Review: Gaza in Crisis

(@ PFLP)

U.S. anarchist Noam Chomsky and Israeli Communist Ilan Pappé, both prominent Jewish critics of the state of Israel and its brutal oppression of Palestinians, have put together an important account of contemporary imperialism in Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War on the Palestinians, a volume edited by activist Frank Barat and published in late 2010. While Gaza in Crisis deals in large part with Israel’s policies with regard to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and in particular the Jewish state’s murderous winter 2008-2009 assault on the territory, the work as a whole constitutes something of a dialectical exploration of domination and negation as perpetuated not only in historical Palestine but also more generally by the system that lords over the Palestinians’ dispossession and colonization. In this sense Gaza in Crisis provides critical perspectives on what the late Edward W. Said termed the question of Palestine as well as the world at large; given the negation that dominates both these spheres, reflection on the reflections of these thinkers could prove an important task.

The profundity of the predicament in contemporary Palestine should be self-evident. Citing the work of Richard Falk, Chomsky claims the “stranglehold” that Israel tightened considerably on Gaza following the 2006 elections that Hamas won handily to represent a “prelude to genocide”; Pappé for his part finds Israel’s behavior during Cast Lead itself to have constituted genocide. The present reality is that of a “human catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions”: reason would demand that Israel be relegated to the status of a pariah state, says Pappé. Instead, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) uses its influence to call for U.S. strikes on Iran as the Obama administration continues to bankroll Israel and protect its settler-colonialist project.

In Chomsky’s view, Israel’s brutality as evinced during Cast Lead reflects “depraved indifference” to human life; in accordance with the Goldstone Report, Chomsky sees the assault as amounting to a clear example of state terror, one reminiscent in fact of the Russian state’s crimes in Chechnya. He claims Cast Lead to have found its basis in conscious efforts taken by Israel and the U.S. to crush the model of resistance proferred by Hamas in Gaza against the collaborative approach favored by the Palestinian Authority, an organization with which Chomsky suggests doing away—this in an interview years before the publication by Al Jazeera and The Guardian of the Palestine Papers. His calculus in this sense follows from his postulation of a Mafia doctrine on the part of the U.S. whereby alternatives to the geopolitical designs favored by prevailing elites, whether they be Islamist or humanist, must be repressed, even and especially through the use of overwhelming force. The support granted by official U.S. society to Cast Lead in particular and Palestine’s destruction in general is obvious and shprofould need no explication. For the Israeli and U.S. establishment, indeed, the interests of Gazan Palestinians are at best ipso facto suspect, at worst disregarded entirely—they are “unpeople,” in historian Mark Curtis’s term: moscas (flies), or nadies (no one), as scrawled in Acteal, Mexico, site of a massacre committed by government-affiliated paramilitaries in December 1997. In their victimization by constituted power, Gazans undoubtedly share much with Iraqis, Haitians, Congolese, Mexicans, and many others. It is however not insignificant that Hosni Mubarak, the man who met with Tzipi Livni days before the launch of Cast Lead and kept the Rafah border-crossing closed as Gazans were being ruthlessly bombarded by Israel’s military during subsequent operations, has been overthrown by means of the struggle of subordinated Egyptians. While the present suffering of Gazans, Egyptians, Libyans, and many other peoples of the present world makes rather difficult declarations that would celebrate the facticity of historical progress, the radicality of the efforts taken by the Egyptian masses against Mubarak—itself an echo of previous attempts at intifada, whether in Palestine in 1987, Paris 1789, or Chiapas 1994—is to be welcomed, both in Palestine and elsewhere. Indeed, its applicability can be said to reach something of a present universality.

Critical for the prospect of progress in Palestine is the exploration of how it is that that which currently prevails so does. Chomsky is undoubtedly right to stress that the immediate fact of Cast Lead is explained by the present state of former Palestine: the indigenous Palestinian population itself has no state but is instead the object of U.S.-Israeli domination—a diagnosis that in no way denies the objectified and subordinated Palestinians subjectivity. Neither Chomsky nor Pappé seem to take John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s theses on the Israel Lobby as entirely convincing; both point out that U.S. policy vis-à-vis Palestine is the product of the work at least as much of the Pentagon and arms manufacturers than AIPAC, with Pappé even finding space for fundamentalist Christian Zionists in his account of the historical trajectory of Israel within the official U.S. policymaking apparatus. Indeed, he shows that the U.S. government’s foreign policy has not always unconditionally supported the Zionist project in historical Palestine, as he examines the tradition of the ‘Arabists’ in the U.S. State Department who reportedly held the interests of the region’s populations with less dismissal than Zionism has to date. These Arabist officials included Henry King and Charles Crane, who participated in a commission on inquiry sent by the Versailles Conference held at the close of the First World War to the Levant to investigate the aspirations of the area’s residents in light of the defeat of their imperial overlords, the Ottomans. King and Crane found that most Arabs who were interviewed favored incorporation into a Syrian Arab state, one historical possibility that like others has been negated by that which has passed. Pappé claims Arabists to have been hegemonic in the State Department until the Eisenhower administration, during which the AIPAC was founded, though he also recounts the Bush I administration’s tepid criticality of Israel. In this sense he presents an alternative he finds to have existed through his examination of historical events—an indication that matters can be other than the way they have been and are.

A key point for Pappé in this work as elsewhere is consideration of al-Nakba (the catastrophe) suffered by the Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel. He finds that examination of the historical negation committed by Zionism at the birth of its state in particular could raise questions regarding the legitimacy of the ideology and its practices altogether—an educative potential largely occulted by formal-educational processes in Israel as in much of the world-system’s core, as Pappé notes. The historian furthermore stresses that al-Nakba should not be considered a merely historical reality, in light of the breadth of Israel’s destructiveness both historically and contemporarily. That which Pappé terms “mainstream” or “pragmatic” Zionism—a project that seeks hegemony in all of that which imperialists call Eretz Israel—is rather firmly in power in Israel: as is the case in the imperial entity’s godfather-country, the official Israeli political class is itself a catastrophe. Beyond having massacred the largely defenseless population of Gaza during Cast Lead, Israeli hegemons threaten other acts reminiscent of those that accompanied al-Nakba at Israel’s origins, in Pappé’s estimation. The émigré-historian finds there to be little grounds for hope for the development of a humane alternative to the present devastation in Palestine from within Israeli society itself; though substantially oppositional forces exist within Israel—Anarchists Against the Wall, for example, or the critical youth demonstrators in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, Hadash perhaps—Pappé finds them to be exceedingly marginalized as regards having much of an impact on Israeli public opinion, which it should be said seems to collaborate enthusiastically with the dispossession of the Palestinians. Whether or not such a conclusion can definitively be made, Pappé nonetheless seems correct to insist that a fundamental transformation of Israeli attitudes and comportment comprises the “principal barrier” to “peaceful reconciliation” among the present resident-subjects of occupied Palestine. It it toward the end of promoting this transformation that Pappé expresses his support boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state.

Chomsky finds the prospect of boycotting Israel questionable if advocacy of such a position is not coupled with calls to boycott the U.S., the Zionist state’s imperial enabler. Presenting such a task as largely unthought-of due to widespread perceptions that the U.S. is “simply too powerful,” he demonstrates how far global-justice movements have to develop—a reality which does not however seem to be an argument against BDS targeting Israel. As elsewhere, Chomsky in Gaza in Crisis stresses the dire need for the administration of political matters to be devolved to the global demos: he notes that while the most likely future scenario for conflict in historical Palestine will be the very destruction of Palestine, human affairs anarchically depend too much on “will and choice” for this tendency to necessarily become an inevitability. Following the example recently manifested in Tunisia and Egypt, among other places, the U.S. public could for example intervene radically in matters and, together with other ends, enact a more humane and rational approach to the problematics brought about by Zionism. Employing perspectives close to those expressed by autonomous Marxists—and considerably more profound than those proffered in this work by Pappé, who never really goes beyond advocating strategies that would “change” the “political elites’ orientations”—Chomsky warns his audience that Israel’s “murder of a nation” is perpetrated “at our hands.” Responsibility for mass murder and social destruction, whether perpetrated in Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or the world over, lies with the managers of the prevailing system but also crucially with those who collaborate with it.

The Holocaust and climate genocide: an eco-socialist review of Nations Have the Right to Kill

NB: Originally published on Countercurrents in October 2009

The prospect of reviewing a recent book on the Holocaust from an eco-socialist perspective may strike some as unexpected or even strange. The relevance of the attempted extermination of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators to the present predicament may perhaps appear questionable. It will however be the not uncontroversial assertion of this review that Richard A. Koenigsberg’s Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War can help to illuminate some of the factors that currently threaten the continued existence of much of humanity by means of what will here be called climate genocide.

If Koenigsberg is to believed, Nations Have the Right to Kill constitutes the culmination of the forty years he has spent investigating the Nazi genocide of the European Jews. His book, though not terribly well-written, and plagued as it is by a maddening tendency of his to literally repeat his points verbatim on multiple occasions throughout the text, presents an intriguing perspective on why it is that the Holocaust took place. Though radical critics of the existent may not finds his conclusions particularly new, his argument is nonetheless important to contemplate, especially in light of the looming climate catastrophe.

Koenigsberg situates the mass-industrial murder of European Jews during the Nazi era within the framework of sacrifice and nationalism. Problematizing the seemingly widespread view of warfare as a ‘normal’ occurrence in human affairs, Koenigsberg finds war and genocide to result from the historical establishment of the state in human society. It is devotion to the state, or nationalism, that Koenigsberg sees as having played a rather significant role in legitimizing many of the most brutal episodes of violence of the twentieth century: in World War I as in its sequel, says Koenigsberg, soldiers of each respective country were led to believe that sacrificing one’s own life in battle constituted the very meaning of strength, virility, and even love. Such ideology was central to Nazism, claims Koenigsberg: it was willingness to give one’s life for the community, the “overcoming of bourgeois privatism,” that was supreme in both Hitlerism and in the German people’s support for such totalitarianism.

