IT’S Now or Never: Dismantle the Present Extractive-Industrial-Capitalist System –
Before It Destabilises All Earth Systems and Create a Climate Catastrophe
Soumya Dutta
Earth’s alarm bells are ringing loud and clear, but the worlds rich and powerful are trying hard to divert our attention from the root cause of the problems and create illusions of solutions within the problem-systems. Right at this moment, there is an unprecedented heat wave going on in large parts of China, along with a massive drought. The powerful and rich Chinese government, with large hordes of dollar reserves and world’s largest techno-industrial capacity, is struggling to assure water supply to cities, industries and water guzzling thermal and nuclear power plants. At the same time, Pakistan is facing a “Monster Monsoon” which has put nearly 30% of the country under water, killed well over a 1000 people and displaced or affected over 30 million. The already weakened Pakistan government is near collapse and is seeking desperate support for ‘international community’. Large parts of India faced an unprecedented Six (6) heat waves during this (2022) March-May, resulting in widespread crop losses for the second most important cropping season – Rabi. This caused a large drop in expected wheat production, forcing the Indian government to ban wheat exports, which in turn caused food-distresses in several countries dependent of Indian wheat imports. In the last four (4) years, both of India’s coasts – of the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, have been hit by large and powerful cyclones every year, again unprecedented in the last 100 years of recorded history. Europe is still not out of the severe impacts of a widespread heat-wave, drought and massive wildfires, which forced even some highly ‘techno-industrial’ countries like France to seek foreign assistance to douse the massive fires. The US west faced a “1000 year drought” till last year, with temperature records broken in dozens of recording stations. Places in normally frozen Alaska reached 30 C temperatures. The Greenland Ice-sheet is now melting away (excess melt over fresh snow deposition) at around Six times the rate it used to a few decades ago, cooling off the extreme northern reaches of the North Atlantic. This in turn is raising sea levels worldwide, and has already disturbed the world’s largest heat distributor, the great Ocean Currents, or AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). This in turn is letting the high Equatorial heat to build up in areas over equatorial countries, contributing to heat-waves and droughts and fires. The world’s largest Ice store, the Antarctic is also melting away much faster and is regularly “calving” (huge islands of Ice breaking off and eventually melting away) huge Icebergs the size of large cities. Rising sea levels is forcing the Indonesian government to relocate its capital Jakarta, with nearly 30 million people, to a higher inland place over a 1000 Kms away. The world’s largest forests, the northern Boreal Forests are dying out under a variety of climate derived attacks, including the pine borer beetle, which is taking advantage of warmer temperatures to reproduce much more. As per some Brazilian studies, parts of the Amazon rain forests, often called the lungs of the Earth, has already become a net CO2 emitter, rather than soaking in the greenhouse gas. The World’s Oceans have been forced to absorb much higher amounts of Carbon Dioxide CO2, and have become almost 30%more acidic than they were before 40 years. This is resulting in large scale impacts on trillions and quadrillions of shell forming life in the Oceans, disrupting the marine web of life. The IPBES report four (4) years ago brought out the scary report that nearly One-Million species are facing ‘imminent’ extinction around the world, with a large part of them being insects. If one realizes that insects are the primary pollinators of our fruits and vegetables, an imminent food crisis can’t be wished away. The vast permafrost areas and the shallow Arctic Sea beds have started releasing vast quantities of Methane, a Green House Gas nearly 87 times more powerful (for warming the Earth) than Carbon Dioxide in the short term. This is the dreaded “Methane Bomb” scientists were afraid off being triggered, as these Permafrost or Permanently Frozen soil hold a vast quantity of carbon than exceeds the total atmospheric carbon content, and if released, will result in fast temperature rise across the globe. Severe cyclonic storms have increased in both numbers and strength in the Gulf of Mexico, in the eastern Pacific and in North Indian Ocean, devastating hundreds of millions of people’s lives. In 2019020, Australia faced a super-mega scale bush-fire the likes of which was never seen before by humans, and which put over 700 million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, mocking all the economic and technological capabilities of one of the richest countries that failed to douse the fires before Nature intervened with rains. The global Coral reefs, which – despite occupying only about 2% of the oceans, are home to nearly 25% of marine biodiversity, are facing extinction, with nearly 40% of coral reefs already bleached and dead, with devastating consequences for fish and other marine life The scary event list can go on and on and on. The global Extractive-Industrial-Capitalist social-economic system is threatening to break the nine (9) Planetary Boundaries and there are ample hard scientific evidence that the Earth’s natural control systems are under tremendous pressure and some are at breaking points.
