities of social provision and an
abundance of natural and cultural delights.
A renewed, permanent version of the ccc could extend
the caring economy to our planet. In rural areas, it could
create new hiking trails, campgrounds, and nature reserves;
in cities, it could support the creation and maintenance of
city parks and community gardens that can help make dense
urban spaces livable and breathable even as temperatures
rise. Across the country, it could restore areas that have long
been damaged by fossil fuel extraction and other industrial
activities. The original ccc employed thousands of Native
Americans, often undertaking projects determined by tribal
councils; a revived version could be paired with a program
for native sovereignty and control over indigenous lands.
On a bleaker note, as climate change progresses, we’ll need
more people trained to deal with forest fires, floods, and
74 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
other kinds of extreme weather.
The experience of recent years shows that the Left
can grow and win on robust and ambitious platforms that
address issues ranging from access to housing and education
to medical benefits and elder care. Integrated more closely
with an ecological analysis, they represent the building
blocks of an eco-socialist platform.
One early vision of what this kind of program might
look like is laid out in Canada’s Leap Manifesto, a docu-
ment produced by a cluster of labor, environmental, and
indigenous groups. The Manifesto advocates in plain terms
for an economy centered on “caring for one another and
caring for the planet.” That would mean working less
time for higher wages, and spending the time we saved
with our loved ones and communities; orienting the
work we do toward ending racial and gender inequality;
generating energy without destroying ecosystems; and
creating ownership structures that return wealth to people
and communities rather than extracting it from them.
The Manifesto places the work of social and ecological
reproduction at the heart of its vision of the future; its
vanguard are those whose work has been feminized and
undervalued. It is a program that is politically savvy on
the terrain of existing politics, involving existing organi-
zations, while also imagining a future that breaks sharply
with the present.
We should follow that example and work to envision
both the future we want and the forces that can get us
there — and then get organized. We can keep the planet
habitable by building a livable world, but we don’t have any
time to waste.  •
75 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017
 By Any Means
Necessary
PETER FRASE

We need a comprehensive
vision of ecological reconstruction —
and that means having
geoengineering as part
of our vision.

76 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

77 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 I
n early 2017, there was a widely reported story about the
death of the Great Barrier Reef. This natural wonder,
off the coast of Australia, stretches over 100,000 square
miles. It has been built and maintained for thousands of
years by billions of tiny organisms, and it sustains a complex
population of aquatic life.
The reef has now become yet another victim of
human-induced climate change. The culprit is a phenom-
enon known as “coral bleaching,” caused by warming ocean
waters. The coral polyps that create the reef overheat and
expel algae that live in their tissue, turning white. Over time,
this leads to the death of the polyps, and thus the death of
the reef ecosystem.
The problem of coral bleaching has been known for
some time, but recent studies have found that the process
is proceeding much faster than expected — large sections
of the reef are already dead. In a March 2017 New York
Times article, an Australian scientist reports finding a level
of destruction not expected to occur for thirty years.
Reactions to the story followed predictable environmen-
talist narratives. For some, it was grist for the mill of green
moralizing, yet another testament to the undeniable imper-
ative to move to a zero-carbon-emissions world. For others,
it was a dispiriting call to nihilism. After all, this was just the
latest demonstration that climate change is happening much
faster than even the most pessimistic scientists had believed.
In such circumstances, it is easy to abandon hope that
political institutions can address the crisis on the time-
scale it demands.
There was, however, another story about the reef,
one which hinted at a different political imaginary for the
response to climate crisis. A group of researchers at the
University of Sydney released a study in which they pro-
posed to protect the reef by means of a technique known
as “cloud brightening.”
The idea is simple to describe, yet radical in its ecolog-
ical implications. The objective is simply to make clouds
reflect more sunlight. This decreases the amount of light
that reaches the Earth’s surface, thereby cooling it. In one
of the most commonly considered implementations, this
would be done by ships that traverse the ocean, converting
seawater into salt particles, and then dispersing those par-
ticles into the atmosphere.
The scientists proposed a local cloud bright-
ening effort, focused specifically on protecting the reef.
By preventing a few degrees of warming, they argued, it
might yet be possible to save it.
78 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
This may or may not be realistic. Indeed, recent
accounts suggest that time may have run out for the
Great Barrier Reef. But the researchers were suggesting
an approach to the climate crisis that has been discussed
on a much larger scale, one which is extremely controver-
sial among those concerned with the breakdown of the
ecological systems that sustain civilization.
The World We Made
Geoengineering, in the definition offered by Oxford Univer-
sity’s geoengineering program, is “the deliberate large-scale
intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract
climate change.” Cloud brightening is only one item on the
agenda. These proposals entail either reducing the amount
of solar energy that reaches Earth, as cloud brightening does,
or actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
through some type of capture and sequestration. Such ideas
have attracted the interest of rich investors like Bill Gates
and Elon Musk.
It is at this point that many on the Left jump ship. Geo-
engineering can easily be dismissed as a fantasy, the most
absurd iteration yet of the Promethean delusion that we can
exercise mastery over the natural world. Even if the pos-
sibility of these efforts is acknowledged, it’s disturbing to
think that it is our current ruling class that would implement
them, with their characteristic combination of hubristic
short-term thinking and disregard for workers. And finally,
some simply find it abhorrent to tamper with nature in this
fashion, disrupting the Earth’s metabolic process.
The last objection is the easiest to dispense with, but
also perhaps the most important. We have to recognize that
we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and
managers of nature. Even those who acknowledge this in
one breath will still fall back on metaphors like reduced
“carbon footprint” — as if we could just step more lightly
and allow nature to repair itself. This is, paradoxically, one
of the most anthropocentric positions imaginable, since it
presumes that it is the eternal and natural state of the world
to be habitable for humans. But God didn’t create the world
specifically for us. Natural history is indifferent to humans
and every other living being, and is characterized by cha-
otic change and mass extinctions, not homeostatic balance.
Moreover, we have irreversibly transformed the natural
world already, often to our detriment. “You broke it, you
bought it,” as the retail expression goes. And we have most
definitely bought it.
 BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

The history of human management

of the nitrogen cycle is a literal
history of shit.

79 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 This is the case made by science journalist Oliver
Morton in his 2015 brief in favor of geoengineering, The
Planet Remade. In it, he takes up the popular idea of the
“Anthropocene.” The term originates with geologists, who
have proposed that we have left the Holocene period for
a stage in the history of the Earth that is specifically char-
acterized by the human transformation of the ecosystem.
There are geographical criticisms of this proposal, but
there are also some serious political ones. Left scholars
like Elmar Altvater, Andreas Malm, and Jason Moore have
called into question the entire notion of the Anthropocene.
It would, these critics say, be better called the Capitalocene,
since the degradation of nature is really attributable to the
ruling class’s methods of capital accumulation, rather than
human civilization in general.
Though this argument is based on sound historical
analysis, it is limited as a guide to politics. Calling out the
Capitalocene amounts to an argument from moral righ-
teousness: it was you ruling elites who broke the world, not
us! But be that as it may, any society that succeeds capitalism
will inherit the world that previous societies have made —
and we have been actively making it for longer than many
people realize.
Morton’s book illustrates this by way of an interven-
tion into nature that gets quite a bit less attention than the
carbon cycle that fuels global warming: the nitrogen cycle.
Nitrogen is essential to life, and it is plentiful in the
atmosphere. But in order to be usable for plant growth,
inert nitrogen atoms must be “fixed” to another element,
a process that for millions of years was done almost exclu-
sively by soil bacteria.
That is, until industrial capitalism came along.
It All Comes to Shit
The history of human management of the nitrogen cycle is a
literal history of shit. Our story starts in nineteenth-century
Europe, with the German chemist Justus von Liebig. It was
he who noted the significance of nitrogen for plant growth,
and therefore food supplies. Moreover, he noted the partic-
ular way that capitalist industrialization had disrupted the
traditional nitrogen cycle.
In an agrarian society, food is consumed where it is
grown, and the waste, in the form of manure and com-
post, is returned to the soil. But in Victorian England,
this cycle was disrupted by industrialization, which drew
huge numbers of people to cities. There, they consumed
80 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
food grown in the countryside. Their waste, rather
than returning to the soil, went into the streets of London,
producing squalor in the city and diminished soil fertility in
the country. Karl Marx, in an expression later popularized
by sociologist John Bellamy Foster, called this disjuncture
in the ecosystem capitalism’s “metabolic rift.”
This, in turn, led Britain to confront an urgent geopo-
litical problem: an insufficient supply of shit. Off the coast
of Peru, it was discovered that birds had, for thousands of
years, been depositing their droppings on islands, where
they built up into huge amounts of a nitrogen-rich sub-
stance known as “guano.” This could be used as fertilizer,
a substitute for the lost nitrogen of an urbanized economy,
and a means to escape any Malthusian limit to the ability of
a given territory to feed a growing population. During the
period of “guano imperialism,” wars were fought to secure
these supplies — but by the end of the nineteenth century,
they had been mostly depleted.
It was at this point that capitalist societies took a deci-
sive leap into human management of the nitrogen cycle. In
1909, German chemist Fritz Haber developed a process for
artificially fixing nitrogen into ammonia, a process which
is still used to produce commercial fertilizers. It was now
possible to escape the dependence on shit, but at a cost: the
process was extremely energy intensive. Thus we come back
around to the climate crisis — so long as energy generation
depends on fossil fuels, all food is, in essence, a petroleum
product.
Decades on, we now live in a world where more nitrogen
is fixed in factories than in the soil, and consequently we can
support a global population of over seven billion. It is certainly
true that we could support that population more efficiently
were we free of the artificial scarcities and wastes imposed
by capitalism. And the production of excess nitrogen, like
the emission of excess carbon, has serious environmental
impacts that scientists are still figuring out how to address.
But it is hard to see how we could ever completely leave
behind industrial nitrogen fixation, humanity’s first great
geoengineering project.
Planning Nature
Nevertheless, left rhetoric remains largely focused on
reducing emissions, rather than on either mitigating or
adapting to the effects of climate change. Take, for example,
Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, which lays out both
the urgency of the climate crisis and capitalism’s inability to
 BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

Leaving aside charlatans

like Newt Gingrich, no
one believes geoengineering is
an alternative to moving to
a zero-carbon energy system.

81 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 address it. Klein correctly observes that demands for redistri-
bution and justice, and a fundamental debate over economic
and social values, are prerequisites for real climate solutions.
Hence her suggestion that fighting for a guaranteed minimum
income might be more pressing than technocratic policies
like a carbon tax. But she also includes a chapter on geoen-
gineering, in which the subject is met with the usual leftist
response of dismissal, disturbance, and disgust.
The subtitle of the chapter asks mockingly if “the solu-
tion to pollution is … pollution?” The dismissive attitude
toward the subject is thus announced at the start. Likewise
with the opening quote from William James: “our science
is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”
True enough. But as we have seen, our ignorance has
bumbled us into a place where we have made ourselves the
managers of an entire ecosystem, like it or not. Just as there
is no easy way back from industrial nitrogen fixation, it’s
hard to see how we escape an ever-greater entanglement
with the carbon system. This is even more the case if we
take seriously Klein’s, and many scientists’, insistence that
climate change is likely to be more severe and rapid than
was anticipated even a few years ago. That is, even if we
went to zero emissions tomorrow, carbon that has already
been emitted is there to stay and will have profound effects.
Klein finds discussions of geoengineering disturbing,
for the same reason many left environmentalists do: they
threaten to be a distraction from the task of transforming
our energy, political, and economic systems. She notes
that the most popular of the aggressive geoengineering
plans “do nothing to change the underlying cause of cli-
mate change, the buildup of heat-trapping gases.” This is
undoubtedly true.
Leaving aside charlatans like Newt Gingrich, no one
believes geoengineering is an alternative to moving to a
zero-carbon energy system. Rather, it’s part of a “both/
and” strategy, combining mitigation and adaptation with
decarbonization. But the political concern is that even
discussing active climate manipulation gives cover to those
who would use such schemes as an excuse for fossil fuel
capitalism to continue business as usual. Given that, some
on the Left ask, can’t we just leave all this stuff for after the
eco-socialist revolution?
But tabling this conversation would itself enable our
enemies — and our fair-weather friends. After all, it isn’t just
rogue tech entrepreneurs who have started down the road
toward climate manipulation. The apparatus of global neo-
liberal governance has geoengineering in its sights as well.
82 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
Consider, for example, the Carnegie Climate Geoen-
gineering Governance Initiative, or the “c2g2.” This is a
project of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International
Affairs, a nonprofit whose origins go back to nineteenth-cen-
tury robber baron Andrew Carnegie. c2g2 takes a cautious
view of geoengineering, asserting that while they are not
“for or against the research, testing or potential use of cli-
mate geoengineering technologies,” they nevertheless see a
need for “a broader, society-wide discussion about the risks,
potential benefits, ethical and governance challenges raised
by climate geoengineering.”
In principle, this seems a sensible, even laudable per-
spective. Certainly it is preferable to placing our faith in
unaccountable private actors. But the c2g2 is a creature
of the transnational capitalist order, its board populated by
United Nations and ngo functionaries. Left unmolested,
a “society-wide discussion” about climate manipulation
will involve the same elites who gave us transnational gov-
ernance bodies like the World Trade Organization and
European Union.
This is why the Left can’t ignore these debates. Because
it turns out that geoengineering isn’t actually all that unique,
or all that different from a whole range of issues that con-
front us today. It is yet another problem that is global in
scope, while our movements remain persistently local in
character. Building international solidarity is necessary so
that we can present alternatives to both the techno-utopian
and liberal-ngo visions of climate politics.
That is one reason to have open discussions of geo-
engineering on the Left: if we don’t, the bourgeoisie
will simply carry out their work without us. But there
is another reason too. Though the prospect of geoen-
gineering as a distraction from the urgency of ending
fossil fuels is an alarming one, we should also be
mindful of another trap that lies in the other direction.
Simply, those who want to emphasize the severity of the
climate crisis find themselves caught between two contra-
dictory imperatives.
On one side is the need to convince people that, as the
title of Klein’s book says, this changes everything. Rapid
climate change is a reality, and capitalism can only respond
in ways that are by turns inept and inhuman. From this
perspective, to speak of anything other than the immediate
need for zero-carbon emissions is to feed the delusional or
disingenuous arguments of those who say we don’t need to
change much of anything, and can rely on a few technical
fixes to solve the problem.
 BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

