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The emergence of the climate

Justice movement and the COP-15

Student: Mark Bergfeld

Course: MA Media, Culture and Society

Supervisor: Sandra Moog

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Abstract

In this paper the author utilizes his own experience as an activist in the climate

justice movement and his participation in the protests, actions and events around

the COP-15 in Copenhagen to analyze to what extent the politics of those involved in

the climate justice movement in the Global North benefit or impede its development.

Hereby, he draws upon Barkers and Tillys definitions and conceptualisations of

social movements. Particular emphasis is given to the fact that social movements

are distinct from organisations yet that organisations play a role within these

movements.

Central to his analysis he critically evaluates to what extent the actors conceptions

of climate justice impact upon their political practices and the wider movement. By

extending his inquiry to NGOs, state actors, autonomists and socialists climate

justice no longer remains an ambiguous term or solely a political discourse but

ultimately finds its expression in the events surrounding Copenhagen.

He looks at the various concepts of climate justice to determine which offers the best

possibility of uniting broad sections of society in a movement against climate

change. The question whether alternative conceptions of climate justice aid in

building a broad and effective movement against climate change in the Global

North is at the centre of his analysis. He concludes that agency must play a role in

building a movement against climate change in the Global North. Trade unions and

the organized working-class can fulfil that role in times of economic and ecological

crises.

The research questions are as follow: 1) To what extent to the politics of those

involved in the climate justice movement in the Global North benefit or impede its

development. 2) To what extent do their conceptions of climate justice impact upon

their political practice and the wider movement? 3) Can alternative conceptions of

climate justice aid in building a broad and effective movement against climate

change in the Global North?

Keywords: climate change, social movements, political sociology

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Climate, politics and movements

2. Chapter one: Climate protests in the Global North

a) A popular mobilisation to tackle climate change

b) Copenhagen calling

c) Mobilising for climate justice

d) Teamsters and turtles: together at last?

3. Chapter two: Contesting Climate Justice

a) Climate justice as (re)distribution and development

b) Rights-based climate justice

c) Struggle-based climate justice

d) Time and politicstowards a working concept of climate justice for the Global

North

4. Conclusion: Whither Climate Justice?

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Introduction: Climate, politics and movements

The past two decades has seen the gradual, incremental development of a global

movement against climate change. At various points the process has proceeded more

quickly than at others. But the single biggest period of growth was unquestionably

during the run-up to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference,

commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, which included the 15th Conference of

the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change (UNFCCC).

The UNFCCC process, which is intended to reach an agreement on reducing carbon

emissions and limiting or halting global warming, has occurred against the backdrop

of a sharp increase in carbon emissions and global temperature. The process is not

working. However, the movement against climate change has been unable to

capitalise on its failure and take the issue of climate change out of respectable

politics and into the realm of social transformation (Gough and Schackley 2001:

339).

In 2009, as COP15 approached, the various wings of the climate movement were able

to mobilise huge numbers of people into campaigning, protesting, letter writing and

many other activities to call on world leaders to bring a halt to the increase in carbon

emissions. But COP15 ended with no binding targets.

I do not want to explore the science of climate change in any great detail in this

dissertation other than where it pertains directly to the questions I am addressing.

Rather, I will explore how the various strands of the climate movement contributed

to the mobilisations and how their political standpoint influenced those

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mobilisations. In doing so, I hope to try to clarify how politics is important to the way

in which we mobilisenot simply in terms of numbers, but in terms of how the

demands put forward, and how those demands connect to the lived experience of

ordinary people, plays a big role in the development of the movement. This is

particularly clear in connection with our understanding of climate justicea major

rallying call at COP15, but a highly contested concept.

In doing so, I hope to show how the successes and failures of the movement can be

built upon to develop a conception of climate justice which can unite a clear

understanding of the need to build a political movement with a strategic vision of

how that movement can achieve its goals.

In order to discuss this, it is necessary to briefly clarify what is meant by a

movement. I wish to take up the conception offered by Colin Barker, following

Marx, that a movement is defined by the following key points:

1) The emergence of movements is a collective achievement. In some

conditions, forms of resistance to oppression and exploitation remain largely

individual By contrast, a movement entails some form of mutual

organization, implying the formation of not just collective identities but

collective projects. A movements emergence transcends atomized ways of

coping with problems engendered by capitalisms workings.

2) Social movements are distinguished from some other forms of collective

organization by their characteristic organizational shape. They arenetwork-

like entities Its perhaps easier to define a movement by what it isnt:

movements are not the same as organisations, although organisations may be

part of them.

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3) Movements are also simultaneously fields of argument. What is the

movements meaning and purpose? What situation is it seeking to maintain or

change? How are its boundaries defined? Who are its opponents, and why and

how are they organized? How should the movement define and how pursue its

objectives? What strategies, tactics, repertoires of collective activity should it

deploy? How should it respond to specific events and crises? All these and

other matters are open to ongoing contestation and debate among a

movements varied adherents.

4) Participation in such arguments is not restricted to movement adherents. A

movements opponents have good reasons to try to influence how it interprets

and seeks to change the world (Barker, 2011).

Movements, then, are organised networks that seek to alter the world around them

through some form of collective action. But they are heterogeneous formations,

within which debates about strategy and tactics (in Tillys formulation, the

Repertoire of Contention) constantly occur. And they are constantly under the

influence of outside forcesthose with which they find themselves in contention.

With this in mind, it is possible to understand the various strategies, political

standpoints and mobilising aims of the various actors within the disparate climate

movementfrom lobbyists and large non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the

right wing (often very close or even part of the ruling class structures of the state)

through to the more radical NGOs of the centre ground and the left wing, consisting

of socialists, anarchists, autonomists and others who would loosely consider

themselves revolutionaries. All these forces have acted, sometimes working

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together, sometimes against each other for many years to develop the climate

movement, as it exists today.

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Chapter one: Climate protests in the Global North

The enormous global mobilisations against climate change that occurred in the run

up to the COP15 summit represent the high point of the movement against climate

change so far. But the content of the demonstrations varied greatly from country to

country. In this chapter, I wish to contrast the nature of the mobilsations in London

and Copenhagen. Specifically, I wish to explore: 1) how did the desire of the

organisers of London protest to keep their aims well within the realms of

establishment politics prevented the widespread articulation of a radical alternative;

2) how the more radical intentions of the many of those involved in organising the

Danish protests opened up a space for much more radical demands and methods to

be articulated, and; 3) how can the successes and failures inherent in both these

approaches might inform the development of the climate movement in the future.

A popular mobilisation to tackle climate change

On December 5, 2009 the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition (SCC) held The Wave

demonstration in Central London, attracting between 50,000 and 100,000 people. It

was loud and lively, with people chanting songs and slogans. Many had brought their

own placards and banners along. Only a year earlier the annual demonstration

against climate change had been attended by less than 10,000 people. During The

Wave the streets between Hyde Park and Parliament Square turned into a sea of

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blue as protestors followed the call from SCC to wear blue clothing. Many had even

painted their faces blue.1

Unlike the major anti-war demonstrations which had filled the streets in London in

2002 and 2003 The Wave had no closing rally with speeches by political and

cultural figures. Instead, the demonstration was supposed to end with the people

surrounding parliament and creating a huge Mexican La Ola wave to symbolise the

flooding of Parliament which could occur if no deal were reached at the Fifteenth

Conference of the Parties to the UN (COP15) talks in Copenhagen the following week.

In fact, The Wave never took place. The organisers packed up their equipment

before the tens of thousands protestorsmainly family with childrenarrived at

Parliament Square. People kept pouring into Parliament Square for hours to come,

only to keep marching and make their ways in smaller blocs to the other side of the

River Thames and into the side streets of Whitehall.

