By Michael Busch, Truthout, October 14, 2011
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| Christian Parenti |
In many respects, 2011 has been marked as much by
the mayhem of nature as it has by the upheavals of men. Although challenges to
political authority have captured the imaginations of millions and produced
exciting tremors of revolution across the continents, Mother Nature's
increasingly ferocious response to the heavy environmental footprint of
industrial production will likely be judged the most profound source of social
change around the world in the years to come.
From the Japanese tsunami, which triggered the
worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, and the extreme drought that currently
threatens the lives of millions in the Eastern Horn of Africa to the wildfires,
hurricanes and periodic flooding that have decimated both coasts of the richest
country in the world, anthropogenic climate change is increasingly - and
undeniably - at the core of politics and society everywhere in the world.
"Tropic of Chaos," Christian Parenti's
excellent new book examining the intersections among climate change, neoliberal
economic policy and the spread of political violence, argues that the
convergence of these threats to international security has set our world along
a course that will result in a broken planet characterized by catastrophe,
conflict and xenophobic distrust. That is, unless meaningful action is taken
immediately to reorient international relations away from this disastrous
trajectory.
I recently spoke with Parenti - who has for several
years been a visiting scholar at the City University of New York Center for
Place, Culture and Politics and is currently a visiting professor of sociology
at Brooklyn College - about his book, the future of climate wars, the failures
of leadership in Washington and at the UN to combat environmental degradation
and what can be done to avoid a world driven by the politics of natural
catastrophe.
* * *
Michael Busch: I wanted to begin by briefly
touching on the book's title and, more importantly, discussing the theoretical
concept that largely gives shape to the book's narrative arc: what you refer to
as the "catastrophic convergence." Would you give us a sense of what
you mean by each and talk about how they informed your research and analysis?
Christian Parenti: The "tropic of chaos" is less important
than the "catastrophic convergence." The tropic of chaos is more of a
play on words that refers to the conditions in the Global South, which is that
belt of post-colonial, underdeveloped, over-exploited states that mostly lie
between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So, it's sort of a
name for that region of the world.
The "catastrophic convergence" is the
driving thesis of the book, the argument that climate change doesn't just look
like tornadoes, floods and droughts. It also looks like religious violence,
ethnic pogroms, civil war, state failure, mass migration, counterinsurgency and
anti-immigrant border militarization. And so, climate change rarely works on
its own. Usually, it arrives in the Global South on a stage preset for crisis.
The forces that have preset that stage are militarism and radical free-market
restructuring - neoliberalism. Cold War militarism and now the War on Terror,
have flooded the Global South with cheap weapons and men trained in the arts of
assassination and interrogation, smuggling, small unit attacks and terrorism.
Neoliberalism has created increased poverty, increased inequality and a
tattered and stressed social fabric. As a result, it leads to less social
solidarity. It damages and degrades traditional economies. And it makes more populations
more vulnerable to sudden weather shocks, extreme climatic events like drought
and flooding, which are due to anthropogenic climate change kicking in hard.
And it is combining with these two preexisting crises - militarism and
inequality/poverty - and the three of them are meeting in this catastrophic
convergence and articulating themselves as increased violence. That can be
religious violence, ethnic violence, sometimes class-based violence. Sometimes
this is expressed as chaos and relative or outright state failure.
But in the Global North, the catastrophic
convergence presents itself as a renewed emphasis on building up the incipient
police state that exists in many western European countries as well as the
United States. So, we now have a reengagement with the discourse around border
militarization, a reanimation of the xenophobic discourse that goes with those
policies, which are increasingly articulated in environmental terms - there's
an environmental crisis; there's not enough to go around; immigrants need to be
rounded up; everybody needs to sacrifice some civil liberties; the border needs
to be militarized. If climate change pushes chaos and state failure in the
Global South, it creates authoritarian state hardening in the Global North, at
least in its earliest stages.
MB: You offer compelling evidence that
although the American popular discourse is largely primitive and backward when
it comes to the politics of climate change, the US military sees the challenges
very clearly and informs to a great degree its doctrine on counterinsurgency.
You argue that this gives life to "the politics of the armed life
boat." Can you talk more about how the US military is responding to
climate threats and what you understand to be the prospects for survival in the
armed life boat?
CP: The militarized response in the United States takes place in the
military but also at the state level in the development of a green xenophobia.
They aren't necessarily connected, but they fundamentally produce the same
thing, which is a hardening of state policy. The military - to its credit -
takes climate science very seriously. It does not question the validity of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report,
which is the last one to be published, the one that was attacked because it had
a few footnotes that were wrong. And they were wrong. There was stupid,
arrogant stuff around those errors, but the errors and their correction in no
way change the conclusions of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. The military
takes the report seriously unlike, say, the Republican leadership in the House
or many other elements of the American political class.
The military runs scenarios of what the future will
bring. What they see is not so much an increase in conventional warfare between
states as an increase in humanitarian crisis, civil war, banditry, religious
wars, state breakdown. And they realize that the armed forces will be called on
to respond with various forms of low-intensity conflict: counterinsurgency,
direct intervention, humanitarian intervention, shoring-up allied states, as
well as increased training and advisory roles in these conflicts. The future
for them is essentially one of open-ended counterinsurgency on a global scale
as articulated through these various reports, some of them public, some of them
secret.
