Month: June 2019

EXXONMOBIL’S SELF-SERVING CLIMATE POLICY

This piece is an extract from a Roarmag.org article on the hidden agenda behind corporate-led reforms and how corporations’ offers to self-regulate are driven by wanting to silence criticism and expanding their own power and influence. It focuses on Exxon Mobil’s support for a carbon emissions tax to combat climate change. This is followed by a news report on how Exxon are heavily committed to growing the production of petrochemicals and plastics as an answer to uncertainty over the future of crude oil use.

EXXONMOBIL’S SELF-SERVING CLIMATE POLICY

In October 2018, ExxonMobil pledged $1 million to support a campaign for a carbon tax. But the donation by the largest US-based producer of oil and gas is no altruistic contribution to combating climate change. It is yet another self-serving corporate reform.

Exxon’s financial support toward climate policy goes toward a proposal championed by Americans for Carbon Dividends, a free-market organization that grew out of the policy think tank Climate Leadership Council (CLC). NPRcommentators summarized the CLC’s carbon tax proposal as raising “the price of fossil fuels to reduce their use and cut the amount of climate-changing carbon released into the atmosphere.” Under this plan the primary focus is to generate short-term revenue, while reducing carbon emissions is considered a mere positive side effect.

While any proposal to cut carbon emission might make environmental activists rejoice at first, there is more to the story. The CLC was co-founded in early 2017 by conservative policy entrepreneur Ted Halstead, and James A. Baker III, a former White House chief of staff and treasury secretary under Ronald Reagan, and secretary of state under George W. Bush. The CLC describes itself as a bipartisan, pro-market organization to “promote a carbon dividends framework as the most cost-effective, equitable and politically-viable climate solution.” Other founding members of the organization include former Federal Reserve chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, with financial and infrastructural support coming from US corporate behemoths like Unilever, GM, Proctor & Gamble, and oil giants ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Total.

Given the “who’s who” slate of political bigwigs and corporate sponsors, it should come as no surprise that the CLC’s proposal intricately embeds and subsumes the pressing issue of combating climate change into a neoliberal market-based scheme that raises the price of fossil fuel in the short run, while simultaneously scaling back EPA regulations against environmental pollution and climate change in the first place.

The CLC is a prime example of American welfare capitalism. The group is touting its support for climate policy while distracting the American people from its own corporate goals and aspirations.

CLC founder Ted Halstead articulated his organization’s agenda most clearly in a TED talk in May 2017: “[T]he road to climate progress in the United Stated runs through the Republican party and the business community.” Halstead argued that the CLC’s carbon dividends plan would result in “less regulation and far less pollution at the same time, while helping working class Americans get ahead.”

Based on the proposition to repeal environmental regulation and to increase prices on carbon-based fuel, it is hardly surprising that ExxonMobil publicly supports the CLC’s carbon tax plan. Behind a thinly veiled and disingenuous veneer of concern about climate change lies an even greater and more genuine concern about the company’s profits and market share.

Moreover, as CLC spokesperson Greg Bertelsen admitted, ExxonMobil and other large corporation are happy to embrace and support regulatory policies like a carbon tax because they all want “regulatory certainty” in order to “know what the rules of the game will be.” In the tradition of Bismarckian controlled progress from above, large corporations want to ensure that reform happens only under their own purview and the parameters that they set.

This type of corporate-inspired climate change policy still forms the basis for establishment politicians in their quest for public support, with Joe Biden’s andMichael Bloomberg’s respective plans to combat climate change each representing yet another public show of capitalist benevolence to reform at a time when the stakes could hardly be any higher, and when anything less than a full, genuine commitment to combating climate change is unacceptable.

Exxon, Saudis Bet on Plastics Growth in Giant Gulf Coast Plant

Exxon Mobil Corp. and Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled petrochemicals company formally approved construction of a new chemical complex in Texas that will process production from the Permian Basin’s booming oil and natural gas wells.

The project near Corpus Christi will be the world’s largest steam cracker and create $50 billion of “economic output” in the first six years, Exxon and Saudi Basic Industries Corp., known as Sabic, said in a joint statement on Thursday. The facility will convert hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane to ethylene, a chemical used to make everything from plastics to antifreeze.
…
Industry executives have been lauding chemicals as an emerging driver of global oil and gas markets. Earlier this week, BP Plc Chief Economist Spencer Dale earlier predicted petrochemicals will dominate energy demand growth for the next two decades.

Plastics and chemicals are seen as increasingly vital to Big Oil’s future given uncertainty over crude demand and the push toward electric vehicles and cleaner energy sources. But some of the world’s most-advanced economies are increasingly clamping down on single-use plastics such as shopping bags and straws.