This did not mean that the demonstration was devoid of politics. In the run-up to the

COP15 talks the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition demanded that the world leaders to

take urgent action to secure a fair international deal to stop global warming

exceeding the danger threshold of 2 degrees Celsius and called for a green

economy with the creation of jobs (SCC, 2009). The demonstration was led by then-

1 From the beginning of November Essex University Students Union was already holding organising and

mobilising meetings and even called its very own Wave demonstration on campus, attracting students who had never engaged in campus activism. At the local level there had neither been any (grassroots) environmental network nor any explicit climate change group. The Students Union had an Ethics and Environment Officer who previously only took care of recycling matters on campus but never had been part of building the movement. However, it was the Students Union which pushed the mobilisation and paid for the transport. Thus a Students Union with a previous record of campaigning and activism rooted in anti-fascist and anti-war work now could easily employ its resources to mobilise for The Wave demonstration. Not only did the Students Union put on transport for students to attend the demonstration it also sponsored my journey to Copenhagen in order to bring the experiences back onto campus. The group of protestors I accompanied throughout the demonstration were part of the Essex Students Union. Before The Wave they had joined the Campaign Against Climate Change rally and feeder march to demonstration.

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Minister for Climate Change and Energy Ed Miliband, who had called for a popular

mobilization to tackle climate change (Porter in Daily Telegraph, 2008).

But crucially, these demands were not articulated on the protest itself. It was left to

the intervention of relatively small organisations of the radical left to raise political

demands in order to relate politically to the demonstrators. The large mainstream

NGOs, with a total membership base of 11 million in the UK, had followed-up

Milibands call but the demonstration was effectively rallying support and

cheerleading for the UK government and the worlds leaders to sign a deal at COP15.

Since the late 1990s mainstream NGOs have been mobilising people, in particular

their members and subscribers, onto the streets before major summits of the G8,

World Trade Organisation or, most recently, the COP15 talks. Most famously, in

2005 the NGO coalition Make Poverty History (MPH)2 spearheaded by Oxfam

mobilised thousands for the G8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. In the run-up to the

demonstrations many activists and more radical NGOs were angered at Oxfams

close ties to the government and the decision to disband MPH after the

demonstration despite the fact that poverty was demonstrably not history and that

governments subsequently failed to live up to their pledges.3 At The Wave history

repeated itself.

As Colin Barker has argued, social movements do not only challenge capitalism and

the status quo. They can also accommodate to and be incorporated into it: The

movement form is capable of overthrowing capitalism, but is equally capable of 2 Ashok Sinha, the main organiser of Make Poverty History, was also a leading organiser of The Wave

demonstration. 3 Justin Forsyth Oxfams former Director of policy and Campaigns went on to become Tony Blairs special adviser

on International Development; Shriti Vadera, an economic adviser to Gordon Brown, has been central to the development of public-private partnerships and is on the Oxfam board of trustees. John Clark, another former campaigns manager at the charity, left Oxfam for the World Bank and has advised Tony Blair on Africa. When Oxfam interviewed candidates for Forsyth's replacement, half those on the interview panel were advisers to New Labour ministers.

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accommodating to it, or re-fashioning the status quo without undermining its

fundamentals. This is as true of trade unionism as of ecological movements,

feminism, gay liberation or national liberationor indeed neoliberalism (Barker,

2006: 21). The close ties between SCC and Ed Miliband should not come as a

surprise.

The different organisations within SCC emphasized their support for different world

leaders. Christian Aid, for example, mobilised 4,000 of its members to The Wave

demonstration. They targeted Douglas Alexander, then Secretary of State for

International Development, who in return promised Christian Aid members that he

would be fighting for an ambitious deal that works for the worlds poorest people

(Christian Aid, 2009). Members of Christian Aid did not see themselves as protesting

against world leaders inability to take any responsibility for the climate crisis or the

ineffective UNFCCC process: they demonstrated on behalf of those people in the

developing countries who do not have a political voice and those people whose voices

are marginalised by the media. The parallels with MPH are again made plain:

representing a supposedly dispossessed and powerless population overseas while

explicitly rallying support for the government and their international development

schemes.

Greenpeace and its members, who usually engage in a form of militant lobbying,

rallied and marched in support of US President Barack Obama. Unlike his

predecessor George W Bush who had refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol and is

directly associated with the oil corporations, Obama represented a sea change within

the UNFCCC process. Promising the creation of 600,000 green jobs during his

election campaign, he represented those ruling class circles and people in the US who

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were interested in moving beyond coal and oil into an era of green capitalism such

as Milton Friedman, who argued in 2008 that [m]aking America the worlds

greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or nave moral indulgence. It is now a

core national security and economic interest. (Friedman 2008:23). After the huge

demonstration in London, the Greenpeace blog read: My spirit lifted Saturday

morning when I saw the news that Obama has committed to attending the final days

of the Copenhagen conference and it just got better from there. (Greenpeace, 2009)

The numbers at The Wave clearly showed that the large environmental and

developmental NGOs were following a more activist strategy in the run-up to

Copenhagen. Pusey and Russell go as far as to argue that these groups and the UK

government have jumped on the social movement bandwagon (Pusey and Russell,

2010). But successful social movements require a development of a discourse that

identifies both a common identitythe usand the target of the protestthe

otherat a transnational level (Della Porta, 2007: 7).

Far from polarising the discourse between an ineffectual ruling class and a wider

movement against climate change, the organisers of The Wave protest sought to

incorporate the energy of those concerned by climate change into the official

structures of the negotiations and thereby neuter them. The protest sought not to

articulate an alternative strategy for dealing with the climate crisis, but rather to

legitimate the UNFCCC process.4

4 The UNFCCC process has now existed for nearly twenty years. During that time carbon emissions have

rocketed. The only conclusion is that it is an ecologically ineffective institution that cannot tackle the climate crisis. NGOs though continue to argue that without their involvement the climate would be in a far worse situation.

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However much The Wave dwarfed previous climate mobilisations in the UK and the

rest of the Global North, it would be incorrect to argue that the demonstration

represented a break with the lobbying tactic and a turn to collective action.

It was not the first time that NGOs claimed to represent a wider social movement

from the inside by sitting at tables with decision-makers behind closed doors and

actively upholding the hegemony of a transnational institutions. At the annual

meeting of the IMF/World Bank in Prague in September 2000, the same NGOs that

had been part of the emergent anti-capitalist movement started to engage in dialogue

with the World Bank and IMF over reform proposals despite the fact that the

majority of the anti-capitalist movement believed that these institutions were

anything but legitimate (Callinicos 2003: 86).

Unlike many actors within social movements who occupy antagonistic positions to

institutions such as the World Bank and IMF (or even the UNFCCC process itself),

NGOs strategically seek dialogue and will engage with decision-makers in

conflictual co-operation (Walk and Brunngrber 2000:276). NGOs are structured

like private business enterprises without any democratic leadership and are

dependent either on state funding or large private donations (or both), so they must

always be able to showcase their successes and keep their donors satisfied.

However, social movements are not simply made up of NGOs and their members.

They are popular and heterogeneous responses to exploitation and oppression. The

Wave demonstration was an expression of a deep feeling that large numbers of

people in the Global North and the UK want to do something about climate change.

But these people moving into action, many for the first time, understandably looked

towards the existing structures of climate activism in order to articulate their hopes.

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This meant that, when the COP15 process was revealed as a massive capitulation, the

movement was left disoriented.