As he develops his argument, Koenigsberg comes to assert that the mass murder of the Jews followed from the demands placed by the Nazi regime upon German soldiers. Given that, beginning in September, 1939, Hitler had sent millions of ‘good’ Germans to lay down their lives in furtherance of his war aims, Koenigsberg tells us that the Führer felt no compunction about the prospect of killing those ‘inferior’ peoples deemed, as a “plague bacillus,” to be the enemy of the German people and their state. The mass killings of Eastern European Jews by the Einsatzgruppen together with the implementation and prosecution of the Final Solution as well as the euthanasia programs that predated and presaged these atrocities, then, are to be understood as decidedly extreme illustrations of the total domination demanded by Nazi totalitarianism—specifically, that all were obligated to suffer and die for Germany, to give over their bodies to the German state.

In an illustrative historical parallel, Koenigsberg briefly compares the Nazi war project and the Final Solution with Aztec warfare. According to Koenigsberg, the Aztecs saw the very purpose of warfare as sacrifice: war was necessary, on this account, to capture enemies and later sacrifice them to the gods who in Aztec thought required the blood of humans for nourishment. The very continuation of life, in this sense, demanded human sacrifice. Koenigsberg claims much of Western state violence to have been prosecuted for a similar end: that is, precisely to “produce dead and wounded soldiers” so as to “establish the truth of a society’s ideology.” The Nazi genocide of the Jews is little different, in Koenigsberg’s view: the Jews were sacrificed by the Nazis to the god they worshipped, the German state.

There is much of value, in the opinion of the present author, in Nations Have the Right to Kill . The critique of nationalism and the state that permeates the work seems entirely justified, as does the claim that the devaluation of the lives of German soldiers was easily transferred to those of the European Jews. Koenigsberg’s brief examination of the Nazi euthanasia program as operating on terms that also allowed for the sacrifice of German soldiers and Jews seems legitimate; it calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s comments on the question in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Other than for the typographical errors and the sometimes-bizarre writing style employed in Nations Have a Right to Kill , one of the major weaknesses with the work seems to be a marked lack of discussion regarding the odious views promoted by Nazism vis-à-vis the Jewish people—the various ideologies that legitimated the Holocaust. The argument of the book almost seems to assume the radical separation between German and Jew as a given and as such seems to beg the question central to the book’s very thesis.

Above all, nonetheless, it is surely in its relevance to the present that Koenigsberg’s work is most important. Besides the value Nations Have the Right to Kill has for critical analyses of such currently prevailing realities as imperialist war, ethnic conflict, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and all other forms of racist violence, it is to be imagined that this work can help shed light on the present problem of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the global climate—that is to say, the catastrophic changes that capitalist societies have wrought on the atmosphere and the very life that depends upon it for continued existence.

As is well-known, climate change stands to threaten agricultural production across much of the globe, radically diminish the global supply of freshwater, inundate low-lying coastal settlements currently home to hundreds of millions of people, prompt widespread desertification, and literally eradicate some countries that today exist. The specter of such life-negating realities seems to find its genesis in capitalist society, a form of totalitarianism that essentially values profitability above all else. The response of nearly every advanced-capitalist country to the now well-established reality of climate change has been entirely inadequate toward the end of allowing much of humanity and life itself the chance to flourish or even survive the projected consequences of anthropogenic global warming; their lack of meaningful action on this question—a lack which results from the desire to hold existing society more or less unchanged—is systematic. It cannot merely then be stated that the mass murder—the rendering-impossible of human life—that follows from reformist inaction is a mistake, an unintended consequence, an ‘externality.’ Such horrifying consequences are today essentially inevitable in contemporary capitalism; as such, dominant Western treatment of these questions bears much in common with other genocidal episodes of human history.

The tactics and methods of climate genocide are undoubtedly different than those exhibited in the genocide with which Koenigsberg concerns himself in Nations Have the Right to Kill —there are no extermination camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka in the present, just as there seems to be no conscious attempt to murder millions more generally. However, present reality, along with the likely future capitalist societies have engendered through both their contributions to climate change and their decidedly weak responses to it, speaks for itself: 300,000 people die annually in the present day as a result of the 0.7-0.8° C increase in average global temperatures that has already taken place because of past emissions.¹ Essentially all of the deaths, economic cost, and other misfortune for which climate change is responsible are borne in the present by what has been termed the developing world.²

As horrible as this is, considerations of the future for the Earth’s social majorities are more distressing still: a 2° C increase in average global temperatures beyond pre-industrial levels, the ‘safe target’ to which most hegemonic global institutions have claimed to be working to aim for, would likely see the total disappearance of the Andes glaciers and thus problematize the source of life for the millions who currently live in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile.³ It would, among other things, also cause at least three-quarters of the population of Mali to starve.⁴ An average global temperature increase of 3° C, for its part, sees much of southern Africa desertified, its environment nearly rendered uninhabitable for life, as well as the desertification of the Indus basin, the collapse of agricultural productivity in Central America, and the instauration of a permanent El Niño Southern Oscillation⁵—this last being a cyclical climatic variation that Mike Davis has found to have synergized with the onset of European colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century to result in the most catastrophic famines recorded in human history.⁶. Reflecting on these matters, it seems that some of the likely realities of a world with an increased average global temperature beyond 3° C need not be quantified: of their myriad horrors there can be no doubt.

The world-historical negations that climate change threatens to introduce to history seem to require at the very least something akin to what Hannah Arendt calls a revolutionary “new guarantee,” a “new law on earth” protective of human welfare, dignity, and freedom.⁷ Clearly, the constituted powers of the world have completely failed to deliver in this sense, just as they have failed severely countless times in the past. There is little indication that they will consent to, let alone encourage, radical action aimed at mitigating their contributions to climate change in the near future, even as numerous reports are released concluding that such approaches would make catastrophic climate change inevitable— inter alia , warnings from climatologists that the world would likely fail to stabilize temperature increases to 2° C,⁸ a study that claims that the average global temperature increase could reach 4° C by 2060,⁹ and another that estimates that such temperatures could well increase by over 7° C in the present century.¹⁰

Indeed, amidst the prospect of such horrors, the U.S. Congress produces legislation that would decrease U.S. emissions by 17-20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020—a mandate that amounts to a reduction in emissions of between 4 to 8 percent in 1990 levels to be realized by 2020, or more or less what the Kyoto Protocol had demanded of the U.S. by 2012. As such, this policy falls dramatically short of the proposed 25 to 40 percent reductions from such levels to be achieved before 2020, as called for by the governments of nearly all poor countries, most serious climate scientists, and the United Nations.¹¹ Such a decidedly weak response by the society most responsible for climate change is entirely outrageous and illegitimate; it belies Obama’s absurd claims, as recently presented at the UN, that the U.S. “understand[s] the gravity of the climate threat” and “will meet [its] responsibility to future generations.”

The remarkable lack of action aimed at mitigating future climate change up to this point taken by the industrialized world as well as the surfeit of money thus far made available by advanced-capitalist societies for poorer societies to adapt to catastrophic change amount to collaboration with the future death of a decidedly overwhelming number of human beings—this, on a scale far greater than any other in human history. The deaths of these individuals would result not from ‘natural’ causes but rather human-induced ones; they would consequently be killed, theirs deaths homicide.

What is currently occurring, then, is the mass-murder of the global South by much of the global North. There has of course been a marked tendency toward this dynamic now for some time in human history, but it seems climate genocide constitutes the most final of these historical denials. The very ability for most humans currently existing as well as those expected to soon be born to survive has been problematized by the behavior of most capitalist societies: the lives of the myriad victims of climate change, both present and future, stand to be sacrificed to the exigencies of the capitalist system. Though the nameless, foreign others sacrificed by climate change are not usually referred to as a “plague bacillus” or an “epidemic” against which one had to struggle, it is largely assumed in the main that the ‘normal’ operation of capitalist society need not be interrupted by concern over the very prospects for the continued existence of much of humanity—it is expected, indeed, that humankind and even life itself be subordinate to the demands of capital.

Just, then, in Koenigsberg’s words, as “[t]he Holocaust depicts the ugliness, futility and meaninglessness of submission to the nation-state,” so does the prospect of climate genocide illustrate the naked abomination of capitalism. Dialectically, of course, it also holds out the necessity of the institution of eco-socialism: it demands that humanity cut the fuse, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “[b]efore the spark reaches the dynamite.”¹²

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1 John Vidal, “Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank.” The Guardian , 29 May 2009

2 Ibid

3 Mark Lynas, Six Degrees (Washington , D.C. : National Geographic, 2008), p. 102-107

4 Ibid , p. 112

5 Ibid , p. 123-127, 134-137, 159-153

6 Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2002), p. 7

7 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest: San Diego, 1968 [1948]), p. ix

8 David Adam, “World will not meet 2C warming target, scientists agree.” The Guardian, 14 April 2009

9 Ibid, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes.” The Guardian, 28 September 2009

10 David Chandler, “Climate change odds much worse than thought.” MIT News, 19 May 2009.

11 “The Waxman-Markey Bill: A Good Start or a Non-Starter?” Yale Environment 360, 18 June 2009

12 One-Way Street and Other Writings (Harvest: London, 1997), p. 80

Angst and hope amidst the prospect of climate catastrophe: a review of James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren

NB: this article first saw public light on Countercurrents in December 2009

Published in the U.S. last December with the intention that its release coincide with the beginning of the Copenhagen climate summit, James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity has an impressive-sounding title, however less than impressive its content at times is. Currently a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen is a world-renowned climatologist widely regarded as having been instrumental in bringing the specter of anthropogenic climate change to public attention with his remarks on the question before the U.S. Congress in the late 1980s, and he has engaged in lesser and greater forms of public advocacy on climate issues since then: he has denounced the liberal-parliamentary process for its failures meaningfully to address climate change to date,¹ written an open letter to U.S. President Obama stressing the absolute imperative of taking urgent action on climate change within the new president’s first term,² been arrested at a protest against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia,³ and most recently seen what he calls the “fundamentally wrong” approach taken at the current Copenhagen negotiations as necessitating the summit’s failure.⁴ Hansen is, then, a decidedly important voice whose contributions should be thoughtfully considered; as we shall see, though, his Storms of My Grandchildren is flawed in many ways, despite the rationality of many of its claims.