Rainforest canopy at the Forestry Research Institute Malaysia, showing the effects of "crown shyness" in the Kapur trees (Dryobalanops aromatica), 2008

83 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 But an emphasis on the apocalyptic has severe down-
sides. Journalist Sasha Lilley has warned against the dangers
of “catastrophism.” She argues that “an awareness of the
scale or severity of catastrophe does not ineluctably steer
one down the path of radical politics.” Instead, it can
encourage passivity and quiescence. This can take the
pessimistic form of anticipating inevitable doom, or the
optimistic conviction that the present system will neces-
sarily fall and be replaced by something better. Neither
version motivates political action.
This is the purpose of raising the prospect of geo-
engineering in a left context — not as a substitute for
decarbonization, but as part of a larger portrait of eco-
socialism. Drawing this portrait matters, because the Left
has always motivated itself for the immediate struggle by
looking to a vision of a better world in the future. And for that
vision to appear both realistic and appealing today, it must
encompass both the end of fossil fuels and active intervention
in the climate. Otherwise we are left to imagine a future of
hair-shirt austerity at best, and apocalyptic die-off at worst.
What that intervention should look like is still a matter
of scientific debate, albeit one that is becoming increas-
ingly pressing. Morton leans toward a program of spraying
aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere, thus reducing
the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth and coun-
teracting the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Other
proposals involve actively removing co2 from the atmo-
sphere and permanently burying it. Even the mass planting
of trees, which absorb co2, can be considered a form of
geoengineering.
Some, including Klein, object to all of this on the
grounds that it would permanently commit us to a project of
human-controlled ecological planning, “taking our ecosys-
tems even further away from self-regulation.” But capitalism
committed us to that course long ago. She worries, too,
about an ecological correlate of her famous “shock doctrine,”
in which “all kinds of sensible opposition melts away and all
manner of high-risk behaviors seem temporarily acceptable”
in the face of an acute environmental crisis.
84 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
The comparison rings true, but not in the way Klein
intends. Shock-doctrine neoliberalism was a response to the
real crisis of postwar welfare capitalism, a crisis that caught
the Left completely unprepared. And if we don’t prepare a
comprehensive vision of ecological reconstruction, it’s not
unreasonable to worry that the ruling class — whether tech
elites like Bill Gates or c2g2 bureaucrats — will come up
with theirs, and impose it by force.
For what matters is ultimately less the techniques
of geoengineering than how they are implemented, and
by whom. In this way, geoengineering resembles genet-
ically modified organisms: not inherently objectionable,
but potentially monstrous when developed by capitalist
agribusiness for the purpose of profit maximization.
In response to the charge of hubris and Promethe-
anism, it is just as important to emphasize that though we
accept the inevitability of attempting to “plan” nature, the
socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature
is never under our control, and there are always unin-
tended consequences. But just as we cannot trust either
the market or a policy elite to automatically produce just
economic outcomes, we cannot assume that an unmolested
nature will provide us with a safe and abundant world in
which to live, in this or any other social system. And so,
in the process of achieving the post-scarcity order that
the Marxist biologist David Schwartzman calls “solar
communism,” we will take up the task of cleaning up the
mess capitalism has made, and creating an Anthropocene
more rational, democratic, and egalitarian than the one
we now inhabit.
Perhaps it won’t matter. Perhaps climate change has
already progressed too far, and geoengineering is merely
a pipe dream — or worse, something that will create unin-
tentional side effects that merely hasten our demise. But
the only alternative to hoping for the best is resigning our-
selves to the worst. The socialist project is predicated on the
emancipatory hope that, in the words of The Internationale,
“a better world’s in birth.” If so, it won’t be born unless we
help deliver it.   •
85 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017
 The
Last Stimulus

DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

We shouldn’t ask whether we must

get out of capitalism so that
humans can survive. We must
ask how and when.

86 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 THE LAST STIMULUS

87 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 I
n the lead up to Chicago’s 1893 World Fair, cultural
elites sought to raise the masses’ level of “civilization.”
Planners built educational exhibits to showcase new
developments in agriculture and machinery, framed with neo-
classical stonework like “a bas-relief personating Columbia
enthroned, with a sword in her right hand and a palm in her
left, and surrounded by Honor, Genius, and Wealth.”
But the public preferred more modern attractions: a
proto-amusement park with a giant early Ferris Wheel,
electrical fountains, spectacular night lighting.
The people wanted electricity. They would want it to
light their homes and their streets, to power factories and
appliances, in cities and on farms, in stadiums, theaters, and
roller coasters. Despite the despair of a thousand cultural
critics, the people still want it.
The costs of our thirst for energy could still doom
the planet to climate chaos. The International Energy
Agency projects that under a business-as-usual scenario —
catastrophic for the climate — global energy demand
will increase by 43 percent in the next twenty-five years.
To keep warming at a safer 2°c, they project that global
energy demand would have to only increase by 9 per-
cent. Leaving room for poor countries to raise their living
standards demands massive reductions in rich countries’
energy use.
How can we avoid doom, decarbonizing energy and
cutting its use in the rich world in an egalitarian and
exciting way? The new green capitalism doesn’t ask this
question, preferring to protect profits while decarbonizing
an economy built on vicious inequalities. But as disillu-
sion with neoliberalism spreads and the threat of climate
change grows, there’s an opening to organize around a
different path: battling climate change and inequality at
the same time.
In North America, one last stimulus of planned eco-
nomic development could replace green capitalism with
prosperous no-carbon cities and energy landscapes orga-
nized to meet ordinary people’s needs and whims. Unlike
prior stimulus programs, this one wouldn’t save capitalism
from stagnation by launching a new round of growth, but
would dismantle the destructive growth imperative. It would
raise money from existing pools of affluence to build a
clean-energy grid, add jobs and shorten work hours, and
democratically redesign our landscapes.
In North America, it’s beyond tone-deaf to call for imme-
diate “de-growth,” appealing to abstract moral virtues like
Honor, Genius, and already existing Wealth. Most of us now
88 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
live with threadbare public services, mounting debt, and
extreme inequality. Who will march for “green austerity”?
We still need a bit more modest growth to transform
systems, cities, and infrastructures, starting right now, to
reach zero carbon by 2050. (Where you set the deadline
depends on your risk tolerance for untested technologies
to suck up carbon from the sky or block sunlight.)
We won’t start from scratch. A ton of what follows can
start at city- and state-level while we build toward 2020.
And capitalism gets greener daily, delivering clean-energy
miracles. We can build on these achievements without
succumbing to the illusion that pricing externalities and
fostering innovation are all that’s needed.
Capitalism is ravaging our environment, which is
increasingly killing us. Greenhouse gases are just the most
urgent indicator of the broader ecological crisis. Look at
extinction rates, soil exhaustion, freshwater pollution, con-
tamination from plastic and toxins — the list goes on. We
shouldn’t ask whether we must get out of capitalism so that
humans can survive. We must ask how and when.
Crash Into Capitalism
The idea of a last stimulus aligns with the best instincts of
those who call for a Green New Deal. But that program
is often reduced to a few bullet points, ignoring the fact
that climate politics and economics in general are now
identical. Climate politics are the field of struggle on which
the central social and economic struggles of the coming
decades will be decided — from raising revenue and allo-
cating investment to structuring employment and shaping
the built environment.
Most of the North American left hasn’t yet grasped this.
Instead, it boils climate politics down to keeping fossil fuels
in the ground and spending more money for more green jobs
making more clean energy. The Left tacks these demands
onto an old-fashioned social-democratic economic plan
that rightly emphasizes universal social services but only
offers vague solutions to environmental destruction and
capitalist production.
The confrontational climate justice movement, working
with scarce resources, has similar priorities. If you went to
a 350.org event in New York in the past couple years, you
heard about heroic frontline communities resisting fossil
fuel extraction in favor of local clean power, saw slides
showing the plunging costs of solar panels, then heard
Antonique Smith cover “Here Comes the Sun.”
 THE LAST STIMULUS

Most of us now live with threadbare

public services, mounting debt,
and extreme inequality. Who will
march for “green austerity”?

89 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 It’s a solid start, but green capitalists have bolder and
more sophisticated plans. They smell opportunity. Global
political and financial leaders now want to invest a trillion
dollars a year into clean energy alone. The budget for cli-
mate adaptation policies will be comparably huge.
Sure, Big Oil and its friends in the White House want
to stop all this. Battle them in the trenches, but recognize
that business as “usual” is changing fast. It’s right to worry
that green capitalism isn’t moving fast enough to stave off
catastrophe — it’s not. But it is moving.
In Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, renewable
sources now provide over a fifth of the country’s elec-
tricity and nearly a sixth of its total energy. Across the
Rhine, France’s government just banned new oil and gas
exploration and issued $7.5 billion in green bonds to fund
renewable energy spending. Globally, governments could
issue over $200 billion in such bonds for climate-related
investment in 2017. For one week in June, China’s Qin-
ghai province, population seven million, ran entirely on
renewable energy.
Imagine if all this activity scales up with a market logic:
private firms will control renewable energy, bond traders will
hold government social spending hostage, and public-pri-
vate infrastructures will deliver sustainable goods only to
those who can pay. Investors and affluent consumers will
do well, while the social and ecological costs of new growth
will be heaped on the poor and racialized. That’s a grimly
violent future. Even green capitalist “success” likely leads
to eco-apartheid.
Indeed, white supremacy and electric prosperity grew
up side by side. As the historian David Nassaw documents,
a century ago, black people were legally allowed to enter
the world fairs that publicized electricity’s arrival — only
to be treated with “consummate disdain.” At Chicago’s
World Fair, organizers rebuffed the abolitionist Fred-
erick Douglass’s efforts to mount exhibits chronicling
black American progress after slavery. When Douglass,
presiding over the Haitian government’s exhibit, tried to
speak publicly on “The Race Problem in America,” he was
heckled and jeered.
Today, an alternative eco-socialist path is emerging.
Groups like The Leap, Global Grassroots Justice Alli-
ance, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the
Labor Network for Sustainability, and the Climate
Justice Alliance are imagining a just transition to a clean-
energy economy. Our challenge is to go big. The rising
North American left must crash into — and in that
90 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
process transform — the epochal energy transition that’s
already begun.
Energy Gridlock
For all their differences, Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau
agree on two things: the Keystone xl pipeline is a great idea,
and the lion’s share of new infrastructure should come in the
form of public-private investment, which surrenders dem-
ocratic control and requires that the projects yield reliable
profits. The broad enthusiasm for private infrastructure is
the really dangerous part.
In terms of raw power generation, clean energy can
easily displace fossil fuels. The cost of onshore wind has
fallen by 40 percent in the last quarter century; the cost of
utility-scale solar has plummeted by half in under a decade.
Prices for each will keep plunging. Battery technology, vital
for storing and smoothing the flow of variable renewable
energy, is now also taking off.
Bad infrastructure has become the bottleneck. As
Gretchen Bakke argues in The Grid, “investments in
renewable sources of power generation are failing or falling
very short because America’s electric grid just isn’t robust
enough or managed well enough to deal with the electricity
these machines make.” Sun and wind are always shining and
blowing in different places, at different levels. The more
intrinsically variable clean energy you have, the harder you
have to work to move it around smoothly.
Free market reforms, which along with government
support spurred the renewables boom, have now become
a barrier to clean energy’s next big step. The “utility death
spiral” in regions where rooftop solar power has under-
mined utility finances is just the beginning. Long-term,
market-based grid policies point to an unequal future
in which reliable energy is only available to those with
favorable geography or wealth. We’ll need public planning
and investment to assemble a continent-wide, polycen-
tric smart grid that can deliver universal, reliable, and
affordable energy.
What’s more, to reach zero carbon, we must electrify
everything, from stoves to delivery trucks to buses. We
also need to develop more efficient systems, overhauling
cities and suburbs and better linking them to energy infra-
structures. The complexity of this transition compounds
the need for public coordination.
Urban densification, building retrofits, transit-oriented
development, and the expansion of community culture and
 THE LAST STIMULUS