All of you might have noticed the recent release of the three Working Group reports of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) sixth Assessment report cycle (AR-6), starting August 2021 for the WG-I report (The Physical Science Basis – of Climate Change), then the WG-II report (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) in February 2022, and finally the WG-3 report (Mitigation of Climate Change). After the release of the WG-I report, the UN secretary general again sounded the alarm – like many climate scientists have been doing for some time, and called this a “Code Red for Humanity”. After the release of the 3rd of the series, WG-III report, global scientific community and many others – including sensible media, have told what the IPCC has indicated – “IT’s NOW OR NEVER”. One has to remember that the IPCC is no radical group of “communist-scientists”. It’s not even a free association of top scientists (though top climate scientists, economists, social scientists (for the AR-6) and other experts work for the reports). It is an inter-governmental body created by the UN, and is fairly conservative. Only those scientific conclusions pass through its final editing, on which there are high degree of certainty and which withstand very rigorous checks. The high pitched alarms and final warnings coming from such a conservative body, indicate that the Earth is very near a collapse of its life-support systems. These have forced even the UN secretary General to voice warnings like “We are Sleep-walking in to a disaster”, or “Climate change is running faster than we are, and we are running out of time”.
The large scale climate driven disasters (or Climate extreme events) have increased sharply, with India facing big cyclones on both Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea coast every year now – a phenomenon not seen for at least the last 80-90 years. This has put – not only the 12 million plus coastal fish-workers, but also over 200 million coastal residents (who reside within 5 KMs of the coastline) in to grave dangers of loss of lives, of property, of loss of livelihoods. Normally dry areas in central and western India have faced massive rainfalls and widespread flooding. Kerala is now facing devastating floods almost every year. Exceptional hot periods are draining the soil of moisture affecting crop yields drastically. As a result (combined with other causes), over 29% of India’s total land mass is facing desertification, as shown in the large scale studies by Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO. Many small rivers have either dried up or in the process of drying up – affecting not only the hundreds of millions who get their drinking and irrigation water from these, but also over 11-12 million inland fishers. People from many states are facing crippling water shortages, with about 200 districts becoming water scarce during summer months. Crops are being affected badly by either untimely heat, or hail damages, or massive losses from flooding. The Urban poor / working class are badly suffering from increasing impacts of Heat waves and Heat Index (a combination of high temperature and high humidity), which is a killer impact, along with much more frequent Urban flooding and ‘basti-fires’. Continuously rising sea levels are already forcing million of people from their homes and farms, and by all studies, these numbers will rise even faster. The list goes on and is increasing.
In the face of these loud warnings of Earth-wide catastrophic changes, the governments, businesses and agenda-setting global financial institutions have only mouthed empty rhetoric to fool the people, while continuing to pursue their fossil fuel based profit pursuit. In the highly hyped Paris Climate summit in 2015 November, almost every government and attending mega businesses agreed to drastically reduce their GHG emissions at a fast pace, and to transition to no-carbon economies by 2050. Yet after the Agreement was signed in November 2015, global total Green House Gas emissions have risen every year from 2016 to 2019, reaching a high of 37.6 Giga tons of CO2, only falling 5.8% in 2020, but Not due to any directed action, but for the world-wide economic shutdown due to the COVID pandemic. And in 2021, the emissions took a sharp upward turn again ! Almost every government is pushing for increasing the production of some or the other fossil fuels – Coal for “developing” countries like China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh,……… And Oil and Natural gas for the richer “developed” / highly industrialised (OECD+) economies. After the Russia-Ukraine war disrupted the Russian gas supply to Europe, many European countries have started pushing up their coal production and restarted many moth-balled coal power plants, completely in conflict with the urgent need and their promises to shut these down. The big global financial institutions (IFIs, MDBs, BDBs,….) have pumped in over US dollar Five Trillion (well over 1.5 times India’s entire current GDP) in to fossil fuel businesses, in just five years from 2016-2020, after announcing their great intentions to “tackle climate change” ! The G20 economies (group of countries with the world’s 20 biggest economies), who account for over 80% of global emissions and nearly 90% of global trade, and also have the biggest financial and technological capacities, have actually increased their collective emissions significantly.