That hasn’t scared off Exxon. This year alone, the oil giant approved major expansions to its giant Baytown petrochemical complex and Beaumont refinery in Texas as well as a plastics unit in Louisiana. CEO Woods, former head of the company’s downstream division, sees the plants as essential to making money all the way from the wellhead to the final products.

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These two pieces show clearly how a corporation will often support reform efforts in order to detract from more wide-ranging demands  that could really damage  their interests. 

Corporations have always offered support to state -led reforms to varying degrees to quell unrest, but all the while advancing their own agendas and expanding their own economic opportunities.

Meanwhile the public may get, some marginal benefits but leaving the bodies that produce the problem in the first place intact, and often stronger.

The Pentagon: The world’s single largest producer of greenhouse gases

The United States military has emitted over a billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the global war on terrorism in 2001, according to a report from Brown University’s “Costs of War” project.

This is equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars, “more than double the current number of cars on the road in the U.S.”

With over 800 military bases in more than 80 countries, the Pentagon remains the “world’s largest institutional user of petroleum” and “producer of greenhouse gases.”

In 2017, the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions were about 59 million metric tons. This was more than Finland (46.8 million metric tons), Sweden (50.8 million metric tons), or Denmark (33.5 million metric tons) in the same year.

At least 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gases are a result of consumption in war zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria.

From 1998 to 2017, the U.S. purchased 2.4 billion barrels of petroleum fuel. Since the 9/11 attacks, annual fuel purchases have averaged more than 120 million barrels of all types of fuel. Between 2010 and 2015, the armed services purchased an average of 102 million barrels of fuel per year from the Dept. of Defence.

It is estimated the Pentagon consumed more than 85 million barrels of “operational fuel” in order to power its fleets of ships, aircraft, and combat vehicles. They also used the fuel for “contingency bases.” In total, $8.2 billion was spent.

Since 2001, the [Pentagon] has consistently consumed between 77 and 80 percent of all U.S. government energy consumption,” the report notes.

Installations that support operations, as well as military non-armored vehicles, are notorious in their guzzling of fuel. There are apparently 60,000 HUMVEEs that remain the U.S. Army’s fleet. They get about “four to eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel.”

Domestic and overseas military installations account for about 40 percent of the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Aircraft are responsible for hundreds of tons of C02. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved massive airstrikes, and materials were flown to setup bases for occupations.

The U.S. war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, which began in August 2014, has entailed tens of thousands of aircraft sorties for various missions—from reconnaissance, to airlift, refueling, and weapons strikes. 

Aircraft are particularly thirsty. For example, the B-2 stealth bomber, which holds more than 25,600 gallons of jet fuel, burns 4.28 gallons per mile and emits more than 250 metric tons of greenhouse gas over a 6,000 nautical mile range. The KC-135R aerial refueling tanker consumes about 4.9 gallons per mile.

A single mission consumes enormous quantities of fuel. In January 2017, two B-2B bombers and 15 aerial refueling tankers traveled more than 12,000 miles from Whiteman Air Force Base tobomb ISIS targets in Libya. Not counting the tankers’ emissions, the B-2s would have emitted about 1,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases.

None of this takes into account the environmental destruction and pollution also called by the Pentagon.

The Pentagon actually recognises the threat that climate collapse will cause to the world’s but in reality is powerless to act in any meaningful way. As long as the USA sees itself as the world’s policeman and maintains its imperialistic ambitions driven by profit seeking, then its defence force will continue to pollute and consume on a massive scale. It is essential that those fighting against climate collapse widen their view to take in the role which the corporate capitalistic world plays it.

Sources:

https://shadowproof.com/2019/06/12/pentagon-world-largest-producer-greenhouse-gases-report/

https://theconversation.com/the-defense-department-is-worried-about-climate-change-and-also-a-huge-carbon-emitter-118017

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Final.pdf

THE NEW SUITS OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENTALISM

“Those who appeal to the state certainly cannot be branded as “radicals,”[nor “rebels”] since while they are against “extinction,” they are not against capital.

This is an extract from an article which can be read in full here: http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/06/13/the-new-suits-of-capitalist-development-the-new-green-period-of-capitalism-and-its-ecological-and-citizen-avant-garde/

…the environmental movement is infiltrated by agents of the multinationals and bought with funds of various origins, resulting in a political network of influences at the service of a new kind of capitalism. The same thing happened with the NGOs. At that moment, the purge of extremisms is necessary for the transformation of the green party of decomposition into an instrument of the dominant order. The message of moderation obedient to the little belligerent slogans would not reach the manipulable masses if the anti-system “fundamentalists” were not isolated as soon as possible, or as the informal hierarchies of ecologism-spectacle say, “bridged”.

