A Global Green New Deal
What do we need to know to make this approach work for all?
Hi all,
As I have pointed out in a few issues previous, “help[ing] other nations achieve a Green New Deal” was one of the 14 projects and strategies that make up Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s 10-year mobilization plan. For them, this entailed “the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding and services”. They subsequently add: “with the aim of making the United States the international leader of climate action”, which, I will state for the record here, is a bit of environmental patriotism I have no problem with, even when it concerns the US. Whatever floats the boat – or rocks it, as the case might be. However, patriotism should not beget parochialism, as Keston Perry recently warned in this tweet:
This is very interesting. It points to the reason why I think much of the Green New Deal debates are parochial, imperialistic & almost completely disconnected from the South apart from having us as disaster props for "why we need a GND"
The “This” refers to an article (2014) by Andrew Fischer, in which he argues that decarbonization both requires, and just might serve as the political occasion for, a global redistribution. It requires one because if it doesn’t accompany decarbonization efforts, it will further indebt poor countries, negating the development part of sustainable development. It just might be the occasion for it, because given the urgency of our challenge, people might be willing to entertain measures hitherto considered hopelessly romantic or worse, socialist.
Enter Bernie Sanders. In a response to Perry’s tweet, Naomi Klein (who, as you probably know, recently came out with this book on the GND) remarked:
This is just true.
It's also what sets Bernie's #GND apart
It calls for $200-billion in climate financing for the Global South
And slashing military spending to help pay for it
It's doesn't confuse foisting made-in-the USA tech on the world w/ wealth redistribution
My name is Marten Boekelo and I approve of this call to read the plan.
$200 billion sounds like an amount beyond the political pale not too long ago. It’s not just romantic or socialist though; the logic behind it (as explained here by Tom Athanasiou) is in part simple means-ends strategy. The idea is that the US cannot decarbonize rapidly enough to meet the goals “mandated by science”; however, what the US can do is help poorer countries develop sustainably, avoiding the greenhouses gasses they would have otherwise emitted.
To that end, the $200 billion would go in the Green Climate Fund. As you might remember, this UN organization was set-up during the respective 2009 and 2010 Copenhagen and Cancun Summits to ease developing countries’ worries that global sustainability politics would work out only in developed nations’ favour. The fund was to support the former countries with adaptation to (coping with) and mitigation (prevention) of impacts from climate change. The Sanders campaign estimates the gain from its capital injection extraordinaire would be a 36% reduction in greenhouse gasses from 2017 levels among “less industrialized nations” (a figure it reached with the help of the Civil Society Equity Coalition).
The Green Climate Fund will help communities, says America.
Extraordinary though it may be (Ban Ki Moon was hoping for $100bn in funding over the space of a decade), it is by all measures the scale of ambition we need. It is also smart about its target – see also this David Roberts piece I also linked to previously on why the Global South is ‘a good investment’. This point will keep coming back in this newsletter: if social science could offer you one tip for the future, equality would be it. Meanwhile however, we must deal with the question that will keep coming back in this newsletter: what do we know about how the world works that can help us steer clear of pitfalls in our endeavours?
Marx goes global
Since this is the sixth in a series on ‘lessons from the anthropological classics’, let’s see if we can mine those classics for some insights!
The past week in our ‘History and Theory of Cultural Anthropology’ class, we read some of the early ‘neo-Marxist anthropologists’, writing between the 1960s and 80s. Scholars like Sydney Mintz and Fernando Ortiz wanted to understand how global economic relations were impacting culture (in their case, in the Caribbean). This line of questioning implied a decisive break from the preceding generations of anthropologists, who had basically been pretending that globalization (i.e. colonialism) didn’t exist and hadn’t changed non-western societies, even in profound ways.
Anthropologists before the 1960s.
While they drew inspiration from the way Marx had foregrounded the economy in his analysis of western society, their perspective from the ‘periphery’ yielded unique insights vis-à-vis established Marxist scholarship.
One is that the periphery is not the periphery. While the North may have been structuring the South according to its own needs (as argued by dependency theorists), the North itself was being reconfigured in the encounter. Mintz pointed out how European industrial modernity was made in significant part on the sugar plantations of the colonies, radically and rapidly transforming the European diet, alimenting European labourers with cheap energy, as well as by serving as testing ground for rationalized, industrial modes of production later foisted upon the metropolitan proletariat.