To realise the present stagnation and impasse over Systemic Climate Governance Actions, one needs to look back a little to the history of international climate governance. Though the clear link between higher Green House Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere – resulting primarily from the burning of fossil fuels (Coal, Oil or Petroleum products and natural gas) – and higher average temperatures on Earth, were known for well over a century, the 1972 “UN Conference on Human Environment” in Stockholm was probably the first instant where global political leaders collectively agreed that this is a Political-Economic problem, and not just an environmental” problem, and needs to be tackled with global political-economic change. But the categorisation of the problem and its root cause was still not clearly acknowledged to be the extractive-industrial-capitalist political-economy. Instead, “poverty” was identified as the “biggest polluter”, disregarding the scientific truth that the poor causes the least amount of pollution through their minimal consumption, and it’s the wealth that created the maximum pollution by consumption! Though the 1972 ‘Club of Rome’ report – “The Limits to Growth”, the 1987 ‘Brundtland commission’ report – “Our Common Future : Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development”, and more had already shown that the over exploitation of the earth’s limited resources and the over pollution of its ecosystems is the root cause, and the Extractive-Industrial-Capitalist political Economy of never ending Economic Growth (to drive ever increasing production and profits) is the driving factor of this destruction.
It took all of 20 years from this realisation to the “landmark Rio Earth Summit” in 1992, for the world’s governments to collectively agree on some frameworks to act politically on the interrelated emerging ecological crises of “Climate Change”, Biodiversity loss and species extinction and fast spreading desertification around the world. As a result, the Rio Earth Summit gave birth to the three Global Ecological Compacts – UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), UNCBD (UN Convention of Biological Diversity) and the UNCCD (UN Convention for Combating Desertification) – all in 1992. One has also to take note of the political juncture at which these events are taking place. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to an euphoria in the capitalist world that the “alternative pathway” of socialist development has been “shown to be incapable of tackling human societal challenges” (though the role of the western capitalist system in this collapse was not brought out). This is despite the fact that even the “Soviet model” of development went on the same path of indiscriminate extraction-industrialisation-waste-dumping from/on Nature, differing only in the ‘control of means of production’ and distributive justice. The fall of the “socialist political alternative” gave rise to the narrative of “end of History”, and from now on, it’s only the capitalist model that will show the world how and where to go! It’s in this background of TINPA (there is no political-economic alternative) that the Rio Earth Summit was held, and it is then no surprise that the “sustainable development” solutions will be visualised within the same political economy.
Right from the birth of UNFCCC in 1992, the recognition of the climate crisis as a major global challenge was there, but policies and actions lagged far behind. Five years after this, in 1997, the country governments party to the UNFCCC, agreed on a very modest policy on actions to climate change, in what is called the ”Kyoto Protocol”. Though modest in its ambitions to reduce the Greenhouse gas emissions from main industrialised countries (between 5 and 8%, from their 1990 levels), it had few important global climate policy and governance principles. One was the key issue of acceptance of the “Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capacities or CBDR & RC”. This meant that all countries agreed that those who have historically emitted far more greenhouse gases (which are primarily responsible for the global warming driving climate crisis), have More Responsibilities than other countries who have not thus contributed significantly to the global atmospheric GHG load, though every country have some responsibility. Along with that, the RC part acknowledged that since it is the same high emitter countries who have amassed wealth, technology and infrastructure at a much higher level, by using the GHG emitting fossil fuels, they have more capacity – financially and technologically, to respond and thus have to do much more to tackle the climate crisis, not only in their own territories, but also to help other, poorer (less capacity) countries, both financially and technologically. These ‘obligations’ of developed or industrialised rich countries to the poorer developing countries have caused lots of debates in the following UN Climate negotiations and also in international discussions of obligations of rich countries for Climate Finance — in the Green Climate Fund GCF, in ODAs etc.
Second important policy was the acceptance that the science will determine how much mitigation (reducing emissions of global warming GHGs) is needed by which time, though the schedule of reduction was far from what was dictated by science. This reduction was initially agreed upon in the First commitment period, from 2008—2012, to be later extended to the second commitment period with enhanced reduction targets. The noteworthy point is that the Kyoto protocol was, in a way, a legally binding agreement, though there was no provision of penalising any country in case of non-compliance (which were many). Also, the four pillars of Climate Action were accepted to be the Mitigation (reducing GHG emissions), Adaptation (helping nations, communities to adapt to the climate change impacts), Technology Transfer (providing technology free of Intellectual Property Rights, to poorer nations, to tackle their low carbon development needs) and Finance (rich and historically high emitter nations commitment to give money – mostly grants from public sources, to poorer nations). Much later, a fifth aspect, that of Loss and damage (the acceptance that in spite of adaptation measures, massive climate triggered losses are happening and poorer countries should be helped to manage these, as they have low capacity).