91 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 sport facilities can all reduce energy demand. Since heat
waves, extreme storms, and rising seas threaten urban areas,
we need to blend energy efficiency with clever fortification.
Here, grid development and urban planning merge.
Urban rooftop solar panels will excel as a backup system,
in case disaster downs power lines. All the time, electric
vehicles will serve as batteries that can store energy from
the wind that blows while commuters sleep.
We’ll have to fight to make most of those vehicles shared
buses and vans. The dream of cityscapes swarming with elec-
tric cars, their manufacture chewing up resources elsewhere,
is one of green capitalism’s saddest fantasies.
Of course, massive social struggles over the terms of all
this change will break out. Indeed, that’s what makes broad
climate justice coalitions possible. With local leadership,
retrofitting working class and racialized communities is
where we start.
All of this requires huge investments. If left forces want
to cement our victories, we’ll need money.
Raise the Roof
To seize public control of our energy system’s most stra-
tegic area — the grid and associated infrastructures — left
forces must pressure public institutions to tap wealth and
income through increasing taxes, setting smart carbon
prices, seizing co-ownership of leading firms, and retooling
banks and bonds.
The economic geographer Sarah Knuth has done bril-
liant research on these issues in the context of California’s
efforts to retrofit cities for a clean-energy economy.
Largely thanks to Proposition 13, passed during that
state’s Reagan years, raising old-fashioned taxes in Cal-
ifornia is virtually impossible. To fund long-term green
investment, Knuth argues, public entities have had to pur-
chase exotic financial instruments that make speculative
bets on explosive future growth that green investment will
theoretically enable. Not good.
But new developments in California — unfinished and
imperfect as they may be — point toward an eco-socialist
alternative. Pricing carbon represents another strategy for
raising revenue, one that penalized fossil fuel companies
and raises the cost of consuming energy-intensive goods,
like gasoline.
Depending on the carbon price’s design and its revenue
allocation, the overall policy can be progressive. Califor-
nia’s first attempt at carbon pricing was a half-decent
92 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
cap-and-trade approach. Working with progressives and
environmentalists, leading state legislators wrote a bill,
sb-775, that cleverly combined a cap on emissions with a
backdoor carbon tax that would raise more money, returning
much of it to taxpayers in a left populist move. In early July,
Governor Jerry Brown scuttled that effort to instead update
the status quo, with even more help for big oil.
Still, thanks to legislation passed in 2016 with sup-
port from that same broad coalition, California must spend
35 percent of ongoing carbon price revenues on low-income
and racialized communities that have borne the brunt of
prior pollution-driven growth. That progressive investment
mandate remains an important left victory.
Similar initiatives have emerged in Massachusetts, New
York, Rhode Island, and elsewhere. As in California, these
proposals have wide support but run up against entrenched
fossil fuel interests. Bigger fights loom. The issue of carbon
pricing has taken center stage at even the federal level.
Climate-conscious Republicans and their allies want to
levy a modest price on carbon and refund the revenue to
all citizens in equal amounts, which would, in most cases,
move wealth from the rich to the poor. In exchange, they
want to slash environmental regulations.
The fatal problem with the carbon tax as a compre-
hensive climate policy approach is the idea that market
incentives alone could reshape the country’s infrastruc-
ture. But as we’ve seen, it’s precisely on the issue of energy
infrastructure and associated systems that markets are
most hopeless.
To be clear, taxes are good at raising money and dis-
couraging bad behavior. The Left should press aggressively
for a big tax on carbon, which will attack fossil fuels, cut the
wealthy’s extreme consumption, and increase revenue. Left
coalitions should also insist, like Senator Bernie Sanders and
activists countrywide, that the public sector retain a third
or more of carbon tax revenues to invest in a just transition.
The problem with markets and carbon isn’t pricing in the
abstract, it’s power.
The finance question goes beyond taxing and spending.
For one thing, we can raise money while building public
power at the expense of corporate power.
Behind every clean-energy innovation lies government
support. For instance, Elon Musk built Tesla and Solar City
with help from government science and cheap loans. Economist
Marianna Mazzucatto argues that the state should get dividend-
paying shares in the firms that it nurtures —let’s say a 10 percent
stake. If you brought the sugar, you should get some lemonade.
 THE LAST STIMULUS

Behind every clean-energy

innovation lies government support.
Elon Musk built Tesla and
Solar City with help from government
science and cheap loans.

93 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 Or consider so-called green bonds, where a third party
certifies that the money raised will be spent on clean energy
or adapting to extreme weather. Historically, when public
entities issue bonds, they’re betting on future growth
and empowering private creditors. Could green bonds
be different?
As the economic geographer Patrick Bigger tells me,
each time a public entity issues a green bond, demand dwarfs
supply. Scandinavian and Californian pension funds are
desperate to buy the bonds, even though their yield rate is
uncommonly low. Thanks to political pressure, millions of
workers’ retirement funds are already investing in a happy
old age in a stable climate. Globally, trillions of dollars in
workers’ retirement savings are up for grabs.
Yet in most of the world, workers don’t manage their
own pension funds — for now. Again, it’s a question of
power. The climate movement’s fossil fuel divestment cam-
paign might also revitalize the long-running labor struggle
to take back control of the wealth workers build.
Finally, the Left should focus on organizing investment
through institutions. Here, too, the field is opening up.
Regional and national governments all over the world are
setting up green banks, financial institutions to help shape
the booming investment in the energy transition.
We have long wanted to turn the financial sector into a
transparent, risk-averse, public-oriented utility — an idea
the 2008 financial crisis revived. Most simply, a national-
ized banking sector could channel funds into socially useful
enterprises, not currency bets, flash trading, and Cayman
island bank accounts.
A recent oecd survey found little consensus on how
new green banks will raise and spend money. They are
like warm clay, begging progressive forces to mold and
enliven them by specifying how they choose directors,
interact with communities, and prioritize spending.
Chill Green Jobs
Of course, the one thing socialists reliably love about invest-
ment is job creation. There’s good news here as well: the
renewables economy is powering job growth. This past year,
employment in the solar sector expanded seventeen times
faster than in the economy as a whole. We can reasonably
estimate that investing tens of billions of dollars into trans-
forming our energy system will produce millions of new jobs.
But there’s bad news too: green jobs can be shit jobs.
They include low-paid work like blowing insulation or
94 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
installing solar panels as well as the presumably more
glamorous stuff, like working at Tesla. As one production
assistant there told the Guardian, “I’ve seen people pass
out, hit the floor like a pancake and smash their face open.”
Meanwhile, pipe-fitting work, for example on the Key-
stone xl pipeline, is demanding, skilled labor, and it pays
accordingly. Further, much of the fossil fuel industry —
unlike renewables — is unionized. The question of
democratic representation — not the world’s carbon foot-
print — divides good jobs from bad ones.
To make the transition to renewables just, we must
be ready to pay — and organize — for it. That means
unions, environmentalists, and their allies must force the
public sector to facilitate green-collar organizing. Gov-
ernments must use their procurement power to support
unionized providers, and greens must show up at the picket
line. Indeed, fledgling labor-climate coalitions are already
forming.
The green job push can fit the logic of the last stim-
ulus by broadening its focus. We must gradually shift jobs
from an end goal to a small component of the good life.
European-style workweek reductions —once a central
demand for many American union organizers — would
allow workers to spend more time having fun.
Studies show that shorter workweeks produce lower
carbon footprints. But those studies were conducted
in Northern European countries, with universal health
care and social services. Dutch innovations that facili-
tate part-time work, demanded by feminists and unions
in the 1980s, mean that workers can unilaterally shorten
workweeks. And they have, since they don’t depend
on their employers for basic needs.
In the United States, where these protections are
lacking, we cannot shorten everyone’s workweek without
pushback from workers. In a transitional move, however,
workers could demand the right to reduce their hours, take
corresponding wage cuts, but maintain full benefits. The
public sector could lead on providing a template. This would
help ease the transition to universal social services, as well
as a basic income and job guarantee.
Organizing Democratic Landscapes
We must situate the clean-energy agenda in the messy real
world. When we begin to transform our energy system,
the spreadsheets and bar graphs of a thousand policy pdfs
will collide with hilltops, seashores, and fields — all
 THE LAST STIMULUS

95 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 wandered, watched, and loved by the people who live there.
The Left has embraced the growing resistance to fossil
fuel infrastructure and extraction, a global movement that
Naomi Klein calls “Blockadia.” But opposition to clean-energy
infrastructure is also growing. Wind farms — whose output
still eclipses solar energy — often elicit fierce local resistance.
Sometimes the refusal comes in comically hypocritical
forms, such as the liberal Kennedy family fighting to keep
offshore wind from ruining their Cape Cod views. More
often, however, it’s an understandable response to big infra-
structure projects dropped down from above.
Rural communities, often politically conservative
pockets in otherwise progressive regions like Maryland,
Ontario, and Vermont, have all fought to keep their familiar
landscapes from being transformed by wind turbines and
power lines. Deeply felt worries about aesthetics blend into
more dubious paranoia about health impacts.
As the Dutch landscape architect Dirk Sijmons writes
in his fascinating book Landscape + Energy, wind turbine
struggles worldwide reveal the central role landscape poli-
tics will play in the energy transition. How we handle these
conflicts, he argues, will shape “whether the transition
will die in the nimby trenches, or whether it will form the
occasion for a transformation of the landscape that will
ultimately benefit everyone.”
To produce the same amount of energy as fossil fuel
infrastructure, wind and solar require ten to one hundred
times more ground space. To drain carbon from the sky, we
must sprawl across the earth. As indigenous and racialized
communities have known for more than a century, the top-
down imposition of energy infrastructure often comes with
brutal, unequal effects.
Today, clean energy needs to take root in Trump country.
Scholars who have tracked decades of resistance to wind
farms in conservative rural areas argue that advocates must
engage in intense public engagement and provide mate-
rial benefits to residents if they hope to build consensus.
This imperative to work closely with locals, addressing
their concerns and sharing power, dovetails with the Left’s
desire to develop closer ties to rural workers. Journalist Kate
Aronoff’s proposal to revitalize US rural electric coopera-
tives created during the New Deal, now serving 42 million
people, is a natural starting point.
Many of the communities that have spearheaded
Germany’s renewable-energy transition are politically con-
servative, low-population areas that saw community-owned
clean energy as a way to revitalize dying towns. This local
96 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
leadership won federal financial support in the form of
mandated “feed-in tariff” subsidies. This federal support
further empowered local action. In 2012, community own-
ership of Germany’s booming renewable sector peaked at
a respectable 47 percent.
But again — to complete this transition, we must move
energy, not just make it. Residents don’t just resist turbines,
but also the giant new corridors of high-voltage lines needed
to transport it.
Of course, the simplest remedy has the biggest price
tag. Burying power lines can increase construction costs
by a factor of five. In Germany, the prospect of 250-foot-
high “monster pylons” carrying wind power along high
voltage wires for over six hundred miles sent Bavarians into
a frenzy. In 2015, the federal government agreed to spend
up to $9 billion to route the wires underground, money it
could have spent on any number of other worthy causes.
This same scenario just played out in Vermont. In
Ontario, local opposition to a top-down, corporate-driven
plan to build turbines and power lines from groups like
“Mothers Against Wind Turbines” has slowed a once-ag-
gressive clean-energy plan. And this is just the beginning
of the energy transition — the landmass in question will
grow relentlessly.
To massively expand renewable energy, you need
broad public support. People must agree on when to sacri-
fice their view and when to invest in making infrastructure
invisible, even at the cost of other potential projects.
As the landscape architecture scholar Nicholas Pevzner
explained to me:
Infrastructure so often faces resistance because it’s a
proxy for power relationships and political priorities.
How huge changes to infrastructure get communicated,
who makes the decisions, is extremely complicated.
That could be left to corporations and utilities. Or
design can try to lead the way.
Design thinking can bring visual tools and expert knowl-
edge into conversation in sophisticated ways. We don’t
have a ready-made model. We can’t know in advance what
people will want after they’ve had the time to learn and
debate. Democracy means that groups of ordinary people,
not technocrats, make the final decisions.
After Hurricane Sandy, the Rebuild by Design ini-
tiative created compelling projects to protect vulnerable
working-class communities, including Manhattan’s public
housing–dominated Lower East Side and the South Bronx’s
 THE LAST STIMULUS

To produce the same

amount of energy as fossil fuel
infrastructure, wind and solar
require ten to one hundred times
more ground space.
To drain carbon from the sky,
we must sprawl across the earth.

97 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017

 Hunts Point, where a food market that helps feed over
twenty million people is shockingly vulnerable to rising seas.
Rebuild by Design would have benefited from deeper
and broader community engagement, stronger fol-
low-through, and more federal money to actually fund
final proposals. Still, the initiative’s best ideas vindicate
close collaboration between community groups, designers,
and other experts.
The Left can build on this model, just as it has found
ideas in flawed-but-productive municipal experiments in
participatory budgeting. In the Netherlands, the design
thinkers who inspired Rebuild by Design built off a centu-
ries-old tradition of local water board deliberation. Today,
they are shifting their focus to renewable energy.
All this might sound way too much like Al Gore’s next
ted talk. Community engagement! Wind! Design! No more
climate denial! No more suffering! But hey: a winning Left
needs to be confident, optimistic, and solution-oriented.
The scale and urgency of the planning required to
remake our energy landscapes offers a huge opportunity.
It could become the organizing project of the next ten years,
where our commitments to democracy and well-being lit-
erally hit the ground.
These rural landscapes will also become the sites of
agricultural renewal and places where hard and soft infra-
structures cushion extreme weather’s effects. We will direct
new investments, extracted from fossil fuel wealth, to
once-poisoned territories populated by indigenous groups,
communities of color, and fossil fuel workers now aban-
doned by Big Oil and Big Coal.
Long Live the Future
Of course, the last stimulus involves much more than
98 № 26  •   SUMMER 2017
just financing a new energy grid, transforming employ-
ment, and restructuring landscapes. But these examples
illustrate three core truths about climate politics: they
have already started, their reach is limitless, and they are
the terrain on which we will battle over the twenty-first
century’s giant questions of inequality and power. Starting
right now.
So far, green capitalists are the ones shaping the future.
They get it. We could too. Just imagine what life could look
like if, in the next few years, the Left seized the initiative
and started winning.
In that world, by 2030 we’ll be on the way to reconciling
nimble, decentralized clean energy with a grid that provides
affordable, reliable, and universal access to electricity. We’ll
be socializing investment, breaking Wall Street’s power.
We’ll have put price signals to work for democratic planning,
organized countless workers, and eased the burden of labor.
As a bonus, we’ll be building landscapes — in cities,
suburbs, and the countryside — where time-rich workers
will roam and recline.
We’ll camp at the edges of re-wilded, carbon-sucking
forests; we’ll hike through valleys with ridges topped by
wind turbines built by local cooperatives; we’ll lay our
towels on flood-softening sand dunes to drink iced rum
mixed with garden-grown mint; we’ll trip over pumpkins
and lick raspberry-stained fingertips in brambly fields sal-
vaged by permaculture; we’ll ride Ferris Wheels built of
materials the twentieth century never heard of, breathing
sweet air that forgot it was once laced with mercury and
soot. We’ll slip in and out of cities on solar-panel-covered
roads in electric buses, carrying electric toothbrushes and
vibrators to usher in the night.
One last stimulus to stop runaway climate change and
break free from capital: rest, song, and wine await us.   •
C ULT U RAL CAPITAL

Out-of-context Gramsci
quotes go here.
CULTURAL CAPITAL
WAYS OF SEEING BY OWEN HATHERLEY

Green
Islands

Eco-socialism
in one city or gated
communities?

