So Why does a Climate Group Sign On to Letters about Fighting Inequality?
Sarah Sackville-McLauchlan
Guest blog by Sarah Sackville-McLauchlan.
Sarah Sackville-McLauchlan is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Her work focuses on the intersections of climate justice and Disability justice. She also seeks to express these issues and struggles through music and (non-academic) writing, which she creates and performs as PhantomFemme.
Climate change is often presented as a simple issue of carbon emissions. Our cars and smoke-stacks emit CO2, and we need to find ways to reduce those emissions in order to lower greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. This presentation often makes it seem an issue of fuel-efficiency standards, government regulations, and great international treaties worked out by technocrats and policy experts – an issue of incentivizing solar panels and wind turbines. It can seem distant and disconnected from the issues of poverty and inequality that effect us all daily “down here on the ground” as it were. But, in fact, the links between climate change and social justice run as deep as modernity itself, although they are often obscured. They can be readily perceived, though, if we, to borrow a phrase from Bill McKibben, connect the dots and consider how the fossil-fuel economy came about in the first place – how we came to be driving all those cars and burning all those carbon-fuels.
The links between climate change and social justice run as deep as modernity itself
Back in the early part of the modern period (the 1500s, more or less, to the late 1700s), there were the beginnings of industrialization and transnational commerce, especially between powerful European countries and their colonies. But this early industrialization developed slowly because it was still powered by wind and tides. This was fine from an environmental perspective, but extremely frustrating from the perspective of the new industrialists. Ships could only sail when winds and tides were favourable, and goods could only be carried on land by vehicles pulled by horse, ox, donkey, mule, etc,. So the transport of goods, raw materials, and settlers for the new, resource-rich colonies was very slow and uncertain. And, though factories could produce goods in far larger quantities than the home industries of previous eras, they had to be powered by water-wheels, and so could only be built on or near rivers. So if there was a flood or a drought that changed the flow of the river, production would be seriously disrupted. Also, if workers went on strike demanding better wages and working conditions (which did happen even this early although they didn’t call it going on strike yet), there wasn’t much the owner could do about it until the dispute was resolved.
Then, of course, in the late 18th century (the late 1700s), James Watt discovered steam power. He, and others like him, discovered that burning coal could produce steam that provided a reliable and uniform source of energy. And this changed everything! Suddenly, ships didn’t have to wait for favourable sailing conditions. They, and later trains, could move goods, raw materials, settlers, workers, and military resources around whenever and wherever governments and businesses wanted. And this allowed the settlement/colonization of North America, India, the rest of Asia, and Africa to accelerate enormously. Which in turn allowed industrialization to accelerate enormously, because it opened up new access to both natural resources (timber, metals, minerals, land for agriculture, and, of course, more fossil-fuel deposits) and markets for finished goods. Moreover, factories could now be powered by coal-fuelled steam as well, so they no longer needed to be located by rivers. Thus, they were freed from the vagaries of natural water-courses, and could be moved wherever labour was plentiful. So, for the first time, if workers made demands, the factory could simply shut down and move.
This acceleration of the pace, and broadening of the scope, of industrialization increased again around the dawn of the twentieth century when it was discovered that oil could be used instead of coal and the combustion engine was invented (the kind of engine that powers all modern moving objects from ships to cars to jet planes to tanks). Thus was born both the modern industrial system that we have come to know and the fossil-fuel economy. These developments allowed Western Europe and North America (the U.S. and Canada) to become very wealthy indeed (although the wealth in them was not evenly distributed by any means), while other regions – Asia, Africa, Latin America, and many people in regions of North America where resource extraction was actually being carried out and industrial production actually performed – became very impoverished. This impoverishment was due both to the constant, and often very dirty extraction of raw materials, and to the destruction of local, Indigenous economies to be replaced by markets for the goods produced by this new, burgeoning industrial system.