In a similar vein, they questioned the dichotomy of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ (actually one of Europe’s most successful export products). In a series of publications, most famous of which The Modernity of Witchcraft, Peter Geschiere (working from Africa this time around) showed how the things we tend to view as ‘traditional’ (i.e. pristine, local) were thoroughly ‘modern’ (i.e. part of and even dependent on the world-system). Indeed, capitalism might well depend on ‘traditions’ for its grounding in non-western societies – as happened when fiat money replaced rare objects as currency for bride prices in Cameroon. Young men became ‘willing’ wage-labourers for the first time.
Geschiere called such complicated mechanisms through which capitalism gained foothold in the colonies the ‘articulation’ of its mode of production. Can that help us understand the international energy order?
Green neoliberalism redux
For some hints I want to revisit a number of publications about renewable energy in Southern Africa, which I reviewed earlier. The main take-way from those articles concerns the uneven but pervasive effects of liberalization.
Liberalization of the energy market, as mandated by the World Bank and still part of, say, EU funding packages, has occurred since the 1980s. We shouldn’t understand it as a ‘simple’ devolution of state power to the invisible wisdom of the market though. Many initiatives contain progressive elements: in Mozambique and Kenya, they are meant to encourage renewables and broader electrification. South Africa has a law mandating community co-ownership of new energy infrastructure to guarantee dividends for historically marginalized communities. In addition, technological development has created good business cases for renewables, as it has elsewhere in the world.
However, the logic of liberalization works against these progressive intentions – foreign companies come for the big buck projects, not to connect the poor to the grid, while the financialization of the energy sector make it quite complicated for national energy companies to participate and local communities to exert influence. And I haven’t even mentioned the amount of debt yet that large-scale projects can incur. (Baker 2015; Newell & Philips 2016; Power et al 2016) It reminds me of Chrstine Folch’s point on “Cultures of Energy” again: there is nothing inherently progressive about renewable energy.
Neo-liberalization has been the way that capitalism has been able to ‘articulate’ itself across the planet. Breaking up national monopolies create ‘markets’ that international players can enter. Never mind that it’s no longer Western countries running this show – the ‘Rising Powers’ of the South might shift the balance of power, but so far they do not seem to play a fundamentally different game. They (say, Brazil, China, India) are either out for resources or looking for markets to deploy their products and services. (Power et al)
China National Petroleum Company wants to build gas pipelines in Mozambique (dramatic image courtesy of CNPC)
Questions
How would a Climate Fund deal with these market structures, now that they’re in place? Will more money create more “policy autonomy” (Power et al: 13) for countries to create energy infrastructure that serve the underserved? Or will that money simply serve as lubricant for the existing machinery of global energy, risking the deferral of energy justice for all to the long term?
Probably it won’t simply anything, but if anyone knows about a plan out there that has some notion of how to sidestep the most regressive tendencies, drop me a line or sound off in the comments. I want to come back to this topic with a special on the Green Climate Fund.
Some of you were promised a newsletter on Mondays. My profound apologies. I have not found a way yet to, er, sustainably combine my teaching with my writing. Both have to give a little. I may finally be forced to writer shorter newsletters.
In the meanwhile, though, if you’re not done reading, you could check out this opinion piece, which basically makes the same point as above: the GND can’t be neoliberal if it is to be at all: that is to say, enough with the financialization and the public-private partnerships. This seems like a good rule of thumb to me. How would that translate globally?
Still not done reading?
Sources
Baker L. 2015. "The evolving role of finance in South Africa's renewable energy sector". Geoforum. 64: 146-156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.017
Andrew Martin Fischer. 2014. "Redistribution as social justice for decarbonising the global economy". The Economic and Labour Relations Review. 25 (4): 574-586. https://doi.org/10.1177/1035304614558165
Newell, Peter, and Jon Phillips. 2016. "Neoliberal energy transitions in the South: Kenyan experiences". Geoforum. 74: 39-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.05.009
Power, Marcus, Peter Newell, Lucy Baker, Harriet Bulkeley, Joshua Kirshner, and Adrian Smith. 2016. "The political economy of energy transitions in Mozambique and South Africa: The role of the Rising Powers". Energy Research & Social Science. 17: 10-19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2016.03.007
One of Geschiere’s later books The Perils of Belonging highlights the problem with communities – just like the lines dividing traditional and modern, their boundaries seem constantly redrawn upon closer inspection. That kind of thing can become problematic when you make ‘communities’ recipients of aid money or resource dividends. A word to the wise thinking about community energy.
PS: If you do not have the appropriate credentials to cross the paywall to these articles, maybe you can check out https://sci-hub.tw (just copy paste in the doi number), or if you are uncomfortable with that, send me a message and I’ll lend you a copy.