Another important aspect, an aberration in some views, was that under US threat of not signing the KP, a “flexible mechanism” meaning mostly a (capitalist) Market based mechanism, was introduced in the mitigation mechanisms. This gave rise to the Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Trading mechanism called the “Clean Development Mechanism” etc. Thus, the actual reduction of GHG emissions where it is being emitted, was replaced by the complex and hard to verify carbon emission trading (through Certified Emissions Reductions or CER), which later became the dominant operational method, leading to all kinds of problems, and actual rise in emissions globally (emissions post Kyoto rose both in developed and developing countries). The KP ‘came into force’ in 2005, and was supposed to be upgraded and replaced by a much stronger agreement later.
As part of these policies, two tracks were established under the UNFCCC – the Technology Mechanism and the Finance Mechanism, for implementation. For the Technology Mechanism, two bodies came into being – Technology Executive Committee (TEC) and Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN), for carrying on the work. On the Finance front, Green Climate Fund was created to support developing / poor countries with no interest/ low interest climate finance, to the tune of US Dollar 100 billion per year (which, though sounds a lot, was less than one-sixth of the World Bank estimate at the time, on minimum annual support needed to tackle CC).
What transpired from 2009 in the Copenhagen climate summit (CoP-15 of UNFCCC) and in the next year in Cancun (CoP-16), was a near complete negation of the accepted principles, that science will dictate the mitigation targets and CBDR & RC will be the guiding principle. From 2010 in Cancun, a new “Pledge and Review” global climate governance was pushed for, meaning each country will do (or reduce or take climate action) as per their own decisions, NOT as needed to avert a climate catastrophe based on science. Simultaneously, the rich countries started pushing for the so-called “emerging economies”, like China, India, Brazil, Mexico………. To take more responsibilities, as they are now emitting more and also has better financial capacities. Thus, the two key aspects of Kyoto protocol, Science based determination of mitigation targets and CBDR&RC, were effectively nullified, though still kept in the texts of the UNFCCC negotiations. On the critical Finance part, the concept that the rich countries will provide at least a $100 billion each year in mostly grants to poorer countries, has also changed drastically. After the “Fast Start Climate Finance” of about USD 30 billion from 2010—2012, the GCF is struggling to raise money. The GEF (Global Environment Facility, another climate finance provider under UNFCCC) is a much smaller player. Even the GCF is talking about part loans part grant, of Private finance being leveraged, of complex mechanisms of accounting…. Meaning that those basic commitments are no longer sacrosanct!
Coming to the ‘present’, the currently active global climate governance principles and structure is determined by the Paris Agreement, which again, is totally based on Pledge and review system (meaning Governments are working on the principle of – “we will do as we like, but allow checking compliance with that pledge”). Each country was told to, and submitted their so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as required under the Article 4 para 12 of the Paris Agreement (PA). The NDCs include both mitigation and adaptation, though developed country NDCs are mostly mitigation, and poorer (LDCs, island nations) country NDCs are largely adaptation, with middle economies planning both. Almost all of these NDCs are way below the bare minimum required for preventing climate catastrophe, and some analysis shows that even if all pledges in NDCs are fulfilled, the global average annual temperature will rise from 3.2 to 3.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures by the year 2100, and the Redlines of 1.5C and 2.0C will likely be breached by 2030-2040 and 2050-2060. Already, the global annual average have increased over 1 C, and the average over northern hemispheric landmass (where a large majority of humanity lives) has almost touched 1.4 C (average) over pre-industrial. These are scary scenarios, but the earliest review of the PA pledges is scheduled in 2020, before and during the UNFCCC CoP-25 in Chile, and every passing year is proving that the Climate Crisis is spreading faster than predicted. Though the UN Secretary General has invited all government leaders to the one-day Climate summit in UN HQ in New York on Sept.23, 2019, and asked them to “come with concrete plans” to do much more, not with speeches, there are hardly any sign that governments are preparing to drastically shift away from a fossil-fuel driven, continuous GDP growth oriented economy. Despite the significant progress a few countries made in installing solar and wind power and some coal power plant shutdowns, GHG emissions have started rising again, after three years of stagnation (stagnant from 2014-2016, but rose in 2018 at highest rate in 7 years), and GHG spewing fossil fuels still provide about 80% of global primary energy supply.
