In the northern hemisphere's summer months, the climate crisis is undeniable. Even the national, for-profit media outlets focus on devastating heat, droughts, and forest fires. These catastrophes displace stories of the obliteration of Gaza and the pillage of Ukraine with reports that highlight United States and European cities opening cooling shelters for their poor and unhoused population. The more well-off take refuge in air-conditioned homes and workplaces while the wealthy take jets to cooler and safer destinations. Just a microcosm of the human condition worldwide.
From the southern hemisphere, filmmaker Rehad Desai has documented conditions where there are fewer safe places than in the global north for far larger proportions of local populations: "The frequency of drought has increased over the past decade in African regions ... Over the last eight years, only two seasons have been considered successful. Consequently, malnutrition among children now stands at record levels, affecting just over 20% of all children in the wealthier parts of the region, and climbing to high 40s as we get close to the equator" (MR Online). Desai is a leader of the Global Ecosocialist Network. He wrote that the needed "socialist response [to climate change] will require, among other things, the public ownership of energy, a massive expansion of public transport, water, housing and land as public goods and the expansion and support of small-scale farming".
A "massive expansion" of public goods was central to the campaign platform of Howie Hawkins who was the 2020 US Green Party presidential candidate. Hawkins' "ecosocialist Green New Deal" has "two major programs, an Economic Bill of Rights and a Green Economy Reconstruction Program". It includes a "guaranteed basic income" to protect workers from the insecurities of the labour market, and the nationalisation of public power utilities to support green reconstruction of energy, manufacturing and agriculture. Hawkins proposes to fund these initiatives through cuts to war spending and the progressive taxation of income, wealth, corporate profits and the enormous estates of the ultra-rich. These few have benefited from a half-century of neoliberal policies that concentrated wealth at the pinnacles of US society. Hawkins' platform decouples the ecosocialist green new deal from dependency on market mechanisms.
In his book, Burning Up, energy researcher and historian Simon Pirani cautions against the market-based "green growth" policies of the US Democratic Party, United Nations and European Union countries: Advocates of those policies declared "...that the world was now on the way to green growth". But Pirani argues: "Actually, while a shift towards electricity generation from renewables had started in some countries, fossil fuels remained completely dominant in electricity and other energy-consuming systems." This helps to explain how US President Joe Biden's supposed policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future have resulted in record US extraction and export of fossil fuels in 2023. A US federal agency recently bragged that the US "produces more crude oil than any country, ever".
As Sabrina Fernandes has explained, "fossil capital and green capital [are not] separate things". Fernandes, a Brazilian writer and activist, is a Steering Committee member of the Global Ecosocialist Network. On the relationship between the global north and global south, she and co-author, Breno Bringel, wrote: "There is a big difference between a project of ecological transition that requires moving away from the current extractivist model and one that preaches a green and sustainable society in one part of the world through the creation of sacrifice zones elsewhere. This is green colonialism, which is about how old practices of appropriation and dispossession now take on a green faade by taking control of key elements of the ecological transition such as minerals for electric vehicle batteries or hectares of forest for carbon credits."
Between the hemispheres and among the world's nations, the roadmaps to ecosocialism have differences and share similarities. Nowhere does the roadmap begin, however, with exhorting individuals to change their behaviours but rather to get people to change the power relationships in our societies. Pirani wrote that it is social, economic and technological systems that consume resources, that individuals do so through those systems and that there is no direct, arithmetic correlation between their consumption and environmental impacts. The roadmap to ecosocialism does not end, moreover, with climate mitigation but in reducing resource throughput that starts with destructive and inequitable resource extraction, followed by the wasteful use of resources in the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities. Each step of the process releases pollutants. The latter include carbon dioxide, plastics, and PFAS "forever chemicals", which today permeate our environment to sicken us and the creatures that share that environment. Our challenge is much larger than climate change.
The Global Ecosocialist Network and marxmail.world are holding an on-line forum on September 10 (September 11 in Australia) featuring Desai, Hawkins, Pirani and Fernandez. Please join us for this discussion of goals, strategy and tactics that may prepare us for more effective activism worldwide. Register here.
