A Next Step for the Climate Justice Movement
by Li Vinthagen and Stellan Vinthagen
We have only a few years in which to implement the global transformation
needed to create a society that functions sustainably.
This piece first ran in the Winter/Spring issue of Nonviolence.
After 21 years with climate summits two things are clear. First, we finally have a global climate justice movement. During last year’s climate change conference, 10,000 activists from various parts of the world gathered in Paris. Many traveled there even though the shootings and bombings in Paris and St. Denis resulted in French president François Hollande calling for a state of emergency and banning protest organizing. Since commercial activities and sports events were allowed to continue, climate campaigners saw the ban as a repressive attempt to squelch dissent. Despite the circumstances, activists were prepared to carry out civil disobedience.
Second, we now know that the world’s politicians are not prepared to take responsibility for preventing climate change. Climate negotiations have been going on since 1992, leading to ambitious goals but no binding agreement with firm measures against violating parties. Even Sweden, which has long been regarded as a pioneer in the environmental field and today has a green-labor government, has chosen to sell one of the largest coalmines in Europe to a venture capitalist rather than allow the carbon to remain in the ground. We must conclude that our politicians have abdicated.
The UN’s expert panel on climate warns that climate change is happening faster than scientists previously expected. We have only a few years in which to implement the global transformation needed to create a society that functions sustainably.
Climate change is not a theoretical threat, but a reality here and now, created by the fossil fuel industry in the most industrialized countries. Our starting point is that we are in an emergency situation in which, according to Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum, 300,000 people die every year and millions are forced to flee due to the consequences of climate change, such as drought. There is a moral responsibility to act, and with strong measures. The question is what the climate justice movement should do now.
Since its founding in the 1980s, neoliberalism has given rise to a new stage of market fundamentalism: naked greed. Everywhere, our elected politicians have increasingly shifted their loyalty from people to economic powers. This shift changes the playing field for grassroots movements and their ability to lobby politicians.
Currently, most movement actions are designed as symbolic dramas aimed to sway public opinion, brand-sensitive companies and politicians concerned about voter flight. But between corporate lobbying and one heightened political scandal after another, marches and other forms of symbolic activism are far less effective than they were in the late twentieth century, when public opinion could still influence policy frameworks.
How should the political battle strategies be designed in a context where democracy is rapidly shrinking and economic power is emboldened? The answer seems clear: We that understand this emergency situation must step up our resistance and affect the economy directly. Here’s what we propose strategy-wise: a focus on dismantling the fossil industry, literally — as in material infrastructure. This would be a kind of “incapacitating” of the biggest threat to climate protection.
This could be called “sabotage,” but it is not conventional sabotage that we propose. We do not believe that the climate movement could win a fight that is reduced to economy. Companies can always defend themselves with increased surveillance and get the state’s help with repression. Plus, if the measures by activists are perceived as threatening, citizens could end up supporting the fossil fuel industry. What we’re suggesting is to creatively design the dismantling so that we achieve a combination of economic effect and political crisis. The key problem is how this dismantling can be done in such a way that it is perceived as both legitimate and necessary.
A practical dismantling of fossil fuel infrastructure would directly affect the industry’s economic activity and possibly its profit. We assume that this form of action initially leads to polarization, increased repression and rejections. But if the dismantling were perceived as legitimate by a substantial number of people, it would become difficult to label it a threat to society.
To win an increasing share of public opinion, the dismantling would need to be done not only creatively, but peacefully and in an organized way, with many participants taking an open accountability for their actions. With seniors and young people, professors and workers, students and parents purposefully dismantling climate-destroying factories and plants, the actions would be tough to characterize as “extreme.” The decisive factor is that such dismantling actions does not threaten human life or safety, but instead appears clearly as a defense of our society, our lives and our future.
We’ve seen this type of mass disobedience succeed before, most notably when hundreds of people equipped with sledgehammers smashed the Berlin Wall in 1989. Describing it in 1992, CIA Director Vernon Walters said that “ultimately, it was not the Soviet Government which leveled the wall, it was the citizens of Berlin themselves — ordinary people, taking into their own hands hammers and chisels — battering the wall.” Just as the purpose of demolishing the Berlin Wall was to achieve a tangible impact, a dismantling would also show that people are ready to step up and take the necessary measures to stop the climate destruction that threatens the existence of humankind.
We realize that our proposal is controversial. While not everyone will agree with it, we hope that we have nevertheless offered a contribution to the debate on what the global climate justice movement could do next.
Li Vinthagen is a sociologist, activist and painter. Stellan Vinthagen is Professor and Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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