The movement against climate change has given rise to a registered “brand”, Extinction/Rebellion, which covers the environmentalist flank of left-wing citizenry, giving it arguments in favour of state mediation of the crisis. Those who appeal to the state certainly cannot be branded as “radicals,” since while they are against “extinction,” they are not against capital. Nor against any concrete responsible; one of its principles reads as follows: “we avoid accusing and pointing at people, because we live in a toxic system”. No concrete individual (no leader) can be considered guilty of anything. For a climbing mentality, not all leaders, not all capitalists, are equal, and ecological reforms can even be beneficial to the majority. They are potential allies and benefactors. Thus, the declared objectives of eco-citizenship do not go that way. They limit themselves to pressuring governments to force them to “tell the truth to the citizens”, to take “decarbonizing” measures foreseen in the “energy transition” and to decree the creation of “supervising citizen assemblies”, true political springboards for the arrivists. Their weapon: the non-violent mobilization of 3.5% of the “citizens”. No revolutions, because they imply violence and do not respect “democracy”, that is, the system of parties and ranks.

They do not want to put an end to the capitalist regime, they want to transform it, making it “circular” and “carbon neutral”. We will not overlook the fact that the majority of waste is irrecyclable and that the production of “clean” energies implies the consumption of enormous quantities of fossil fuels. The professionals of citizen ecology do not want to destroy the State either, the great tree under whose shadow their personal careers thrive and their placement strategies work. The ecological crisis is reduced by this captive ecologism to a political problem that can be solved by the heights thanks to a Roosevelt-style Green New Deal: a new pact for the global economy between the world’s ruling class, the political bureaucracy and its environmental advisors that imposes measures for the reduction of polluting emissions and the storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide that the multiple conferences on climate change have failed to impose. Something extremely suspicious, like everything that comes from the system. The “dual” citizen strategies are “symbiotic”, not ruptured. Ecosystems would be restored by harmonizing conflicting interests from within. Duality consists precisely in collaborating (acting in symbiosis) with the institutions on the one hand, and mobilizing the catastrophe-sensitive masses on the other. However, the mobilizations are nothing more than a spectacular display of purely symbolic support. They do not aspire to much, as they do not question the status quo, not saying a word about the symbiosis of governments to those who are pressured by markets, growth or globalisation.

It has been proven that since the Johannesburg summit in 2002, if not before, the capitalist world is aware that its uncontrolled functioning produces such a level of destruction that it is in danger of collapsing. It is more than evident that despite the resistance to regulation by countries whose stability and influence depend on hard extractivism or unhindered development, capitalism as a whole has entered a green developmental phase and is trying to establish controls (Agenda 21, creation of the Green Climate Fund, fifth IPCC report, Paris Agreement, the 24 different COPs). This explains the epidemic of realism and opportunism that has taken over the ecological media “in action” to the point of provoking an avalanche of demands for employment in the political-administrative field. The militants do not want to close their doors, especially when there is a good remuneration, so that all the ideals are kept in their pockets. In truth, it is not only the capitalists who would benefit from a state of alarm.

The new subsidized ecologism follows in the wake of “green” developmentism based on “renewable” industrial energies, and sustains the alarmist leaders of capitalism against the negationists. All their efforts are devoted to adjusting the industrial and consumerist way of life with the preservation of the natural environment, despite the fact that the results have not been flattering until today: greenhouse gas emissions, far from being reduced as established by international agreements, have reached record figures. With the optimism of a newly enlightened novice, they want economic growth, necessary for the survival of capitalism, and the territory, necessary for the conservation of biodiversity, at least in appearance, to be marvelous, no matter how much the global temperature continues to rise and the climate is degrading. Incomparable advantages of the symbiotic method and the reformist narrative!

Those responsible for global warming and pollution, and those responsible for precariousness and exclusion are the same, but those who fight them are often not. They are two battlefields, the one of imbalance and the one of inequality, which do not finish converging and not because a cohort of vocational bureaucrats appears under the stones, trying to carve out a future for themselves by acting as an intermediary. Aspiring leaders have their days numbered because ordinary people lose their meekness when their means of subsistence are affected and they no longer allow themselves to be domesticated with the ease of days of abundance in less aggressive climates. The weakness of world-capital lies not in the climate, not even in health, but in supplies. The day when the techno-industrial system – either from the markets, or from the State – stops satisfying the needs of a large part of the population, or in other words, when due to the climate or any other factor the supply fails, the era of insurrections will come. A failed system that hinders the mobility of its subjects and puts them in immediate danger of starvation is a corpse system. It is probable that in the heat of the protest, community structures will be recomposed, fundamental to ensure the autonomy of the revolts. If civil society succeeds in organizing itself on the margins of institutions and bureaucracies, then ecological struggles will converge with wage struggles, as reflected in the praxis of a unified social conscience. And that slogan heard in the French rebellion of the “yellow vests”: “end of the month, end of the world” will reveal all its meaning.

