Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Last week, Agence France-Presse got its hands on a draft UN report called Special Report on the Ocean and Cyrosphere in a Changing Climate. This 900-page document is study of the oceans for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007. What extracts have become available make for chilling reading. âThe same oceans that nourished human evolutionâ, the draft says, âare poised to unleash misery on a global scale unless the carbon pollution destabilising Earthâs marine environment is brought to heelâ.
Unless there are deep cuts to the carbon emissions created by humans, at least 30% of the northern hemisphereâs surface permafrost could melt within the next eight decades. This would mean that by 2050 the oceans will rise, and the âextreme sea level eventsâ will wipe out islands and low-lying megacities. Few scientists are convinced that warming can be controlled at the threshold of 1.5ËC; they hope for 2ËC. At this increase of temperature, the oceans will rise sufficiently to displace more than a quarter of a billion people; these displaced peopleâat 250 millionâwould collectively form the fifth largest country in the world after China, India, the United States of America, and Indonesia.
The final Special Report on the Ocean is to be released on 25 September, two days after a special Climate Action Summit hosted by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York. In late August, Guterres spoke at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, where he noted, âLittle undermines development like disasterâ. He had in mind the terrible cyclone Idai that struck Mozambique, destroying 90% of the area around the city of Beira. Watching this drone footage again from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is chilling.
IFRC drone footage of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, 2019
Disasters are not hard to find. Hurricane Dorian has swept through the Caribbean with ferocity. Guterres mentioned the fires in the Amazon, a crime against humanityâas the peasant organisation La Via Campesina put it. It is disturbing to watch this short videoâBrazil in Flamesâmade by Brasil de Fato:
âDecades of sustainable development gains can be wiped out overnightâ, Guterres said about these cascading disasters. And there will be more such disasters. âWe are on trackâ, Guterres said, âfor 2015-2019 to be the five hottest years since there are recordsâ. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says that we now have the largest concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in world history. As far as oceans are concerned, the WMO shows that Ocean Heat Content in the upper 700m and the upper 2000m in 2018 were âeither the highest or second highest on recordâ.
Culpability is of different levels. Both Mozambique and Brazil face the deleterious impact of the climate catastrophe, but in the case of Brazil there is also a more proximate culpritâthe logging and mining firms. When it comes to pointing fingers, one or two hands are not enough. Fingers must point toward the conglomerates of finance and energy that make their money from carbon. They would also point with intensity at the countries in the G-7 and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that refuse to bargain in good faith at the climate negotiations.
The fingers would be remiss if they did not point with special ferocity at the two-faced behaviour of the developed countries. Professor T. Jayaraman of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) told UNESCOâs Courier that the talk of carbon taxes and carbon trading is a smokescreen. Why donât these governments simply âmandate certain targets to be reached by certain industries? There have to be tighter regulations. Otherwise they should be made to pay the penaltyâ. âTo believe that you can sweet-talk businesses into acting morally, or scare them into taking the right steps, seems to me a little absurdâ, Jayaraman said. Developed countries, he said, need to âconvert rapidly to green technologiesâ, which does not mean to just change fossil fuels (gas for coal) but which means to transfer to renewable energy. On the other side, developing countries must leapfrog, but in a sensible way. Public transport in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, for instance, is all electricâwith the plan to make all transport in the city follow suit.
South China Morning Post, Shenzen: the Worldâs Pioneer in Electric Vehicles, 2018
Agung Mangu Putra, Abstraki Ikan, 2001.
Prevarication on the climate catastrophe is merely the same evasiveness that emerges when capitalism confronts the moral questions of hunger and homelessness, indignity and inequality. There are charming theories that allow the capitalist class to keep appropriating almost all social wealth, while the workers and peasants live at the edge of survival. It is not the lack of motion to confront the reality of the climate catastrophe that is the problem; it is the affliction of affluenza, the deep cultural roots of capitalism, that will prevent a solution to both social and climate catastrophe.