In Storms, Hansen casts himself in the role of a “witness”: someone, he quotes Robert Pool as saying, who “believes he [or she] has information so important that he [or she] cannot keep silent.” As a witness, his general claim is that, due to the historical and contemporary mass burning of fossil fuels, “Planet Earth […] is in imminent peril,” “in imminent danger of crashing.” Hansen finds the urgency of the matter to be absolute: the very survival of humanity and millions of non-human species is in question. He spends much of the book reviewing the evidence for climate change, finding human-induced contributions to increased average global temperatures to be in “total dominance” over naturally occurring ones; as such, he claims those who deny such realities—global-warming contrarians, as Hansen refers to them—to have no basis for their views. In reflecting on the seriousness of the present situation, Hansen reserves much of his ire for what he calls “scientific reticence”—positivistic approaches that undermine the relevance and necessity of applying the precautionary principle as well as a marked reluctance among individuals knowledgeable about the present predicament to take public stands on this most important of issues. His discourse, furthermore, mirrors a growing disappointment among self-styled progressives with the ascendancy of the Obama administration in the U.S.: Obama, in Hansen’s estimation, “does not get it,” and Obama’s approach of greenwashed compromise is seen here as fundamentally flawed, since, as Hansen writes, “nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise.”

The gravity of the present situation notwithstanding, Hansen believes that hope for a “brighter future” has not yet been entirely stifled. Transitioning from the current atmospheric carbon concentration of 387 parts per million to the “appropriate initial target” Hansen finds in 350 ppm is in his view still practically achievable, though “just barely.” (Strangely enough, Hansen does not address the question of an appropriate CO2-equivalent concentration—that is, a measurement of atmospheric concentrations that includes greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, such as methane, etc.; a CO2-e target of 350 ppm would call for a carbon-dioxide concentration of much lower than 350.) Central to the project of realizing a peak in global carbon emissions and a concomitant return to 350 ppm is the phasing-out of coal emissions as rapidly as possible, says Hansen: slowing down the rate of such emissions, in his view, does no good; all such emissions must end by 2020 in the ‘developed’ world. Hansen tells us that most of the world’s remaining supply of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas, as well as tar sands and shale oil—must be kept in the ground if future generations are to have a “livable planet.” He sees oil and gas as having to play a role in the transitional period that must begin immediately, but emissions from coal, tar sands, and oil shale are to eliminated—which is not to say that the use of the latter sources is to be discontinued, for Hansen feels that they can be allowed to continue if adequate capture and sequestration technologies can be developed and implemented on a mass scale. He does stress the importance of energy-efficiency gains and renewable-energy sources, but he finds it “extremely irresponsible” to depend entirely on these two strategies to combat global warming; instead, he writes favorably of the prospect of a “nuclear renaissance” driven by the development of fourth-generation nuclear power plants, which he seems to find to be the only viable means by which drastically to reduce carbon emissions in the near term. Both forest preservation and reforestation, moreover, are to play a role in his favored carbon-reduction trajectory, though he warns that tree-planting cannot be taken as a substitute for—an offset of—existing carbon emissions. Though initially skeptical about the place that geo-engineering schemes should have in the struggle against climate change, Hansen does conclude that such options may become necessary if business-as-usual is continued for the foreseeable future, and as such he suggests that research be made into exploring such schemes. Furthermore, he eschews the hegemonically favored cap-and-trade approach for what is referred to as “fee-and-dividend,” a framework whereby fees are collected at the mine or port of entry of a given fossil fuel and then divided equally among legal adult residents of the public, the idea being that those who outstrip their share of carbon-emissions—in most cases, Hansen assures us, economically wealthier individuals—will be financially penalized and hence face incentives to reduce their carbon footprints. Hansen envisions these fees as rising over time, so as to allow households and individuals to adjust their lifestyles accordingly; to prevent more carbon-intensive production from simply shifting their operations to a location where such regulatory frameworks are non-existent, he also insists that the fee-and-dividend approach be globalized.

His questionable views on nuclear power aside, much of what Hansen proposes in Storms of My Grandchildren seems reasonable, and as such certainly can be considered useful for informing action aimed at working to mitigate some of the more catastrophic life-negating realities that the prospect of climate change promises, however foreign many of his recommendations seem to be to the approaches favored by those currently negotiating in Copenhagen. Much of Hansen’s commentary on matters not directly related to his programmatic vision for the necessarily urgent reduction in carbon emissions, though, is both frustrating and misleading, and as such merits discussion and refutation. To begin with, Hansen discloses that he is, within the spectrum of mainstream U.S. politics, a “registered Independent” who has cast votes in the past for both Democrats and Republicans. He tells us that he supported the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign in 2000 (adding unnecessarily that he contributed a thousand dollars to the campaign), felt “enthusiasm” at one point for the candidacy of John McCain in 2008, and experienced “moist eyes” during Obama’s Election-Day speech in November of that year. Despite his disappointment in the remarkable lack of action on climate change that Obama has thus far taken, Hansen still maintains that the current U.S. president is “still our best hope.” Moreover, Hansen claims rather bizarrely that he feels the “captains of industry” have to be a “big part of the global warming solution”; he claims that the realization of his carbon-reduction vision “require[s] their leadership.” He also writes elsewhere that he finds the U.S. Constitution to be “remarkable,” and he claims it to have been designed with an eye to preventing the “subversion of the democratic principle for the sake of the powerful few.”

That a document written in large part by slaveholders who decided to count some 700,000 enslaved former Africans as three-fifths of a human being—or, indeed, that allowed for the continued existence of formal slavery in the first place—can be considered remarkable is astounding, as is the faith Hansen seems to have in the U.S. oligarchy. Expressing enthusiasm for the prospect of a McCain presidency is clearly a horrifying position; little more need be said on that. Hansen’s final take on the newest occupant of the White House, though, is similarly of marginal value: claiming that Obama—who, to briefly review, has overseen the transfer of trillions of dollars to the very financial institutions that precipitated the current economic downturn, entirely jettisoned hope for transition to a single-payer health-insurance program in the U.S., requested a ‘defense’ budget larger than that of Bush, backpedaled on curbing Israel’s ongoing colonization of the West Bank, moved toward normalizing relations with the very leadership that has overseen genocide in Darfur, escalated war in Afghanistan, and endorsed the Congress’s pathetic proposals to reduce carbon emissions by around 4 percent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels—is “still our best hope” is entirely unjustified and obfuscatory in the extreme.

Indeed, Hansen’s fairly uncritical view of the representatives of the present system is reflected in a lack of expressed criticality toward the totality of that very system. There is in Storms of My Grandchildren no critique of the environmentally destructive consequences of consumerism, as stressed in Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich are Destroying the Earth; ⁵ of economic growth, which James Gustave Speth denounces in his The Bridge at the End of the World;⁶ or of capitalism and its myriad manifestations, all of which various Marxist and anarchist critics have long sought to abolish. It is probable that Hansen, who fashions himself an “objective scientist” who should refrain from disclosing “personal opinions,” feels that explicitly making such conclusions may prove to alienate his intended audience—the U.S. public—or, perhaps, affect book-sales or even result in his being publicly discredited and his concerns for the climate dismissed. It may also be the case that Hansen himself does not share these critical views on the present state of affairs; he did, after all, see grounds for enthusiasm in the presidential candidacy of John McCain. It should be said, though, that Hansen may well be doing a disservice to his readers in not making linkages between the profundity of the climate predicament and the necessity for a radical politics: the clear responsibility that capitalism and the State bear for the specter of climate catastrophe should be taken as representing the very limits of their continued existence, not as grounds to re-affirm such. Not to find currently prevailing power relations illegitimate in the extreme is simply absurd, and to see in the madness propagated by presently constituted power “our best hope” is in the view of the present author to consign the future of life on Earth to what Hansen calls “the Venus syndrome”: runaway catastrophic climate change that violently transitions the Earth’s climate to one similar to that of Venus, where life simply cannot exist.

Perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of Storms of My Grandchildren is the selective concern expressed in the text by Hansen for the victims of climate change, both actual and potential, present and future. The main subject of Hansen’s concern seems to be the recently born eponymous kin of his, whose pictures we find in several of the work’s chapters. Fear for the possible future that the children of his own children will likely have to face because of dangerous anthropogenic interference with global climatic processes is entirely legitimate, but it seems deeply limiting and even reactionary to find in the prospect of climate catastrophe grounds for concern only or primarily for one’s family members, who in Hansen’s case happen to be white Americans. To his credit, it is true that Hansen recognizes that millions of non-human species are similarly threatened by global warming, but one strives in vain to find in his argument a serious acknowledgment of the profoundly unjust effects climate change stands to have on human society in geographical and socio-economic terms. There is no mention in Hansen’s book, for example, of the Global Humanitarian Forum’s May 2009 report that estimated that some 300,000 humans, living almost entirely in less materially wealthy Southern societies, are being killed annually in the present day as a result of the 0.7-0.8° C increase in average global temperatures that has already occurred because of past emissions,⁷ nor is any concern other than vague generalities expressed for the plight of the billions of presently impoverished, oppressed peoples whose very continued existence is problematized by climate change. Significantly, Hansen does not endorse or even consider the concept of ecological debt,⁸ a framework whereby ‘advanced’ industrial-capitalist societies are to engage in massive redistribution schemes to the ‘developing’ world due to their historical and contemporary appropriation of far more than their legitimate share to the world’s commons, especially the atmosphere. These omissions may again speak to his worries regarding public support in the U.S., where racism and imperialism unfortunately seem to hold hegemonic positions, but they should serve as reminders that one’s obligations with regard to climate change should be general rather than particular, that what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as responsibility for the Other should be limited to nothing less than life itself—Eros, in Herbert Marcuse’s formulation.⁹

This review of Storms of My Grandchildren should not be taken as dismissive of Hansen’s contributions in the book as a whole: while it seems clear that Hansen should not have the last word on the present crisis, there is certainly much of value to be found in Storms. Many of Hansen’s practical recommendations for stepping away from the climatic abyss surely merit attention and implementation, as do some of the perspectives advanced in the fictional future-historical account with which he closes the work’s final chapter: Hansen there has one of his characters, a member of a human-like species that developed on a distant planet called Claron, dismiss humans as “primitive,” given the “irrationality in their politics,” the “dividing lines they draw on maps,” their “abuse of animals,” “the fighting” they engage in, and “the starving people” they ignore. Against the life-negating realities that he correctly criticizes as having long plagued the human condition, Hansen offers the beautiful possibility that Earth be made “an intergenerational commons,” a world which would make available its “fruits and benefits” to “every member of every generation.”

———————————————————————————————————————–

1 David Adam, “Leading climate scientist: ‘democratic process isn’t working,’” The Guardian, 18 March 2009

2 Elizabeth Kolbert, “James Hansen Arrested,” The New Yorker, 24 June 2009

3Robin McKie, “President Obama ‘has four years to save Earth,’” The Observer, 18 January 2009

4 Suzanne Goldenberg, “Copenhagen climate summit must fail, says top scientist,” The Guardian, 2 December 2009

5 White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2008

6 New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009

7 John Vidal, “Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank,” The Guardian, 29 May 2009

8 Andrew Simms, Ecological Debt: Global Warming & the Wealth of Nations (London: Pluto, 2009)

9Emmanuel Levinas, Totality & Infinity (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1969); Herbert Marcuse, Eros & Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

On Climate Refugees

NB: Also published on Climate & Capitalism

The French Collectif Argos’s 2007 volume Réfugiés climatiques (Climate Refugees) has recently been translated into English. The work, a series of essays and sets of photographs that examine the lives of a number of social groups from around the globe who have been or likely soon will be victimized by anthropogenic climate change, is the product of four years of investigation; much of it seems to have been written shortly after the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 Fourth Annual Report. The work itself is a testament to massive human-rights violations, whether past or possible future, as well as to the stunning “loss of ethnodiversity” that climate catastrophe threatens to bring about. Though much of its textual argumentation is allied to reformism, its coverage of a number of regions in which individuals are menaced by climate change—the Arctic, Bangladesh, Chad, the Maldives Islands, the Gulf Coast of the U.S., northern Germany, Tuvalu, northern China, and Nepal—is important; moreover, many of its photos are certainly worthy of reflection.

It must be stated immediately that Climate Refugees’s written reflections on the prospect of climate catastrophe is disappointingly tame, this perhaps the product of a reliance on the now-outdated climatological reports that were available when the work was written. One of the book’s introductory essays, written by Jean Jouzel, a high-ranking IPCC official, claims that, while “[s]tabilizing our climate is a huge challenge,” the world’s “political leaders deserve credit for making this issue a centrepiece of their discussions at the international level.” Though this essay was written before the failure of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations—a “deadline,” indeed, that Jouzel identifies as “key”—it seems unjustifiable to have made such a claim at any historical point, given how inadequate has been constituted power’s response to the specter of climate change. In Collectif Argos’s account, global warming rather euphemistically constitutes the “last straw” for the impoverished of the world—not, as seems to be the case, their death-sentence. The work, in addition, rather dramatically underestimates the possible number of climate refugees—that is, those who (will) have survived and been displaced by the effects of climate change—as being 200 million by century’s end: this, when some 20 million were displaced by unprecedented flooding in Pakistan within a matter of weeks in recent memory. Sadly, furthermore, the already-horrifying numbers proferred by the authors regarding the recession of the Himalayan glaciers—that 2 billion people “could be affected” by what are termed “water shortages” within 50 to 100 years—also seem unjustifiably optimistic. Somewhat strangely, indeed, the Collectif endorses a 2ºC average global temperature increase as a goal toward which to strive—that is, a more than doubling of the temperature-levels whose frightening effects they examine in the work. It should not be surprising, then, that Climate Refugees’s short appendix includes a reference to the reformist organization Greenpeace “for more information.”

Despite such drawbacks, however, much that is found in Climate Refugees is in fact quite good, in addition to being crucially important. An Inupiaq woman residing on an island threatened by warming seas in northern Alaska is quoted as saying she has “trouble imagining a future for [herself].” In Bangladesh, Collectif Argos demonstrates the undeniable dangers posed by rising sea levels, including the penetration of saltwater into bodies of groundwater, a development that quite simply renders-impossible agricultural production. Writing honestly, Donatien Garnier, the author for the Bangladesh section, states that “[p]rospects for survival seem grim.” Additionally, Climate Refugees examines the life of Chadians who reside by the ever-retreating shores of Lake Chad and depend upon it. Lake Chad, of course, is a body of water that has reduced in size from 25000 km² to 2500 km² in the last 40 years; Aude Raux, the author of the article on Chad, quotes UNESCO as asserting that the fate of Lake Chad constitutes “the most spectacular example of the effects of climate change in tropical Africa.” Climate Refugees also explores the phenomenon of outburst floods of glacial lakes in Nepal, formed through the marked retreat in recent years of the Himalayan glaciers; these outburst floods, or GLOFs, undoubtedly jeopardize the existence of underlying human populations. Collectif Argos furthermore considers the prospect of agricultural collapse in Tuvalu, where rising saltwater has come to sterilize soils, and in northern China, a region subject to increasing desertification—said to be increasing by an astounding 2500 km² each year in the country as a whole. Raux’s article on China at points constitutes a particularly compelling examination of migrant labor-refugees who, abandoned by capitalists and government, remind one of the masses of humanity dispossessed and proletarianized around the world with the introduction of capitalist social relations. The work’s treatment of the expanding Gobi Desert also illustrates the general trap which capitalism has imposed on Chinese society, as on global society as a whole—to destroy itself environmentally, in addition to practically enslaving its working class, so as to promote ‘development.’ This dynamic, naturally, has surely been advanced historically by Northern industrial societies before China—as is certainly reflected in the work’s sections on New Orleans, devastated in 2005 by extreme weather, and on islands threatened by rising sea-levels in Germany’s north—but the juxtaposition of the example of northern China with the threats that warmer oceans pose to the coral that currently protects the Maldives Islands, or the disrupted climatic patterns that promote greater rates of dengue on these same islands, may be taken as commentary on the pronounced lack of solidarity among Southern societies on climate change, a dynamic already experienced at last year’s talks in Copenhagen.

Though Climate Refugees is not a work dedicated to examining possible solutions to the myriad catastrophic problems provoked by climate change, its authors at times briefly mention reasonable responses to the prospect of such. For one, a researcher with the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies is cited as advancing a rather sensible proposal for climate-refugee policy—that each of the world’s countries “transport and accommodate a quota of climate refugees” that is “proportional to its past and present greenhouse emissions.” Garnier himself explicitly calls for the reform of the 1951 Refugee Convention to include those displaced by climate change and hopes that one day the concept of “environmental persecution” will be codified as a norm governing international relations. Garnier also mentions that Tuvalu had once planned to take the oil companies and the U.S. government to international tribunals for their disproportionate contributions to climate change, though he neither endorses nor condemns such proposals.

In essence, Climate Refugees constitutes a stark warning regarding the “endangered paradise[s]” it explores—all of them metaphors for the totality of the Earth, itself a potential paradise imperiled by climate catastrophe. In its focus on Southern peoples and marginalized Northerners, the work also certainly functions as a reminder of the unmitigated brutality and total injustice currently being enacted by the contributions of industrial-capitalist societies to anthropogenic climate change. Of course, many of the world’s regions not examined in Climate Refugees could today be examined similarly, hopefully in fruitful fashion: the Sahel, Pakistan, Bolivia and Peru, Mozambique, Russia, and the India-Bangladesh border come to the mind of this author.

The book’s value is perhaps best encapsulated in its closing image, that of Rames Rai, a Nepalese yak-herding boy, who is shown to be running in the mountains with a large grin emblazoned on his face: it is precisely toward securing the happiness of the world’s children, and its peoples as a whole, that radical action must soon be taken to avert the various negations climate change promises to introduce into history.

On Solar

Satellite image of flooding near Sukkur, Pakistan, taken 18 August 2010 (@ The Guardian)

In reflecting on the experience of reading Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel Solar, the present author must express disappointment as central. Such disappointment follows from the high hopes gleaned from the few information-sources on the work the present author had read before reading Solar itself. The Guardian‘s David Adam explains that Solar is “about a scientist working on a technology to address global warming,”¹ while Stefan Rahmstorf of RealClimate compares the existential concerns of the work with those advanced in Death in Venice.² McEwan is even said to have gone back to rewrite part of the conclusion to Solar following the failure of climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December, an event McEwan reportedly watched “very closely and with some despair.”³ The truth of Solar, sadly, is far less interesting or heroic than it conceivably could have been. McEwan’s work is very far from an examination of the life’s work of a committed, concerned climatologist like NASA’s James Hansen, let alone of the efforts of an actor analogous to Alfonso Cuarón’s Human Project to stave off catastrophe; it has little to do with Herbert Marcuse’s revolutionary “new science.”⁴ Rather, Solar concerns itself with slices of life from the existence of Michael Beard, a corpulent aging bourgeois physicist, from the years 2000 to 2009 CE.