Miguel Amorós

What Will the Farms of the Future Look Like?

drawing by Clifford Harper

Industrial monocultures — those big farms you see with acres and acres of corn or soy, not to mention those giant cattle feedlots — are systems that degenerate, they die, over time. They produce more carbon emissions than they sequester. Their pesticides kill insects, including pollinators, a trend which may soon initiate “the collapse of nature.” Every year, they suck the nutrients from the soil, and replace them with toxic chemicals. They draw water from local watersheds, pollute it, and let it run off into gutters, or evaporate when hot weather comes, rather than employing management techniques that would allow it to sink back down to replenish local aquifers. Eventually, land treated this way becomes barren, eroding away to create dead zones in rivers and oceans or being lifted up by the wind to join the particulate matter in the air, poisoning the lungs of human beings (it’s telling that a recent report showed that Fresno and Bakersfield, in the heart of California’s industrial farm-filled Central Valley, have the worst particulate pollution in the USA). The air is truly brown in such places. The crops grown on these farms are sent off by truck or ship to factories where they’re processed and packaged — using more resources — and finally delivered to our homes, often in a form that’s as bad for our bodies as the dust is for our lungs.

This is what agriculture looks like in a globalized corporate economy, where, like the nutrients from the soil, the livelihood is sucked from farming communities and siphoned up into the coffers of a few giant corporations .

But as I’m sure many of us know by now, this is not what agriculture has to look like, by any means. Farms can be regenerative, living systems, that produce a bounty but no waste. They can supply the needs of a local community — if that community is willing embrace the idea of eating a mostly seasonal, locally adapted diet — with no need for long-distance transport by trucks, ships, or planes. Farms do not have to be net carbon emitters — plants absorb CO2 when they photosynthesize, and only emit it very slowly, through respiration and decomposition; studies show that, if managed correctly, farms, orchards, and even animal grazing systems can become places that sink and sequester CO2.

Not only that, but these are the same kinds of diversified farming systems that make people most resilient in the face of climate change. If we grow one kind of bean, for example, as a cash crop, and then the summer is too hot for that variety, we lose absolutely everything — all of our profits, which we would have used to buy food throughout the year. If we grow a diverse variety of crops, however, all with slightly different climactic limitations, then not only will a heat wave fail to do us in, but we can feed ourselves, right from our own backyards, no matter what happens. In fact, there are many points in favor of small diversified farms. Even minimal diversification has been shown to increase crop yields, while intensive permaculture systems — which have only recently been recognized by science — have the potential to completely transform our concept of productivity, and of what a “farm” is.

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 In the global South, some are rejecting the idea that leaving the land for polluted, overpopulated cities is a sign of progress. One’s income might be higher working in an urban sweatshop than it would be in a rural village. But that increased income does not necessarily reflect an increased quality of life. In villages where people own their own land and live as they have for generations — using clean water, eating local foods, making clothes and other goods from locally sourced materials, relying on community support for things like child care — a comfortable life can cost almost nothing. (This is why corporate land grabs, for purposes like mining, logging, oil drilling and factory farming, are among the most pressing human rights issues of our time.) In confirmation of this, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN has declared that small family farming is the only way to feed a growing population, while the economic powers that be have confirmed it by creating a climate in which those who fight for land rights must fear for their lives.

Full Read:

http://geo.coop/story/what-will-farms-future-look

We Only Want the Earth

Anarchist writer Andrew Flood started a new YouTube channel: We Only Want the Earth.

Originally published by We Only Want the Earth.

The overwhelming evidence of Climate Change is causing me significant alarm, Extinction Rebellion is a response that has gained some traction but as I show here its ‘beyond politics, declare a climate emergency’ solution cannot deliver what is needed because capitalism and colonialism are the very political problems that caused Climate Change in the first place.. This is the first of my We Only Want the Earth episodes.

statement:

Unlike many green economists, we will never say that capitalism can offer the solutions to climate change. We do not believe capitalism has the answers, but too many environmentalists suggest simply another form of capitalism’s economics. 

