Global pessimism and local optimism: that’s how to quickly explain Climate Justice (CJ) ‘scale politics.’ Or, better: paralysis above, movement below.

The combination is on display again this week, in Lima, Peru, at the twentieth annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘Conference of the Parties’, the ‘COP20’ (actually, ‘Conference of the Polluters’ is more accurate). So it is opportune to re-assess global environmental governance as a site of struggle, one that has proven so frustrating over the past two decades.

It is time again to ask, specifically, can hundreds of successful episodes in which communities and workers resist local greenhouse gas generation (‘Blockadia’ is Naomi Klein’s term for the newly liberated spaces) or seed local post-carbon alternatives, now accumulate into a power sufficient to shape climate negotiations?

My answer is, unfortunately, not yet. We need to become much stronger and more coherent in rebuilding the CJ movement, once so full of hope, from 2007-09, but since then in the doldrums – even though individual, mostly disconnected activist initiatives have deserved enormous admiration, no more so than in the Americas.

Lima comes on the heels of two world attention-grabbing policy events: a United Nations special summit in September just after a 400 000-strong Manhattan people’s march and Wall Street blockade, and the Washington-Beijing deal on a new emissions-reduction timetable.

The Andean opening

The COP20 offers a chance to gauge the resulting balance of forces, especially in the critical Andean countries where melting mountain glaciers and shrinking Amazonian jungles meet. Here, combinations of the world’s most radical conceptions of nature’s integrity (‘Rights of Mother Earth’, sumak kawsay and buen vivir) combine with concrete struggles to transcend the destruction of nature or its commodification.

In my experience, the world’s most visionary CJ, post-capitalist politics are fused when Ecuador’s Accion Ecologica eco-feminists find indigenous movement allies and solidarity activists across the world. The Quito NGO had long argued the case for collecting the Global North’s ‘ecological debt’ to the South and to the planet. But it was only when oil drilling was proposed in the Yasuni National Park – on the Peru border, deep in the Amazon – that the stakes were raised for both Action Ecologica and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities.

They lost the first rounds of the battle: first, shaming Germany and Norway into making payments to leave the oil in the soil (an initial $3.5 billion was demanded, as a downpayment on the North’s climate debt), and second, once the money was deemed insufficient, a national referendum to protect Yasuni (regardless of payments) was not treated fairly by Ecuador’s extractivist ruling class.

But international outreach continues. As Ivonne Yanez of Accion Ecologica explains, ‘Now we are trying to join with the movements to reclaim the commons, in an effort to start a dialogue with people across the world. We want to see anti-capitalist movements fighting together in a new internationalism, beyond the solidarity with affected peoples in the way it is traditionally understood.’

Pink plus green, or just fossil-soiled?

The Yasuni struggle and others like it – e.g. Bolivia’s notorious proposed forest highway, TIPNIS – force onto the progressive agenda this uncomfortable dilemma: are the ‘pink’ governments of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Nicolas Maduro in nearby Venezuela capable of generating serious eco-socialist policies consistent with their leaders’ rhetoric? Or instead, are the new elites irretrievably petro-Keynesian, petro-Indigenous and petro-Socialist, respectively, with radical climate politics foiled by their economies’ carbon rentiers?

In more conservative Peru, the current regime of Ollanta Humala swept into power in 2011 on a pinkish electoral platform. Yet the mining sector has since boomed, with disastrous impacts in the highlands and Amazon alike.

Recall that in 2009, the Awajun and Wampis Peoples and the Interethnic Association for Development of the Peruvian Jungle (Aidesep) blockaded roads in Bagua, leading to a confrontation with the military that left 38 dead and 200 wounded. As Aidesep’s leader Alberto Pizango put it, ‘Thanks to the Amazonian mobilizations I can say that today the indigenous agenda is not only inserted in the national level and within the State, but on the international level.’

Yet Pizango and 52 others are in the midst of being prosecuted for that protest. And profiteers continue to apply pressure. To his credit, Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal admits that thanks to the threat of the ‘forestry market of carbon, people are losing trust and confidence around that mechanism. People are thinking that it can create conditions to lose their land.’