In terms of the ethics of the armed life boat,
which would seek to manage this crisis of a planet in decline and manage it
through the use of force, examples can be found on right-wing talk radio, which
calls for expelling immigrants, or in people like Deborah Walker, who I discuss
in the book. Walker describes herself as a northern Californian
environmentalist. She's also an anti-immigrant xenophobe and racist. And then
there's the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which I didn't
address in the book because I didn't know about it; it was only exposed after
the book was published, FAIR is the original anti-immigrant lobby group
associated with Garrett Hardin and others. It started a front group called
Progressives for Immigration Reform that was seeking to reach out to
environmentalists and progressives with a message of excluding immigrants,
talking about the carrying capacity of the country and making the case that immigrants,
essentially, should be repressed.
These are the current features of this state
hardening. One can imagine how this project of border militarization and
planetary management through counterinsurgency and counterterrorism could build
around it a kind of paranoid, frightened, xenophobic consent among more and
more Americans. And that would be the politics of the armed life boat: the idea
that we have ours, the world is ending and we need to hold on for as long as we
can through the force of arms. The military - again to its credit - does not
think this is a good long-term plan. They always say that this stuff has to be
dealt with through the reduction of carbon emissions. Otherwise, we are going
to hit all the tipping points climatologically, which will lead to
self-compounding climate change and the unleashing of such radical
transformations in weather patterns that it will be very hard for civilization
to hold on. Radically rising sea levels and the massive desertification of the
grain baskets of the world, among other problems, will make it very hard for
even the most developed economies to survive. That's what scientists predict
and project if we continue with business-as-usual, which is burning fossil
fuels.
MB: Let's talk about water for a moment, a
point of hope for some environmentalists insofar as it seems to be one of the
few things that states have a interest in securing and a resource around which
even antagonists - such as India and Pakistan - can cooperate. You take on a
variety of this argument, that "water is rational," when it comes to
something like the Indus Water Treaty, and question its long-term viability.
Talk about where things currently stand and what you see as the prospects for
the treaty's continuing functioning in the future.
CP: The Indus water treaty is remarkable insofar as it has worked for as
long as it has. It was signed in 1960, negotiated in 1959, but it is fraying in
part because climate change planners and elites in each country are very much
aware that water resources are going to be increasingly scarce. So India is
building lots of dams and canals on its side of the border and claims that it
is not violating the treaty, that it has the right to use the water under the
treaty - which it does - as long as it doesn't diminish the flow. But then
Pakistan argues that there is diminished flow, which contributes to their
suspicion of India. Pakistan believes that India is not simply impounding the
water but actually siphoning it off. And increasingly we witness this entering the
discourse of the radical religious right in Pakistan, the asymmetrical assets
that have been cultivated by Pakistani intelligence like Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Jama'at-ud-Da'wah, which recently made statements about India's "water
terrorism" and how water must flow or else blood will. So the issue is
becoming more intense.
As to the question of whether or not the treaty can
be maintained, that's an open question in part because the threat of climate
change is suddenly part of the equation but also because there's just
horrendously bad management of the agreement, in Pakistan especially, where
there is very little productive adaptation. I wrote a piece in The Nation
recently about just this. The core of any climate adaptation in Pakistan would
be social justice and land reform. No elites in Pakistan are willing to
consider this, however, nor do aid agencies make this a condition of
development aid and the US government doesn't want to talk about it. There is a
tradition of progressive movements in Pakistan, but they have suffered
tremendous repression and their demands for economic redistribution go
unanswered. As a result, even after the recent horrendous flooding, there has
been no movement on the issue toward land redistribution and social justice,
out of which might have come some better water management strategies, not to
mention better use of the land.
MB: The ability of the world to mitigate the
worst effects of climate change will largely depend on multilateral efforts at
containing the damage. The UN has traditionally been the center of gravity for
this effort and, yet, it's largely been a failure. Copenhagen was a disaster
and Cancun only cleaned up some of the mess. Among other problems, the
secretary general has been almost entirely absent as a force in these
proceedings. And as you point out, the United States, the necessary prime mover
in all of this, hasn't assumed leadership on the issue. Why is that, do you
think? Would you talk about how you view the Obama administration's record on
the environment thus far and what you think can be done to reorient Washington
toward more productive action?
CP: The way you framed it is correct. The United States has played a
non-productive role, a destructive role. It has not taken the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change negotiations seriously and as a result they have
broken down. We are the largest economy in the world and until recently we were
the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world before China overtook us. The
world looks to the United States for leadership but US actions, especially at
Copenhagen, were really depressing. As a result those talks fell apart, though
the process limps on toward its next round of negotiations in Durban South
Africa.
What will change the US position? Protest, clearly.