They do not usually dispute that the drive for profit underlies the move towards the planet’s degradation. What they want instead is a “fairer” system of in which environmental and social needs are taken into account and, as in the USA, Green New Deal which will look towards sanctions to ensure compliance with regulations, funding for their enforcement, taxes and duties on environmentally damaging practices and so on.

In other words, they unreasonably expect that the goal of increasing profits and expanding the market can be countered under the profit system. But it can’t. The profit system demands a system that allows profits to be maximised. The Green New Deal is setting out to impose on capitalism something that is incompatible with it. 

To protect the environment it is the whole global profit system itself that must go. Transforming the capitalist economy so that it works for the common good cannot be done. No State is going to implement legislation which would penalise the competitiveness of its national enterprises in the face of foreign competition. States only take into account environmental questions if they can find an agreement at international level which will disadvantage none of them. But that’s the snag because competition for the appropriation of world profits is one of the basis of the present system. Capitalism cannot go green because it simply cannot change its spots.

The market economy demands that businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interests. Pleasing shareholders takes far more priority than ecological considerations. The upshot is that productive processes are distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits.

When we blame the capitalist system, we are promoting the idea that all social problems derive from the fact that a few individuals or countries own the means of producing the things we require to live. 

We are no different from XR and others in desiring an environment in which the conservation of all animal and plant species is ensured, in a society in which each production process takes into consideration not only human need but any likely effect upon the environment. Where we differ is in recognising that their demands have to be set against a well-entrenched economic and social system, based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding law of profits first.

We seek a radical transformation of the world where a sustainable society is achieved in which all the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, have become the common heritage, under democratic control at local, regional and world level, of all humanity.

ANZACGF

How The Yellow Vest movement in France could offer some lessons for climate activists.

From here: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-06-11/the-climate-movement-needs-more-radicals/

While new climate emergency groups like XR have taken a vital step toward a more reality-based movement, they have not gone far enough. What we need to see in the US and abroad is a movement that adopts a more confrontational, disruptive coalition focused on overthrowing not just the neoliberal paradigm in which climate change has accelerated and positive action has been stifled, but the roots of capitalism itself. The Yellow Vest (YV) movement in France could offer some lessons for climate activists.

As it happens, the YV movement began demonstrations all over France on the same day that XR launched their Rebellion Day in London. The YV demonstrations, too, involved blocking roads. But their paths have since diverged sharply, with differences between the movements growing stark. Whereas YV is fundamentally a populist, working-class movement focused on economic justice, XR has less substantial messages about economic justice, except incidental and sometimes peripheral nods to resisting corporations. They recently got into some trouble with leftists for showing affection for the police and declaring themselves “beyond politics.” While YV is a long-overdue response to neoliberal politics represented by French President Macron and global consolidation of wealth, XR is speaking more to the decades of liberal inaction on climate. Compared with YV’s rioting, mass strikes, fistbrawls with police (protesters are literally losing their limbs to police violence), XR’s street parades seem quite tame.

Part of this is intentional; XR organizers have sought to do everything properly, like getting permission before marching and closing streets, while being open and friendly with police and bystanders. There are good reasons to be approachable and welcoming if the goal is to make climate concern more mainstream or to impact the national conversation. But to pass truly meaningful policy, and to fundamentally erode capitalism, we need to do so much more than try to bring attention to climate change. And so far this strategy has failed to provoke fear or respect in the people activists are supposed to be rebelling against. It’s easy for MPs to laugh off a happy hippie gathering; it was easy for passersby to ignore the protesters and I heard more than one say something to the effect of “they need to get a job,” and other equally dismissive suggestions. That’s a problem. It’s hard to have our issues taken seriously if our movement is not. It’s hard to get people to believe the world is ending when we’re not acting like it. One of XR’s own slogans admonishes, “Tell the truth and act like it’s real.” Perhaps “acting like it’s real” means going further than XR yet has.

There are of course replicability issues with bringing a YV-style movement to the US and UK climate movements. The Anglophone world has generally been more timid than the French in standing up to elites. Liberté, égalité, fraternité is not so deeply embedded in US and UK political cultures. But marrying the economic populism of YV with the emergency climate stance of XR need not be far-fetched. As Emily Atkin has pointed out, the Yellow Vests themselves are in favor of radical action on climate change. “In a communique issued on November 23, the Yellow Vests said France should ‘put in place a real ecological policy and not a few piecemeal fiscal measures.’” They want climate policy to be commensurate with the problem, but also just. Macron and other elites will continue trying to put the burden of decarbonization on the working-class and middle-class; like YV, climate activists must be insisting that elites pay for most of it.