McEwan’s anti-hero is at the opening of Solar relatively unconcerned with the undeniable threats posed by dangerous anthropogenic intereference with the Earth’s climate system. In the novel’s first section, set in 2000, Beard takes the social-democratic position that climate change represents something of a problem, but that it would likely be resolved through negotiations among the world’s states. Following this initial treatment, climate change then disappears as a focus of the text, to be eclipsed by rather unstimulating explorations of Beard’s private, provincial worries related to sex and family-relations. To find such a denouement negating rather than affirming should not, of course, be taken to mean that sexual and affective relations are unimportant—for the opposite rather seems to be the case—but rather to emphasize that a text entitled Solar which at points concerns itself with the presently unfolding climate catastrophe could likely have provided perspectives more provocative and important than mere mundane examinations of Beard’s rather boring, bourgeois life-style.

Indeed, it must be said that McEwan’s treatment of climate change in Solar, considered as a whole, could indeed be cause for concern. It is true that Beard at one point cites the findings of the entirely horrifying report published by the Global Humanitarian Forum in May 2009 which estimate some 300,000 people to lose their lives annually due to the climate change that has occurred to date,⁵ in addition to his mentioning that “Bangladesh is going down because the oceans are warming,” that the summer of 2007 saw the Arctic losing “forty percent” of its ice, that there exists a “meltdown under the Greenland ice sheet that no one really wants to talk about,” that “[t]here’s drought in the Amazon rain forest,” and that “the eastern Antarctic is going.” Such brutal truth-telling is decidedly the exception in Solar. Indeed, even given the older, more conscious Beard of 2005 and 2009, we still see him unjustifiably consuming steak, smoked salmon, and even “quails’ legs wrapped in bacon on a bed of creamed garlic,” in addition to employing air-travel liberally. What is more, the perspectives on responding to climate change advanced in the text are entirely commensurate with reformism—that is to say, illegitimate. In the second section of the text, set in 2005, Beard is shown as trying to convince wealthy capitalists to invest some of the $400 billion available in their portfolios into renewable-energy schemes; assuring them that the “sector” is teeming with “vitality,” “invention,” and “growth,” he promises them that “[c]olossal fortunes will be made” in the transition to a post-carbon global society. Significantly, though, that the investors are depicted as uninterested in considering financing that which one of them refers to as “unproven, noncontinuous forms of energy supply” may reflect misgivings on McEwan’s part regarding the rationality of leaving responsibility for the promotion of what Max Ajl terms an “Apollo project for green energy”⁶ to the capitalist market. Indeed, the response given to Beard by these potential investors should serve as a reminder of the obvious: that directing one’s concerns regarding looming climate catastrophe to the bourgeoisie and their defenders simply will not work. What may though work in its stead, as McEwan acknowledges in passing near the start of his novel, is the employment of reason.

That McEwan fails rather significantly in Solar to present the looming climate catastrophe as such does not mean that his work is bereft of all value, surely. Like many other commentators on the present predicament too tied to hegemonic power structures to call things by their name—James Hansen,⁷ for example, or Mark Lynas⁸—he certainly acknowledges the status quo to be problematic: through a research-assistant of Beard’s he presents the compelling metaphor of a man dying of thirst in a rainforest who ravages the forest’s trees for their sap, rendering the area into a wasteland when he could very readily, and far less destructively, simply collected rain-water for consumption. Early on in the text, McEwan recognizes that “[e]veryone, all of us” faces “oblivion” at the hands of climate change, and that “the general condition” is that humanity is “running out of time”; he has Beard reflect at one point on the injustice and irrationality of the market system in observing that “There was no premium for being virtuous, for not screwing up the climate system.” McEwan even inserts into Solar some rather legitimate observations on the 2000 U.S. presidential elections—observations that have of course lost none of their relevance, whether with regard to the U.S. or more generally—claiming it to constitute “a struggle within an elite” whose outcome, whether it be favorable to Al Gore or George W. Bush, would have office-holders “schooled in like-minded orthodoxies” and “bound by the same constraints.” McEwan complements such passing comments with more regular criticisms of Tony Blair’s New Labour regime in the U.K.

Moreover, McEwan centrally affirms the scientific basis for anthropogenic climate change, depicting Beard as finding it to be “as incontestable as the basics of natural selection.” He has Beard and his research-assistant engage in thought-experiments involving aliens who, landing on planet Earth and noting it to be “bathed in radiant energy,” would be shocked to learn that humans “ever should have thought of poisoning lives by burning fossil fuels or creating plutonium.” In a move that may constitute what Theodor W. Adorno terms “a progress which leads out and away,”⁹ at least in embryonic terms, McEwan depicts Beard as claiming that “no one can own sunlight.” At the close of Solar, indeed, the actual possibility of an escape from catastrophe is proferred but then crushed: on the eve of a demonstration of the artificial-photosynthesis solar technology Beard has developed—an innovation that will finally allow for “endlessly self-renewing” clean energy that in turn will permit humanity to “draw back from the brink of disastrous self-destructive global warming”—his former employer files a lawsuit against him regarding a purported breach of intellectual-property rights, and a former lover of one of his ex-wives takes a jackhammer to the installation itself. This negation, then—one that quite literally smashes a potentially reasonable means by which to avert climate catastrophe—is surely one critical of constituted power, and in many ways it parallels the close to Checkpoint,¹⁰ when Jay is prevented by means of coercion from engaging in a plot to assassinate war criminal George W. Bush. Because the technological breakthrough made by Beard could theoretically be taken up by others, the defeat at Solar’s end hardly represents a total one, or one worthy of Schopenhauer’s lamentations.

Beyond such considerations, Solar features a good deal of amusing comic situations. For one, McEwan pokes fun at postmodern and constructivist social theories when he relates a scandal that erupts following Beard’s non-postmodern comments in response to a question posed to him regarding the under-representation of women in the field of physics; Beard soon finds himself accosted by crowds comprised of those partial to social constructivism that accuse him of advancing a “crude objectivism” with which he seeks to “maintain and advance the social dominance of the white male”—against all evidence—while others attach the epithets “genetic determinist,” “eugenicist,” and even “neo-Nazi” to the embattled Beard. Beard’s comical difficulties in this sense are in a way reminiscent of those which haunted Theodor W. Adorno near the end of his life (1969), at a time when German activist students denounced the leftist giant as a defender of the establishment in light of his desperate conclusions regarding the possibility of progress beyond prevailing conditions and his concomitant refusal to endorse the student movement. The historical example McEwan most likely had in mind for Beard, though, is Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, who became embroiled in controversy following comments he made in 2005 on questions rather similar to those for which Beard comes under fire. It should of course be recognized that Adorno shares very little else with Summers, present economic adviser to the U.S. president and author of the infamous 1991 “toxic memo” written for internal use at the World Bank which makes capitalist arguments in favor of relocating highly-polluting industries to impoverished African societies; that Adorno shares even less with Beard need go unmentioned.

To close, then, it seems clear that McEwan considers climate change to be rather serious, as he should; we can see in the explicit reference to situationism he makes at one point in the novel an awareness on his part of radical socio-political alternatives to that which presently prevails. There remains considerable room for doubt, though, that a synthesis of these two considerations—looming climate catastrophe on the one hand, thoroughgoing reconstructive political projects on the other—finds coherent expression in Solar. Indeed, in light of the gravity of the present predicament, it rather seems to be the case that McEwan’s work has far less in common with modern radical politics than its unwanted offspring, postmodernism—the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson has put it,¹¹ or simple reformism, in Takis Fotopoulos’ estimation.¹²

——————————————————————————————————–

1“Ian McEwan: Failure at Copenhagen climate talks prompted novel rewrite,” The Guardian, 5 March 2010

2“What climate scientists think of Ian McEwan’s Solar book,” The Guardian, 5 May 2010

3David Adam, op. cit.

4One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 150-67; Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 67

5John Vidal, “Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank,” The Guardian, 29 May 2009

6“BP, Obama and the Economics of Disaster,” Truthout, 16 July 2010

7Cf. his Storms of My Granchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity and my 15 December 2009 review of it, published in Countercurrents

8Cf. his Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008) and my review of it, published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

9Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Eric Krakauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 96

10By Nicholson Baker (New York: Vintage, 2004)

11Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991)

12“The transition to an Inclusive Democracy,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, vol. 6, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2010)

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Solar review

In reflecting on the experience of reading Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel Solar, the present author must express disappointment as central. Such disappointment follows from the high hopes gleaned from the few information-sources on the work the present author had read before reading Solar itself. The Guardian‘s David Adam explains that Solar is “about a scientist working on a technology to address global warming,”¹ while Stefan Rahmstorf of RealClimate compares the existential concerns of the work with those advanced in Death in Venice.² McEwan is even said to have gone back to rewrite part of the conclusion to Solar following the failure of climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December, an event McEwan reportedly watched “very closely and with some despair.”³ The truth of Solar, sadly, is far less interesting or heroic than it conceivably could have been. McEwan’s work is very far from an examination of the life’s work of a committed, concerned scientist like NASA’s James Hansen, let alone of the efforts of an actor analogous to Alfonso Cuarón’s Human Project to stave off catastrophe; it has little to do with Herbert Marcuse’s revolutionary “new science.”⁴ Rather, Solar concerns itself with slices of life from the existence of Michael Beard, a corpulent aging bourgeois physicist, from the years 2000 to 2009 CE.