Answers are given for symptoms, not for causes. The waters rise, so Jakarta, Indonesiaâs capital, builds a 24-meter-high sea wall even as 40% of the city is already below sea level. Indonesiaâs President Joko Widodo knows this is no solution. He has announced that the fourth largest country in the world will move its capital to the island of Borneo. Meanwhile, the UN has held a preliminary discussion on a new agreement on the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea to conserve and sustain marine biological diversity. Everything seems timidâthe Voluntary Trust Fund is merely to offer finances so that small island states can come to these meetings. Nothing else is on the table. There is no real commitment to tackle sea rise or ocean acidification. Tuvaluâs Fakasoa Tealei said that the existing frameworks are âineffectiveâ and even this discussion might not add âany practical valueâ to the problem. Tealeiâs honesty and Widodoâs surrender to the sea are disappointed canaries in an endless coal shaft.
Tonga, the archipelago south of Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean, is vulnerable to being washed away in the rising waters. Tongaâs main islands have built sea walls, but their residents can look across the waters and see their smaller islands slip into the ocean. Where would the 100,000 Tongans go if the waters rise? Konai Helu Thaman, one of Tongaâs great poets, wrote decades ago of her dream of another world.
Ivana Kurniawati, We Are Not Monkeys, 2019.
We cannot see
far into the distance
neither can we see
what used to stand there
but today we can see trees
separated by wind and air
and if we dare to look
beneath the soil
we will find roots reaching out
for each other
and in their silent inter-twining
create the hidden landscape
of the future.
North-east of Tonga is West Papua, the half of the Papua island that is held by Indonesia. Strong feelings for independence stir once more in West Papua after Papuan students were treated disgracefully by Indonesian nationalists in the town of Surabaya. Called âmonkeysâ by these nationalists, the Papuan radicals reversed the order of things: Papua merdeka, itu yang monyet inginkan (Free Papua, this is what the monkeys want). One of the leaders of the struggleâSurya Antaâhas been arrested. The situation is very unclear, with internet to West Papua closed. In a future newsletter, we will run an interview with Benny Wenda of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.
One of the lingering residues of the independence struggles in South America has been the question of continental integration. This comes up regularly, most recently during the Pink Tide. Then the question of integration emerged as a part of the regional class struggleâshould the terms of integration merely benefit the oligarchy and multi-national firms, or was integration a means to socialist development? Last week, in Rio, as part of a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research co-organised series, Monica Bruckmann and Beatriz Bisso of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro joined Mariana Vazquez of the University of Buenos Aires and Olivia Carolino of Tricontinental before a crowded room of academics, students, and militant to discuss these themes. The idea of integration is a pressing one, but not integration without a clear assessment of its class character. Globalisation is a form of capitalist integration; integration of countries on a programme to benefit the working-class and peasantry is an entirely different issue. How to do it when the balance of forces is adverse? Thatâs the question on the table. These presentations will be folded into a book from us.
It has been ten years since Venezuelaâs Hugo ChĂĄvez address the climate conference in Copenhagen. ChĂĄvez evoked the regionalism of Latin Americaânotably ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas). His sharpest comments came when he pointed his finger at the richest individuals and countries of the world whose attitude âshows high insensitivity and lack of solidarity with the poor, the hungry, and the most vulnerable to disease, to natural disastersâ. The richest, ChĂĄvez said, should do two related things: first, âset binding, clear, and concrete commitments for the substantial reduction of their emissionsâ; and second, âassume obligations of financial and technological assistance to poor countries to cope with the destructive dangers of climate changeâ. Simple.
ChĂĄvez saw those roots reaching for each other. But this is not a perspective shared by the G7 and the OECD. They see the fruits, which they want to pluck and eat for themselves. Thatâs their attitude. It is the attitude of the marauder, not of the human being.
Warmly, Vijay
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