A look at the current issues surrounding climate change with three groups offering different insights on the subject. Camp for Climate Action explain what the climate camp initiative is and what it seeks to achieve, Workers Climate Action on the relationship between workers and climate change, and Anarchist Federation who present an overview of the effects and real causes of climate change.
Camp for Climate Action
Camp for Climate Action (CCA) is a 365-day of the year movement that for one week of the year squats disused land and produces a camp that takes a simultaneous approach of taking radical direct action on climate criminals, and positively displays sustainable, communal, non-hierarchical, empowered participatory living – thereby showing to ourselves and others that a radical, boss-less alternative to capitalist social organisation is possible.
CCA directly emerged out of the mobilisations against the G8 in Gleneagles in 2005, so is therefore one of many anarchist inspired social movements that have emerged in North America and Europe of late, following the collapse of communism as the dominant opposition to the ‘free market’ nightmare in the early nineties.
It was felt in 2005 that a new frame was needed on the issue of climate change – one that targeted the main economic and political drivers of climate change, and one that was prepared to take direct action to thwart the endless rise of greenhouse gas emissions that are killing hundreds of thousands of the world’s poor each year.
It is to this aim, following very successful camps at the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire in 2006, at Heathrow airport in 2007, and at Kingsnorth Power Station in Kent last summer, that CCA has the city of London as its primary target for 2009 – this financial meltdown is the golden opportunity to highlight an economy that is failing people and planet. On 1st April, to coincide with the G20, CCA held a 24-hour ‘flash camp’ outside the European Carbon Exchange to draw attention to the idea that more western capitalism and imperialism – in the form of Carbon Trading – as the solution to a problem that it has caused is utterly ridiculous.
On 26th August, thousands will once again ‘swoop’ down onto an as yet undisclosed location in London to set up camp in full view of the habitat of the unholy grail of transnational corporations, that are desperately trying to keep fossil fuels and ‘free market’ capitalism on the table; of our elite representatives who choose their glitzy watering holes and schmoozing avenues above the people they supposedly represent; and of the casino banks that finance the whole thing.
Let’s be clear, CCA demands social justice with a de-carbonised economy. The ‘free market’ model has long been shown to be an instrument of human misery, of which climate change is simply the tip of a rather large melting iceberg. The UN summit this December in Copenhagen looks like it will re-legitimise this failed insanity under the banner of Carbon Trading, which will encourage the march of privatisation of humanities most precious resources, maintain the rigid class structure, instigate carbon colonialism by disposing indigenous peoples of their lands and forcing the worlds poor to sell their rights to pollute, all the while creating a welcome invitation to the cheating Enrons of the future, where corporations and elite politicians will do all they can to fiddle the figures, keep those fossil fuels burning and profits growing, even while the droughts spread and the death toll rises.
We must stop this madness, and to do so we need an urgent radical broad based movement of civil society. If the future is to be bright, it must be red, black and green.
Workers Climate Action
Workers’ Climate Action (WCA) is a direct action, activist network of class struggle activists from a variety of backgrounds that came together after the Heathrow Climate Camp. As climate movement activists, we wanted to argue within the movement for working-class, anti-capitalist solutions to climate change – against those who see a ‘greener’ capitalism or an accumulation of individual actions as a solution, and against those who believe that the scale and immediacy of the issue transcends differences of politics and class. And as trade unionists, we wanted to challenge our unions’ sectional and conservative attitudes on issues like aviation and coal mining and rediscover the tradition of radical, rank-and-file working-class environmentalism that inspired struggles like the Lucas Aerospace workers’ plan and the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers Federation’s ‘green bans’ of the 1970s.
For us, the global working class is not just one of many ‘interest groups’ or ‘stakeholders’ who will be affected by climate change. The working class is a key agent of social change; the class capable of making society move, and of stopping it from moving. For many of us in WCA, the working class is the key agent of social change. We believe that movements led by organised labour can and must be central to winning a socially and environmentally sustainable world. This is not to say, however, that we do not think climate change can be tackled or combated until a thoroughgoing working-class revolution. The central goal of WCA is to catalyse and support workers’ struggles in the here-and-now that respond to climate change and create the conditions from which wider struggles can grow.
At the 2008 Kingsnorth Climate Camp, WCA activists leafleted the power plant every day at the start of shifts with bulletins discussing ideas around workers’ control and worker-led just transitions. We believe that workers in frontline industries have a crucial role to play in demanding that productive capacity of our workplaces and our humans skills are used to produce goods and services that are socially useful and environmentally sustainable – just as Lucas workers in the 1970s developed a plan for the aerospace factory they worked in to produce hybrid cars, defibrillators, integrated road-rail vehicles and tidal energy hardware. But we also believe that to undertake such high-level, implicitly anti-capitalist struggles, workers often need to build up our political and organisational confidence by fighting more immediate, day-to-day battles. That’s why WCA actively supports all workers’ struggle in frontline industries, regardless of whether or not they have an immediately obvious environmental angle. All workers’ struggles implicitly pose the question of whose interests a particular workplace, industry or society is governed by – WCA activists fight in our workplaces and communities to argue that the interests of collective human and environmental need, rather than profit, should be paramount.