The process of fossil-fuel based industrialization lead directly to the vast inequalities we know today and to the climate crisis
This process of fossil-fuel based industrialization lead directly to both the vast inequalities we know today and to the climate crisis. It lead to the former by concentrating wealth and power in the countries of the “Global North” (Canada, the US and north-west Europe), and, within them, in the hands of a few very powerful, now multinational, corporations. And it has lead to the climate crisis through the burning of all those fossil-fuels, first coal then oil, in order to power that wealth accumulation.
The problem is that CO2, once released through burning, remains in the atmosphere for a very long time. It does not fall back to Earth anything like right away. Thus, much of the CO2 burned during the early industrial revolution, during the era of coal, is still in the atmosphere now. And everything we burn now gets added onto what has already been accumulated. Thus, the “greenhouse effect” we are experiencing now is actually the result of coal and oil burned a century or two ago. What we burn now is like throwing gasoline on a fire that’s already been lit in a wooden house. It didn’t start the fire, but it makes it burn hotter and devour the house faster.
This history, then, is what climate activists are referring to when we say that those who will be harmed first and worst by the climate crisis are those who did the least to cause it. We are speaking absolutely literally. Europe and Anglo North America (Canada and the U.S.) burned the coal and oil, and brought other parts of the world into the fossil-fuel industrial economy. That economy became their only way to generate prosperity for their people. But it is those very late-comers to the petro-economy, many of them former colonies, who will experience the effects of all that fossil-fuel burning first and worst, either because they are in low-lying coastal regions (like much of South Asia) and are vulnerable to flooding as sea-levels rise, or because they are in tropical regions where heat and drought will be more extreme. Also, the impoverishment caused by two-hundred years of relentless resource extraction has left these regions severely constrained in their capacities to adapt to these onslaughts. This same impoverishment has, over the decades, forced many people to migrate in order to find better economic and/or safety situations for themselves and their families. And many of these migrants have, because of various policies over the years, ended up among the poor in our cities along with all us other ordinary workers and folks who don’t work due to age, disability or straight-up lack of available jobs. And they/we, too, will feel the effects of climate-change first and hardest, as we saw in Superstorm Sandy where those in public housing and/or on social assistance, largely immigrants and people of colour, were hit hardest. Housing is already precarious, and the poor, like countries in the “Global South”, have few economic resources with which to adapt – to shore up homes much less do fancy retrofits, to stock up supplies, or even to get out and evacuate when things get really dyer.
Those who will be harmed first and worst by the climate crisis are those who did the least to cause it
As can be seen from the above, the climate change crisis, far from being a technical issue, is truly an issue of justice at the most profound level. Any solution to that crisis, must address this underlying reality. It must do right by those who will suffer the effects of climate-change, providing them with the justice and dignity to which they have a fundamental human right. And thankfully, such solutions are being proposed and advocated by those very people and communities: locally controlled renewable energy, food-sovereignty, respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples, high-quality, climate-adapted affordable housing, good, “green” unionized jobs that pay living wages and more. Our task as climate activists, is to join our voices with those demanding such solutions – never presuming to speak for those affected, but speaking with them to amplify their demands, and working with them to help bring about those solutions.
Note 1: Much of the above, in particular the historical overview, was synthesized from Naomi Klein’s superb book This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs the Climate (Knopft Press, 2014) See in particular her chapter on “extractivism”.
Note 2: The terms “Global North” and “Global South” can be a bit confusing as to whether they refer strictly to physical geography or to economic position. But “Global North” refers to the wealthy, highly industrialized countries of Europe and North America, while “global South” refers to the poorer countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia, even though many poorer countries in Asia are actually physically in the northern hemisphere. There is a long history as to how and why this terminology came about, but essentially it seeks to find a way of describing the economic relations between these groups of countries without privileging either one (in contrast to previous terminologies – “First World” and “Third World”, “Developed” and “Under-developed” or “developing” countries” – which were felt to privilege Europe and Anglo North America).
Follow PCM on Social Media