McEwan’s anti-hero is at the opening of Solar relatively unconcerned with the undeniable threats posed by dangerous anthropogenic intereference with the Earth’s climate system. In the novel’s first section, set in 2000, Beard takes the social-democratic position that climate change represents something of a problem, but that it would likely be resolved through negotiations among the world’s states. Following this initial treatment, climate change then disappears as a focus of the text, to be eclipsed by rather unstimulating explorations of Beard’s private, provincial worries related to sex and family-relations. To find such a denouement negating rather than affirming should not, of course, be taken to mean that sexual and affective relations are unimportant—for the opposite rather seems to be the case—but rather to emphasize that a text entitled Solar which at points concerns itself with the presently unfolding climate catastrophe could likely have provided perspectives more provocative and important than mere mundane examinations of Beard’s rather boring, bourgeois life-style.

Indeed, it must be said that McEwan’s treatment of climate change in Solar, considered as a whole, could indeed be cause for concern. It is true that Beard at one point cites the findings of the entirely horrifying report published by the Global Humanitarian Forum in May 2009 which estimate some 300,000 people to lose their lives annually due to the climate change that has occurred to date,⁵ in addition to his mentioning that “Bangladesh is going down because the oceans are warming,” that the summer of 2007 saw the Arctic losing “forty percent” of its ice, that there exists a “meltdown under the Greenland ice sheet that no one really wants to talk about,” that “[t]here’s drought in the Amazon rain forest,” and that “the eastern Antarctic is going.” Such brutal truth-telling is decidedly the exception in Solar. Indeed, even given the older, more conscious Beard of 2005 and 2009, we still see him unjustifiably consuming steak, smoked salmon, and even “quails’ legs wrapped inb acon a bed of creamed garlic,” in addition to employing air-travel liberally. What is more, the perspectives on responding to climate change advanced in the text are entirely commensurate with reformism—that is to say, illegitimate. In the second section of the text, set in 2005, Beard is shown as trying to convince wealthy capitalists to invest some of the $400 billion available in their portfolios into renewable-energy schemes; assuring them that the “sector” is teeming with “vitality,” “invention,” and “growth,” he promises them that “[c]olossal fortunes will be made” in the transition to a post-carbon global society. Significantly, though, that the investors are depicted as uninterested in considering financing that which one of them refers to as “unproven, noncontinuous forms of energy supply” may reflect misgivings on McEwan’s part regarding the rationality of leaving responsibility for the promotion of what Max Ajl terms an “Apollo project for green energy”⁶ to the capitalist market. Indeed, the response given to Beard by these potential investors should serve as a reminder of the obvious: that directing one’s concerns regarding looming climate catastrophe to the bourgeoisie and their defenders simply will not work. What may though work in its stead, as McEwan acknowledges in passing near the start of his novel, is the employment of reason.

That McEwan fails rather significantly in Solar to present the looming climate catastrophe as such does not mean that his work is bereft of all value, surely. Like many other commentators on the present predicament too tied to hegemonic power structures to call things by their name—James Hansen,⁷ for example, or Mark Lynas⁸—he certainly acknowledges the status quo to be problematic: through a research-assistant of Beard’s he presents the compelling metaphor of a man dying of thirst in a rainforest who ravages the forest’s trees for their sap, rendering the area into a wasteland when he could very readily, and far less destructively, simply collected rain-water for consumption. Early on in the text, McEwan recognizes that “[e]veryone, all of us” faces “oblivion” at the hands of climate change, and that “the general condition” is that humanity is “running out of time”; he has Beard reflect at one point on the injustice and irrationality of the market system in observing that “There was no premium for being virtuous, for not screwing up the climate system.” McEwan even inserts into Solar some rather legitimate observations on the 2000 U.S. presidential elections—observations that have of course lost none of their relevance, whether with regard to the U.S. or more generally—claiming it to constitute “a struggle within an elite” whose outcome, whether it be favorable to Al Gore or George W. Bush, would have office-holders “schooled in like-minded orthodoxies” and “bound by the same constraints.” McEwan complements such passing comments with more regular criticisms of Tony Blair’s New Labour regime in the U.K.

Moreover, McEwan centrally affirms the scientific basis for anthropogenic climate change, depicting Beard as finding it to be “as incontestable as the basics of natural selection.” He has Beard and his research-assistant engage in thought-experiments involving aliens who, landing on planet Earth and noting it to be “bathed in radiant energy,” would be shocked to learn that humans “ever should have thought of poisoning [them]selves by burning fossil fuels or creating plutonium.” In a move that may constitute what Theodor W. Adorno terms “a progress which leads out and away,”⁹ at least in embryonic terms, McEwan depicts Beard as claiming that “[n]o one can own sunlight.” At the close of Solar, indeed, the actual possibility of an escape from catastrophe is proferred but then crushed: on the eve of a demonstration of the artificial-photosynthesis solar technology Beard has developed—an innovation that will finally allow for “endlessly self-renewing” clean energy that in turn will permit humanity to “draw back from the brink of disastrous self-destructive global warming”—his former employer files a lawsuit against him regarding a purported breach of intellectual-property rights, and a former lover of one of his ex-wives takes a jackhammer to the installation itself. This negation, then—one that quite literally smashes a potentially reasonable means by which to avert climate catastrophe—is surely one critical of constituted power, and in many ways it parallels the close to Checkpoint,¹⁰ when Jay is prevented by means of coercion from engaging in a plot to assassinate war criminal George W. Bush. Because the technological breakthrough made by Beard could theoretically be taken up by others, the defeat at Solar‘s end hardly represents a total one, or one worthy of Schopenhauer’s lamentations.

Beyond such considerations, Solar features a good deal of amusing comic situations. For one, McEwan pokes fun at postmodern and constructivist social theories when he relates a scandal that erupts following Beard’s non-postmodern comments in response to a question posed to him regarding the under-representation of women in the field of physics; Beard soon finds himself accosted by crowds comprised of those partial to social constructivism that accuse him of advancing a “crude objectivism” with which he seeks to “maintain and advance the social dominance of the white male”—against all evidence—while others attach the epithets “genetic determinist,” “eugenicist,” and even “neo-Nazi” to the embattled Beard. Beard’s comical difficulties in this sense are in a way reminiscent of those which haunted Theodor W. Adorno near the end of his life (1969), at a time when German activist students denounced the leftist giant as a defender of the establishment in light of his desperate conclusions regarding the possibility of progress beyond prevailing conditions and his concomitant refusal to endorse the student movement. The historical example McEwan most likely had in mind for Beard, though, is Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, who became embroiled in controversy following comments he made in 2005 on questions rather similar to those for which Beard comes under fire. It should of course be recognized that Adorno shares very little else with Summers, present economic adviser to the U.S. president and author of the infamous 1991 “toxic memo” written for internal use at the World Bank which makes capitalist arguments in favor of relocating highly-polluting industries to impoverished African societies; that Adorno shares even less with Beard need go unmentioned.

To close, then, it seems clear that McEwan considers climate change to be rather serious, as he should; we can see in the explicit reference to situationism he makes at one point in the novel an awareness on his part of radical socio-political alternatives to that which presently prevails. There remains considerable room for doubt, though, that a synthesis of these two considerations—looming climate catastrophe on the one hand, thoroughgoing reconstructive political projects on the other—finds coherent expression in Solar. Indeed, in light of the graveness of the present predicament, it rather seems to be the case that McEwan’s work has far less in common with modern radical politics than its unwanted offspring, postmodernism—the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson has put it,¹¹ or simple reformism, in Takis Fotopoulos’ estimation.¹²

1“Ian McEwan: Failure at Copenhagen climate talks prompted novel rewrite,” The Guardian, 5 March 2010

2“What climate scientists think of Ian McEwan’s Solar book,” The Guardian, 5 May 2010

3David Adam, op. cit.

4One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 150-67; Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 67

5John Vidal, “Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank,” The Guardian, 29 May 2009

6“BP, Obama and the Economics of Disaster,” Truthout, 16 July 2010

7Cf. his Storms of My Granchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity and Javier Sethness’s 15 December 2009 review of it, published in Countercurrents

8Cf. his Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008) and Javier Sethness’s review of it, published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

9Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Eric Krakauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 96

10By Nicholson Baker (New York: Vintage, 2004)

11Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991)

12“The transition to an Inclusive Democracy,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, vol. 6, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2010)

Toward radical interruption: a review of Bill McKibben’s Eaarth

Fires in central Russia, summer 2010 (@ The Guardian)

NB: published in slightly altered form on Climate & Capitalism

According to North-American environmental activist Bill McKibben, planet Earth has died. That which has come to replace does not, constitute dialectical progress toward a higher or better state; the new-born planet, named Eaarth by McKibben in his book of the same name (New York: Times Books, 2010), follows instead from the brutality and thoughtlessness engaged in by much of humanity since its historical emergence. In McKibben’s estimation, the Holocene geological epoch—one that, characterized by a narrow range of fluctuation in average global temperatures, has allowed for humanity’s rise and development on Earth over the past 12,000 years—can no longer be said to exist, due to anthropogenic interference with planetary climate systems as well as human-induced environmental destruction writ large; Eaarth, referred to elsewhere as the Anthropocene, jeopardizes the survival of much of humanity and the continuation of a great deal of life itself. Such-world historical regression is “pretty outrageous,” as a climatologist McKibben quotes in the work has it; for McKibben, indeed, it represents “the deepest of human failures.” In light of such negations, though, McKibben suggests that “we must keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit [the] damage” visited by constituted power on humanity and the planet; like Noam Chomsky, he sees no legitimate alternative to present struggle.