Since our formation, WCA activists have led and participated in solidarity work around struggles of workers at Heathrow, the Lindsey Oil Refinery, the bus service in Sheffield, and migrant cleaning workers in London. WCA supporters working on the London Underground are also centrally involved with the RMT’s ‘Jobs/Pay/Justice’ dispute.
In June 2009, WCA activists began leafleting the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight in response to the announced closure, catalysing a campaign that resulted in a workers’ occupation of the factory and in which WCA remains central. WCA activists also led solidarity direct action around the country, including gluing ourselves to the doors of the Department for Energy and Climate Change! We believe that the struggle at Vestas epitomises perfectly how a class struggle for workers’ control and sustainable work must spearhead the fightback against the environmental destruction wrought by capitalism’s disregard for any concern other than the accumulation of profit.
WCA activists come from a variety of political backgrounds and include Marxists, anarchists and other radical anti-capitalists. Many of us are active trade unionists, including several energy workers and transport workers. We have diverse views on many issues, but we are united by our commitment to class struggle and working-class self-organisation as key focuses, and by our belief that only an anti-capitalist struggle for a democratically organised society can fundamentally cut the roots of climate change. We organise non-hierarchically and welcome debate and discussion within our meetings and activities.
Daniel Randall
Workers’ Climate Action: for green jobs under workers’ control. To get involved with our activities, email workersclimateaction.info@googlemail.com or visit http://workersclimateaction.wordpress.com.
(Daniel Randall is a supporter of Workers’ Climate Action, a member of Workers’ Liberty and an activist in the GMB trade union.)
Anarchist Federation
“Capitalism will either destroy humanity by destroying its ecological niche or it will destroy humanity by changing it. From this statement comes an inescapable conclusion: that the class war is also a war of ecological survival” – Ecology & Class, Anarchist Federation
Who will climate change affect most? This question can only be answered in the context of a planet of both absolute and relative environmental limits and resource constraints. The threat posed by peak oil is well known but now ominous warnings are beginning to be heard about the world’s food supply, its energy supply, the availability of water for drinking, industry and agriculture. The commodities that underpin our existence – stable weather conditions for agriculture, secure supplies of water, the oil to make fertilisers, fertile land, energy to produce and move food and other necessary things – are reaching their limits.
Climate change will result in heat waves and droughts, heavier rainfall and monsoons, floods and inundations, hurricanes and tidal waves and extreme weather phenomena will become more common, be more destructive and will experienced in parts of the world ill-equipped to deal with them. And this changing climate and weather will result in crop failures and starvation, the spread of water-borne disease, mass emigrations, land and resource wars, pandemics, riots and repression as governments try to cope with the effects of climate change and their citizens’ responses to it.
These calamities will be felt most by the working classes of the world and by the poorest amongst them. When crops fail because of falling water levels or salinisation of the land, who suffers? When tribes go to war for grazing land – the origins of the war in Darfur – who will die? When sovereign wealth buys up millions of hectares of land along river systems in order to guarantee national food supplies – as is happening now led by South Korea, China and Indonesia – who will be driven from that land? Corporate aquaculture – to feed burgeoning new markets – is driving fishermen from shores and seas they have fished for generations. It is the poorest who must live in the marshes, along low-lying river banks, above fetid lagoons of sewage and who die in their hundreds of thousands from disease, malnutrition, tidal waves and floods.
In contrast, the rich and the powerful hope to escape the effects of climate change by controlling the availability and distribution of water, energy, oil, land and even clean air. More people die of disease when hospitals and clinics are inundated than by the floods themselves. Who will get already rationed healthcare as it comes under increasing pressure from disease, stress, cold- and heat-related illness, violence? The rich of the world are increasingly demanding gated communities, privatised healthcare, physical separation into suburb and ghetto and the right to lifestyles that, in a world of limited resources, can only be granted at someone else’s expense: hence the mad rush to produce biofuels from food-producing land which massively increased grain prices and led to malnutrition and starvation amongst those who could no longer afford bread.
The ruling class has built a monstrous castle of greed out of the world. It hopes to survive by inventing green technologies and exploiting them to perpetuate its position and power and, sadly, many part of the green movement are buying in, literally, to this agenda. But if this fails it plans to send out its soldiers to annexe the surrounding lands, drive off its inhabitants except those who are needed to work it, while reserving the right to pull up the drawbridge should an aroused peasantry storm the gates. Yet it is the working class that has the ideas, the means and the labour power to begin putting the planet to rights, creating a stable, fair and sustainable world from the wreckage of the old.
If we have one task, it is this: to prepare for and win the war of resources, the last war, and to take back and fairly share what our planet can sustainably produce.
Anarchist Federation member