While the path to building a truly revolutionary, populist climate movement may look quite different from the Yellow Vests, there can be no doubt that such confrontational action will be necessary if radical policies are to get any traction. This is particularly true battling governments largely beholden to fossil fuel interests and consolidated wealth. Street parades and congressional sit-ins will only take us so far. At some point, we will need general labor strikes, we will need tight, militant organisational discipline, and we will need more diverse support.

There were many beautiful moments on the London bridges in XR’s opening protests. Seeing one group of cheering activists join another with hugs and smiles was truly awe- and hope-inspiring. Many moving speeches were given, a haunting call to prayer sung. But while many first-time activists have joined XR, it’s still far from the revolutionary movement that we will need for revolutionary policy. 

AirPods ~ the future fossils of capitalism.

Full read here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neaz3d/airpods-are-a-tragedy

AirPods are a product of the past.

They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt.

The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine them. As they work, humans breathe in airborne particles, which deposit in their lungs. The materials are shipped from places like Vietnam, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, and India, to factories in China. A literal city of workers creates four tiny computing chips and assembles them into a logic board. Sensors, microphones, grilles, and an antenna are glued together and packaged into a white, strange-looking plastic exoskeleton.

These are AirPods. They’re a collection of atoms born at the dawn of the universe, churned beneath the surface of the earth, and condensed in an anthropogenic parallel to the Big Crunch—a proposed version of the death of the universe where all matter shrinks and condenses together. Workers are paid unlivable wages in more than a dozen countries to make this product possible. Then it’s sold by Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar company, for $159 USD.

For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, which does electronics teardowns and sells repair tools and parts, told Motherboard that AirPods are “evil.” According to the headphones review team at Rtings.com, AirPods are “below-average” in terms of sound quality. According to people on every social media platform, AirPods are a display of wealth.

But more than a pair of headphones, AirPods are an un-erasable product of culture and class. People in working or impoverished economic classes are responsible for the life-threatening, exhaustive, violent work of removing their parts from the ground and assembling them. Meanwhile, people in the global upper class design and purchase AirPods.

Even if you only own AirPods for a few years, the earth owns them forever. When you die, your bones will decompose in less than a century, but the plastic shell of AirPods won’t decompose for at least a millennium. Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They’ll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now.

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The disposability of AirPods mirrors the fact that they were built upon disposable labor.

Disposable labor refers to the workers who are subject to the whims of what capitalists call the “invisible hand of the market.” When there’s demand for a product or service, these people have work. When there isn’t, these people don’t. These could be contractors, part-time workers, or low-wage blue collar workers who are treated like a “replaceable part of the production process,” as explained by socialist writers Fred and Harry Magdoff in an article for the Monthly Review.

Every electronic product is the culmination of international labor from mines, refinery facilities, and assembly facilities, usually from underpaid workers. Thousands and thousands of people work in dozens of countries around the world—including, but not limited to, Brazil, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Malaysia, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, India, the Philippines, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Russia, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Estonia, Macedonia, Korea, Canada, and Netherlands—in order to extract and refine the materials used to make modern electronics.

There’s a human cost to all of this. Consider Foxconn—the Chinese company that assembles an estimated half of all iPhones, according to Business Insider, as well as other Apple products. (Luxshare and Investec assemble AirPods.) Foxconn has a factory in Zhengzhou that’s sometimes referred to as “iPhone City.” According to reporting by Business Insider from May 2018, about 350,000 people work in these facilities. Salaries start at $300 per month. 

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Of course, AirPods aren’t unique. Many of the products that we use daily were built to become trash, and eventually fossils. Single-use plastics—like water bottles, coffee cups, plastic packaging—are cheap for companies and convenient for consumers. They also, largely, end up floating in the ocean and littering ocean floors. Some scientists have even started to refer to the present as the Plasticine. Electronics are no different. For companies like Apple, product repairability hurts the bottom line, so the company has lobbied against right-to-repair efforts and collaborated with Amazon to boot iPhone and Macbook refurbishers off the Amazon marketplace.

On a global scale, our economic system is predicated on a disregard for longevity, because it’s more profitable for companies to make products that die than it is to make products that last.

So sure, AirPods aren’t the most expensive earbuds on the market, and the jokes that the product is a display of wealth are largely tongue-in-cheek. But in truth, AirPods are a symbol of wealth. They’re physical manifestations of a global economic system that allows some people to buy and easily lose $160 headphones, and leaves other people at risk of death to produce those products. If AirPods are anything, they’re future fossils of capitalism.

