10-Point Platform On Climate Change.
10-Point Platform on Climate Change
From time to time, A2 members ask where A2 stands on issues of particular interest to them. For example: “What’s your position on nuclear power?” “How do you feel about carbon capture and storage?” “How does racial justice intersect with climate change?”
These are all good questions. So, we decided to assemble our answers in a succinct document. Following the list of things we favor is a list of ten things we oppose!
A2 Supports:
1. A phased-in prohibition of the extraction, refinement, sale, and use of fossil fuels.
From its inception in the early 19th Century, fossil-fuel-based capitalism destroyed vast swaths of forests, meadows, rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Today, smog and smoke from oil, natural gas, and coal kill at least 200,000 people per year in the U.S. from heart disease, cancer, emphysema, and asthma. Because of global warming, fossil capital will become genocidal, destroying whole national populations from flooding, heat, drought, and hunger. In fact, its brutal impacts are already apparent nearly everywhere.
Technology for a transition to non-carbon-based renewable energy already exists. What’s required is the political will to strand the assets of the fossil fuel companies — keeping coal, oil, and gas in the ground. The ethics are clear: The oil companies have already earned trillions in profits by externalizing the costs (environmental and human) of hydrocarbon extraction — more than $2 trillion in profits since 1990 alone. Now these companies must forgo further enrichment from fossil fuels for the sake of the survival of present and future generations.
2. Abundant, cheap, clean energy: The provision of regional, local, and hyperlocal supplies derived from photovoltaic (solar), wind, wave, geothermal, and other low-cost, clean, and renewable sources.
Until recently, publicly owned electric utilities were the rule. Today, investor-owned utilities dominate the market for energy; that must change if the transition to renewable energy is to be accomplished. Electricity is too important to be left to the electric companies; its production and distribution should be controlled by governments, community-based organizations, and local, regional, or national cooperatives.
We don’t need a vastly expanded, expensive, and environmentally destructive electricity grid, or wind turbines off every coast. Rooftop solar energy with battery storage, small solar farms, geothermal, and neighborhood-based wind turbines can satisfy energy needs in most parts of the country. Whenever possible, small-scale distributed energy systems (microgrids) should replace big ones. Where that’s impossible, for example, where sunlight and wind is limited, a regional power grid will suffice. To keep renewables clean, the minerals and metals needed for their manufacture should, to the maximum extent, be derived from recycled materials.
3. Energy savings! Energy efficiency and energy conservation are essential steps in the transition to a sustainable energy regime.
Greater energy efficiency in homes and businesses is among the best ways to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s easy, and with government support, affordable: insulating homes, driving electric cars, and buying energy-star household appliances will save money and reduce energy use. But efficiency gains are self-limiting because buying new, energy-stingy stuff expends a great deal of energy in manufacture. Also, if your house is better insulated, you tend to turn up the heat, consuming the same amount of fuel as before. This phenomenon is called “Jevon’s Paradox.”
That’s why energy conservation (reducing demand) is even more important than efficiency; it results in permanent cuts in energy use. Effective conservation will require more use of public transit (using renewable energy), fewer airplane flights, a steep carbon tax (with rebates to low-income individuals), and lower levels of consumption. It will also require big cuts in the U.S. military, currently the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Conservation is more politically difficult than efficiency because it brushes against the grain of a political-economy orthodoxy that encourages growth.
But the masses of people impacted by climate change – essentially everyone on the planet — need to remember that the economy exists to support them, not the other way around. A constantly rising GDP (gross domestic product) is no longer a valid measure of public well-being. In any case, there are easy ways to reduce growth without limiting comfort. For example, limit by law the manufacture or use of climate-hazardous goods, like cryptocurrency and single-use paper and plastics; tax long-haul air flights, cruises, and carbon-dense products, such as steel and cement, and rebate the money to the people who need it most. Instead of subsidizing oil extraction and resulting products, support human services and activities like child-rearing, housekeeping, poetry, art, music, hiking, swimming, and other forms of cultural expression or play.