Still, Pulgar-Vidal believes safeguards will be sufficient. At an Indonesian forest debate in May, he asked, ‘What kind of incentives can we create to bring the business sectors to the forest?’ He praised Unilever as ‘a good example of how a private sector [firm] can play a more active role regarding the forest.’

Expressing faith in the ‘green economy’, Pulgar-Vidal continued, ‘What we need to do is to address the problem of the value of the carbon bond around the forest. The current prices are creating a lack of interest… disincentives to have the business sector and the investor more close to the forestry sector.’

The persistence of COP-hosting polluters and COP saboteurs

This sort of vulgar-capitalist COP hosting is not a coincidence. The four preceding COPs, in Poland, Qatar, South Africa and Mexico, witnessed dominant local state actors co-presiding alongside UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretary Christiana Figueres. Following the power logic within their national power blocs, they remained universally addicted to hydro-carbon exploitation, with one common, logical COP result: total failure to move world capitalism away from the cliff-edge.

Likewise, the UNFCCC appears addicted to market mechanisms as alleged solutions to climate chaos, even after the breakdown of the two main carbon trading schemes: in the European Union, which has suffered an 80 percent price crash since 2008, and the US where the Chicago Climate Exchange (self-interestedly promoted by Al Gore) suffered a fatal heart attack in 2011. Nevertheless, the UNFCCC and World Bank express high hopes for a new generation of carbon trading and offsets in California, a few major Chinese cities and a layer of middle-sized economies including South Korea, Brazil and South Africa.

In other words, ruling-class personalities still shape global climate politics far more than CJ activists, as witnessed in the futility with which the latter have attempted to influence the UN’s Green Climate Fund. Between the coal, oil and mining barons who rule over recent COP hosts on the one hand, and a former carbon trader (Figueres) who rules the UNFCCC on the other, there has never been any possibility for getting the CJ perspective a seat at the global table.

The structural problem is simple: each national delegation comes to each COP with the agenda of maximizing the interests of its own corporations, which tend to prominently include those with industrial or fossil fuel assets. Hence their need to emit more and more gases, and prevent a CO2 ceiling from being imposed. A Conference of Polluters it will remain until that flaw is solved, or until the world elects governments possessing even minimal awareness of the climate threat and the political will to address it (the way they did in 1987 when the ozone hole’s expansion was halted by the UN Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs).

The COPs are also stymied because the US State Department’s main negotiator, Todd Stern, looms over the proceedings like a smug vulture during a deadly drought. Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations about Washington’s surveillance capacity, we recently learned how Stern and US President Barack Obama cheated their way through the ‘Hopenhagen’ climate summit in 2009 by listening in on the competition’s cellphones, rendering hopeless a genuine deal that would enforce emission cuts.

And thanks also to Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks providing us those 250 000 confidential State Department cables, we know that the weeks after the Copenhagen fiasco were spent by Stern and his colleagues cajoling, bullying and bribing. They did so with such gusto that they even purchased (for a lousy $50 million in aid) the tough-sounding Maldives Island leadership whose famous scuba-gear-adorned underwater cabinet meeting stunt in late 2009 dramatised that sinking feeling.

As a result of our awareness about Washington’s COP corruption, might the growing US climate activist community become sufficiently brave as to test their budding civil disobedience muscles neck-locking Stern and John Kerry? Could they, for example, prevent the US delegates from departing Washington for Lima? (Comrades, a timely blockade of the I-66 highway and Dulles Airport Access Road in early December would do the trick.) And please add to that ‘no pasaran’ list the COPs’ saboteurs from Ottawa, Canberra and Tokyo, too.

Still, such leaders and delegations are rarely much more than the personification of the class power wielded by leading fractions of capital over labour. It is in a structural critique of capitalist, patriarchal, racist-colonialist and anti-ecological systems that we annually find the COP elites sorely wanting.