To Buy Or Not To Buy ? that is not the question

juliet-jones-1954-09-19It’s tough being environmentally conscious – you order takeaways that comes in plastic containers; you have a craving to eat meat; you drive your car instead of bicycling to work because it was raining. All reasons to maybe feel guilty.

Yet we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves, rather we should save our scorn for the system that inflicts environmentally damaging things and situations on us. The emphasis on individual action leaves people concerned about everyday activities that they can often barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system we live in.  If we want to function in this society, we have no choice but to participate in that system.

It is understandable why people may feel guilt though.  Scientists and politicians keep warning us that we are the ones causing climate collapse. Check out the New Zealand Government’s abysmal video they released for World Environment Day.  They make no bones about it being all our fault and we are the ones who need to get us out of this mess by consuming greener (not less though), produce less waste (but don’t stop buying stuff) and plant trees (although we guess if you are renting you will have to ask for the landlord’s permission first).

Of course people want to do something though, and of course we should make lifestyle changes where we can, but the narrative that it is down to the individuals is harmful to the growing movement against climate collapse, and plays into the hands of the ruling class by diverting our gaze from them to our own navels. This narrative tells us climate collapse is our fault, and could be avoided, or at least lessened, if we eat less meat, use fewer plastic, or drive an electric car.  

This belief that tweaking our consumer habits is all that is needed is not only wrong – it’s dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice putting shame on those who don’t have the knowledge, the resources, or the ability to uphold the correct standards. It’s divisive and will deter people from offering support when they may otherwise do so.  It raises a barrier to the entrance to the climate protest movement, often pricing out people on a low income.

While we’re challenging each other’s environmental credentials, we let governments and companies completely off the hook. The fact is that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations, aided and abetted by the world’s governments. We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, and take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable.

So what can we actually do about climate change?  We admit that the worst thing you can do about climate change is nothing. Climate collapse is here now, and a problem that’s only going to get worse, and we have to be willing to make sacrifices not only for our own sakes but for those of  future generations.

At the same time, though, if in focussing on individual action we neglect to look for systemic change, then we are guilty of not looking properly for the correct solutions. There is a danger that personal actions can be meaningful starting points, but then go no further.

We need to broaden our definition of personal action beyond what we buy or use. We need to start holding the corporations and governments responsible and make demands on them to change and compensate the world for the damage they have done to it.

Look at your personal lifestyle changes, but then look further and magnify them into something bigger than what kind of bag you use to carry your groceries home.  It’s not just about what we consume but more about how it’s produced.

ANZCFG

art: theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com

Can Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa NZ help save the world?

Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in October 2018 as a movement that aims to use tactics of nonviolent direct action in order to avert the effects of climate change. Since its formation it has rapidly spread to at least 35 other countries, including New Zealand, who have recently carried a few headline-grabbing protests, with the promise of more to come.

Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement are encouraged by the fact that the movement has managed to tap into the sense of alarm over climate change, and mobilised many people not previously involved in protest, and we do not want to undermine the important work that they are doing, but we feel that there is a conversation that needs to be had about some of their demands.


While we support the means of using direct action tactics it is their ends that needs greater examination. Extinction Rebellion is essentially a reformist movement, whose earnest activists lack a real vision of what is needed if we are serious about halting the damage to our environment. Instead, they are pinning their hopes on merely making adjustments to the present system which is destroying our world.


We argue that this isn’t enough, and the only way to effectively campaign to halt climate change is to impart a true picture of a capitalism whose insatiable hunger for profit is not only undermining the working and living conditions of hundreds of millions of working people but the basis of life itself. The future of our planet depends on building a livable environment and a movement powerful enough to displace capitalism.


Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa NZ are guilty of thinking that their demands can create an idyllic capitalism, managed by the state, that can end the destruction being caused to the Earth’s environment They see their role as just needing to make enough noise to wake up political and business leaders. Theirs is a view which sees capitalism moving towards sustainability and zero growth. It is the idea that capitalism can be reformed to become a green system. In this model of capitalist society lifestyles change and infrastructure are reformed while technical green advances are applied. It supposes that all would be well if we all bought organic food, never took a holiday anywhere which would involve flying, and put on more clothes in winter rather than turn up the heating. Green capitalism presumes it will be enough to replace fossil fuels with renewables, whilst leaving the overall system intact.


We argue that such a scenario completely ignores the way capitalism operates, and must operate, and is therefore hopelessly utopian. The present capitalist system is driven by the struggle for profit. The present system’s need for infinite growth and the finite resources of Earth stand in contradiction to each other. Successful operation of the system means growth or maximising profit, it means that nature as a resource will be exploited ruthlessly. The present destruction of the planet is rooted in the capitalist system of production and cannot be solved without a complete break with capitalism. Yet ending capitalism is something that Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa NZ does not appear to be prepared to countenance, they are only attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. They see their green capitalism as a type of capitalism worth fighting for.