In January 2010, when it had become clear that COP15 had failed, the Royal Society

for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which had mobilised thousands of its members

and subscribers to London for December 5, started targeting decision-makers with

personalized letters to maintain pressure to drive the international negotiation

process forward rather than increasing its efforts of mobilising people onto the

streets.5

The repertoire of contention (Tilly and Tarrow, 2006) employed by NGOs displays

a process of de-mobilization, turning away from a serious engagement with climate

politics. Having rallied support for the worlds leaders such as Gordon Brown, Ed

Miliband or Barack Obama, the NGOs were unable to deal with the failure of the

COP15 talks to agree binding reductions in carbon emissions and, in turn, the mass

of their supporters were left demoralised at the possibility of action to tackle climate

change. As De Lucia writes:

Their demands are watered down and re-oriented so that discontent is absorbed

and kept within the framework of action, providing the hegemonic social group

with a mechanism to manage the demands of dissent and to transform

potential resistance: by adhering to some of the demands in some diluted form,

it draws these groups within its bloc (De Lucia, 2009: 237).

In fact, the deal which was reached at Copenhagen failed even to secure demands in a

diluted form. As Jonathan Neale argues:

5 Personal e-mail discussion with Richard Budden, member of staff for RSPB

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In the Kyoto agreement all the countries had together negotiated by how much

each would have to reduce its emissions. In the Copenhagen accord, each

country will volunteer whatever figure it chooses for reductions to the UN by 31

January 2010. There had been a long debate about whether there would be

legally binding targets after 2012, or just politically binding targets for

emission reductions. In the accord there is nothing binding at all

Within two months the scale of the damage was clear. By 31 January 55

countries, responsible for 78 percent of global emissions, had sent in their

proposed cuts to the UN and in effect signed up for the Copenhagen accord.

This meant the international negotiation process had been badly damaged, and

perhaps smashed. Most of the governments of the rich countries, however,

added that they would only meet their promised levels of emissions cuts if there

was an internationally agreed binding treaty. Because Copenhagen was

precisely not that, they meant they would not meet the promised cuts (Neale,

2010: 42, 43).

In the wake of the Copenhagen accord, the SCC coalition was disbanded. But this did

not lead to the supporters of SCC drawing more radical conclusions. The annual

climate camp, an event organised by autonomists and anarchists as a radical, direct

action base, attracted less than 400 activists, far less than in previous years. Since the

NGOs had abandoned the field of battle, it was left to the smaller, radical wing of the

climate movement in Britain, to organise the annual demonstration. The Campaign

against Climate Change demonstration in December 2010 attracted less than 3,000

people. Clearly, there had been a massive drop in engagement with collective action

around climate chang

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Copenhagen Calling

Historically, there has been a sharp contrast between the nature of climate protest in

the developed and developing worlds. In the Global South large protests for climate

justice often went hand in hand with the anti-capitalist movement. Behind this lay

two important factors: 1) the implantation of the trade union movements and NGOs

within civil society was far less advanced than in the developed states, requiring

larger and more frequent mobilisations to ensure their legitimacy was recognised by

the state, and; 2) the developing nations were not only in geographical regions more

prone to the destabilising effects of climate change, but their underdevelopment left

them less able to deal with these changes than the countries of the Global North.

So, on 28 October 2002, thousands of activists marched for climate justice in the

streets of New Dehli, India, during the COP8 talks. Fishers, farmers, their respective

unions and indigenous peoples affirmed that climate change is a justice issue. They

issued a statement promising to build alliances across states and bordersrejecting

the market-based principles that guide the current negotiations to solve the climate

crisis: Our World is Not for sale! (Roberts, 2009: 386).6

At the COP6 talks in 2000 at The Hague, Netherlands, the picture was very different.

Friends of the Earth supporters built a giant dyke from sandbags decorated with

letters from their supporters. The chairman of the COP6 meeting as well as many

other prominent political leaders publicly came to the protest and gave their

support to this direct action (Gough and Shackley 2001: 339).

6At the COP6 in Den Haag (2000) there was no demonstration. There was, however, a Climate Justice Summit,

which offered a critique of the market-based solutions to tackle the climate crisis.

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At the COP14 in 2008 in Poznan, Poland, around 1500 protestors came together to

demonstrate for climate justice. Whilst the notion of climate justice had gained

traction within the UNFCCC negotiations themselves since COP13 in Bali in 2007

and the creation of Climate Justice Now! (CJN),7 mobilisations for climate justice

had as yet remained small and isolated.

The Planet FirstPeople First demonstration on 12 December 2009 was to change

this. Some 538 organisations, 160 of them Danish and hailing from 67 countries in

total, supported the demonstration.8 Organisers were optimistic and expected

40,000 people to answer the call to demonstrate for a fair, ambitious and binding

deal. On the day, 100,000 people turned up in Christiansborg in central

Copenhagen to march ten kilometres to the Bella Centre, where speakers from

different campaigns, organisations, and struggles made their voices heard. As Neale

describes it,

The march was long, loud, cold, bouncy and energetic, about half Danes and

half foreigners. No one had expected 100,000. For most of the activists

gathered from around the world, this was by far the largest climate

demonstration they had ever seen. It mobilized way beyond the ranks of the

environmentalists. There are only two million people in metropolitan

Copenhagen and this was the largest demo in Denmark for 30 years (Neale,

2010: 48).

The confines of the nation-state and locality which had dominated most

environmental movements for so long were being left behind (Della Porta, 2005: 28).

7 Gerlach and Hinde illuminate how movements organise themselves as a net, network or what they call

reticulate. The core of the movement consists in nodal points within the network. These nodal points are constituted of activists, many of whom belong to more than just one organisation, campaign or network. 8 See website http://12dec09.dk/content/english for full list of supporters.

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It illuminated that people in the Global North who were not immediately affected by

climate change could be mobilised in large numbers for climate justice. This was a

direct response to the perceived deficiencies within the UNFCCC process and the

NGOs top-down strategy of lobbying and advocacy.

This was not a simply a red demonstration in which trade unionists, communists,

socialists and other anti-capitalists took it to the street. There was no minimal

consensusa pluralistic, but effective political, concretely anti-neoliberal

consensuson what the target or who the enemies were (Passasakis & Mller,

2010). From the outside it was difficult to differentiate whether some on the protest

were merely rallying support for the worlds leaders like The Wave had been or

whether it indeed did constitute an antagonistic position. Placards reading Blah,

blah, blah, Act now! and There is no Planet B blurred the positions to the media

and the outside world.

But the majority of the demonstration though did not come to cheerlead the worlds

leaders. Unlike at The Wave, anti-capitalists, the radical left and critical NGOs had

formed a bloc called System Change not Climate Change. This bloc was the largest

one on the demonstration and had been organised by the critical NGOs of CJN and

the direct action network Climate Justice Action (CJA).9 The slogan meant that the

bloc was united around a critique of climate change as the product of capitalism and

the current socio-economic order.

Here, protestors explicitly rejected green capitalism and market-based solutions for

tackling the climate crisis with their banners, chants and slogans. Autonomous

groups and anarchists who had joined the demonstration tried to form a black bloc

9 The decision was taken at a CJN strategy meeting in mid-2009 in Bangkok. In an article that I wrote for the

German journal Marx21 I called the demonstration anti-capitalist carnival (Bergfeld, 2010b).

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which ended with 900 people being arrested and thousands having to sit on cold

concrete in sub-zero temperatures.10

The slogan System Change not Climate Change drew upon the anger that people

felt over both the ecological and economic crises. It is exactly for the reason that the

anti-capitalists, the critical NGOs and the radical left with its broad church slogan

managed to have an impact on the demonstration and actions around the COP15 and

within the Bella Centre itself, when Hugo Chavez very clearly aligned himself with

the social movements and the sentiments of the slogan by inverting the slogan to

Change the system not the Climate in one of his speeches to the UNFCCC. This

clearly showed that the anti-capitalists and radical left had managed to politicise the

COP15 negotiations in an unprecedented way. This was confirmed a week later when

the Klimaforum Declaration, to which more than 50,000 people had contributed,

reaffirmed that commitment.