4. A smaller U.S. and global economy. Our material surroundings should be filled with joy, not junk.
China uses 25% more energy than the U.S. and produces twice as much CO2 as the U.S. But it has four times the population. So, we are still the world’s champion user of energy, the world’s leading polluter, and the world’s largest consumer.
As noted above, we need to reduce our energy use – that means making and using fewer things. In his Special Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein proved that mass (or matter) and energy are the same (E=mc2). Energy conservation can be achieved by reducing manufacturing. We really don’t have much of a choice in the matter – nature imposes limits.
The United States exceeds its biocapacity (the ability of a nation to provide for itself) by more than 150%. Therefore, to meet demand (driven by corporate advertising), we must either plunder our own ecological assets, or else steal somebody else’s. Either way, our current productive model is not sustainable. An ecologically sustainable civilization can be made by “de-growth,” or simply “conservatism” in its original sense: “the tendency to resist great or sudden change.” There’s nothing more disruptive than global warming!
5. Carbon storage. Not pumped into caves or underground tanks (expensive, impractical, and leaky), but naturally contained in soils, forests, mangrove swamps, tidal marshes, seagrass meadows, and sea mammals.
Soils are significant carbon sinks; however, poor farming practices return carbon and nitrogen dioxide (a potent greenhouse gas) to the atmosphere. Conservation Agriculture could protect carbon sequestered in the soil while reducing the use of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, themselves significant sources of global greenhouse gases.
Protection of existing forests, replanting forests where they have been cut down, and planting new forests where they currently don’t exist (afforestation) can increase the absorption of planet-warming CO2. Old-growth forests are important carbon stores and deserve global protection. Logging, thinning, or burning our forests to save them from fires generally makes no sense.
Wetlands, marshes, lakes, and seas are also essential carbon sinks. Even whales, which are majestic and intelligent in life, are valuable as carbon sinks after death. When the largest whales die, their bodies fall to the ocean floor and remain there for centuries, sequestering an average of 33 tons of CO2 per animal. Whale waste is also valuable, encouraging the growth of ocean phytoplankton, which sequesters CO2.
6. Supporting a plant-based food system. Agriculture can be a carbon sink instead of a huge carbon and methane emitter.
Animal agriculture is responsible for about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and a high percentage of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Any plausible scenario for limiting global warming to 1.5 -2 °C must include reform of our wasteful and unhealthy food system, especially its emphasis on the consumption of animals. Veganism isn’t only good for protecting animals; it’s good for the earth.
As a whole, food systems are responsible for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, there are many ways to reduce this number and to make food systems sustainable. Agriculture can even become a means for carbon sequestration.
7. A national plan for managing The Great Climate Migration: The likely resettlement of some 30 million Americans over the next 50 years due to climate change.
It’s already the case that hundreds of thousands of Americans experience extreme heat, floods, and fires due to climate change. Black, Latino, and Native American communities in the U.S. are more likely than white ones to experience these climate-exacerbated disasters, but less likely to receive government support for recovery. Many have been forced to migrate from their homes and communities, and the numbers will grow exponentially in the coming decades. They must be first in line for government support.
Climate migrants are not, however, exclusively people of color. Anyone who lives in a floodplain (or near one), on the coast, or in a region impacted by high heat and wildfires is liable to become a migrant. A2 supports state and national plans for a fair and effective disaster relocation system. Even if we manage to halt production of fossil fuels tomorrow, climate change is baked into our climate forecast for centuries to come, and we’ll need a broad plan to manage the displacement of people and communities.
8. The preservation of nature and the protection of animals.
By nature, we mean which earth systems (geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere), formerly outside human control. Until about 10,000 years ago, human cultures were nature-friendly – they took what they needed and little more. Even now, amid a capitalist society that disavows its debt to nature, there are Indigenous communities in the U.S. as well as families and individuals who hold in their hearts a deeply felt sense of love, protection, and awe for non-human nature.
Human-caused climate change, however, has melted glaciers and ice caps and killed or threatened the animals that depend upon them. It has burned forests with thousand-year-old trees, destroyed coral and other oceanic ecosystems, decimated insect and bird populations, and initiated a mass extinction event that, if unchecked, may rival the one that occurred during the Permian-Triassic period, when over 90% of species disappeared. Any sound climate protection policy must aim to protect nature.