Garden Cities of Tomorrow

Long predating the environmental movement and probably the first example
of “green” town planning and architecture anywhere, the new towns of the
Garden City Movement were regarded by their inventor Ebenezer Howard as
“common-sense socialism” — communally owned towns that were neither
city nor country, where white- and blue-collar workers would live together
surrounded by great belts of trees, powered by non-polluting light industries.

These were then actually built, in the 1910s and ’20s, in the form of places
such as Letchworth, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Welwyn Garden City,
to the designs of architects like the committed socialist Raymond Unwin.
They were pleasant — if you could get to live there. The aim of creating cross-
class cities independent of London remained a mirage, with the communally
owned development companies soon monopolized by private interests, and the
attractive workers’ cottages becoming desirable suburban residences for
middle-class commuters into the capital.

100
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
 WAYS OF SEEING Green Islands

Architect Konstantin Melnikov

proposed his green city would be
a “city of sleep,” with psycho-
somatic smells and sounds playing
throughout to soothe the
hard-working Soviet proletarian.

Zelenograd
In 1930, the Soviet Union held a competition for a “green city” to be built
outside of Moscow, which became a showcase for one of the stranger ideas of
the early ussr — “disurbanism.” This theory aimed to completely
dissolve both the city and the country, as was proposed by Marx and Engels in
The Communist Manifesto. Proposals for high-rise communes, living pods
in forests, and for immense networks of self-built single-family dwellings placed
along linear strips of industry ensued. Architect Konstantin Melnikov
proposed his green city would be a “city of sleep,” with psychosomatic smells
and sounds playing throughout to soothe the hard-working Soviet prole-
tarian. Needless to say, it was never built, though a more pragmatic version
was eventually made for the Soviet electronics industry in the 1960s.

101 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 WAYS OF SEEING Green Islands

Broadacre City
The exact opposite of any kind of green city is the American suburb.
No matter how much there might be in the way of trees and grass, it requires
a way of life completely dependent on a car, and hence, on petroleum, with
gigantic distances between home and places of work and leisure. Suburbia was
the basis of Frank Lloyd Wright’s American Utopia, worked on throughout the
architect’s long career.

Broadacre City was based on the assumption that if everyone had

an automobile, the city could be dispersed for miles and miles across
the expanses of the United States, like a capitalist version of
the Soviet green city, with one acre per citizen. Real exurbia, of course, lacked
the imagined integration of agriculture, industry and every-
day life, or the organic architectural touches Wright added to the idea.
The “disappearing city” Wright longed for had no need of his
modernist aesthetics.

Drop City

This communal settlement in Colorado, founded in 1965, was the first

example of green architecture on any scale in the manner in which we’ve come
to expect it — somewhat ramshackle in appearance and elective in residence.
Visually defined by a series of geodesic domes constructed from industrial waste
and placed in a barren rural space, it was run communally and founded an
early solar energy company. Drop City has been abandoned since 1977, but it
was the ancestor of later experiments in dome living such as Biosphere 2,
written about recently in Douglas Murphy’s Last Futures, an attempt to recon-
ceptualise everything about dwelling, architecture, and technology. It was
eventually taken over and run into the ground by none other than Steve Bannon.

102 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 102

 WAYS OF SEEING Green Islands

BedZED
The New Labour government in Britain, elected in 1997, had proposals for
“Millennium Communities,” ecologically efficient, sustainable new suburbs
intended to be connected to improved public transport. One of the few of
these to actually be constructed is “BedZED,” a shortening of Beddington
Zero Energy Development, designed with the help of the London-based
alternative technology company BioRegional. It’s a functioning example of
green architecture, with power generated on site. Its flats are densely
clustered rather than, as in so many putatively “green” schemes, spacious and
thus hard to link to public transport. Perhaps because of this, it has had no
successors; recent proposals for “eco-towns” have been scaled down to mere
“garden villages,” as the building industry dislikes experiments that could
affect its profit margins.

Dongtan
Around ten years ago, magazines were full of images of Dongtan, a planned
eco-city just outside of Shanghai. Intended to be self-sufficient in water and
energy and connected by zero-carbon transport, it was designed in 2005 by
the multinational engineering firm Arup on behalf of the Chinese government.
Images were circulated, books were published, and awards were awarded.
China has constructed new cities at an astonishingly rapid rate in the twelve
years since then, but curiously, Dongtan is not among them. Many of the
officials involved in planning it have been sentenced for corruption, and the
site remains undeveloped.

103 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 WAYS OF SEEING Green Islands

Masdar
Oddly, the most extensive recent eco-city has been constructed not on a
riverside site in China but in the desert in the United Arab Emirates. The uae
is a paradigmatic example of egregiously wasteful construction, with metro-
poles like Dubai and Abu Dhabi reliant on massive projects of geoengineering,
all paid for by oil, of course.

Yet Masdar City, planned by Foster Associates, intended to supplement this

with a town of fifty thousand people, living in terracotta houses with natural
cooling systems, moving between their homes and jobs in alternative
technologies via personal rapid transit, with cars banned altogether. The
International Renewable Energy Agency is moving its headquarters to
the city. If it is built, as seems likely, Masdar will be a telling indicator of what
green cities of tomorrow will actually be like — gated communities of piety,
green islands in a petroleum sea.   █

Masdar is what green cities of

tomorrow will actually be like —
gated communities of piety,
green islands in a petroleum sea.

104 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE BY ALEXANDER BILLET

Bono
Kills the Planet

Rock concerts
can’t stop the ice sheets Remember Live Earth? You could be
forgiven if the answer is no. It’s been
from melting. ten years since the global mega-
concert was beamed across the world
in a purported effort to save it.
How it was supposed to do so was
never made clear, and it only
took a few years for it to quietly fade
into memory.

Founded by media mogul Kevin Wall

and inconvenient-truth teller Al
Gore, Live Earth consisted of twelve
roughly simultaneous concerts,
staged on every continent, including
Antarctica. The diverse lineup
featured everyone from Snoop Dogg
and m.i.a. to Garth Brooks and
the Soweto Gospel Choir. If social
change could come from star power
alone, global warming would’ve
stopped on July 7, 2007.

We weren’t so lucky. A decade later,

the most powerful nation in the
world has a blustering climate denier
at its helm, and every season seems
to top its average high temperature
by a few degrees.

105 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE
Of course, today most of the
performers and viewers alike would
admit that the concert was a
spectacular failure. Yet the idea that
a culture of awareness can magically
save the world remains alive and well.
We can chalk up a fraction of Live
Earth’s failure to its lack of
vision. What exactly was it supposed
to achieve? Was every person
watching from home going to start
driving hybrids and using energy
efficient light bulbs? How could it
address private corporations,
which spew a thousand times more
pollution into the atmosphere
than consumers? Even Bob Geldof —
always the first to defend
anything modeled after his own Live
Aid — publicly criticized Live
Earth’s awareness-raising goals as
hopelessly vague.
What ultimately did the brand in,
however, was the real world, which
was supposed to stand inert while
Gore ran to its rescue. In November
2008, terror attacks struck
Mumbai, and organizers canceled
the concert scheduled for the
next month. Protests greeted the 2010
“Run for Water,” which had bafflingly
recruited Dow Chemical as a sponsor.
As critics pointed out, the company
is responsible for some of the worst
environmental disasters in history,
from the notorious Bhopal gas leak to
more recent poisoning of ground-
water in Michigan and Louisiana.
This is not to say that a concert
cannot become a space of transfor-
mation. Geldof may have created
the modern mega-benefit performance,
but he arguably got the idea from
106
Bono Kills the Planet
a large festival that invoked a very of Israeli trash on top of Palesti-
different kind of power. In his nian villages.
1986 book Beating Time: Race ‘n’
No concert can substantively push
Riot ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll, David
back climate change, racism,
Widgery mentions that, seven
poverty, or war — at least not on its
years before Live Aid, Geldof had
own. What it can do, however, is
been actively involved in Rock
situate itself in ideological opposition.
Against Racism. Widgery offers a
This isn’t simply a matter of
brief but sharp criticism of Geldof’s
choosing the right theme or emphasis,
follow-up project:
but of understanding the areas
The political problem was not where popular culture and popular
that Live Aid failed to over- politics overlap and recognizing that
throw imperialism, East and we cannot engage with music
West (which it was never without dealing with questions of
intended), but it ... neglected its political economy.
other declared intention,
Rock Against Racism shunned
to really hammer the big powers’
corporate funding, openly and enthu-
refusal of effective aid [to
siastically allied with protest
Ethiopia]. Geldof was not “too
movements like the Anti-Nazi League,
egotistic,” rather he was too
carefully selected its acts, and
easily steered from confronting
demanded that artists and audience
Thatcher to having off-the-
members put their bodies on the
record dinner with the royals,
streets. These traits distinguished it
partly because it was
from a dominant culture that sees
too much of a one man band.
change as coming only from personal
A lot changed between 1978 and consumer choices.
1985. These were neoliberalism’s
While today’s mega-benefit concert
early years, and the cultural
might have a little bit of this spirit
logic of personal responsibility as
still floating in its dna, it dilutes the
absolute determinant was just
idea of “music that mobilizes” to
starting to infect daily life and art.
the milquetoast “music for a cause.”
This narrative deliberately
presented mass power as nothing Climate change is not a cause. It is a
more than a series of personal totalizer, something that will
choices divorced from the structures determine whether humanity can
of power and profit. survive long enough to compile
an “extinct list.” It is a massive cliff,
Today, this logic is ubiquitous, and
and a select few have a vested
thousands of smaller music festivals
interest in pushing the rest of us off.
thrive on it. For example,
A culture that sees working and
Milwaukee’s 2012 Rock the Green
oppressed people as collective parti-
festival was supposed to promote
cipants can keep us from falling
environmentalism, but its primary
off the edge, but I highly doubt that
backer — Veolia Environmental
Bono will have a role in it.  █
Services — had dumped 200,000 tons
EARTH, WIND & FIRE
 2017 from FERNWOOD PUBLISHING
One-Dimensional
Man 50 Years On
The Struggle Continues
edited by Terry Maley
available at www.fernwoodpublishing.ca
“Winona LaDuke’s David Camfield lays
latest book reads out a theoretical
like a prayer…she basis for political
offers a spiritual and social change
compass and that fuses critical
invaluable insight Marxism with
into the relationship insights from
of prophesy to the anti-racist queer
realities of climate feminism.
change, economic
collapse, food “This is a must read
scarcity and basic book for anyone who
human rights.” wants to understand
– Huffington Post the complex forces
that shape our
societies and change
them.”
— Sara Farris
September 2017
Cuba–U.S. Relations South Africa’s Agroecology
Obama and Beyond Corporatised Science and Ecology
by Arnold August Liberation by Peter M. Rosset
Foreword by Keith Ellis & Miguel A. Altieri
A Critical Analysis
Introduction by Ricardo Alarcón December 2017
of the ANC in Power
by Dale T. McKinley
 T HE TUM BREL