Colin Barker has argued that: Movements represent a kind of collective focusing of

attention and energy on transforming, more or less, the parameters of a specific

question, in opposition to other forces: dominant or subaltern classes, parties,

movements, states etc (Barker 2006: 15). CJN and CJA were successful insofar as

they reconfigured climate politics as a whole. To argue that [the] problem was the

sheer diversity of political sentiments encapsulated by the banner system change not

climate changesuch a broad church is arguably too simplistic to articulate and

communicate the multitude of perspectives (Apocalypse Anonymous, 2010),

10

For a very good account of the police repression in Copenhagen during COP15, see Rovics, 2010. Despite its theoretical shortcomings regarding why the police engaged in disproportionate measures, it gives an insight to how tense the atmosphere was. I was myself stopped and searched by the police at least ten times. At the German-Danish border, the Campaign against Climate Changes coach was held for more than five hours. Rovics writes: People were handcuffed in uncomfortable positions for many hours on the frozen pavements, not allowed to move, not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants, which added to the danger posed by the freezing temperatures. Elderly people were arrested along with teenagers. (Rovics 2010: 6)

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discounts the very fact that the slogan did connect with a wide layer of activists who

had come to Copenhagen. The climate justice movement succeeded in building a

strong foundation to in order to build a broad movement with a minimal consensus

around the slogan. It leaves the necessary room for interpretation and imagination

which can draw different organisations together in a loose way thus exploiting the

political opportunity that Copenhagen presented. Whether organisations mean an

energy system beyond fossil fuel production or a working class revolution, the slogan

encapsulated both without making unity on the question of reform or revolution

binding upon affiliates.11

Social movements are always heterogeneous, full of debate and also an arena of class

struggle. The climate justice movement may claim to want to change the system but

not necessarily have a programme on how to do this. Yet actions and movement

institutions such as Klimaforum, Climate Camp, squats, Peoples Assemblies et al

provide the basic framework for the constitution of a new society. The collective

action and repertoire of contention displayed by the movement stood in stark

contrast to the action of the worlds leaders in the Bella Centre where the

negotiations were happening. However, these actions and events did not rise from

nowherethey involved co-ordination and coalition building, paying attention to

pre-existing social ties, mobilising structures and social networks.

In 2007, when the COP13 in Bali failed, a group of critical NGOs formed a loose

network under the banner of Climate Justice Now. This was where global justice

activists and radical environmentalists first came together. One could argue that this

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The discussion of reform versus revolution appears in every movement. Whether it was the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1903; the famous debate between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein or even the collapse of the Second International. In recent years and movements the debate has come up again and the problems are similar to those that presented themselves a hundred years ago. Movements can deal with a tension between reformists and revolutionaries. For a tactical discussion, see Trotsky, 1922.

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new coalition simply arose out of the anti-capitalist movement and directed its

energies to the field of climate politics. Patrick Bond however argues that CJN has

not simply involved the rebranding of existing radical networks but rather

constitutes a new transnational red-green movement. He goes on to say that it will

necessarily be anti-capitalist if it addresses the problem with the seriousness

required (Bond 2010: 24).12

Indeed, CJN constitutes a new network, but old networks and movement institutions

such as the World Social Forum were used to educate activists about climate justice

and mobilise for Copenhagen. The World Social Forum in Belem in 2009 constituted

an important stepping-stone in that direction when activists drafted the Belem

Declaration for Climate Justice.13 CJN writes:

Our demonstration [could] mobilise more than 100, 000 people in Denmark to

press for climate justice, while social movements around the world mobilised

hundreds of thousands more in local climate justice demonstrationsThe

movement for system change not climate change is now stronger than when we

arrived in Denmark Copenhagen will be remembered as an historic event for

global social movements. It will be remembered, along with Seattle and Cancun,

as a critical moment when the diverse agendas of many social movements

coalesced and became stronger, asking in one voice for system change, not

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Bond is right to say that the climate movement necessarily needs to be anti-capitalist. Yet there are many variants of anti-capitalism. For a good account of the different anti-capitalisms present in the movement see Callinicos, 2003. 13

New movements should not be viewed in isolation from previous social movementsthey must always be seen as inheriting the history of struggles that preceded it. Just as the 1905 revolution in Russia and its establishment of Soviets (workers councils) laid a blueprint for the seizure of the factories in 1917, social movements today use many of the same democratic institutions which were born in struggle during previous rounds of mobilisation.

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climate change We will take our struggle forward not just in climate talks, but

on the ground and in the streets, to promote genuine solutions (CJN, 2009). 14

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The idea of a cycle of protest which is invoked here first appears in Tarrows work 1989. In this view protests come in waves, with peaks and lows. Interactions between different aspects within a movement intensify or decay. A description of what this means in practice can found in Rosa Luxemburgs The Mass Strike (1906) in relation to the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.

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Mobilising for climate justice

Whether Press TV or CNN,15 media attention began to focus on the Reclaim Power

Demonstration on 16 December which was aimed at bringing together delegates from

within the Bella Centre with protestors in a Peoples Assembly aimed at

delegitimising the UNFCCC process. Strategically, the demonstration aimed to set a

totally different agenda and kick-start the new movement. Protestors would enter

the conference area and disrupt the summit sessions. Delegates on the inside would

lead a mass walk-out from the summit so the Peoples Assembly could take place

with everyone together.16

In the early hours of the morning protestors assembled at Tarnby train station south

of the Bella Centre to join one of the four blocs. Around 3,000 protestors had come

to join the blue bloc, which would follow the police pre-approved route.17 A broad

spectrum of groups were involved in the bloc: Ya Basta, Jubilee South, Via

Campesina, and other NGOs organised in CJN, as well as different political parties

such as Grne Jugend Deutschland or the British Socialist Workers Party.

Demonstrators quickly organised human chains around the demonstration out of

fear that the police would infiltrate the demonstration and provoke violence. As the

speaker wagon started to shout that the police should stop the provocation when the

police closed in on the demonstration caused people to drift away as they were scared

of being arrested. Many Danish people had stayed away from the demonstration due

to the heavy-handedness of the police in the days prior to the event. It soon became

15

CNN wrote on its page A vast and influential network known as Climate Justice Action (CJA) are also coordinating what is probably the most hotly-anticipated action of the week (CNN, 2009). 16

Tadzio Mller outlined this strategy at the CJA meeting in Christiania. 17

Diversity of tactics is one of the organising principles of the demonstration. Protestors had organised a bicycle bloc that was confiscated by the police during the night. There was the green bloc, which organised in small affinity groups and would go its own way and enter the Bella Centre.

24

very clear that there was no possibility of the demonstration succeeding in entering

the Bella Centre. It also became very clear that the numbers had dropped

significantly since the 100,000 strong protest to just a few thousand.

Sudden splits had emerged between the worlds leaders, but the NGOs could not

resolve their own contradictions: 1) that of being socially closer to the decision-

makers than to grassroots activists (Walk and Brunngrber, 2000: 165), and; 2)

between their own radicalisation while being subject to an active programme by

neo-liberal governments and international agencies to shape NGOs to their own

ends (Nineham, 2006). The day before Obama arrived, 80 percent of all NGOs,

including the Friends of the Earth International delegation, had been excluded from

the negotiations. As President Connie Heedegard stood down as the chair of COP15,

the rifts within the Bella Centre led to complete breakdown.

Whilst protestors were being batoned, tear gased and and pepper sprayed outside of

the Bella Center delegates led by the Bolivian government,18 as well as NGOs

organised in CJN, were starting to disrupt the sessions on the inside.19 Delegates

wanted to join the protest from the inside had been threatened with arrest. However,

around 200 delegates led by the Bolivian delegation to the UN were waiting for the

protestors to get to them. When they tried to march across the bridge they were

batoned. Six police vans and two rows of police in riot gear separated protestors from

the delegates.