The environmental and climate justice movement has paid too little attention to securing rights for non-human animals. And when animals are considered by them, it’s mostly at the species level. Though they belong to a species, animals are still individuals, and the latter need protection just as much as the former. Indeed, they require greater protection because while a species doesn’t suffer or experience pain, loss, anguish, or fear, an individual animal does.
What that means is that A2 won’t pursue any policy initiative or promote any program, remediation, or mitigation that would harm or endanger animals. Rather, we seek solutions to climate-exacerbated floods, fires, heat, and drought that will support nonhuman as well as human animals and allow everyone to live in safety and comfort.
9. Frontline communities.
Frontline communities, and especially ones that are predominantly Black, Latino, and Indigenous, have experienced the greatest climate impacts and therefore possess the greatest first-hand experience about how to deal with them. They are subject-matter experts. That’s why we believe so strongly in community-science, a process whereby community members and researchers come together to share their experience and insights and come up with solutions. In that scenario, scientists don’t impose their research projects top-down; nor do community residents make assertions without first gaining a detailed understanding about the benefits and risks of a potential action.
Wherever possible, federal, state, and local authorities should provide communities with the resources and expertise needed for survivors to understand climate-exacerbated disasters and identify the best possible solutions for mitigation.
10. “Non-reformist reform” or structural change.
We endorse what has been called, after the Swiss activist and philosopher, Andre Gorz, “non-reformist” reform: changes in environmental regulation, economic development, and social practice that both alleviate immediate suffering and promote more profound, or structural change. Building a new sea wall to protect part of a city from tidal surges may appear to be a sound investment. But the vast sums of money required could have been used to rebuild naturally occurring barrier islands and restore forests or wetlands. The former is reform; the latter is non-reformist reform.
Carbon capture and storage, as well as geoengineering, may (or may not) reduce global warming for a period of time, but by allowing the continued emission of greenhouse gases, they ensure a bigger crisis later. A better, non-reformist reform would be the prohibition of the production and sale of fossil fuels and their substitution by renewables. Helping a community migrate from a climate-threatened area is a reform. Non-reformist reform would be ensuring that evacuated lands become essential green infrastructure (wetlands, forests, or meadows) that then become part of a wider network of natural carbon sinks that reduce global warming.
The idea here is that the best climate solutions should both reduce suffering in the short term and reduce the possibility of more suffering in the long term. If an action empowers or emboldens those who are responsible for an irresponsible climate policy — even if it offers short-term benefits — it should be rejected. If it promotes structural change that enhances ecosystem protection, it should be embraced.
Here’s what we’re AGAINST:
1. Direct air carbon capture and carbon capture and storage – an experimental technology that is expensive, energy-intensive, and likely to fail.
2. Geo-engineering to reduce global warming. It’s impractical, dangerous, and a subterfuge to allow the petrochemical industry to continue business as usual.
3. Natural gas (aka methane) as a “bridge” fuel. There is nothing “natural” about burning methane gas. It increases global warming.
4. Nuclear power plants. Their manufacture burns vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Their operation is uneconomical, and their wastes endanger future life on Earth.
5. Cap and trade policies. These are ruses to allow low-carbon businesses to profit from high-carbon ones. They have little impact on overall carbon emissions.
6. Hydropower (new dams). These release surprisingly large amounts of greenhouse gases and are both expensive and environmentally destructive.
7. So-called “renewable” biofuels with carbon storage. They are not really carbon neutral and may devastate global agriculture and water reserves.
8. More efficient cows, for example, fed with seaweed. No matter how much seaweed cows are fed, the dairy industry will still be a big emitter of greenhouse gases.
9. Carbon offsets by planting trees. This is currently a scam. There is no effective system to ensure that the offsets (if they are even created) are maintained or protected.
10. “De-coupling” economic growth from carbon growth. It’s a nice idea. In practice, it just means exporting carbon-based production from rich countries to poor ones.