Righteous haterade
against the enemies of
proletarian progress.
 THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS
People Make the
World Go Round
How the Sierra Club came
to dabble with neo-Malthusianism.
Bad ideas have a habit of sticking
around. More than two hundred years
ago, Thomas Malthus predicted
that population growth would inevi-
tably outstrip the pace of food
production, leading to calamity. Since
then, his model has been used in
all manner of heinous ways, first to
justify slashing aid to the poor,
and later by eugenicists in the early
twentieth century.
Malthus’s theory is still with us today.
Only this time it’s some segments
of the environmental movement who
propose illiberal methods to prevent
a Malthusian catastrophe.
109
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Columnist Dan Savage made waves
a few years back after half-jokingly
suggesting that “abortion should be
mandatory for about thirty years,”
and that population control would
need to be instituted. Before
that, British journalist Alex Renton
argued that governments in the
developed world should offer incen-
tives and penalties to induce
families to have less children, while
hinting that, down the line, it
may have to happen “the hard way.”
Canadian reporter Diane Francis
posited that a “planetary law, such
as China’s one-child policy” was neces-
sary to prevent global warming, and
that “birth restriction is smart policy.”
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
85
80
75
70
65
60
55
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
This idea dates back to at least 1968,
when Paul Ehrlich published
his neo-Malthusian classic, The
Population Bomb, which predicted
ecological and social collapse the
world over and the starvation of ten
million people a year through the
1970s. To halt rapidly approaching
catastrophe, Ehrlich offered a range
of measures, some benign (change our
lifestyles to be less resource inten-
sive), some alarmingly authoritarian
(taxes on children and baby
supplies, forced sterilization of fathers
with three or more children).
At one point, Ehrlich suggested the
government may eventually have
to add a “temporary sterilant to staple
food, or to the water supply.”
Ehrlich and his organization, Zero
Population Growth (zpg), quickly
 GIRONDINS
amassed tens of thousands of followers
convinced of the imminent collapse
of civilization. If what they advocated
seems extreme, it’s perhaps under-
standable given their panic — though
when one hears advocates say
they’d “like to see people have fewer
children, and better ones,” one
suspects there was more to it
than this. Just read Ehrlich describe
his come-to-Jesus experience in Delhi:
The streets seemed alive with
people. People eating, people
washing, people sleeping. People
visiting, arguing and screaming.
People thrusting their hands
through the taxi window,
begging. People defecating and
urinating. People clinging to
buses. People herding animals.
People, people, people,
people.... Would we ever get to
our hotel? All three of us were,
frankly frightened.
Ehrlich’s ideas caught on among
some environmentalists. One
was ecologist Garret Hardin, author
of The Tragedy of the Commons,
who wrote in 1971 that “continuing
to support the right to breed is
suicidal” and that “if we defend the
freedom to breed, we shall
ultimately lose all other freedoms.”
Another was John Holdren, who
coauthored a textbook with Ehrlich
in 1977 that outlined — though
didn’t advocate for — several possibly
coercive population-control
measures that could be allowed if
“the population crisis became
sufficiently severe to endanger the
society,” including forced abortions.
The passages caused a stir when
Holdren was nominated as Obama’s
science adviser in 2009.
Still another environmentalist taken
110
with these ideas was David Brower,
the first executive director of the Sierra
Club and founder of prominent
environmental organizations like the
League of Conservation Voters
and Friends of the Earth. Brower commis-
sioned The Population Bomb after
hearing Ehrlich on the radio. In his
foreword to the book, he charged
that uncontrolled population was “a
menace” and registered his hope
that organizations like the Sierra Club
would “awaken themselves and
others” to the importance of popu-
lation control. Over the decades,
Brower would repeatedly state that
overpopulation was one of the
world’s biggest problems, and that a
large part of this was linked to
immigration. He remained on the
Sierra Club’s board until 2000.
Through the 1970s and ‘80s, the
Sierra Club proselytized about the
need to curb immigration. It told
Congress that immigration policy “is
the determinant of future numbers
of Americans,” and in 1989, it officially
adopted the policy that “immigration
to the US should be no greater than
that which will permit achievement
of population stabilization in the US.”
The Wall Street Journal reported
in 1992 that the organization helped
form the anti-immigration California
Coalition to Stabilize Population.
There were other overlaps with
immigration restrictionists. One of the
Sierra Club’s former presidents
joined the board of advisers for the
Carrying Capacity Network, an
anti-immigration environmental group
that today rails against sanctuary
cities and warns about supposedly
criminal Muslim immigrants.
Another former member became the
executive director of Californians
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
People Make the World Go Round
for Population Stabilization.
None was more prolific than John
Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty
Law Center calls “the racist archi-
tect of the modern anti-immigrant
movement.” Tanton, a leading
Sierra Club official during the 1970s
and president of zpg, founded a
network of thirteen anti-immigration
think tanks and advocacy groups,
including the Center for Immigration
Studies, whose “data” Trump has
heavily relied on.
The Sierra Club’s stance on
immigration changed in the late ’90s,
when its rank and file defeated a
push by its anti-immigration wing to
explicitly support restrictionism.
In 2013, it officially adopted a plank
that endorsed a path to citizenship
for undocumented immigrants while
taking no stance on broader US
immigration policies.
Today, calls for restrictionist policies
and forced birth control are
limited to a fringe of the environmental
movement. This in itself is a sign
that liberal environmentalists can be
pushed to embrace policies that
can fight climate change without
running roughshod over the rights and
freedoms of ordinary people. It
was, after all, Sierra Club members
who ushered in progressive changes
in the organization.
There is perhaps hope that
with pressure from both within and
without, liberal environmentalists
can be won over to the idea that
capital itself will need to be tamed and
overcome to keep the Earth habit-
able for future generations. Ehrlich was
right — when it comes to securing
the future, it really should be about
people, people, people, people.  █
 THE TUMBREL
VERSAILLES
Bill Gates
Won’t Save Us
When it comes to green technology,
only the state can do
what Silicon Valley cannot.
Silicon Valley prides itself on solving
problems. Whether it’s colonizing
Mars or finding a parking spot in San
Francisco, the tech industry
promises to tackle humanity’s greatest
challenges. Yet on the most urgent
challenge of all — how to stop climate
change before it renders large
portions of the planet uninhabitable —
it has made vanishingly little progress.
It’s not for lack of trying. Eager to take
advantage of what venture capi-
talist John Doerr called “the biggest
economic opportunity of the
twenty-first century,” from 2006 to
2011 investors poured a staggering
$25 billion into companies that vowed
to radically reduce our reliance on
111
BY BEN TARNOFF
fossil fuels. It seemed like a perfect
fit: Silicon Valley could fulfill its
vision of itself as an instrument of
human salvation by literally
saving the world, while collecting
the vast profits that would
presumably flow from spearheading
a global energy transformation.
The result was a disaster. By 2011,
vcs had lost more than half of
the money they had invested over
the previous five years. Nearly all
of Silicon Valley’s clean energy startups
had gone bust or were about to.
With the exception of a few high-
profile outliers like Tesla, Silicon
Valley fled the sector and “cleantech
became a dirty word,” according
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
to TechCrunch. The aversion
has persisted ever since, although in
December 2016, Bill Gates
announced a new billion-dollar fund
called Breakthrough Energy
Ventures that aims to rekindle vc
enthusiasm for clean energy.
But Breakthrough Energy Ventures
is likely to suffer the same fate as
its predecessors, for the simple reason
that venture capital is a terrible
model for funding innovation. If the
goal is major advances in how we
generate, store, and distribute clean
energy, as well as how we remove
massive quantities of carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere — all of
which are critical for keeping global
warming under the 2°c limit
widely seen by scientists as cata-
strophic — then venture capital
is the worst possible way to get there.
Venture capital is designed to demand
large returns in the short term.
This makes vc firms unlikely to
support the sort of research that
produces technological breakthroughs,
which requires generous financing
 Climate Bill Gates Won't Save Us

Finance

$1.7 billion
Venture Capital and Private Equity

$131 billion
State Investment Banks

over long periods of time. Science

operates on a different timetable
than capitalism.

Most vc funds are structured as ten-

year partnerships. This usually
means they’re looking for startups
headed for an “exit” — an ipo or
an acquisition by a bigger company —
within three to five years. Gates’s
Breakthrough Energy Ventures is orga-
nized as a twenty-year fund, in
the hopes of giving founders a bit more
breathing room. But this still sets
$46 billion an unforgiving pace for startups to
Commercial Banks achieve exponential growth. Because
most startups will fail, vcs must
select companies they believe can scale
fast enough to pay off ten to a
hundred times their investment. One
or two superstars will make up for
the many duds, enabling the fund to
provide a competitive return.

vc firms are impatient and greedy

because the market demands it. It
doesn’t matter what’s in your heart:
even philanthropically inclined
investors like Gates must function
under these constraints. vcs simply

112 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 VERSAILLES
Publicly-funded research has supplied the private sector
with its most pioneering and profitable inventions.
That’s because the public sector can afford to be everything
the private sector can’t: patient, generous, and insulated
from the iron discipline of the market.
can’t afford high-risk, capital-intensive
projects that don’t offer the
possibility of a quick and sizable
payout. As a result, they’re good at
bankrolling the next Tinder or
Snapchat, but bad at financing the more
ambitious technologies needed
to purge the carbon from our energy
and our air.
So if venture capital isn’t capable of
funding the innovation we need, what
is? The same entity that has funded
every major innovation since World
War II: the state. It is an article of
faith in Silicon Valley, and in corporate
America more generally, that the
private sector is entrepreneurial and
risk loving while the public sector
is stagnant and risk averse. The truth
is nearly the exact opposite.
In one field after another, publicly
funded research has supplied
the private sector with its most
pioneering and profitable inventions.
That’s because the public sector
can afford to be everything the private
sector can’t: patient, generous,
and insulated from the iron discipline
of the market. This is most power-
fully true in the case of the industry
that most loudly proclaims its
entrepreneurialism — Silicon Valley.
The computer, the Internet, the
smartphone — these are just a few of
113
Bill Gates Won't Save Us
the technologies that wouldn’t exist in the “climate finance” landscape
without piles of public money. The is state investment banks, which
state bears the risk of radical inno- invested $131 billion in renewables
vation so that companies and their in 2014 — compared with $46 billion
investors can reap the rewards. from commercial banks, and a
measly $1.7 billion from venture
When it comes to clean energy, other
capital and private equity.
countries understand this dynamic
far better than the United States. In Public institutions aren’t just
fact, as the economist Mariana funding research into new techno-
Mazzucato has observed, one of the logies — they’re also funding
reasons that the US has lagged decarbonization using existing
behind other countries in renewables technologies. This is a critical point
is its “heavy reliance on venture too often obscured by Bill Gates
capital to ‘nudge’ the development and other clean energy capitalists:
of green technologies.” China, by we already have the technology
contrast, has opted for a strong “push”to transition to a zero-carbon energy
from the state. In 2015, China system. We even have a detailed
installed one wind turbine and one road map for what the transition would
soccer field’s worth of solar panels look like, thanks to Stanford
every hour. Its lavish public funding scientist Mark Z. Jacobson and his
of solar panel manufacturers has colleagues, who have plotted
helped produce a 80 percent drop in out how to convert all fifty states to
world prices, driving down the 100 percent clean energy by 2050.
cost of renewable energy everywhere.
Of course, innovation can help
And larger investments are on
ease and accelerate this process —
the horizon: earlier this year, China’s
it can also find ways to scrub
National Energy Administration
centuries of carbon emissions from
announced that the government
our atmosphere. In fact, without
planned to invest more than $360 bil-
major technological advances, we are
lion in renewables through 2020.
unlikely to keep warming within
China may be especially aggressive, the 2°c limit. But we’ll never generate
but it’s not alone in its reliance on those advances if we surrender
public institutions. Around the world,society’s most important investment
the state is leading the charge on decisions to billionaires like Gates.  █
clean energy. The single biggest actor
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
 THE TUMBREL
THERMIDOR BY KATE ARONOFF

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DEK: Nam aliquet, ipsum et Climate-denying Republicans

semper convallis, quam lacus luctus grab the headlines, but green policy
nisi, ac cursus
As Naomi Klein hasenim
pointeddiam
out, ut leo. debates are being shaped
the Right may be onto something when by the Right.
it describes global warming as a
Bolshevik plot: curbing climate change
requires a fundamental rethinking
of our economic system and the role
of the state in orchestrating it.
Conservatives grasp at a visceral level
just how vast the implications contained within it is a conviction But for many this consensus comes
of the ecological crisis really are. For that a perfectly free market and its not from their desire to curb
them, rejecting climate change is rational economic actors can offer warming so much as to create more
a perfectly rational political position. salvation from the end of the world as efficient markets. The neoclassical
we know it. Even amid the gop’s logic behind carbon pricing seeks to
And yet, while climate-denying
staunch denialism, it’s this uneasy make companies factor the cost of
Republicans grab the headlines, neo-
coalition that may pose one of pollution into their budgets. It’s what’s
liberal and openly right-wing actors
the most difficult barriers to sur- known as a Pigouvian Tax, and
have carved out sizable space in policy
mount as the stark reality of whether it actually succeeds in curbing
discussions about how to stem rising
the climate crisis becomes more emissions is secondary to whether
tides and scale up renewable energy.
painfully obvious. it breeds efficiency.
Though the climate fight tends to get
Unsurprisingly, conservative A reasonable carbon tax probably
painted in black and white terms —
economists, housed everywhere should exist as part of a suite
either you believe in global warming
from Ivy League universities to of much bolder policies to reign in
or you don’t — the former camp
libertarian think tanks, are especially emissions. Yet the plans right-
contains multitudes. The thread
gung-ho on this point. Some wing wonks put forward, like one
linking the Wall Street bankers,
95 percent of all economists agree Exxon-approved carbon pricing
oil magnates, and progressive heroes
that a carbon tax should be enacted. scheme, tend to see a tax as a silver

