Climate Justice

From the Editor

Luke Cole was a brilliant lawyer, a committed activist, a passionate lover of nature and humans, and the co-founder of this journal. [See article.]  I only met him once, but I feel the power of his work every day, as I labor to live up to the vision that Carl Anthony and he laid out in creating this platform. This issue is dedicated to Luke Cole, 1962-2009, may his inspiration live on.

I started this issue as a skeptic of climate change. I didn’t doubt its reality—the human contribution to it, or the threat it represents to the ecological health of the planet—but I doubted that this crisis created an organizing moment that could benefit low-income people and communities of color. When Race, Poverty and the Environment covered this topic in 2006, [Clarke] efforts within the United States to organize in response to climate change were scattered and largely led by white environmentalists. We had to turn to a Canadian author to find a succinct description of a framework for green economics. [Milani]

Since then the global crisis has become more apparent and we have seen the development of a much broader engagement in climate justice organizing. Judging from the wide-ranging responses we received to our call for submissions, a movement is emerging.

Imagine waking up on December 1, 1999, and learning about the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the first time by watching it fall apart. The catalyst? An internationalist “inside-outside” strategy that leveraged people power on the outside to provide political space inside for the Global South and civil society organizations. (A note on the WTO.)

The potential for such a political moment is once again upon us, exactly 10 years after the collapse of the WTO in Seattle, Wash. This time, it’s the 15th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark on December 7, 2009, for 12 days to forge a climate policy that will succeed the initial commitments set by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The goal is to substantially reduce atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses while addressing the consequences of climate disruption already underway. Global warming has already disproportionately impacted the small island states, coastal peoples, indigenous peoples, and the poor throughout the world, particularly in Africa.

As the national journal for social and environmental justice, RP&E aims to provide information and analysis that will strengthen our efforts to win real solutions to the climate crisis—alternatives that will lead to social equity as well as equilibrium between humans and the natural world. RP&E’s online climate justice portal presents research, case studies and “Voices of Climate Change” from across the country. These grassroots perspectives reveal the ways that local organizing against economic, social and gender inequality feed a global movement for climate justice that can challenge the dominant economic order.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference(COP 15) will be held in Copenhagen, December 7-18.

The following speakers and writers are available for press interviews. Some will be on the ground in Copenhagen. Please note that Copenhagen is nine hours ahead of the West Coast of the U.S., so if it is 9 a.m. in Oakland, it will be 6 p.m. in Copenhagen.

By Noam Chomsky

Last June, a group of MIT scientists released the results of what they describe as the most comprehensive modeling of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century. It shows that “without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated” a couple of years ago. It could be even worse than that because their model does not fully incorporate positive feedbacks that can occur, such as the melting of permafrost in the Arctic regions caused by the increased temperature. It will release huge amounts of methane, which is worse than carbon dioxide. 

“There’s no way the world can or should take these risks,” says the lead scientist on the project. “The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies.”

At present there’s very little sign of that happening. Furthermore, while new technologies are essential, the problems go well beyond that. In fact, they go beyond the current technical debates in Congress about how to work out cap-and-trade devices. We have to face something more far-reaching—the need to reverse the huge state-corporate and social engineering projects of the post-Second World War period, which very consciously promoted an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil fuel economy.

By Daphne Wysham

Earlier this year, the United States House of Representatives passed the first major legislation aimed at addressing climate change—the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). Informally known as the Waxman-Markey bill—after Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA)—the bill faces an uncertain future in the United States Senate. But one thing that is all too likely: the aspects of the bill that address the needs of low-income workers, people of color, and indigenous peoples will be shortchanged.

As currently written, ACES will:

•  Not protect the poor from price-hikes as the price of carbon gets internalized into our energy bills;
•  Protect polluting industries by granting them free pollution permits;
•  Encourage the creation of a huge carbon derivatives market leading to fraud, shell games, and an unprecedented carbon market “bubble” with dire economic consequences for all Americans;
• Make a mockery of our common understanding of "renewable energy" by favoring dirty smokestacks over truly clean, renewable energy;
• Strip the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from all power plants, including coal burners, under the Clean Air Act.

By Movement Generation

Oil is the life-blood of globalization. Along with its sister coal, it has made industrial capitalism hum at a feverish pace for the past 200 years. Globalization is the force that is pushing our ecological and economic systems to the brink. Should we choose to stay the current course, the planet’s health will face some serious and catastrophic tipping points.

The most common face of the crisis is climate chaos, but this is only one of several interconnected and mutually reinforcing problems: Toxic waste poisons our land, air, and water; a shortage of fresh water has left growing numbers of humanity without access to clean potable water; a food and agriculture crisis has resulted from land being industrially consumed and depleted to produce export crops; biological and cultural diversity are facing extraordinary rates of extinction; and indigenous communities are facing cultural and physical genocide. It’s apparent that our addiction to fossil fuels and a fixation on market-based ‘economic growth’ have placed the planet’s life-systems in a precarious situation.

By Clifton Ross

It may seem hard to believe that the process that brought the head of lettuce to your salad—and all the other delicious components of your organic meal, like the baked potato and the grilled free-range chicken breast—are all a major cause of climate change. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, “Approximately one-third of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by agriculture and land-use changes, with 18 percent of the overall total coming from livestock alone.”[1] While organic, free-range, or better yet, vegetarian diets are steps in the right direction, the steps are still circumscribed by a system that guarantees climate change, even in its “greenest” sectors.

Part of the problem is the amount of energy (inputs) required by standard agriculture to produce the world’s food: in the United States 7.3 calories of energy go into delivering one calorie of food.[2] From the tractors that break the ground for planting, then return to do the planting and harvesting, to the transport and processing, to the further transport to the supermarket, and all the way to your drive to make the purchase (unless you bicycle and cut a calorie or two off the process), energy is used and carbon produced.

By Al Weinrub

In the wake of the recent debate over national climate legislation and the disastrous outcome of the House Bill, 380 different organizations sent a letter to California Senator Barbara Boxer, head of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, urging her to draft a Senate bill “that provides the transformational change and greenhouse emissions reductions required to avert catastrophic climate impacts.”[1] But the efforts of these organizations to argue for meaningful legislation have for the most part been ignored.

By Wade Crowfoot

The frightening consequences of climate change are becoming increasingly familiar to Americans: rising sea levels, severe and unpredictable weather, frequent storms and droughts, and less reliable water supplies. Less familiar, perhaps, is the scale of the impact of climate change on poorer communities, typically located in environmentally sensitive areas, but with fewer resources to adapt to the changing conditions. If you can imagine a series of Hurricane Katrinas occurring in slow motion among poor communities across America, you get the picture.