Our climate strategy must combat the technofixes-plus-markets fraud

LES LEVIDOW analyses the predominant political narrative on climate, and ways for social movements to oppose it

As embraced by the world’s most powerful governments, the predominant approach to climate change has three main elements: market mechanisms, technological fixes, and delay. Market-type policy instruments are meant eventually to stimulate novel techno-solutions which can decarbonise or replace high-carbon systems. 

This techno-market framework has maintained a societal hegemony through a seductive narrative, namely: that a smooth low-carbon transition will become more feasible sometime in the future, as grounds to delay climate action for now. 

Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) remains elusive, meanwhile justifying lucrative fossil fuels. Cartoon by Cathy Wilcox

These climate-delay narratives warrant scrutiny for their strategies, broad appeal and role in system continuity. Focusing on them, this article ends with ideas for counter-strategies towards system change.

Climate-delay narratives

As climate-change denial has become marginal, climate-delay has become a more important obstacle.  Having initiated the US agenda for a Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deploys the epithet “climate delayer” against politicians who promote excuses for delaying effective action, especially the Democratic Party leadership.

Climate-delay narratives encompass a broad range of obstructors, excuses and delays. In the guise of sharpening debate, they raise questions that divert attention from decarbonisation solutions. Their strategies variously redirect responsibility, promote non-transformative solutions, emphasise disadvantages of climate action, and/or encourage a fatalistic surrender to climate change, according to an academic analysis published in the journal Global Sustainability. 

Its authors argue that a prevalent strategy has been to divert the focus away from stringent decarbonisation measures, towards “technology and market-based measures with minimal interventions, even if these are ultimately insufficient to address the scale of the problem”. 

This strategy has many variations, e.g. emphasising recent progress in renewable energy deployment, promoting techno-optimistic solutions (always falling short of the promised timeframe), and recurrently substituting new future solutions, e.g., zero-carbon airplanes, fusion power and direct air capture of greenhouse gases.  

Stop fossil fuel projects, African civil society groups demand

“There must be a halt to all new coal, oil, or gas exploration and extraction activities in Africa in line with the imperatives of the energy transition”, delegates representing more than 30 civil society organisations from across Africa urged this month.

“We specifically demand the stoppage of oil exploration and expansion plans in the Virunga basin of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Keta region of Ghana, the Okavango Delta of Botswana, the Orange River Basin in Namibia, and a halt on all plans for the West African Gas Pipeline Project, the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline Project, and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline Project, among others.”

Delegates to Oilwatch Africa’s “Stop Gassing the Continent” conference this month

The delegates gathered in Accra, Ghana, for a conference entitled “Stop Gassing the Continent”, organised by Oilwatch Africa on 8-12 August.

The communique adopted by the gathering also called on African governments to “leverage the hosting of COP27 this year [in Egypt] to demand far-reaching measures on climate adaptation and finance, including emissions cut at the source.

“African governments should demand from polluting industrialised countries an annual climate debt of $2 trillion being the amount they currently spend on military hardware and warfare annually. This will pay for loss and damage and serve as partial reparations for historical harms.”

African states must “develop Africa-centred and just energy transition plans where such do not exist and, where they do, mainstream such plans into broader national development plans in ways that take cognizance of Africa’s huge renewable potential”.

The trend for multinational oil and gas companies, to sell stakes in onshore oil and gas assets and invest in offshore fields was highlighted. The companies were accused of abdicating responsibility for historical damage caused by their activities.

COP26 politicians give thumbs up to oil and gas

No sooner had politicians signed the Glasgow Climate Pact in November, than the US government paved the way for new oil and gas output, by selling $191 million of new drilling licences.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and 29 other companies bid at an auction for blocks in the Gulf of Mexico, in an area twice the size of Florida.

The sale came after the Joe Biden administration’s moratorium on new drilling was overturned in the courts. Earthjustice said the sale was a “climate bombshell”: if all that production goes ahead, an extra 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere.

On the plus side, the UK’s biggest new oil project, Cambo, suffered a blow, as Shell pulled out, after forceful mobilisation by climate campaigners. Siccar Point Energy, which owns 70% of the project, then said it is pausing work.

Extinction Rebellion in London, September 2020. Photo by Steve Eason

Cambo could still go ahead, though, and if it does, that will be thanks in part to the UK’s lavish tax breaks for North Sea producers. Siccar Point says the project is “not forecasted to pay taxes for many years”.

The company-friendly tax regime means that in 2020 the treasury collected a paltry £255 million from oil and gas producers, while handing rebates of £39 million to BP and £110 million to Shell. 

These tax breaks are just one part of a multi-billion-dollar mountain of subsidies for fossil fuel producers from rich countries’ governments.

And those subsidies form the background to COP26’s failure to tackle global heating, and to the decisions made there, which Climate Action Tracker estimates will lead to 2.1-2.7 degrees of warming, far above the 1.5 degree target.  

Don’t expect real climate solutions from COP26. It works for corporations

This article by SIMON PIRANI first appeared on Truthout

In the run-up to the United Nations climate change conference (COP26) in the UK in November — the 26th session of the talks that were launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 — the governments of the world’s richest countries are making ever-louder claims that they are effectively confronting global warming.

Nothing could be more dangerous than for social, labour and environmental movements to take this rhetoric at face value and assume that political leaders have the situation under control.

There are three huge falsehoods running through these leaders’ narratives: that rich nations are supporting their poorer counterparts; that “net zero” targets will do what is needed; and that technology-focused “green growth” is the way to decarbonize.

On Extinction Rebellion’s London demonstration last month. Photo by Steve Eason

First, wealthier countries claim to be supporting poorer nations — which are contributing least to global warming, and suffering most from its effects — to make the transition away from fossil fuels.

But at the G7 summit in June, the rich countries again failed to keep their own promise, made more than a decade ago, to provide $100 billion per year in climate finance for developing countries. Of the $60 billion per year they have actually come up with, more than half is bogus: analysis by Oxfam has shown that it is mostly loans and non-concessional finance, and that the amounts are often overstated.

Compare this degrading treatment of the global south with the mobilisation of many hundreds of billions for the post-pandemic recovery. Of $657 billion (public money alone) pledged by G20 nations to energy-producing or energy-consuming projects, $296 billion supports fossil fuels, nearly a third greater than the amount supporting clean energy ($228 billion).

Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change are magnified by poverty. This year’s floods, wildfires and record temperatures in Europe and north America have been frightful enough. The same phenomena cause far greater devastation outside the global north.

In 2020, “very extensive” flooding caused deaths, significant displacement of populations and further impacts from disease in 16 African countries, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) annual climate report recorded. India, China and parts of Southeast Asia suffered from record-breaking rainfall and flooding, too.

Climate and weather events had “major and diverse impacts on population movements, and on the vulnerability of people on the move,” the WMO reported. Cyclone Amphan displaced 2.5 million people in India and Bangladesh last May. Many could return soon, but 2.8 million homes were damaged, leading to prolonged displacement. Severe storms in Mozambique piled on dangers for tens of thousands of people displaced by the previous year’s floods and who had not been able to return home.

The political leaders’ second fiction is their pledge to attain “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (the U.S., U.K. and Europe) or 2060 (China).