In 2021, the critical Glasgow climate summit was acknowledged to be the (almost) last chance for a globally agreed turn-around from massive extraction-production-growth-emissions, and towards a low emission, ‘zero-carbon’ global economy. The same-year accepted (in September 2015) Sustainable Development Goals accepted the principles of “Leaving No One Behind”, and a zero-hunger, No-Poverty, Water & education for all, decent jobs / income for everyone, restoring Oceans and land to health, ……and it was universally accepted that without stopping the catastrophic turn to Climate Chaos, none of this can be achieved. Yet, just before coming to attend the Glasgow CoP-26 (the 26th Conference of Parties), US president Joe Biden was negotiating hard with OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to increase their oil and gas productions, so that US drivers of big SUVs can enjoy low cost Gas (petrol) to merrily drive around to destruction of the Earths life support systems. The Prime minister of the CoP-26 host country, Boris Johnson, was pushing hard to open a massive new oil drilling operation in Combo. The head of government of the most populated country in the world, China (the biggest emitter / polluter by far) increased their coal based power, though taking some action to control the severe air pollution. India (third largest emitter behind China and USA, but much lower down the rank in per capita emission), is opening up multiple new large coal mines, privatised coal mining for profit and pushing ahead for new coal based power plants, despite over capacity and critical levels of air pollution all over the country, killing over 12 lakh Indians each year. The president of the largest economy of Latin America, Brazil, is merrily burning millions of acres of Amazon forests each year, to increase grazing grounds for beef exports, and open fields for soybean etc. Other large economies like Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa…..all followed in the same mould.
Thus it is very clear now that the global Extractive-industrial-capitalist systems WILL NOT abandon their pursuit of more extraction—more production-more profits—more waste dumping, as that is at the core of its very survival. Even though there are a large no of indications and catastrophic events that shows that the Earth-systems are about to collapse. The massive impacts on the Earth-systems are only intended to be ‘softened’ a little with palliatives like Efficiency Increase, the “Circular Economy”, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” etc. With this perspective, and keeping in mind the dire warnings of the IPCC, IPBES, WMO, reports, the urgency called for by the WG-1 report, which paints a grim picture of the physical state of the climate systems, and the WG-2 report that show an equally dangerous scenario of impacts, vulnerabilities etc., the WG-3 report on mitigation sounds another clear and loud alarm — that global aggregate emissions of GHGs must peak by 2025 (less than a mere 4 years’ time) and then rapidly decline by 50% in the next 5 years (the “NOW” part of “now or never”), if there has to be some possibilities of avoiding 1.5°C temperature rise (from pre-industrial average) and catastrophic climate change. It’s another matter that some of the IPCC forecasts have been overshot by actual changes in the Earth Systems, and some scientific assessments show that we are now committed to crossing 1.5°C rise in the next decade. This is Not Like other localised or short term problems. Once the Earth passes a critical temperature rise – be it 2 C or 1.7 C or something round that (no certainty about what temperature rise will finally trigger the Tipping Points, but approximate figures are around 2 C), there is a danger that the “Feedback Mechanisms” will take us in to a Runaway Climate Change situation, and we will race towards a “Hot-house Earth” scenario, may be for centuries to come. Human civilization as we know it, will likely cease to exist, with only the elite creating highly protected safe havens for themselves. Hundreds of millions might die and billions will suffer badly. It’s also clear that governments, businesses and industry have consistently refused to take necessary climate actions, that they used only rhetoric to deceive the people at large, and that they are pursuing a largely fossil fuel driven “COVID recovery” of the economies.
In these circumstances, it’s only large scale people’s uprisings that can hope to force a change of course, but that is far easier said than done. The “ordinary people” are kept in darkness about the grim situation all of us are facing. They are also faced with multiple challenges in their daily lives, of earning enough to feed their families, of escaping death and severe diseases due to non-availability of basic health care, of struggles to get the basic water and energy supplies. It is a challenge that we must accept, to make these connections clear to people on the ground, to mobilize them for acting as organised collectives, for better scientific and political understanding and action.
It’s a matter of encouragement that over the past few years, an increasing number of youth and children’s collectives in many countries are becoming more militant in demanding climate action and climate justice. In climate marches called by numerous small groups, over 3-5 lakh people are turning up – in countries like USA, and those of European Union. In UK, the Extinction Rebellion is taking non-violent militant actions to both demand action from the government and stop the economic wheels of this extractive-exploitative economies. In Europe and Latin America, the de-growth movement is gaining grounds. During the CoP-26 in Glasgow, the people’s Climate March attracted the spontaneous participation of over 120,000 protesting people, despite that being a cold, rainy and windy day. The challenges are greater in the countries of the south, where people are kept debilitating occupied for the basic survival needs, leaving little energy for deeper engagements. But history shows that when the push become shove, and if enlightened political guidance is present, people have risen up to the challenges and changed the course history. And as it becomes clearer that we have No Other Option but to Dismantle this currently global Extractive-Industrial-Capitalist system and replace it with a Nature-determined and respecting, equitable (in the sense of all humans, in the sense of all future generations and in the sense of all species of life on Earth), just Political-Economic-Social system, across the world. It’s the final call to action for all of us. That is the challenge we have to rise up to.