This new relationship between social movements, NGOs and progressive

governments, between the inside and outside, was aptly called diagonalism. Unlike

18

People from the Navajo nation in Arizona, Rainforest Action Group participated. Joshua Kahn Russell on Democracy Now!: Once we got outside there was this beautiful North-South alliance of people who from the inside felt silenced just as delegates all week felt silenced and came outside together to join the peoples assembly. A coming together of social movements, a beautiful coming together. 19

Naomi Klein told the Guardian: Its a symbolic moment for people to turn their backs on the negotiations.

25

its predecessor horizontalism (which was common use in the anti-capitalist

movement and excluded parties which pursued a strategy in contradistinction to

other groups participating in the movement, thus contesting for hegemony within the

movement), political parties, progressive governments and hierarchical NGOs now

have started to participate in acts of civil disobedience and movement institutions in

an organised fashion. Only ten years ago this would have been unimaginable as all

governments subscribed (or were forced to subscribe) to neoliberalism. Further,

activists shied away from political parties and other hierarchical organisations as

these often co-opted social movements for their own electoral success. At Reclaim

Power, though, NGOs and revolutionaries were taking baton-hits and twittering

about it alongside each other. Traditionally the one knows their shit, the other knows

their gut, the one accepts reform, the other pushes for deeper change (Evans, 2010).

Diagonalism, however, is not without pitfalls. Heller and Robbe, both activists with

Friends of the Earth International, describe the difficulties presented by trying to get

a highly and centrally structured NGO, which forms coalitions in open dialogue with

different actors, to commit to an action with autonomous affinity groups. In fact

many of the Southern Friends of the Earth International activists could not make

sense of a network which no longer fits the body of a NGO, but is not yet a

movement Copenhagen itself forced us to make decisions as to which way we

would jump (Heller and Robbe, 2010).

One of the fears amongst activists from an anti-authoritarian and NGO background

is that diagonalism will end in the movement being either co-opted by a state (i.e.

Bolivia) or a political party. These fears are legitimate and need to be addressed.

26

The Reclaim Power demonstration though took place at a time when progressive

governments like the Bolivian and Venezuelan government had been brought to

power by social movements. European parties of the radical left like Die Linke, Bloco

Esquerda and Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste were born out of the first cycle or

proteststhe anti-capitalist and anti-war movement . These are parties that want to

see the destruction of the existing form of political and economic power and the

replacement of direct power by subaltern classes. The success of the movement will

to a part depend on the parties proposals within the movement.

Despite many protestors having been tear gassed, scared off and having left due to

the heavy handedness of the police the Peoples Assembly took place in freezing

temperatures outside the Bella Centre. Climate Camp activists alongside Philippine

fishermen were putting their solutions to tackle the climate crisis forward.

The Peoples Assembly was small, with only about 200 people participating. Yet as

the talks had broken down the peoples assembly represented a coming together of

forces from Global North and South which reject both green capitalism as well as

fossilistic capitalism. Neither would serve the interests of the vast majority of

people on the planet and would rather entrench neo-liberalism. This was not the

first time that NGOs and horizontal activist movements, and their different and

common roles, aspirations and strategies have met. It will not be the last (Heller and

Robbe, 2010).

27

Teamsters and turtlestogether at last?

On 30 November 1999 a new grassroots coalition of environmental and anti-

sweatshop activists, anarchists, and trade unionists took the worlds stage with mass

protests targeting the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Summit in the city of

Seattle. Due to internal divisions on the inside and street occupations, blockades and

direct action on the outside, the WTO was shut down successfullya highly visible

display of resistance to neoliberalism that marked the birth of the anti-capitalist

movement in the Global North. The strength of the protest derived from the coming

together of the activist left with organised workers the so-called turtles and

teamsters alliance.

The Reclaim Power action in Copenhagen stood in the tradition of the Battle of

Seattle. Lisa Fithian who had coordinated the actions ten years earlier had come to

Copenhagen. Michael Hardt, whose book Empire gained massive prominence within

the anti-capitalist movement, was stressing the importance of the struggle for climate

justice and pushing his new book Commonwealth at a CJA mass meeting in

Christiania. Last but not least, Naomi Klein had created a massive resonance with

her article published a week earlier:

There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the huge

range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and

the developing country governments ready to bring activists demands into the

summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over. It feels like, instead, as

though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that

builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes (Klein,

2009).

28

Yet the Reclaim Power action attracted just 3,000 people, and around 200 people

participated in the Peoples Assembly. This was partly due to the fact that the

demonstration was on a workday in the early hours of the morning and people need

to work. Secondly, police repression was going from bad to worse as the final days of

COP15 approached. Yet, there is another reason, one that is central to the debates

happening within CJA and Climate Camp. Yet in Copenhagen at the CJA meeting it

seemed of little relevance to the majority of people when I intervened and asked

Michael Hardt: One slogan comes to mind when one thinks of Seattle: Teamsters

and turtlestogether at last! However, at no single point did teamsters or trade

unionists participate in the actions or play a role in CJA. I see loads of turtles. But

where are the teamsters?

The breakdown of the COP15 talks made it clear that lobbying and expert work had

become obsolete. NGOs were no longer able to work toward their aims as they had

done for the last 15 years. Despite failing to break down the barriers and delegitimise

the UNFCCC process, the Reclaim Power demonstration was a qualified success. It

had politicised events an unprecedented fashion, something that would have been

unimaginable at The Hague, Bali or Poznan. This was heightened by the subsequent

failure of the talks to agree to binding emissions reductions. As Mller argued,

These are precisely the situations where radical social movements have the

greatest capacity to act and make history, when the usual problem-solving

approaches (these days: create a market around it, or repress it) dont seem to

provide any believable way of dealing with something that is perceived as a

problem (Mller 2008).

29

The usual problem-solving had shown to be anything but legitimateyet the radical

social movements did not make process history. And therein lies the nub of the

problem. We can see from the case of The Wave demonstration that situations in

which a movement is co-opted by the dominant class, it is unable to make any

significant headway in politicising the issue which it is seeking to influence. In

Copenhagen, where an alliance of the radical left with the more radical NGOs was

able to hegemonise the protests, they were successful in politicising the process. But

they were still limited by their inability to exercise real class power.

In order to delegitimise the UNFCCC process, the balance of class forces within the

nation-states of the Global North (those who refuse to commit to deeper emission

cuts and assert their hegemony within the process) would have to radically change.

Symbolic actions like those at Copenhagen cannot hope to break down the hegemony

of a system which has been driving market-based solutions for nearly 15 years and

continues to be legitimised by the large well-funded NGOs and even the poorer

states. The process has continuously absorbed the voices of the subaltern classes into

civil society. The UN has taken it so far as to officially recognizing the radical NGO

network CJN. This meant that CJN had more than 50% of the accredited NGO

delegates.

For action that is more than merely symbolic, it must target the levers of power and,

by extension, of production. Within the capitalist system, it is the ability of

collectively organised workers to withdraw their labour and turn off the taps of profit

that give them their collective power. That is why the coming together of teamsters

and turtles at Seattle was of such significance. That protest did not come out of the

blue but involved serious coalition building for several years. It would be unfair to

30

reproach CJA for being unwilling to build coalitions, as even at their planning

meetings a few trade unionists had come along.

But there are a number of key problems that limit the ability of the climate

movement to involve wider layers of workers and trade unionists in their movement.

Many of these are related to the organising tacticstime consuming consensus

decision-making and an abstract commitment to non-hierarchical forms, for

example (these ideas are prevalent in the autonomist movement and are not

exclusive to climate activism and need not concern us here, but see Callinicos, 2003,

for a critique).

The two specific problems specific to the climate movement are the those of

individual solutions to climate change and the related prevalence of degrowth as

an economic strategy among many radical climate activists. Degrowth activists

advocate the downscaling of production and consumption, since they argue that

economic development has not only reached its ecological limits but rather has

passed them already. In that sense, climate justice means that the rich countries

should ratchet back our growth and clear some space for those who need it

(Ellwood, 2010: 5,6).