As an academic concerned with environmental studies, McKibben is cognizant of the dire nature of the present state of affairs. On the new Eaarth, he mentions that billion-people famines could be regular events by the middle of the present century, that the flow of the Euphrates and Nile rivers could well decline significantly in the near future, and that glacier retreat in the Himalayas and Andes could cause the water supplies of billions to dwindle within decades. In light of the various horrors climate catastrophe could visit upon history, McKibben suggests that humanity recognize limits to what Max Horkheimer terms its seemingly “boundless imperialism”¹—as Meadows et al. have emphasized since the publication of their Limits to Growth in 1972—and jettison “the consumer lifestyle” altogether, instead adopting a “Plan B” characterized by the sharing of resources between Northern and Southern societies within the context of a joint effort to thoroughly re-arrange global society on rational-ecological grounds. McKibben here re-affirms the goal of attaining an atmospheric carbon-concentration of 350 parts per million (ppm), noting that carbon-concentrations higher than 350 ppm jeopardize the capabilities of human society to function. Toward this end he endorses what he calls a “clean-tech Apollo mission” and an “ecological New Deal,” arguing that such thoroughgoing changes be accompanied by a return to small-scale organic agriculture on the part of humanity generally conceived. This final recommendation, it should be said, is not terribly different from those made by Via Campesina.

Despite the critical and important perspectives advanced in the contributions made by McKibben in Eaarth as summarized above, it must be said that much of the rest of the book is little more than mystificatory platitudes that serve present power-arrangements. For one, McKibben places responsibility for the regression to Eaarth and the various possible future negations that could be introduced by climate catastrophe at the feet of “modernity,” which he defines as “the sudden availability” of “cheap fossil fuel” in the eighteenth century CE. There is no recognition here, or at any point in the work, of the processes which resulted in the onset of the capitalist mode of production during this period of human history; similarly, there is no explicit critique of the highly destructive nature of capitalism in general. It should not be surprising, then, that his present recommendations do not include a call for the abolition of capitalist social relations. Furthermore, he rather bizarrely seems to hold the current U.S. president as some sort of messianic figure worthy of devotion, claiming Obama to be “a president using centralized power to good ends” who is working “aggressively” toward the creation of a global climate-change accord—against all evidence. Such highly irrational views, of course, are typical of liberal environmentalists: in presenting the accession of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1981 as the onset of a markedly irresponsible socio-environmental regime—one he would have us believe as being dramatically different from that overseen by his predecessor, Jimmy Carter—McKibben once again betrays his ties to hegemonic politics. Unsurprisingly, he also endorses the imperial scheme presently being considered to erect vast solar plants in North Africa for use among European consumers and seems to support the maintenance of existing dams and the building of new ones for the development of “clean” hydropower.

McKibben presents these reactionary perspectives while engaging in a maddening tendency to attribute responsibility for the current socio-environmental predicament to an amorphous ‘we’—as though the impoverished, the young, and other excluded groups have had any sort of choice on climate policy, let alone the course of history. This obfuscatory tendency contrasts significantly with views advanced by Chomsky, who in June 2009 suggested a thought-experiment by which North-Americans 50 years ago were to have been given the choice of directing resources either toward the development of “iPods and the internet” or instead the creation of “a livable and sustainable socioeconomic order”—a false choice, as Chomsky points out, for no such offer has ever been made.² Indeed, McKibben’s attribution of a vague sense of collective responsibility reflects comments made in March 2010 by world-renown Earth scientist James Lovelock, who then alarmingly claimed humanity not yet to have “evolved” to the point at which it is “clever enough” to deal with climate change.³ That McKibben claims at one point in Eaarth that “[w]e don’t pay much attention to poor people” should need little comment.

Given his recognition of the dire state of the present, it is perhaps strange that he does not come to conclusions more substantive than his call for a return to small-scale agriculture coupled with a “green Manhattan project” (!). Eaarth, for example, includes little reflection on the terrifyingly repressive actions that capitalists and their defenders may well take to attempt to maintain their privileges within the context of a climate-destabilized world, as examined briefly in Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars (2008), as elsewhere. Remarkably, indeed, McKibben fails to systematically examine the alarming possible impacts climate change could have on future agricultural production—considerations that may well prove important for the viability of his ‘back to the land’ project!

In sum, then, Bill McKibben is surely not Walter Benjamin, the revolutionary German historian who died fleeing the Nazis 70 years ago. Hope for the present predicament may lie in the possibility, though, that parts of McKibben’s Eaarth can help move humanity toward adopting Benjamin’s concept of revolution—the “attempt by the passengers” on a metaphorical train “to activate the emergency brake” before being barrelled on into the abyss.⁴

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1The End of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 108

2“Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours,” 12 June 2009

3Javier Sethness, “Is Humanity Too Stupid to Deal with Climate Change?” MRZine, 7 April 2010

4Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 402

Against world-negation: a review of Climate Code Red

An Indian family displaced by flooding (@The Guardian)

It could justifiably be said that David Spratt and Philip Sutton’s Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action is a challenging read. The work’s authors, principally concerned with systematically exploring the present predicament of anthropogenic global warming, or climate change, come to conclude that the greenhouse gases emitted since the onset of the Industrial Revolution have already caused the Earth’s climate to warm to dangerous levels, and that hence the future warming expected to accompany the carbon-reduction trajectories to which governments of the world are in principle committed to realizing would induce catastrophic destruction. Extant climate-change policy is fundamentally irrational and deeply inhumane, in this calculus, for “the fate of most people, and most plants and animal species” that exist on Earth is essentially being jeopardized by the status quo and its defenders. Going far beyond the warming targets being considered in hegemonic discourse and policy, and even those endorsed at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, Bolivia,¹ Spratt and Sutton find that the highest average-global temperature increase that can reasonably be allowed is one of 0.5°C beyond the temperatures that prevailed in 1750 CE, before industrialization—that is, 0.3° below the warming that has taken place to date. Any warming beyond this level would be unacceptably destructive to life on Earth, claim Spratt and Sutton.

In this sense, Climate Code Red is a reminder—assuming we need it—of the horror of the present state of affairs, of the radically wrong nature of what Hegel and Adorno refer to as the “world-course” (Weltlauf). The only potentially rational response to the threat of the climate catastrophe currently being enacted, as Spratt and Sutton assert in Benjaminian terms, is to treat the present as an emergency, and to act accordingly. As is the case, then, with other recent works on climate change, such as Mark Lynas’s 2008 Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet or Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2006 Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, one can see how it is that the experience of Climate Code Red could be considered anxiety-provoking. As Avital Ronell claims, nonetheless, in Astra Taylor’s 2008 film Examined Life,² “anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity”; for the sake of currently-existing humanity and its expected future generations, as well as the myriad of other species that reside on Earth, it is to be hoped that Ronell’s observation here is an accurate one.

The perspectives advanced by Spratt and Sutton in Climate Code Red are “desperate,” for they reflect “the desperate straits our [sic] planet is now in,” given the profundity of the threat presented by “business- and politics-as-usual” regarding climate change (132). The specter of climate catastrophe amounts in Spratt and Sutton’s conclusion to “the greatest threat in human history”; the likely futures being provoked by present approaches to the problem call into question the very future “viability” of Earth as “a life support system” (178, 251). The authors’ reviews of climate-related incidents experienced in recent years, taken together with the climatological reports they consider, make the basis for their argument clear. For one, Spratt and Sutton see the alarmingly violent recent recessions of Arctic sea-ice cover, and especially that experienced during 2007—to say nothing of this year’s reports, which show even more extreme reductions of the Arctic sea-ice minimum³—as demanding a radical reconsideration of approaches to the problem of climate change, since, among other things, the sustained loss of Arctic ice would prompt a reduction in albedo that would in turn bring about further warming. That the unprecedented 2007 and 2010 Arctic sea-ice minimums occurred within the context of the ‘achievement’ of a 0.7-0.8°C increase in average global temperatures beyond those of pre-industrial history shows the present level of warming to be unacceptably high, say the book’s authors, while consideration of the dire threats that current atmospheric carbon concentrations and their attendant warming-capacity pose to the Greenland ice sheet as well as the life that today resides in the Earth’s coastal areas should further support this claim (20-27, 33-44). Spratt and Sutton also claim already-extant climate change to be responsible for famine in Darfur (89); one could also indict this culprit for presently emerging famine conditions in Niger, Chad, and Mali,⁴ as well as murderous heatwaves experienced this summer in South Asia.⁵

Spratt and Sutton’s findings, decidedly radical in implication, revolt against the 2°C “safe-warming limit” advocated by many dominant global institutions—a target that nine-tenths of climatologists polled by The Guardian more than seven months before the disastrous Copenhagen climate talks claimed would in any case be missed, in light of present treatment of the question.⁶ Were global warming to be controlled to a 2°C increase in average global temperatures, though, such an achievement would amount to “a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species” (99), claim Spratt and Sutton, for a world experiencing such warming would see dramatic disruptions of agricultural production in northern India’s grain-belt, the complete disappearance of glacial ice in the Andes—which provides water for millions in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile—and mass starvation in Mali, among other effects.⁷ It should not be controversial to state that such outcomes, in addition to those that are to be expected to take place under conditions of warming beyond 2°C, should be avoided.