We, rather, see the need to create a different form of social organisation before the present system destroys us all. The entire system of production based on wage labour and capital needs to be replaced with a system which produces for human needs. All the half measures of converting aspects of capitalism to limit the damage to the environment, while the fundamentals of capitalism remain in place, are just wishful thinking, and to pretend they could solve our problems is deception on a grand scale.


The fact is that before production can be carried out in ecologically-acceptable ways capitalism has to go. Production for profit and the uncontrollable drive to accumulate more and more capital mean that capitalism is by its very nature incapable of taking ecological considerations into account properly, and to be honest it is futile to try to make it do so.


A sustainable society that is capable of addressing climate change can only be achieved within a world where all the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, are under the common ownership of us all, as well as being under grassroots democratic control at a local and regional level. If we are going to organise production in an ecologically sound way we can either plead with the powers that be or we can take democratic control of production ourselves, and the reality is to truly control production we have to own and control the means of production. So, a society of common ownership and democratic control is the only framework within which the aims of Extinction Rebellion can be realised. In reality, to achieve their wish of halting climate collapse, those within Extinction Rebellion should be anarchists.


One of the demands of Extinction Rebellion is a call for participatory democracy, and yet they also talk of giving governments emergency war-time powers. It’s not altogether clear what they mean by this. Does it mean, for example, seizing fossil fuel industries and shutting them down? Enforcing new low-carbon, low-travel, and low-meat shifts in consumption? Or imposing sanctions against companies or countries trafficking in fossil fuels? Will it see imprisonment for those whose protest when they feel their interests may be compromised by green government legislation?


In the past, warlike conditions and major disasters typically were seen to justify the temporary abolition of democratic liberties, but how long will they last for this fight, what will be the endpoint, or will the special war-time powers last indefinitely? Would such a suspension of democracy be easy to reverse anyway? These are big questions, and, for those of us that value the limited freedoms we have, they need to be addressed.


Giving more power to the state is also a case of putting all your eggs in one basket as there is no one simple response to fixing climate change. Climate change will bring many issues, those that we can have a go at predicting, but also many unforeseen. Increasing the powers of the state reduces its ability to be flexible and capable of learning from policy mistakes. The fight against climate change must be associated with greater local democracy. We need more democracy, strengthening local and regional capacities to respond to climate change. For those in Extinction Rebellion who think that there can be only one pathway to addressing climate change, the erosion of democracy might seem to be “convenient.” History, however, tells us that suppression of democracy undermines the capacity of societies to solve problems.


Those campaigning with Extinction Rebellion are no doubt sincere and caring people who want something different for themselves and future generations. In their own lifestyles they probably have made genuine changes which are in line with a more ecologically sustainable way of living. So have we, but we are well aware that our individual lifestyle changes are not going to change the fundamental nature of the social system which is damaging the planet. Millions of us might give up using products which destroy the environment, but what effect do we really have in comparison with the minority who own and control the multinational corporations. Just 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988. They, and all businesses, have an interest in keeping their costs down, and profits up. If their profits come before the long-term interests of people, who can blame them for sacrificing our needs? They can act no other way.

We do not have faith that capitalists, or their parliamentary representatives, can act in time to limit climate change in a meaningful way, but when we make a call for revolution, the answer we mostly get is that the lesser evil of piecemeal reforms will take less time to achieve than our grand anarchist aims. However, we think it is an ill-advised attitude to take that small improvements are more worthy of support than realisable big ones. There is unlikely ever to be a government passing meaningful green legislation. Governments may pass a few minor reforms to appease green voters, the business owners themselves may realise that some of their brands may be harmed by a lack of environmental concern, and greenwash their product, but ultimately these acts will be a sticking plaster when what is required is major surgery.

If anyone concerned with Extinction Rebellion read this and grasps the impossibility of what they are asking for, then we would say it’s time to keep the methods of direct action that you are advocating, but change the demands. If Extinction Rebellion ever wants their arguments to carry any force, then they need to campaign to abolish capitalism and create a system of grassroots democracy.

In the UK a Green Anti-Capitalist Front has been created to work alongside Extinction Rebellion but with a greater focus on the capitalist roots of climate catastrophe. We feel that such a coalition is needed here in Aotearoa / New Zealand. If anyone is interested in working with us we can be contacted via our e-mail address.

This article originally appeared on the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement website https://awsm.nz/?p=2198