In the preposterous film 2012, solar flares cause the earth’s tectonic plates to move, resulting in ecological catastrophe. The ruling classes respond by building a number of modern Arks, so that the best of humanity will survive the apocalypse and begin again. Reflecting existing divisions, the main states all build separate Arks, and allow the extremely wealthy to buy tickets for themselves, so that they can pick up business as usual.
In a provocative essay in the latest New Left Review (61, January-February 2010), Marxist geographer Mike Davis draws out some of the key contradictions in the ruling classes’ approach to climate change after Copenhagen. The article provides a much-needed realism together with at least some grounds for hope.
Pessimism of the intellect
Davis makes a number of pertinent observations of the realities we face in tackling climate change. Firstly, he argues that “we have already lost the first, epochal stage of the battle against global warming”. He cites the austerely-named Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, which decided in 2008 that the Holocene epoch—the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilisation—has ended.
Carbon emissions from two centuries of industrial and urban development have destroyed the climate equilibrium of the Holocene. Evolution itself has been forced into a new trajectory. Instead we are in the ‘Anthropocene’ epoch—defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force.
Davis also draws on the critical perspectives of NASA scientist James Hansen. Instead of the IPCC’s proposed red line of 450ppm carbon dioxide, Hansen has found compelling evidence that the threshold of safety was only 350ppm or less. Since the current level is about 385ppm, we may already be past the notorious ‘tipping point’. The oft-stated goal of keeping global warming below two degrees Celsius “is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation”, according to Hansen.
Davis also makes some powerful arguments about the continuation of existing capitalist social relations for climate change.
The IPCC’s socio-economic projections for future global emissions are based on different ‘storylines’ about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Every scenario assumes the continuation of capitalist social relations of production. As Davis puts it, “The IPCC, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on a market-driven evolution toward a post-carbon world economy: a transition that requires not only international emissions caps and carbon trading, but also voluntary corporate commitments to technologies that hardly exist”.
Although the IPCC never spells it out, “its mitigation targets necessarily presume that windfall profits from higher fossil-fuel prices over the next generation will be efficiently recycled into renewable energy technology and not wasted on mile-high skyscrapers, asset bubbles and mega-payouts to shareholders”.
Meanwhile carbon emissions accelerate. The “relocation of energy-intensive production to East Asia burnishes the carbon balance-sheets of some of the wealthiest countries” but “deindustrialisation should not be confused with spontaneous decarbonisation”. Significant research shows that energy intensity has actually risen since 2000 - global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use. Coal production has undergone “a dramatic renaissance over the last decade”, not just in China and India, but also in Europe. Falling fossil-fuel prices and tight credit markets “are eroding entrepreneurial incentives to develop capital-intensive wind and solar alternatives”.
Finally, there is the failure of policy. Neoliberal apologists argue that it makes more sense to defer carbon abatement until poorer countries become richer and thus more capable of bearing the costs themselves. As Davis puts it: “Instead of galvanising heroic innovation and international cooperation, growing environmental and socio-economic turbulence may simply drive elite publics into more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity. Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned—as, to some extent, it already has been—in favour of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers. The goal would be the creation of green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.”
Optimism of the will
Davis’ realism is a welcome relief from the wishful thinking that preceded the Copenhagen climate talks. This kind of climate diplomacy assumes that, once the major actors have accepted the IPCC science, “they will recognise an overriding common interest” in gaining control over the greenhouse effect. Coordinated global action “presupposes the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened ‘solidarity’ with little precedent in history”. It assumes that “privileged groups possess no preferential ‘exit’ option, that internationalist public opinion drives policy-making in key countries and that greenhouse gas mitigation can be achieved without major sacrifices in northern hemispheric standards of living—none of which seem likely”.
If the essay is an essential exercise in calling things by their right names and saying what is, then its chief virtue is that it spells out some key elements in the revolutionary socialist alternative to current climate politics. In particular it confronts head on the difficult issue of how to combine tackling global warming with maintaining and improving working class living standards.
Davis is an unashamed advocate of socialist urbanism. He argues that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, “is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth”. The “ecological genius of the city” remains a vast, largely hidden power. As he puts it convincingly: “There is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence—represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction—represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on Earth-friendly sociality.”
Davis points to a broad socialist utopian urbanist tradition, including Guild Socialism, the ideas of Kropotkin and Geddes, of garden cities to the Karl Marx-Hof, Red Vienna’s great experiment in communal living. He also cites the early experiments in the USSR to relieve congested apartment life with splendidly designed workers’ clubs, people’s theatres and sports complexes. This “radical urban imagination” was a victim of the pulverisation of working class socialism by Stalinism and post-war social democracy.
Davis also argues that the fight to prevent catastrophic climate change must converge with the struggle to raise living standards and abolish world poverty. He argues that climate activists must think beyond the horizon of neoliberal capitalism and “suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to the present”. They must embrace “alternative configurations of agents, practices and social relations”, to make “a global revolution”. He states that they should look towards the labour of the working classes for the “sustainable reconstruction of their built environments and livelihoods”. Although the formulations on agency could have been clearer, the broad line, for a working class-based global climate movement against capital, is clear.
Climate activists have embraced one element of the Marxist tradition - a willingness to advocate the necessary rather than the merely practical. The message is clear: “either we fight for ‘impossible’ solutions to the increasingly entangled crises of urban poverty and climate change, or become ourselves complicit in a de facto triage of humanity”.