There has to be a movement that forces the Obama administration to do this. The
Obama administration is proving itself to be very right-wing on many issues,
including this one. It just hasn't been good on climate even as the majority of
people who elected him take climate change very seriously and care deeply about
the issue. And so, I think there needs to be a movement to pressure him. There
are campaigns underway that can do just that. For instance, there is Beyond
Coal, a big campaign sponsored by the Sierra Club under the leadership of
Michael Brune and the work that Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, the
direct action group Radical Action for Mountain People Survival and
long-struggling local groups like the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition are doing
to stop mountain-top removal coal mining and coal plant production. Using
everything from direct action to lawsuits and lobbying, this array of groups
has helped stop the construction of about 130 coal plants.
So, there are campaigns like the fight against coal
that people should get involved with. There's also the actions that were taken
in August to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline that would run Canadian tar sand
slurry through the United States and down to the Gulf for final refining and
export, where people committed acts of civil disobedience in Washington, DC.
These kinds of things need to be done.
Beyond that, I think organized labor has to begin
taking climate change seriously. The main thing that organized labor has done
recently was Rich Trumka urging President Obama to take China to the World
Trade Organization because Beijing was subsidizing its clean tech sector. In
the name of competitiveness, the AFL-CIO is trying to cut Chinese subsidies,
which they will not be able to do, first of all. And second of all, they're not
demanding similar subsidies here in the United States that would put people
back to work. It's pathetic. So, all the various institutions of the left need
to take climate change seriously and start building a movement to pressure
government to make it an issue on the international stage.
Now, in terms of what the Obama administration
could do to reduce emissions: if it wanted to engage the UN process, there's a
lot that can be done without having to go and get permission from the
Republicans.
The EPA, for one, has the obligation to regulate
greenhouse gas emissions. This is the result of environmental groups suing and
fighting in court for 10 years - and finally winning at the Supreme Court level
- to get the EPA to consider greenhouse gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air
Act, which holds that if emissions are dangerous to human health then they have
to be regulated. And sure enough, greenhouse gas emissions are dangerous to
human health due to their adverse effects on the environment. Therefore, the
EPA has an obligation to regulate them and has just begun promulgating these
rules. Unfortunately, they are not very robust. In fact, they're pretty lame
and the administration is dragging its feet on the issuance of these rules by
building in delays. If the EPA were serious and really imposed strict rules,
say, on smoke stacks in coal plants and oil refineries it could effectively
push investment toward clean technology as the rising cost of dirty energy and
carbon emissions would drive people away from it.
The other thing the government could do is leverage
its tremendous purchasing power. If state purchasing of vehicles and electric
power were done according to environmentally clean specifications, the public
sector's carbon footprint would be substantially reduced. At the same time, it
would also likely create knock-on effects in the private sector by allowing the
burgeoning clean-tech sector to achieve economies of scale and provide its
energy, vehicles and services at a rate that is cost competitive with diesel
fuel and gasoline.
MB: As power shifts from west to east with
the so-called rise of China, many warn that China's growing political and
economic might is being built on the back of environmental degradation, which
is only further exacerbating climate change internationally. In the book,
though, you briefly mention that China is beginning to move to clean technology
production. Would you give us a sense of how Beijing's approach has differed
from that of Washington and what the likely outcome might be?
CP: I don't think that China's approach is that well-organized, yet. The
main thing to keep in mind, though, is that Beijing's actions aren't motivated
by some high-minded concern about climate change. The issue of local pollution
has really driven China to embrace clean technology. Take the wind sector, for
example, which is growing at something like 20 percent a year in China. They
invited in all the Western firms - Gamesa, Vestas, GE - then essentially
counterfeited their technology. Then China invited these firms to take, in the
case of GE, 2 percent of the market. GE could go to war with them and say
"hey, you stole our technology" and try to prove it in court, which
would only get them shut out of the Chinese market. Or they can just shut up
and take 2 percent of a market that is growing very, very fast. Needless to
say, they have chosen the latter.
The one lesson we can take from China is the same
lesson that most of the Asian economies remind us of, which is that capitalism
develops best when there is a strong state guiding it. Capitalists and capital
need discipline, they need to be disciplined. They need to be taxed and their
investments need to be guided by the state because when the market is left to
its own self-regulation - which is the ideological preference and prevailing
ethos of our political class - you do not get the types of innovations and
hothouse developments that have characterized industrialization throughout East
Asia. The command model of capitalism that China has embraced - a version of
what was done in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong - this dirigiste
model is quite effective in potentially mitigating the worst abuses of people
and nature committed by capitalism while at the same time encouraging its
better, Promethean qualities.
After all, Marx not only ruthlessly criticized
capitalism, he also praised its ability to create enormous amounts of wealth
and technology and transform the face of the planet. That is essentially what
we have done in a bad way with fossil fuels. But we need to push on through it
and have a reindustrialization around clean technology. I do not think a
retreat from industry back to the local is in any way realistic. We have to
accelerate through this crisis and come out the other end with clean
technologies. That means that we can't keep flying around everywhere, driving
big cars and generally being wasteful. We have to consume less and transform
the way we live, radically. But we aren't going to do that by turning our backs
on machinery and electricity. We need windmills. If we don't get them, we are
going to continue burning coal and field-stripping our AK-47s in preparation
for our neighbor's next attack on the bunker.
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