As with other climate commentators who have had books that deal with the climate predicament published in recent months—NASA’s James Hansen and 350.org’s Bill McKibben come to mind—Spratt and Sutton do not hold climate catastrophe to be at this point an inevitable eventuality. Instead, they insist that the present state of the world’s climate necessitates the realization of an emergency response within the little time which remains for the possibility of such. This state of emergency would be directed toward achieving a “safe climate”: a drop to the aforementioned 0.5°C average-global temperature increase, or a reduction from the present carbon-dioxide concentration of 390 parts per million (ppm) to 315 ppm. Warming at such a level would restore the summer Arctic sea-ice and avoid the various other life-negating consequences expected to accompany further warming. Policy directed at achieving such would, in Spratt and Sutton’s estimation, entail three important movements: cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to zero, removing excess atmospheric carbon, and engaging in the direct cooling of the Earth. World society must come to become ‘post-carbon’ in the first place to avoid significant future temperature-increases and also embark on massive re-afforestation campaigns to draw down current carbon-concentrations—but these two moves, crucial to preventing climate change of a catastrophic scale, would paradoxically itself provoke warming, as the artificial cooling effect of industrially produced aerosols would disappear with the abolition of carbon emissions. Since Spratt and Sutton assume that the transformations needed to realize a post-carbon global society would, if seriously pursued, require at least two decades to be achieved, they naturally expect greenhouse-gas emissions to continue for some time, thus also inducing warming. In the authors’ view, the warming that is to be expected to result from the emissions expected to occur during the envisioned transition system—an increase in average global temperatures of 1 or 2°C beyond that experienced to date, for a total increase of 1.8-2.8°C—would be too dangerous, and so they advocate geo-engineering schemes to cancel out the potential for such warming. Their treatment of this last proposal is brief, referred to quickly as constituting a “least-worst option” for preventing climate catastrophe (132). They do not consider reports that warn that geo-engineering may result in disruptions to the Asian monsoon season and exacerbate drought in Africa, thus imperiling the lives of a great number of humans—two milllion, claim estimates reported by Silvia Ribeiro in La Jornada.⁸ They do however insist that any large-scale geo-engineering project, once implemented, would necessarily have to exist continuously during the entirety of the hypothetical transition period; for it to be suspended at any point during this time would result in unacceptably dangerously levels of warming.

As should be clear, the thoroughgoing changes called for by Spratt and Sutton would be possible only through a “great transformation” of existing society. The market, which the authors of Climate Code Red find to be incapable of “respond[ing] by itself at the depth and speed required” (192), would need to be heavily regulated as a first step, though Spratt and Sutton seem to endorse planned economics and a concurrent reduction of the market’s role in society altogether (224). Consumption patterns deemed “non-essential” are to be “curtailed or rationed” in this vision (224); “mass air travel” by planes would preferably not exist (196). Strangely enough, the authors at no point directly consider the importance that the general adoption of vegetarian diets, let alone vegan ones, could have for the avoidance of climate catastrophe, considering the dramatic greenhouse-gas emissions implicated in the mass-raising of livestock for exploitation and slaughter.⁹

Spratt and Sutton do make clear that their favored approach to the specter of catastrophic climate change is not to be an initiative imposed by technocratic elites but rather one to be advanced by the active democratic participation of “the broad community” by means of deliberative decision-making processes (234-6). The authors’ call here for building participatory democracy comprised of a “fully engaged” citizenry aligns with Noam Chomsky’s assertion that present trends of popular disenfranchisement constitute a “critical challenge for the future” that must be overcome, if reason is to be given a chance to prevail and humanity afforded a chance to avoid the numerous threats to its survival.¹⁰ With regard to preventing future wars in the Middle East, Chomsky’s call in this sense for the realization of “functioning democratic societies” may be a convincing policy-proposal,¹¹ but it is less so on the question of responses to climate change, given that nearly half of U.S. citizens believe the various threats posed by climate change to be exaggerated, while 46 percent hold either that scientists are unsure about global warming or that it is not occurring at all.¹² Similarly worrying developments have been seen in Britain, where the percentage of polled adults who take climate change to “definitely” be real has dropped from 44 to 31 percent since last year.¹³ Both positions are radically at odds with general attitudes found in most other countries of the world, as well of course with climatological realities. It is to be hoped, then, that the democracy-promotion practices endorsed by Spratt and Sutton would allow for the overhauling of such disastrous perspectives through educational processes.

Questions could surely be raised regarding the can-do optimism evident in Climate Code Red. Spratt and Sutton’s work is not a melancholic lamentation of the “systematized horror”¹⁴ of the present and its likely futures but rather a reasoned proposal aimed at “the prevention and avoidance of total catastrophe.”¹⁵ At points, the work’s authors do note that the implementation of their proposals is “clearly a very challenging task,” and perhaps even an “impossible” one (111), but they proceed by assuming that such can be achieved; indeed, they base their work on the “need to start from the assumption that we will not fail in our efforts” to avoid catastrophic climate change (229). They hold, for example, that the ruling classes of China and India will find in the threat posed to the Himalayan glaciers by climate change reason to conform with the policy recommendations advanced in Climate Code Red, just as “conservative governments and corporations” the world over will come to acknowledge that profit cannot be had on a climate-devastated Earth (232). Unfortunately, such comments seem utopian in the extreme; the faith Spratt and Sutton place in the reconstructive possibilities to be had by means of deliberative democracy seems more justified. As made clear in both Climate Code Red and alarming climatological findings released since its publication,¹⁶ then, the present urgency of instituting radical counter-power is absolute.

The treatment of spaces referred to as belonging to ‘developing societies’ or ‘the Third World’ in Climate Code Red seems also to merit examination. Spratt and Sutton of course recognize that climate change constitutes a dire threat to humanity as a whole, but they do not seem to emphasize that it will “produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes, reinforcing, rather than diminishing, geopolitical inequality and conflict,” as Mike Davis has it.¹⁷ Climate Code Red, in this sense, is not Davis’s 2002 book Late Victorian Holocausts, a work that examines the catastrophic famines suffered by millions of residents of South Asia, East Africa, and China facing the climatic disruptions associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation that coincided with the imposition of capitalist imperialism at the close of the nineteenth century; Spratt and Sutton do not systematically explore the various negations that climate change could present to the peoples of the global South, as Lynas obliquely does.¹⁸ Neither do they claim hegemonic climate policy to find its basis in principles similar to those that “funneled six million people in Europe into furnaces,” as Sudanese climate negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping claimed at the close of the Copenhagen climate conference,¹⁹ nor do they characterize existing approaches to the problem as equivalent to climate genocide, as Gideon Polya asserts.²⁰ Criticism of Spratt and Sutton on such grounds may however easily be countered by recognition that their work as a whole is dedicated precisely to avoiding the various horrors posed by climate change, however they may be termed.

Less clear than Spratt and Sutton’s commitment to achieving a safe climate is their take on capitalism, a present reality that has clear implications—principally highly negative ones—for the project set forth in Climate Code Red. Given the exegesis of Spratt and Sutton’s arguments as presented above, their profound opposition to the existent should not be in doubt; on the second page of text in the work, indeed, we find guest writer Ian Dunlop claiming that the “ideological preoccupation with a market economy that is based on maximising short-run profit is rapidly leading us towards an uninhabitable planet” (xii). Spratt and Sutton themselves argue for the general establishment of “local and global ‘Commons,’” or spaces held “’in common’ for the benefit of all” (216), a position remarkably similar to that of the “intergenerational commons” that would make available its “fruits and benefits” to “every member of every generation.”²¹ In the closing pages of Climate Code Red, Spratt and Sutton assert that concern for “shareholder value” is be subordinated to concern for “a viable future for our planet” and the lives of those who currently exist together with those who are expected to be born in the future (253-4). Here, as in analyses reviewed above, the authors express radically anti-capitalist perspectives, though they fail to identify their opposition to capitalism explicitly in the book’s text. This lack of clarity is reflected in their treatment of technological development and questions related to the financing of the transitional period aimed at realizing a safe climate. For one, the authors fail to consider the seemingly sensible possibility of employing space-based solar power as a means of moving toward a post-carbon global society, as explored briefly by Kolbert (p. 144-6), and they constrain themselves to discussing strategies for the financing of the general adoption of renewable-energy sources using the terms and understandings handed down to them by dominant power-interests—as though the self-instituted planned economy they seem to favor could not come up with more rational modes of valuing things. Furthermore, Spratt and Sutton do not come to advocate the expropriation of capital to finance the thoroughgoing changes that will be needed for the transition period, as Marxists and anarchists might, nor do they call for the resources currently dedicated to military spending to be re-directed toward addressing the climate emergency, as Clarke does.²²

These shortcomings aside, Spratt and Sutton’s contributions to addressing looming climate catastrophe are in general terms well-reasoned and much-needed. The prospect of the “great transformation” of existing society held out by the authors of Climate Code Red, however, together with the more general commitment to prevent the loss of “most of the life on this planet” (145), would likely be better served if their analyses advanced perspectives explicitly critical of the world-destructiveness of the capitalist mode of production.

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1Cf. the People’s Agreement proposed at the conference: English translation and Spanish original

2Trailer available here

3John Vidal, “2010 could be among warmest years recorded by man [sic],” The Guardian, 2 June 2010

4 Henry Foy, “Millions face starvation in West Africa, aid agencies warn,” The Guardian, 21 June 2010

5Jason Burke, Hundreds die in Indian heatwave,” The Guardian, 30 May 2010

6David Adam, “World will not meet 2C warming target, climate change experts agree,” The Guardian, 14 April 2009

7Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008)

8“No hay planeta B,” 13 March 2010

9George Monbiot, “Why vegans were right all along,” The Guardian, 24 December 2002ñ Felicity Carus, “UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet,” The Guardian, 2 June 2010

10Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), p. 170

11Ibid, p. 135-7

12Suzanne Goldenberg, “Nearly half of Americans believe climate change threat is exaggerated,” The Guardian, 11 March 2010

13Juliette Jowit, “Sharp decline in public’s belief in climate threat, British poll reveals,” The Guardian, 23 February 2010

14Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005 [1951]), p. 113

15Ibid, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006), p. 143

16Juliette Jowit and Christine Ottery, “Global emissions targets will lead to 4C temperature rise, say studies,” The Guardian, x July 2010; Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy, “World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists,” The Independent, 18 November 2009

17“Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Melt-Down,” in The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), p. 14

18Op. cit.

19 Simon McGee, “Anger at delegate’s Holocaust jibe against climate deal—as his country shares £62bn bonanza [sic],” The Daily Mail, 20 December 2009

20 “G8 Failure Means Climate Genocide For Developing World,” Countercurrents, 11 July 2009

21Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009)

22Renfrey Clarke, “The 350 ppm carbon dioxide challenge and how to achieve it,” Links, 14 January 2010