114 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 THERMIDOR
bullet, or even as an easy vehicle
through which to dismantle
regulation. One of the four pillars of
a proposal put out by the conservative
Climate Leadership Council last
spring, for instance, is a “significant
regulatory rollback.”
The scheme — co-authored by Reagan
and Bush-era treasury secretaries —
would phase out the epa’s authority
to regulate carbon and implement
an “outright repeal of the Clean Power
Plan.” The problem with this is
that carbon taxes on their own don’t
tend to be especially good at
bringing down emissions sans regu-
lation, especially not at the low price
most plans tend to set (generally
well under $100 per ton). Exxon’s
own spokesperson has said that such
a price would need to be set at
$2000 per ton in order for it to cap
warming at 1.6°c. Like many
other oil majors, they already assume
a carbon price in their long-term
projections, in some cases as high as
$80 per ton. When fossil fuel
companies embrace market-based
solutions, it’s because they
know it won’t pose a threat to their
business model.
Industry-friendly climate action isn’t
a new phenomenon, though. In
fact, one of the earliest backers of a
carbon tax was Milton Friedman.
In 1979, amid debates over pollution
controls, he argued that people
who hadn’t contractually agreed to
endure pollution — that is, the general
population — had a reasonable
right to be protected from it, and that
the government had a role to play
in protecting them. But the way to do
115
it, he argued, wasn’t through
rules and regulations administered
by federal agencies. “The way to do
it,” he said, “is to impose a tax on the
cost of the pollutants emitted by a
car and make an incentive for car manu-
facturers and for consumers to keep
down the amount of pollution.”
He made the case even more bluntly
two years earlier when asked how
ecological pressures might influence
economics. “I would like to tax
those activities which create pollution,”
Friedman said. “The greatest
protection of wildlife has not come
from governmental measures to
protect wildlife. It has come from the
Audubon Society and from other
private associations,” small groupings
of rational actors who — in Fried-
man’s view — were better suited to
drive down pollution than the state.
Nearly forty years later, everyone
seems to be a Friedmanite environmen-
talist — even figures like Robert
Reich. Still more pervasive
than support for carbon pricing specifi-
cally, though, is the wider belief
that the market is the best and only
tool to dig us out of this crisis. In
a new book co-authored with former
Sierra Club head Carl Pope,
Michael Bloomberg evangelizes that
climate change is a problem best
solved by the private sector and local
governments. Pope famously threw
his lot in with fracking enthusiast
T. Boone Pickens in 2008, stepping
down from the Sierra Club shortly
thereafter “to revitalize the manu-
facturing sector.” Before leaving, he
negotiated a $1.3 million contract
allowing Clorox to use the group’s
logo on its line of green products,
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
The Eco-Right's One Simple Trick
and regularly hyped up corporate
partnerships as being an integral
part of the club’s work.
The upshot here is that if you happen
to frequent places like Davos,
your outlook on climate change is
probably an optimistic one. Indeed,
you might stand to make a bit of
money because of it.
Scientific reality, of course, is
grimmer. Given how thoroughly
neoliberalism has infected
nearly every aspect of daily life,
that its logic has taken root in
high-level climate policy discussions
shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Like neoliberalism itself, support for
the market-as-panacea position
also doesn’t fall firmly along partisan
lines, either. There’s plenty of
daylight separating Robert Reich from
Milton Friedman, of course, but
the ubiquity of faith in market-based
solutions among some of the climate
fight’s most visible faces should
be cause for concern. As warming
mounts — and denial ebbs —
the neoliberal solutions currently
dominating the conversation
about how to respond are poised to
find friends at the highest levels
of government, perhaps even in a
Trump White House where
Goldman Sachs executives and former
ExxonMobil ceos-turned-cabinet
members agree with progressives that
a carbon tax is our best shot at survival.
We shouldn’t think for a moment
that popular gop denialism is set in
stone. The Right’s fundamental
mission is to preserve capitalist class
power — if we let them, they’ll find a
way to use climate policy to do that.  █
 CHRISTIAN PARENTI

IF WE FAIL
IF WE FAIL

T
 he climate crisis is often imagined as a
sudden, all-encompassing, simultaneous
collapse in which agriculture fails, the
seas flood in, disease spreads, and human civiliza-
tion crumbles into Hobbesian war of all against all.
But in reality, some crises will appear more imme-
diately and others will take a long time to arrive,
and if we act with speed and purpose some can
still be avoided.
In the near term, perhaps starting in the 2020s or
2030s, the foremost problem will probably be a new
climate-driven urban crisis of disinvestment, aban-
donment, and depopulation caused by rising sea
levels and large inundating storms that will leave
rotting urban infrastructure. As the water rises and
the floods increase in severity and regularity, the
once posh shoreline will be the new ghetto.
A new, climate-driven urban crisis could have
major negative impacts on other parts of the global
economy. The collapse of coastal real estate mar-
kets could trigger broader crises in financial markets
while loss of the communication and transportation
links provided by major cities could hurt the real
economy. A climate-driven economic depression
is not out of the question.

HERE
117 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
 AS THE WATER RISES AND
THE FLOODS INCREASE
IN SEVERITY AND REGU-
LARITY, THE ONCE POSH

COMES
SHORELINE WILL BE THE
NEW GHETTO.

THE
E
ven if we drastically cut greenhouse
gas emissions and stripped co₂ from the
atmosphere so as to stabilize tempera-
ture increases at no more than 2°c above the 1990
baseline, we are locked in for significantly higher sea
levels. Melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,
mountain glacier loss, and the expansion of ocean
water volume due to its higher temperature are driving
the sea level rise.
On the east coast of the US, the ocean is rising
three to four times faster than the global averages,
which are themselves rising at an accelerating rate.
In 1993 the annual rate of sea level rise was 2.2 milli-
meters a year; in 2014 it had reached 3.3 millimeters
a year. By 2100, global average sea levels could be

OCEAN
2 meters to 2.7 meters, that’s 6 to almost 9 feet, higher.
Since 1900, sea levels on the East Coast have risen
by about a foot, according to the federally funded
National Climate Assessment.
This is usually invoked in threats that entire cities
will be “underwater.” But in the meantime, the rising
oceans are slowly but steadily reshaping property
values, urban landscapes, and city dynamics.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 118

IF WE FAIL

T
he real threat is not so much the slow and
steady increase of average sea levels
but rather, the major inundations caused
by large storm surges. These floods damage the
infrastructure as a whole, not just its edges. During
Hurricane Sandy the storm surge that hit lower Man-
hattan was 9.23 feet higher than a typical high tide.
When infrastructure gets damaged, even
unharmed properties that depend on the damaged

STORM
electrical, transportation, and water systems lose
value.
A few inundations in quick succession could start
a process of combined physical and socioeconomic
decline. As the time and tremendous expense needed
to repair water-damaged underground electric and
telecoms lines, subways and rail lines, drinking water
and wastewater treatment systems, and power sta-
tions becomes apparent, property owners will start
panic selling.

URBAN
When it becomes clear that sea walls were not
constructed in time and vital infrastructure has started
to collapse, property values will follow, possibly trig-
gering broader financial panics
If properly planned for, one can imagine how
such problems could be managed. But if the current
denial continues until markets are caught unaware,
there could be regional real estate panics and, flowing
from those, major financial losses.
New York City’s Department of Finance recently

FRAST
estimated the total assessed value of the city’s prop-
erty for fiscal year 2017 at more than $1 trillion. That
is real money, enough to help trigger problems in
financial markets more broadly.
Collapsed property values means a collapsed
tax base, which means local government will be hard
pressed to make costly infrastructure repairs. And it
is the infrastructure as a whole that property values
depend on.
Hurricane Katrina, which famously hit New Orleans
in 2005 and was quickly followed up by Hurricane Rita,
offers a hint of what to expect.
Professor Bernard Weinstein, at the University
of North Texas, has estimated the cost of those

119 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 A PERMANENT STATE combined storms as $250 billion in both direct and
indirect damage. Weinstein found: 113 offshore oil and

OF EMERGENCY IN THE gas platforms destroyed, 457 oil and gas pipelines
damaged, and almost as much oil spilled as during

MOLDERING, COASTAL, the Exxon Valdez disaster. Katrina destroyed almost

half of New Orleans’s levies, wiped out most of the

MUCK ZONES COULD sugar crop, and wreaked havoc on the oyster industry.
Insurance companies paid out $80 billion.

BECOME THE NORM. Most shockingly, Katrina killed 1,836  people

across the Gulf, most of them senior citizens who were
trapped in houses or abandoned in nursing homes.
We forget the magnitude of this damage in part
because the real estate and entertainment industries
in New Orleans embraced the rebuilding process with
such gusto and denial. They were, after all, thrilled

MS VS.
that the storm did its worst damage to poor black
neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward.
Since Katrina, the Eastern Seaboard has been
lucky. An unusually high percentage of hurricanes
have been turning out to sea rather than making land-
fall. Ironically, recent research by James P. Kossin
suggests this might be a short-term side effect of
global warming. Just as a hotter sea surface tem-
perature creates more hurricanes, a hotter land mass
creates more vigorous vertical wind shear, which

N IN-
acts to block the arrival of hurricanes. That said, this
natural protective pattern is not perfect, storms do
make landfall, and the pattern of wind shear blocking
hurricanes will likely change as other elements of the
climate system are transformed.
Regardless, with a rapidly rising sea level,
the near-future promises more metropolis-flooding
mega storms.

TRUCTURE
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 120
IF WE FAIL

DE
T
he New York City tristate area offers a
glimpse into the possibilities and pathol-
ogies of planning for sea-level rise. After
2012, when Hurricane Sandy did $50 billion in eco-
nomic damage, including destroying or damaging
650,000 homes, it was clear something needed to be
done. Eventually Congress allocated about $60 bil-
lion in federal aid for recovery and resilience work
in the impacted area. But the pace of disbursement
has been painfully slow.

SIV
One example is repairing the L line’s Canarsie
Tunnel, connecting northern Brooklyn to Manhattan.
Flooded during Sandy, the tunnel is now badly
corroded and is set for a $477 million, one-and-a-
half-year closure for a vital overhaul. That’s just one
short tunnel.
The city is now building a barrier around lower
Manhattan, called the “Big U.” Designed to be covered
with grass and serve as public open space, the wall
will run from 42nd on the east side, along the shore,
and up to 57th street on the west side. Construction
will take years and cost billions.

PRE
At this rate and in this fashion, it is hard to imagine
how the city’s entire 520-mile coastline could be
secured. Worse yet, half preparations are, in some
ways, as bad as no preparation. As the Rolling Stone’s
Jeff Goodell said of New York City’s largely sym-
bolic efforts thus far, “Barriers, dikes and levees make
people feel safe, even when they are not.”
Meanwhile, in a clear subsidy to unsustainable
gentrification, the city is also planning to build a
$2.5 billion tramline along the Brooklyn and Queens
waterfront, where old industrial warehouses are
giving way to luxury high-rises. Similar insanity is
found in New Jersey, where several groups of coastal

RAT
homeowners, many of whom have subsidized govern-
ment-provided flood insurance, are suing to prevent
construction of protective sand dunes.
Eventually, cities that did not build sea barriers
soon enough and high enough will get hit. Inundated
by storms coming in close succession, some cities
will find themselves too broke to rebuild their infra-
structure and a process of real and metaphoric rot
will set in. As public services decline, so will prop-
erty values, each feeding the other; the rotting and
molding landscape will be the visual symptom of a
political-economic spiral of a shrinking tax base,

121 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

FEN-
disinvestment, and abandonment.
Eventually, those who can will leave the coast. A
study by University of Georgia demographer Mathew
Hauer projects that 250,000 people in New Jersey will
be forced to move by rising seas by 2100. In Florida,
Hauer projects that 2.5 million people will have to
leave their homes by that date.
Perhaps some of the ravaged coastal cities will
become sources of scrap. High-quality housing stock
in dying coastal cities might be worth disassembling by

E
scavengers in search of bricks, copper pipe, slate tiles,
windows, doors, and old-growth hardwood lumber to
sell to inland construction markets. We’ve seen that
pattern in the Rust Belt: for much of the 1990s St. Lou-
is’s top export was old bricks bound for the booming
Sunbelt where its rubble was repurposed as patios
bought on credit.
What will happen in Dhaka, Lagos, Karachi, or
Rio? All are megacities situated on flat terrain close
to sea level in countries already in crisis, legendary
for corruption and poor planning. One has to assume
that as the future impacts of climate change become

PA-
obvious, many more people will migrate inland or
attempt to go abroad.

MASS MIGRATION AND A RACIST

BACKLASH TO IT ARE ALREADY
HALLMARKS OF THE EARLY

TIONS
CLIMATE CRISIS.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 122

IF WE FAIL

INFRA-
STRUC-
TURAL
CHOKE
POINTS
123 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
T
he geography of global capitalism relies
disproportionally on coastal cities as seats
of commerce, trade, research, transporta-
tion, and education. They are the nodes that link the
world economy together.
Much industrial production and the global food
system, for example, depends not only on what
happens in factories and fields but also on a small
number of infrastructure bottlenecks along interna-
tional supply chains at key ports, airports, road and
rail links, and politically sensitive maritime straits like
the Panama and Suez canals.