Some proponents of de-growth like New Internationalist writer Zoe Cormier argue

Workers of the world, relax. Cormier asks what seems like a perfectly reasonable

question: since productivity has risen, so why not share those productivity gains in

the form of less work? (Cormier, 2010). However, calling for less work at a time

when the advanced capitalist states are pursuing a strategy of generalised austerity

cuts to jobs in services in order to pay for the costs of the economic crisis. As Neale

argues,

31

in the current economic crisis there is a strong argument coming from the top

of society that everywhere people will have to sacrifice living standards, jobs

and public services because we are in debt. Many people are already making

sacrifices, and some in the poorest countries are making the ultimate sacrifice.

If environmentalists and climate activists join our voices to these calls, we will

be rejected

the loudest voices we hear proclaim the ruling class consensus that serious

sacrifice by ordinary people is the only way to rescue the world economy. These

voices are all louder than the Marxists and autonomists. They condition what

people hear when you talk about growth. (Neale, 2010: 56-58).

This was summed up succinctly by a Belgian trade unionist who had come to the

climate justice demonstration in Bonn with 40 of his comrades in June 2010 when he

said: we need an anti-capitalist answer to the climate crisis but not one built off the

sweat of workers like some in our movement demand (Bergfeld, 2010b).

The climate justice movement cannot contribute to an emancipatory political project

in the Global North if it aligns itself with the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel

and David Cameron who are calling for workers to sacrifice. We must therefore

consider concretely what climate justice is, and what kind of demand can

contribute to building the kind of movement that can build a broad and effective

movement against climate change.

32

Chapter two: Contesting Climate Justice

In the previous chapter I analysed the deficiencies inherent in the last round of

climate protests. In this chapter, I will look at the various concepts of climate justice

to determine which offers the best possibility of uniting broad sections of society in a

movement against climate change.

Climate justice as (re)distribution and development

Whether Oxfam20 or Kofi Annan, climate justice was a key term during the

COP15`at Klimaforum one could not a find brochure, pamphlet or postcard

without it. But like every other movement the climate justice movement is a place of

argument and an arena of struggle and contestation. Thus, it comes as no surprise

that climate justice had already been co-opted by businesses,21 marketing

campaigns like Tck tck tcktime for climate justice and politicians: while we see

lots of young people holding posters that say Climate Justicein fact, many groups

that are driving the youth climate movement support policies that run counter to the

established principles of climate justice (Dayaneni 2009: 83). Of course, I wish to

explore the idea that there are no established principles when it comes to the

climate justice. But these attempts to co-opt climate justice constitute a direct

intervention by organisations and governments who have no interest in building a

mass movement which challenges the roots of the climate crisis, alter the existing

20

Ian Sullivan one of Oxfams full-timers writes on the Oxfam website: At Oxfam, were involved with climate change because we know that its already impacting on the poorest peoples lives. The irony is that theyve done the least to cause it and often dont get a say in the decisions that have life and death implications for them. For me, this is about justice. 21

The European Business Council for Sustainable Energy holds workshops titled Climate Justice as a business case.

33

social relations or emancipate people from exploitation and oppression. These forces

could be considered the right wing of the climate movement.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annans Tck tck tck marketing campaign which,

like its UK counterpart SCC, demanded the worlds leaders to seal the deal, had

collected nearly 15 million digital pledges for a fair, robust and binding deal. Their

call for no more than a two degree Celsius rise in average global temperature had

little to do with justice, given this would have a catastrophic environmental impact

for tens of millions of people in the developing world. The call exposes glaring

discrepancies in the use of the notion (Seidentsicker, 2010).

Climate justice emerged as the unifying discourse of various organisations in order

that, as the organisers of The Wave had intended

discontent is absorbed and kept within the framework of action, providing the

hegemonic social group with a mechanism to manage the demands of dissent

and to transform potential resistance Once integrated and transformed, civil

society can become an engine of hegemony. At the same time this process

isolates the more radical antagonizing elements of potential counter-hegemony,

by framing their existence outside of common sense (De Lucia, 2009:237).

The Tck tck tck campaign involves organisations such as World Wide Fund for

Nature (WWF),22 Environmental Defence Fund, Natural Resource Defence Council,

and even the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. The campaigns website does not mention

anywhere what the campaign regards to be just or what climate justice entails. It

does mention that Bob Geldorf, Lilly Allen, and Jet Li are some of their 15 million

22

On WWFs website they state: WWF partners with companies to help them achieve their environmental objectives. During the COP15 talks, WWF emblazoned its logo on a 1 kilometre long billboard saying climate responsibility is simple, its just good business sense Let the clean economy begin. This is an example of what Pusey and Russell call capitalist strategies for dealing with the bio-crisis (Pusey and Russell, 2010).

34

climate allies. Annans political weapon in the fight against climate change are

financial transfers and transfers of sustainable technologies, which is to say, (re-)

distribution and (right to) development (De Lucia, 2009: 231). These are the very

same solutions that business leaders of big corporations propose as these increase

the opportunities for profits and the enclosure of new markets (Brunnengrber,

2008). Climate justice has here been co-opted to serve the interests of powerful

elites. This is should not be confused with the co-opting of the movement itself.

Long before COP15, climate justice had been framed in terms of (re-) distribution

and the right to development. Gordon Brown and former World Bank President

James Wolfensohn showed their support for climate justice (Roberts, J. Timmons

2009, 397), the European Parliament which urged its member states to integrate

climate justice into their long-term perspectives until 2050 (Seidensticker, 2010).

Climate Action Network (CAN) describe their vision on their website as to protect

the atmosphere while allowing for sustainable and equitable development

worldwide [emphasis in original].

CAN is an example of how the concept of climate justice is deployed to serve the

interests of ruling classes. It was founded in 1989 and brings together the largest

environmental organisations. More than 500 NGOs are currently are affiliated to the

network whose main goal is to promote government and individual action to limit

human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels. The central

operation limits itself to information exchange, lobbying and expertise.

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the NGOs took the global stage with a massive

presence. The event was aptly described as the NGOization of world politics

35

(Altvater and Brunngrber, 2002). From then on NGOs have been part of the policy

process concerning the environment and climate change enabling them to make

textual amendments to ministers proposals. NGOs have sought to make minor

changes from within system using the language of peoples participation rather than

building a new political process from the bottom-up. However, greenhouse emissions

have risen sharply since then. These highly wealthy organisations, which largely draw

their donations from states, large donations and subscription rates, continue to argue

that without their involvement the climate would be in a far worse situation thus

legitimizing their participation in a highly ecologically ineffectual process.

(Kaufmann, Stephan and Mller, Tadzio (2009a))

The NGOs organised in CAN have consistently supported market-based mechanisms

to tackle the climate crisis in a scientific, managerial efficiency-based wayPatrick

Bond calls CAN inadequate, compromised and ideologically confused (Bond, 2010:

23).

In solving the problems of the ecological crisis NGOs orient themselves along the

lines of the political restrictions of participation and content imposed by the ruling

elites of the international system (Walk/Brunngraeber 2000:276, own translation)

Arguably, CANs participation in the UNFCCC process has legitimized the use of

market-based solutions as peoples solutions despite the very fact that these cause

more harm today than climate change itself.

36

Emissions trading has not been accompanied by a reduction in greenhouse gas

pollution but by an increase. These NGOs are part of the institutional apparatus that

do not challenge the hegemony of the ruling class ideology but rather enshrine it and

contribute to the marginalisation of dissenting voices.