The merits of CJers harassing COPsters

Even if we can conclude ahead of time that the COP20 will break the ‘Climate Action Network’ (CAN) NGO reformers’ hearts, as have all others since Kyoto in 1997, this event is important. It serves CJ activists as a platform for highlighting Latin American struggles. It will also nurture the flowering activists who attended the CJ-oriented pre-COP prep-coms in Venezuela twice this year.

And it offers a warm-up protest – more fearsome to COP elites than tame Warsaw’s or Durban’s, we might safely predict – for the ‘big one’ in Paris: the COP21. In August this year, French activists’ prep meeting generated visions of shutting down Paris, and identifying a date in early December 2015 for a global mass protest and closure of educational institutions as the youth find their voices.

One reason CJ activists must continue investing the bulk of their political energies ‘below’, locally, and condemning the elites above – i.e., not getting lulled into global COP-reformism – is because more people are asking the question posed after Copenhagen in relation to the UNFCCC (as we did at Seattle in relation to the WTO in 1999): ‘fix it or nix it’?

After all, the World Bank and IMF are now regularly considered last-century institutions given their incapacities, and the US dollar is apparently being terminally weakened by the Federal Reserve’s printing-press dilution and by the coming liberalised yuan trade. Isn’t the UN also destined, as Tariq Ali put it after the US-UK 2003 Iraq invasion was endorsed in the UN General Assembly, ‘to go the way of the League of Nations’?

The UNFCCC’s irrelevance at the time of its greatest need and responsibility will be one of our descendants’ most confounding puzzles. After Copenhagen, illusions promoted by stodgy Climate Action Network member groups under the slogan ‘Seal the Deal!’ were dashed. As 350.org’s Bill McKibbon put it, the presidents of the US, Brazil, China, South Africa and India (the latter four termed BASIC) ‘wrecked the UN’ by meeting separately and agreeing to eventually make merely voluntary commitments. Now add (Kyoto-reneging) Russia to the BASICs and, as the BRICS, the economic agenda signaled at their Fortaleza, Brazil summit in July this year boils down to financing infrastructure to ensure more rapid extraction, climate be damned.

Still, the insolence of the Obama Administration outshines the BRICS, when cutting another exclusive side deal so soon before Lima and Paris. The November 12 climate pact with China clarified to CJers how much more pressure is needed from below if we are to maintain warming below the 2 degrees danger threshold (not the 3+ degrees that Barack Obama and Xi Jinping settled on). Yet the bilateral deal actually reduces pressure to hammer out a genuinely binding global agreement with sharp punishments for emissions violations, plus the needed annual climate debt payments of several hundred billion dollars from polluters to climate victims.

As a result, rising activist militancy is ever more vital, as the window for making the North’s (and BRICS’) needed emissions cuts begins to close tight. I’ve been most surprised by the militancy emanating from what is probably the most difficult place to organise on climate outside China, the US. There, the Climate Justice Alliance, Global Climate Convergence and System Change Not Climate Change networks did an impressive job radicalizing the previously bland (Avaaz) discourses just before the People’s Climate March in New York.

As miserable as the balance of forces appears in Lima, nevertheless the CJ community is regularly reinvigorated when in contact with Andean activists: by the campaign against oil extraction from Yasuni; by the $8.6 billion ecological debt battle against the legacy of oil spills by Texaco (now Chevron) nearby; and by the region’s indigenous resistance to privatized trees in the form of Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD).

Indeed if REDD is a chosen battleground for the most advanced Latin American activists, then the worry is that, as happened at the Cancun COP16 in 2010, men like Humala and Pulgar-Vidal will divide and rule civil society with patronage pay-offs. The possibility of consolidating many other local initiatives into national and then global-scale struggle awaits a stronger sense of CJ strategies to prevent cooptation or brute repression. They may well come from the Lima side events and protests.

Since the heady days when 1980s-era IMF Riots gave way to mass social movement formations, to Zapatismo, to Brazil’s Movement of Landless Workers, to leftist political parties and to other manifestations of progress, Latin Americans have been at the vanguard of the world’s civilising forces, in the best sense of that abused term. They – and we – are not strong enough to change the balance of forces favouring climate injustice in Lima. But they do usually signal the way forward.

Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and authored Politics of Climate Justice.

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