A recent study by the British think tank Chatham

SHUT ENOUGH OF THE House found that 55 percent of the global grain trade
passes through one of fourteen “chokepoints,” all of
CHOKEPOINTS AND THE which are vulnerable to extreme weather like local
flooding, rising sea levels, and the associated political
GLOBAL FLOW OF FOOD and military conflict.
Shut enough of the chokepoints and the global
WILL BE THREATENED. flow of food will be threatened. Chatham House found
that about 20 percent of global wheat exports pass
through the Turkish Straits. Similarly, more than 25 per-
cent of global soybean exports pass through the
Straits of Malacca, which run between Malaysia and
Indonesian.
The world got a glimpse of how local flooding can
impact global supply chains in 2011 when flooding in
Thailand inundated much of Bangkok, including more
than 1,000 industrial facilities that made everything
from cars and cameras to hard drives. The United
Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates
the Thai floods reduced global industrial production
by 2.5 percent. The world’s top three insurance com-
panies paid out $5.3 billion in claims.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 124

IF WE FAIL

A
s coastal cities slide into ruin and those
who can migrate inland do so, inequality
and relative depravation will increase.
Those left behind will be angry and have little stake
in maintaining a social order that leaves them in a
sacrifice zone. Who will be the last one out? If Amer-
ican history thus far offers answers, the poorest of the
poor, undocumented climate refugees, might be the
scavengers and squatters in the dead cities.
One can imagine left-wing social movements
emerging in these zones, or entirely reactionary
millenarian ones, or just widespread, apolitical crim-
inality. Any and all of these will, in lieu of radical social
change, be met with an increasingly repressive para-
military state response — checkpoints, swat patrols,
National Guard, racist and rightist vigilantism.
We saw the patterns previewed on the Gulf Coast
after Katrina. When local governments offered help to
New Orleans, most of it came as heavily armed police.
This was in large part because after almost fifty years
of federally subsidized law-and-order, most cities

125 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

and counties have a surplus of repressive capacity,
yet almost nothing in the way of disaster-oriented
civil defense.
ONE CAN IMAGINE LEFT-
A permanent state of emergency in the moldering,
coastal, muck zones could become the norm. Thus the
WING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
rising waters of climate change threaten to erode not
only beaches but also civil liberties.
EMERGING IN THESE ZONES,
Mass migration and a racist backlash to it are
already hallmarks of the early climate crisis. By the
OR ENTIRELY REACTIONARY
2030s and 2040s, far more people will likely be on the
move. Already, right-wing demagogues from Arizona
MILLENARIAN ONES, OR JUST
to Cote d’Ivoire, to Myanmar, to Paris have been
raging against the outsiders. Too often the dema-
WIDESPREAD, APOLITICAL
gogues successfully ride the fear and rage to power,
and once there, turn state repression against immi-
CRIMINALITY.
grants and other poor people.
Thus, as drought, neoliberalism, and militarism
produce crises, warfare, and waves of refugees in the
Global South, in the North they produce a reactive,
opportunistic, authoritarian state hardening.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 126

IF WE FAIL

SOLUTIONS

T
he good news is we have all the technologies we need to save
civilization from climate collapse: solar and wind electrical
grids; electric vehicles; the ability to re-wild wetlands and build
artificial barriers to break and block the power of the sea. And we very
well can develop the political capabilities to win over a majority behind
the policies that will preserve the health and security of that majority.
Just as importantly, we already have the technology to strip co₂ from
the atmosphere. That technology is fairly simple and has been in subma-
rines for decades. The problem was always how to safely store the co₂.
Now, scientists in Iceland have recently created a process that strips
co₂ from the atmosphere and turns it into rock. The process is called
“enhanced weathering” because it mimics one of the natural processes
by which co₂ is washed out of the atmosphere and bound to rockworks
by mixing carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide with water, and injecting
it underground into Basalt rock formations. Within two years, the co₂ in
the water mixture “precipitates” into a white, chalky solid, a carbonate
rock similar to limestone. Lucky for us, Basalt rock, the feedstock of this
process, is one of the most common rock types on Earth.
Already, in Reykjavik, a geothermal power plant strips and stores
5,000 metric tons of co₂ a year. That only equals the annual emissions
of about 2,000 cars. But the point is we have the technical ability to strip
atmospheric co₂ and safely store it.

127 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 SCIENTISTS IN ICELAND HAVE
RECENTLY CREATED A PROCESS THAT
STRIPS CO2 FROM THE ATMOSPHERE
AND TURNS IT INTO ROCK.

H
owever, like proper defense of cities from the sea, there is
no way the profit motive or market relations can bring this
technology to scale. The world economy is producing about
40 billion metric tons of carbon emissions a year. At current prices, strip-
ping out this much emissions would cost about 24 trillion dollars, a sum
equal to 133 percent of the annual US GDP.
Free-market boosters for enhanced weathering technology push
the idea of selling its artificially created limestone as building material.
The economics don’t make any sense. Why buy expensive rock when
cheaper natural rock is available?
Clearly the private sector and the profit motive cannot deploy
enhanced weathering technology at the scale needed, nor push a rapid
energy transition, nor build coastal protections at the scale and speed
necessary. But none of these tasks is technically or economically impos-
sible. The mechanism needed in each case is state action and the public
sector.
One more bit of good news. A radical climate solution, counterintui-
tive perhaps, requires that we use more, not less, energy. But energy, in
the form of solar energy, is the one economic input that is truly infinite.
Our mission as a species is not to retreat from, or to preserve, some-
thing called “nature,” but rather to become fully conscious environment
makers. Extreme technology under public ownership will be central to a
socialist project of civilizational rescue, or civilization will not last.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 128

IF WE FAIL

SO WHAT IS THE
WORST-CASE
SCENARIO?
O
n the agricultural front, crop failure and
famine leap to mind when imagining
the bad future. For example, heavily
subsidized and mechanized American and Cana-
dian petrochemical agriculture can likely adapt and
migrate north for a long time. More capital-intensive
forms of closed-environment fish farming and weath-
er-protected indoor farming of produce are already
in operation. Poultry and swine are primarily raised
indoors already.
There will, nonetheless, be serious disruptions to
agriculture. As the National Climate Assessment puts it:

While some US regions and some types of agri-

cultural production will be relatively resilient to
climate change over the next 25 years or so,
others will increasingly suffer from stresses due
to extreme heat, drought, disease, and heavy
downpours. From mid-century on, climate change
is projected to have more negative impacts on
crops and livestock across the country — a trend
that could diminish the security of our food supply.

In many countries of the Global South, where

the state is less robust and large numbers of people
depend directly on farming for their livelihoods, cli-
mate-driven disruptions are already intense and often
violent. Between June 2010 and June 2011, for instance,
world grain prices almost doubled, triggering rioting
in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to Nairobi, Kenya.

129 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 THE
VENUS
SYNDROME
ULTIMATE I
n the long-term, worst-case scenario in which
we burn all the fossil fuel we can, Earth ends
up as a lifeless rock swathed in boiling-hot,

RISK:
toxic, water vapors. The scenario, dubbed “the Venus
Syndrome” by America’s most famous climate scien-
tist, James Hansen, would happen if global warming
becomes self-compounding through a series of rein-
forcing feedback loops in which global warming’s
symptoms intensify its causes.
For example, if the Earth gets warm enough due
to human-made greenhouse-gas pollution, the arctic
permafrost will melt. When the permafrost melts, it will
release naturally occurring deposits of methane that
are now locked a permanent layer of ice. Methane
is a very powerful heat-trapping greenhouse gas, so
the release of methane will cause even more warming,
and more melting, and so on.
In Hansen’s scenario, this self-fueling process of
breakdown could lead to several thousand years of
continual warming, during which the oceans would
boil off, all life on Earth would end, and Earth would
have a super hot atmosphere like that on Venus.   ▲

SOMETHING TO LOOK
FORWARD TO.

EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 130

L E FTOVERS

Our work here

is not yet done.
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT
We Gave
Greenpeace
a Chance
Less stunts, more
organizing.
In what has become typical of the
Greenpeace style of stunt activism, a
protester recently scaled Trump
Tower with a flag that read, “Resist.”
It was placed next to a picture of
a globe with “Defend” written on it.
This was a response to the break-
down in the g20 talks, which left the
president isolated over his unwill-
ingness to curb America’s staggering
greenhouse emissions.
Greenpeace usa released a
statement, in what could only be some
kind of performative naiveté,
saying “Activists with Greenpeace
usa are at Trump International
133
BY ANGELA NAGLE
ILLUSTRATION BY
SERGIO MEMBRILLAS
Hotel in downtown Chicago,
preparing to send a message that the
Trump Administration can’t
ignore.” Having ignored the g20, the
president would, of course, ignore
a feeble banner.
Stunts, as a chosen alternative to
formal politics or mass movements,
are designed to be symbolic
spectacles that will get picked up by
media and communicate a message
visually. So what does this kind of
spectacle communicate? Is it making
itself the David and Trump the
Goliath, a self-diminishing display of
plucky bravery in the face of the
overwhelming brute force of capital?
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
The reflective fifty-eight-story
skyscraper in Manhattan symbolizes
the boastful, nouveau-riche spirit
of Trumpism, while the simple banner
with the passive unambitious
language of its slogan communicates
the opposite — the little guy, the
underdog, a return to mother earth
and the simple things in life, a
rejection of materialism and greed.
But as Adorno put it, “In the end,
glorification of splendid underdogs is
nothing other than glorification of
the splendid system that makes them so.”
This aesthetic aversion to ambitious
technologies and Promethean
modernity communicates precisely
 THERMIDOR
the wrong message about what must
be done to address new
environmental dangers and improve
people’s lives.
The performance of diminutive
direct action also doesn’t represent
what Greenpeace is — an inter-
national ngo with campaigns that
have the most appeal to those in
the West not exactly struggling for
survival. Last year, for example,
an open letter to the organization from
over a hundred Nobel laureates
urged an end to its campaign against
genetically modified organisms.
They focused on opposition to Golden
Rice, a crop the scientists claimed
could prevent malnutrition, blindness,
and severe immune system
disorders among millions in the
developing world.
Trump promised wealth, growth, and
abundance in the economic realm
but a check on too much change in the
private and social realms. Liberal
greens offer the opposite — constant
revolution in the personal realm
but conservatism in the economic and
productive, a reigning in of the
Human interference in the natural world
is now the only way to save it.
We Gave Greenpeace a Chance
excesses of modernity and its ravages has since learned to synthesize
on the natural world. many of its best criticisms. George
Monbiot, once the voice of green
In a time of austerity, stagnant wages,
austerity in the Guardian, has since
and a lowering of expectations,
become an advocate of nuclear
it should not be difficult to see why
power. Credible mainstream voices
Trump’s vision holds appeal and
with popular appeal from Bernie
the Greenpeace one does not. My only
Sanders to Naomi Klein emphasize
sense of shock at first hearing
workers and employment, and
Trump’s statements on climate change,
advocate technology as part of the
such as his comment that “the
solution, not the problem.
concept of global warming was created
by and for the Chinese in order The green movement should move
to make US manufacturing non- beyond what remains of its worst
competitive,” was that someone tendencies — local, individualized,
was actually talking about manufac- ngo-based and ethical-consumerist
turing again. solutions to vast global problems
that require international cooperation
In the 1990s, during a high period
and a humanistic ethos and instead
of the anti-globalization movement
embrace a confident economic trans-
and green stunt activism, when
formation designed to benefit the
people were urged not to consume
environment so that people may live,
and growth was a dirty word, bitter
eat, and prosper in it. Human
fights raged over “deep green”
interference in the natural world is
primitivism and Murray Bookchin’s
now the only way to save it — we
criticisms of lifestylism and
should support organizations that
misanthropy in the anarchist and
proudly place people at the center of
green movements.
their ambitions and ditch all that these
But while there has been a general self-deprecating stunts represent.  █
ngo-ification of the radical roots of envi-
ronmentalism, the green movement
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE 134
135 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017
 LEFTOVERS
THE COOKSHOP BY LEIGH PHILIPS
MICHAL ROZWORSKI

ILLUSTRATION BY
SERGIO MEMBRILLAS

Planning
the Good
Anthropocene

What is profitable is not always useful, The market is blindly leading us

and what is useful is not always
toward climate calamity —
profitable. Worse still, many things
that undermine human flourishing democratic planning is a way out.
or even threaten our existence remain
profitable, and, without regulatory
intervention, companies will continue
to produce them.

This — the market’s profit motive,

not growth or industrial civilization —
caused our climate calamity and
the larger biocrisis.
It would be very useful to wind down
our species’s combustion of fossil
fuels, responsible as it is for roughly
two-thirds of greenhouse gas
emissions. It would be useful, too,
to increase input efficiency in
agriculture, which, together with
deforestation and land-use change,
is responsible for most of the
remaining third.
We know how to do this.
A vast build-out of dependable base-
load electricity from nuclear and
hydroelectric plants, supported by
more variable renewable energy
technologies such as wind and solar,
could replace nearly all fossil fuels
in short order, cleaning up the grid
and delivering enough clean gene-
ration to electrify transport, heating,
and industry. Decarbonizing
agriculture is more complicated, and
we still need better technology, but
we understand the overall trajectory.
Unfortunately, wherever these
practices do not create profit, or
do not create enough profit,
companies will not put them in place.
We hear regular reports claiming
that investment in renewable energy
is now outpacing investment in fossil
fuels. This is good, though often the
result of subsidies for market actors,
themselves often derived from
hiking the price of electricity rather
than taxing the wealthy, thus
hitting working-class communities.
Even if, in relative terms, more
money is going toward wind and solar
than toward coal, the absolute
increase in combustion from deve-
loping nations will likely push us
past the 2°c limit most governments
have agreed is necessary to avoid
dangerous climate change.
Simply put, the market is not
building enough clean electricity, nor
abandoning enough dirty energy,
nor doing either quickly enough.