The action proposed by Annan and the Tck tck tck campaign is money and aid in

form of loans and development. These do not differ from policies such as prescribed

by the IMF and World Bank. The Kyoto Protocol has enshrined carbon sinks and

cap-and-trade mechanisms and thus Tck tck tcks campaign for climate justice is

working within the free market paradigm and see no alternative to Kyoto

(Seidensticker, 2010; Bedall and Austen, 2010; Bond, 2010: 24). This model of

climate justice involves commodifying the atmosphere and subjecting peoples to the

further marketisation of their livelihoods and their resources.

The emphasis on (distributional) justice and the right to development as key

elements in any post-Kyoto agreement has then this effect of transforming

dissenting sections of public opinion and developing countries into supporters

of the global capitalist vision of ideology of the dominant social group. Justice

turns then into a fundamental space of ideological negotiation, where hegemony

is nurtured, articulated and universal/ized (De Lucia, 2009: 237).

De Lucias points clarify what SCC, CAN, Tck tck tck and world leaders mean by

climate justice and how it could emerge as a unifying rallying call. While SCC or Tck

tck tck do emphasize the historical role of the Global North and the common sense

fact that climate change will disproportionately affect the worlds poorest, their

policies of mitigation and adaptation solely to create business opportunities for

corporations. The campaigns completely ignore political and economic interests and

37

conflicts, reducing the climate crisis to a diplomatic act of will (Muller and

Pasadakis, 2010) and putting forward an efficiency-based strategy aimed at the

middle classes of the Global North (Brand, Bullard, et al, 2009:12).

The perspectives and policies advanced by these NGOs and political leaders are

congruent with the dominant political and economic interests of the ruling classes

[mainstream environmental organisations] act as safety valves to make sure that

demands for social change, that our collective rage remain within the boundaries set

by the needs of capital and governments. (Mller and Passadakis, 2008).

This would not be the first time that an ecological concept has been co-opted. The

term sustainability, which arose in 1990s, can now be found on many products,

company logos and supermarkets. Climate justice finds itself in the same danger as it

does not contain an inherent antagonism which has brought the movement about

and the very fact that there is no magic bullet or policy which can make climate

justice a reality.

Thus, the movement for meaningful climate justice must also succeed in collectively

focusing its attention on transforming the political parameters of the debate around

he phenomenon of climate change in opposition to the forces which have been

outlined above.

38

Rights-based climate justice

Earlier I quoted Dayaneni stressing that a lot of young people waving placards calling

for climate justice actually do not represent the principles of climate justice. The

principles referred to here were mainly laid down in the Bali Principles of Climate

Justice in 2002 and the Climate Justice Assembly Declaration in Belem 2009. The

two documents are fundamentally different in purpose yet both explicitly refer to

rights-based/justice-based approach to climate policy (Dayaneni 2009:82).

Rights and justice-based approaches in social movements are not a novelty. Whether

the civil rights movement or the environmental justice movement, both shared a

common understanding that the existing laws discriminated against one people and

benefited another people directly. The repertoire of contention and tactics used

within the movement were many: sit-down, road blockades, mass meetings or

litigation. Yet, they all strived to empower the community and win the rights that

others were privileged with. In the face of Jim Crow laws when African-Americans

could not even visit state parks to enjoy nature claiming rights was radical yet broad

enough as people indeed were enjoying these rights. The political opportunity here

could be exploited and full civil rights for African-Americans were grantedon paper

(from more on the parallels between the civil rights and environmental movements,

see Roberts, 1999: 230-267).

There is pitfall inherent in the language of rights. An African-American might have

the right to enter a state park but may not have the financial means to get to the state

park: if, say, is 150 miles away and public transport only runs every two days. There

are stark limitations with a rights-based approach to climate justice if rights are

isolated from structural, economic inequality. Yet these approaches manage to

39

establish a discourse and subsequently demands which are opposed to those of the

market and corporate-led globalisation. The rights-based approach can serve radical

NGOs, helping create their own political practice, to point to certain struggles and

environmental problems and create new networks between activists, social

movements and NGOs and hopefully broaden their social base. This is crucial as in

many cases activists belong to a multitude of organisations, networks and

movements, a so-called multi-organisational field (Klandermans 1992;

Klandermans 1997).

The Bali Principles of Climate Justice assert, Climate Justice insists that

communities have the right to be free from climate change, its related impacts and

other forms of ecological destruction (CJN, 2002). Unlike an efficiency-based

strategy aimed at the middle classes, a rights-based approach asserts rights to be

universal: rather than following a NIMBY (not in my backyard) approach, rights-

based activists argue not here, not anywhere (Agyeman and Evans, 2004: 160) or

NIABY (not in anyones backyard). This involves a movement of solidarity, not

simply pressuring governments to tinker with market mechanisms.

In order to uphold the rights-based approach to climate policy one thus needs to go

to the roots of climate change and the climate crisis itself. The Bali Principles read

that the aim [is] to eliminate the production of greenhouse gases and associated

local pollutants (CJN, 2002). Thus, climate justice ultimately becomes removing the

cause of climate change once and for all.

Removing the causes of climate change means tackling the fossil-fuel (dependent)

economy or what is commonly is referred to among activists as fossilistic

capitalism. However, we have seen that mainstream NGOs and businesses

40

emphasize the right to developa pretence for creating business opportunities in the

Global South and in underdeveloped areas. These market-based mechanisms and

technological fixes currently being promoted by transnational corporations are false

solutions and are exacerbating the problem (CJN, 2002). These solutions have aptly

been named false solutions and include nuclear energy, carbon offsets, techno-fixes

like geo-engineering, clean coal, agro-fuels, and large scale hydro-dams. Indeed

CJN emphasizes a radical re-thinking of the dominant development model (CJN,

2008).

Rejecting the false solutions of big corporations must entail the formulation of real

solutions. These solutions come from people in the affected communities and

impacted disproportionately by climate change. Energy sovereignty as opposed to

energy security, food sovereignty as opposed to food security are key in the fight for

climate justice. There are more specific demands however which highlight the rights-

based approach in its entirety.

The demand for climate debt reparations or ecological debt reparations entails

financial redistribution from North to South. On the one hand, it involves

diminishing the dependency of the Global South. Reparations must be made in the

form of deep and drastic GHG [greenhouse gas] cuts in the North domestically and

transfer of financing and technology to the South. There should be strong penalties

for countries that do not follow targets. Reparations also means funds for mitigation

and adaptation cannot be based on creating loans and grants (CJN, 2008). Climate

debt reparations thus reconsider who owes what to whoyet there is a serious

question as to whether this right can be fulfilled on the basis of the capitalist

market given the fundamental challenge they would represent to the balance fo

41

forces both between and within nation states (Kaufmann, Stephan and Mller,

Tadzio (2009a): 190). The civil rights question in the US could be fulfilled under the

same configurations and without radically altering the property relationsit is

difficult to imagine a way that a struggle for equal climate rights could succeed

without fundamentally challenging such relations. Thus, the rights-based approach

to climate policy in the form of climate justice also means radically re-thinking our

rights in terms of ecology and environment.

The rights-based approach to climate policy means that new coalitions and networks

can be established in the field of climate politics as it frames climate change not as

simply an issue of ecology and conservation but a question of societys (natural)

conditions (Gerstetter, Christiane and Krause, Ilana (2010). Thus, social, economic

and environmental justice groups, anti-racists and almost every other progressive

group can gather under the banner of climate justice and frame policies and

demands which have the underlying principle of justice for those most affected by

climate change. This is particularly helpful for and plays a large role why climate

justice has been the unifying call for Copenhagen and beyond.