136 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

 THE COOKSHOP
The relatively simple directive
to “clean up the grid and electrify
everything” that resolves the
fossil fuel part of the equation doesn’t
work for agriculture, which will
require a far more complex set of
solutions. Here too, as long as
a particular practice rakes in money,
the market will not abandon it
without regulation or public-sector
replacement.
Liberals and greens argue that we
should include the negative impacts
of fossil fuel combustion (and
its agricultural corollaries — some
suggest a nitrogen tax) in fuel prices.
Once these externalities increase
the carbon price to $200 or $300 per
ton, the market — that efficient
allocator of all goods and services —
will resolve the problem.
Leaving aside the grotesque
inequalities that would result from
steadily ratcheting flat taxes up
when working-class and poor people
spend a larger proportion of their
income on fuel, carbon-tax advocates
ignore that their solution to
climate change — the market ­— is
the very cause of the problem.
Think Bigger
How will a carbon price build a
network of electric-vehicle,
fast-charging stations? Tesla only
builds them in cherry-picked
areas where it can rely on profits. Like
a private bus company or an
internet provider, Elon Musk won’t
provide a service where that
doesn’t make money. The market
leaves the public sector to fill the gap.
This is no abstract argument.
Norway provides free parking and
charging for electric vehicles, it
137
allows these cars to use bus lanes, and
it recently decided to build a
nationwide charging network. Now,
electric vehicles account for over a
quarter of total new sales, more than
anywhere else. For comparison,
barely 3 percent of cars in eco-friendly
but market-enthralled California
are electric.
As long as
a particular practice
rakes in money,
the market will not
abandon it.
The up-front costs of some changes
pose one obstacle. From a system-
wide perspective, nuclear power still
represents the cheapest option
thanks to its mammoth energy density.
It also boasts the fewest deaths
per terawatt-hour and a low carbon
footprint. But, like large-scale
hydroelectric projects, construction
costs are considerable.
The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change notes that while
nuclear energy is clean, non-
intermittent, and has a tiny land
footprint, “without support
from governments, investments in
new … plants are currently generally
not economically attractive within
liberalized markets.” Private firms
refuse to begin construction without
public subsidies or guarantees.
EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
This explains why the most rapid
decarbonization effort so far
occurred before European market
liberalization took hold. The
French government spent roughly a
decade building its nuclear fleet,
which now covers almost 40 percent
of the nation’s energy needs.
Similarly, we would need to build
continent-spanning, load-balancing,
high-voltage, smart transmission
grids that can fend off variable renew-
able energy’s volatile swings. We
need to plan this project on the basis
of system reliability, i.e., need. A
patchwork of private energy companies
will only build what is profitable.
The Regulatory Limit
Many greens call for a retreat from
scale, a return to the small and local.
But this, too, misdiagnoses the
source of the problem. Replacing
multinationals with a billion
small businesses would not eliminate
the market incentive to disrupt
ecosystem services. Indeed, given
small businesses’ gross diseco-
nomies of scale, disruption would
only intensify.
At a minimum, we need regulation —
that toe-dipping exercise in
economic planning. A government
policy that requires all firms that
manufacture a particular commodity
to use a non-polluting production
process would undermine the advan-
tages gained by high polluters.
This is the social-democratic option,
and it has a lot going for it.
Indeed, we should remember how
fruitful regulation has been since
we gained a deeper understanding of
our global ecological challenges.
 THE COOKSHOP
We patched our deteriorating ozone
layer; we returned wolf popu-
lations and the forests they inhabit
to central Europe; we relegated
the infamous London fog of Dickens,
Holmes, and Hitchcock to fiction,
though coal particulates still choke
Beijing and Shanghai. Indeed,
much of the climate challenge we
face comes from an underdeve-
loped Global South rightly seeking
to catch up.
But regulation only temporarily
tames the beast, and it often fails.
Capital easily slips its leash. So long
as a market exists, capital will try to
capture its regulatory masters.
Everyone, from pipeline-blockading
bullhorn-wielders to Paris Agreement-
drafters, recognizes that this
fundamental barrier stalls our attempts
to curb greenhouse gas emissions:
if any one jurisdiction, sector,
or company undertakes the level of
breakneck decarbonization
needed, their goods and services will
instantly be priced out of the global
market. Only a global, democratically
planned economy can completely
starve the beast, but this proposal
raises some basic questions.
Can we impose global democratic
planning all at once, in all countries,
and across all sectors? Outside of
world revolution, this seems unlikely.
But we can keep that ideal as a
lodestar, something to work toward
over generations, steadily
extending the dominion of democratic
planning over the market.
Further, should we fully eliminate
the market? Wouldn’t that
simply replace the rule of the market
with the rule of the bureaucrat?
Public ownership is
138
insufficient — for both social justice
and environmental optimization —
and the fear of statism is rational.
But democratic planning doesn’t
have to entail state ownership.
Unless they believe democracy has
an upper limit, even classical
anarchists should be able to imagine
a global, stateless, but still planned,
economy. We must ensure that any
non-market mode of global
governance adheres to genuinely
democratic principles.
We should certainly debate the
public sector’s role and size. Could
we seize logistics and planning
Regulation only
temporarily tames
the beast, and it
often fails.
powerhouses — the Walmarts and
Amazons of the world — and
repurpose them for an egalitarian,
ecologically rational civilization?
Could we turn these systems into a
global “Cybersyn,” Salvador
Allende’s dream of computational,
democratic socialism? Let us discuss
whether that’s possible and desirable,
then figure out how to ensure that
we rule the algorithms and that they
don’t rule us.
Climate change and the wider
biocrisis reveal that multiple local,
regional, or continental-wide
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
Planning the Good Anthropocene
decision-making structures are
obsolete. No jurisdiction can
decarbonize its economy if others do
not. Even if one country figures out
how to capture and store carbon, the
rest of the world will still face an
acidifying ocean. Similar truths hold
for nitrogen and phosphorus flows,
closing nutrient-input loops,
biodiversity loss, and freshwater
management.
Moving beyond environmental
questions, we could say the same about
antibiotic resistance, pandemic
diseases, or near-earth asteroids. Even
in less existential policy areas, like
manufacturing, trade, and migration,
too many interlinked nodes tie our
truly planetary society together. One
of capitalism’s great contradictions
is that it increases the real connections
between people at the same it
encourages us to see each other as
monadic individuals.
All this demonstrates the Anthropo-
cene’s horror and its marvel.
Humanity so fully commands the
resources that surround us that
we have transformed the planet in
mere decades on a scale that leviathan
biogeophysical processes took
millions of years to accomplish. But
such awesome capability is being
wielded blindly, without intent, in the
service of profit, not human need.
The Socialist
Anthropocene
Climate researchers sometimes
talk about a “good Anthropocene”
and a “bad Anthropocene.” The
latter describes the intensification
and perhaps acceleration of
humanity’s unintended disruption of
the ecosystems on which we
 THE COOKSHOP
depend. The former, however, names
a situation in which we accept our
role as collective sovereign of Earth
and begin influencing and
coordinating planetary processes
with purpose and direction,
ever furthering human flourishing.
We cannot reach this worthy goal
without democratic planning and a
steady overcoming of the market.
The scale of what we must do —
the biogeophysical processes we must
understand, track, and master in
139
order to prevent dangerous climate
change and associated threats —
is almost unfathomable. We cannot
trust the irrational, unplanned
market with its perverse incentives
to coordinate ecosystems.
Counteracting climate change and
planning the economy are of com-
parable ambition: if we can manage
the Earth system, with all its
variables and myriad processes, we
can also manage a global economy.
Once the price signal is eliminated,
we will have to consciously
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
Planning the Good Anthropocene
perform the accounting that, under
the market, is implicitly contained
in prices. Planning will have to account
for the ecosystem services
implicitly included in prices — and
those that the market ignores.
Therefore, any democratic planning
of the human economy is at the
same time a democratic planning of
the Earth system.
Global democratic planning is
not merely necessary for the good
Anthropocene — it is the good
Anthropocene.   █
 LEFTOVERS
DUSTBIN BY JONAH WALTERS

Beware Your
Local Food
Cooperative

Produce is serious business.

A history of the co-op wars.
In 1969, a band of draft-dodgers
established a commune “to
grow flowers and make pottery”
near an abandoned train depot
in Georgeville, Minnesota. One of
them brought a video camera.
His short documentary survives today.

A narrator’s voice lopes its way

at the time. “One thousand co-ops After a righteous denunciation, the
across some homemade footage of
each providing 1,000 people with interlopers seized control of the
overgrown train tracks: “We talk
healthful and inexpensive food grown cooperative by force. The Peoples’
to the outside world,” the voice
on nearby farms by non-exploitive Warehouse had become a battle-
narrates, “but we have an ambivalent
(and non-exploited) farmers is not just ground in the violent intra-left struggle
attitude toward it.”
a pipe dream.” remembered today as the “co-op wars.”
But before long, these ambivalent
Pipe dream or no, this utopianism was During the 1970s, two factions jostled
communards would venture to the city
short-lived. By 1975, sectarian for control over some two dozen
to participate in the burgeoning
conflicts had spiraled out of control. food cooperatives in the West Bank
food co-op movement. In 1970, an
As an organizer of the Peoples’ neighborhood of Minneapolis.
underground newspaper in Min-
Warehouse, one of the city’s largest On one side, there were the decen-
neapolis proclaimed “good food
co-ops, told a film crew decades tralists, with strong ties to the
for strong revolutionary
later, “We were sitting on bags of flour, communitarian ethos of the hippie
bodies at the peoples’ pantry.”
smoking joints and reading our generation. On the other side,
“There’s no reason why some time in comic book, Invasion of the Stalinoids,” there was a brigade of Maoist true
the not-too-distant future (five years?) when about twenty-five militants believers, whose strategy for
most of the Twin Cities’ food needs carrying steel pipes entered the co-op. prolonged people’s war required
cannot be served by peoples’ co-ops,” “They were full of class rage — at wresting control of the food co-
wrote one cooperative member us! Because we were the bourgeoisie!” operatives from the flower children.

140 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE

 “Co-op War” Factions Face Off Outside Mill City Foods, Minneapolis, 1976 — Minnesota Historical Society
This group was known as the
Co-op Organization (co), and later
simply as The O. It started as a
clique of self-styled guerillas, schooled
in the messianic Marxism-Leninism
of the late New Left. It ended, in the
words of one former member,
as an experiment that “blew up in
the lab, so to speak, flinging the
research staff far and wide.”
The decentralists were enamored of
organic foods farmed on back-
to-the-land communes by former
student radicals like themselves.
Because they alienated most of their
working-class neighbors, they
remained few in number. The co,
on the other hand, following the
model of the Black Panther Party,
wanted to use the cooperatives to
distribute staples like Wonder Bread
and canned soup to as many
community residents as possible, in
the hopes of attracting mass
141
support for the revolutionary struggle
they planned to wage.
But neither group seemed especially
interested in the rich tradition of
cooperative enterprise that already
existed among black residents of
the West Bank neighborhood, who had
intermittently organized co-op
groceries and mutual aid societies
since at least the 1940s.
Gary Cunningham, a cooperative
organizer (and today the husband of
Betsy Hodges, the sitting mayor of
Minneapolis), sympathized with the
co at first. But then the co tried
to seize the Bryant-Central Co-op,
founded by Cunningham’s uncle
Moe Burton, a community organizer
with ties to the Socialist Workers
Party and the Black Panthers.
“There were shots fired that night
at our house,” he recalled to the
same film crew. “We got up the next
№ 26  /  SUMMER 2017
morning and went to the co-op
and it was like a scene from a Western.
We pretty much beat them up. I
think I broke one of the guys’ arms.”
In the end, their campaign of co-op
takeovers failed to propel the co to
the head of a mass insurrection.
Nor did the decentralists succeed in
erecting their utopia of farmers
markets. The decentralists
dispersed. The co degenerated. The
conflict died down.
Still, today, older residents of the
Twin Cities may shudder to hear
newcomers speak casually of food
co-ops, as if they know nothing
of the war.   █
Quotes from Gary Cunningham
and Ken Logsdon (the Peoples’
Warehouse organizer) appear in
the documentary Radical Roots: The
Story of a Food Revolution.  
142 EARTH, WIND, & FIRE
 LEFTOVERS
MEANS AND ENDS BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

Jacobin
Years ago, we warned you. It
was only a matter of time before we
Is Dead. Long
capitulated to liberalism.

We’ve held out as long as we could,

Live Catalyst.
but that day is finally upon us.
The signs couldn’t be clearer: we’re
now selling tote bags and other
apparel on the Jacobin site. We used
to be a Marxist journal, then we
became a socialist magazine, and now
We’ve decided to become
we’ve finally realized our final a lifestyle brand.
synthesis: we are a lifestyle brand.

Don’t worry though, we’ve decided

to start a new Marxist journal
to begin the process all over again.
Does the world need another
journal? Probably not — but the
merchandizing opportunities are too
good to pass up on.
What’s the context of this decision?
We’re launching Catalyst: A Journal
of Theory and Strategy, a beautiful
print journal edited by Robert Brenner
and Vivek Chibber, at a time of
enormous tumult. The political order
is being questioned on a scale we
haven’t seen in decades. Neoliberalism,
which only a few years ago seemed
unassailable, has lost all legitimacy.
Even while the revolt against it is
still mostly electoral, there are signs
of a reemergence of social movements,
stretching across the globe. But at
the same time, the traditional parties
of the Left, which were once the voice
of mass protest, have largely been
absorbed into the neoliberal order.
Labor, once the torchbearer of
progressive politics, is still largely
dormant, in part due to its lack of
organization, and in part owing to its
own conservatism. So even while
the traditional order is in crisis, it isn’t
clear in what direction progressive
forces will, or even should, move.
One thing is clear — discussion
of capitalism is not off the table any
longer. Catalyst launches with
the aim of doing everything it can to
promote and deepen this
conversation. Our focus is, as our title
suggests, to develop a theory
and strategy with capitalism as its
target — both in the North and
in the Global South. While we are
based in the United States,
our hope is to be relevant to readers
stretching from Kolkata to Cairo,
from Pretoria to Paris. It is an
ambitious agenda, but this is a time
for thinking big.
Subscribe to Catalyst at
catalyst-journal.com and encourage
your local and university libraries to
get institutional subs. Jacobin tote bags
are at jacobinmag.com/store/ —
and don’t worry, we’ll be around for
at least a decade or two more.
The people demand Catalyst.
They also demand tote bags. We’re
proud to be here for them.  █

143 № 26  /  SUMMER 2017

catalyst-journal.com