In terms of political practice, however, there are shortcomings related to the rights-

based approach in the Global North. Its demand for climate debt reparations and

analysis that puts the Global South into the limelight of the struggle runs risk of

misconstruing the fundamental conflict over climate change as one between rich and

poor countries. There are however real class conflicts over climate change within the

Global North and Global South (Neale, 2010; Bond, 2010). International movements

often risk omitting the internal class nature of societies in favour of an idealised

north versus south or east versus west dichotomy. Most anti-imperialist

42

movements in the North throughout the 20th century fell prey to this and

subsequently aligned themselves with forces which did not emancipate the working

class majority in those countries fighting against imperialism or did not reach out to

the working class majority in the countries where the movements took the stage. This

political tendency, most closely related to Maoism, continues to influence those in

the movement who emphasise dependency theory and unequal exchange between

advanced and developing economies as the cause of global injustice.23

In its rights-based critique, CJN writes whereas the multilateral development banks,

transnational corporations and Northern governments, particularly the United

States, have compromised the democratic nature of the United Nations as it attempts

to address the problem; whereas the perpetration of climate change violates the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on

Genocide (CJN, 2002). This portrays another serious flaw in the right-based

critiqueit explicitly refers to institutions such as the UN abstractly as neutral,

democratic institutions being undermined, rather than as sites of international

conflict and negotiation that, under the dominance of the US, perpetuate the

hegemony of the status quo. After the collapse of the COP15 talks the rights-based

approach and its orientation on bodies such as the UN might simply continue to offer

legitimacy to institutions and processes that are fundamentally incapable of

addressing the problem.

Only if the idea of justice is linked to people, their place, culture and time can climate

justice contribute to building a lasting mass movement. We have seen how a rights-

based approach to climate policy can mobilise people and create new networks but it

23 Gunder Frank and Fuentes, 1987, is typical. See Callinicos, 2003 for a critique. For a critical analysis of the history and legacy of Maoist influenced solidarity movements in the developed world, see Harman, 1998

43

is crucial to have examples on the ground which are fighting under the banner of

climate justice so that the fear of having the term co-opted by businesses and

mainstream NGOs does not become a political reality.

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Struggle-based climate justice

This struggle-based approach to climate justice targets both fossilistic capitalism and

green capitalism, mainly through non-violent direct action, which is often illegal but

seen by activists as legitimate.

Climate Camp UK was one of the first organisations to unfurl the banner of climate

justice in the UK and Europe. Its main form of contention is the camp which was

born out of the anti-capitalist movements summit mobilisations and became one of

the movements main institutions. There have now been climate camps in Germany,

New Zealand, the USA, Catalonia, Sweden, France and Australia.

Climate Camp is a place for anyone who wants to take action on climate

changeand anyone whos worried about our future and wants to do something

about it and holds four principles on paper: education, direct action, sustainable

living, and building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.24

In 2009 Climate Camp not only organised its annual gathering but increased its

activities by organising a street occupation/party of the European Carbon Exchange

in the City of London during the G20 summit. It organised one of its largest camps

ever at Blackheath in that summer; it had its own Reclaim Power action targeting

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in October and in December it mobilised hundreds

to Copenhagen. Turner writes: The new social vehicle is the Climate Camp...

Evoking the teach-ins and love-ins of the 1960s launching direct actionsfreeing

political prisoners and challeng[ing] climate criminals (Turner 2010:12).

24

Climate Camp UK website: http://climatecamp.org.uk/about/ Accessed 23/12/10

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Having become a major weapon of radical climate activists in the Global North,

Climate Camp illustrates how climate justice does not only offer activists a strategic

orientation around the particular mobilizations in Copenhagen. Instead it can be

used far beyond a mobilisation in the Global North and assist activists in broadening

their social base and creating new networks that highlight that a struggle-based

approach is necessary to tackle the climate crisis.

Climate Camp is a constituent part of Climate Justice Action (CJA) which co-

ordinated the Reclaim Power action. CJA conceives itself to be a primarily Northern

international networking platform for climate activistsa Climate Camp

International. For CJA:

To struggle for climate justice, then, is to recognise that all these crises

[economic, political, food, energy et al] are linked; that the climate crisis is as

much as social and economic crisis as it is and environmental disaster. To

struggle for climate justice is at the same time struggling against the madness of

capitalism, against austerity enforced from above, against their insistence on

the need for continued growth (green or otherwise) It is about empowering

communities to take back power over their own lives. (CJA, 2010)

In their strategy paper What Does Climate Justice Mean in Europe? CJA links the

EU, food and agriculture, military, migration, energy, production and consumption

to the struggle for climate justice. The discussion paper presents a thorough anti-

capitalist critique of the system. The starting point here is not climate justice but an

anti-capitalist critique of the current system. Its goal is the overthrow of capitalism.

For CJA any struggle-based approach to climate justice is necessarily a struggle

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against capitalism. However, this is problematic in as far as the majority of people

within the climate movement have not drawn revolutionary conclusions.

A struggle-based approach such as the one advanced by CJA and Climate Camp run

the risk of cutting themselves off from the vast majority of activists in the climate

movement but also the working class. In the first chapter, I argued that the working

class is the decisive agent in the struggle for climate justice. By extension, they are a

the key agent in the struggle for social transformation on a broader basis, including

that sought by CJA and their ilk. And recent months have shown the international

working classes ability to mobilise huge resistance in the form of general strikes

across Europe and across the world. But this is is long way from overthrowing

capitalism.

Workers responses to alienation and oppression are always heterogeneous and

contradictory since, as Marx argues,

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class

which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling

intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its

disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so

that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of

mental production are subject to it. (Marx, 1845 German ideology).

So workers do not simply reject the system because they are exploited within it.

However, the experience of exploitation, and the need for collective action to resist it,

means that everyday experience offers an antidote to the phenomenon described by

Marx. As Antonio Gramsci argued,

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The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical

consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involves

understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical

consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might

almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory

consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites

him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world;

and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past

and uncritically absorbed (Cited in Harman, 2007: 109, 110 (ISJ 114)).

If activists in Climate Justice Action and Climate Camp want to succeed in advancing

a struggle-based concept of climate justice it must be working to engage the

working-class majority, and to engage the working-class majority with them

(Barker, 2006: 22). This will only be possible if it advances a repertoire of contention

and tactics which do not simply confront workers (such as blockading a harbour or

factory), but rather encourages these forces to join with the climate movement. This

must be approached from the perspective how do we relate to contradictory

consciousness. Workers are not somehow instinctively revolutionary. Bridging the

gap between where we are and where we want to be becomes a key strategic question

in any approach to climate justice based on struggle.

Whilst Climate Camp UK and CJA have pushed for climate justice and their struggle-

based conception of how to tackle the climate crisis, workers on the Isle of Wight at

the Vestas wind turbine factory have provided an exemplary case of what a struggle-

based fight for climate justice in the Global North could look like. As a direct

response to factory closure the Vestas wind turbine workers on the Isle of Wight

48

occupied their factory and raised the slogan Save jobsSave the Planet. They did

not employ the language of climate justice or indeed did not struggle against

capitalismthey demanded nationalization by the Labour government of the time

(see Neale, 2009 for an appraisal of the struggle at Vestas). But this struggle pointed

at a possible way of integrating the best elements of the rights-based and struggle-

based approaches to climate justice with a working class perspective for building the

struggle.

When struggling against the system people under attack use their own language.

Climate justice can draw the links between different struggles and thus act as the

glue to bring disparate campaigns under one banner. However, it cannot define what

means and tactics people use in fighting back and what demands people place upon

the system. When thousands African-Americans blocked trucks from dumping toxic

waste into a landfill in their Warren Council, North Carolina in 1982, and more than

500 people were arrested over the course of two weeks, including the reverend, the

movements leaders, housewives and children as young as four years old, people did

not fight under the banner of environmental justice but to protect their community.

Yet, this came to be known as the birth of the environmental justice movement

(Roberts, 1999: 254-258). Any struggle-based approach to climate justice thus must

be based on the self-activation and self-empowerment of the people themselves.

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Time and politicstowards a working concept of climate

just