{"id":63902,"date":"2013-08-29T09:50:04","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T08:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/beckoning-committed-climate-activists\/63902\/"},"modified":"2013-08-29T09:50:04","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T08:50:04","slug":"beckoning-committed-climate-activists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/beckoning-committed-climate-activists\/","title":{"rendered":"Beckoning Committed Climate Activists"},"content":{"rendered":"

The northern hemisphere summer has just peaked and though the torrid heat is now ebbing, it is evident the climate crisis is far more severe than most scientists had anticipated. The latest report of the UN\u00a0Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a notoriously\u00a0conservative<\/a>\u00a0research agency \u2014 will be debated in Stockholm next month, but no one can deny its projections: \u201cwidespread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even worse is coming, for a giant Arctic Ocean\u00a0\u2018belch\u2019<\/a>\u00a0of 50 billion tonnes of methane is inexorably escaping from seabed permafrost, according to scientists writing in the journal\u00a0Nature<\/i>. North Pole ice is now, at maximum summer heat, only\u00a040 percent as thick<\/a>\u00a0as it was just forty years ago, a crisis only partially represented in the vivid image of a\u00a0temporary \u2018lake\u2019<\/a>\u00a0that submerged the pole area last month.<\/p>\n

The damage that will unfold after the burp, according to leading researchers from Cambridge and\u00a0Erasmus Universities,\u00a0could cost\u00a0$60 trillion<\/a>, about a year\u2019s world economic output. Global warming will speed up by 15-35 years as a result.<\/p>\n

With these revelations, it is impossible to mask the self-destructive greed of fossil fuel firms and their carbon-addicted customers. The ruling crew in the United States, Russia and Canada will enthusiastically let oil companies exploit the soon-to-be ice-free Arctic summers with intensified drilling, joined by unprecedented bunker-fuel-burning in the newly-opening shipping lanes.<\/p>\n

Heat Blowback in the US, China and Durban<\/b><\/p>\n

But the extreme weather that necessarily results has just hit China, whose world-record CO2 emissions \u2014 mainly a result of producing junk purchased by wealthier countries which have outsourced their industrial emissions to East Asia \u2014 generate as a byproduct not only\u00a0thick layers of smog<\/a>\u00a0in the main cities. There were also scores of heat-related deaths earlier this month. Shanghai suffered\u00a0ten straight days above 38C<\/a>, with temperatures in some places high enough to\u00a0use a sidewalk to fry eggs and prawns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter (and biggest historically), the western United States is suffering a brutal drought, so severe that\u00a086 percent of New Mexico\u2019s water supply<\/a>\u00a0evaporated, extreme\u00a0wildfires<\/a>\u00a0broke out \u2014 this week, for example, scorching\u00a0Yosemite Park\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0legendary redwoods and threatening San Francisco\u2019s water supply \u2014 while California\u2019s Death Valley temperatures soared to\u00a050C<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The effects are highly uneven, with\u00a0environmental-justice research<\/a>\u00a0now proving that as climate change hits US cities, the wealthy turn up the air conditioner while the poor \u2014 and especially black and Latino people \u2014 suffer in \u2018heat islands.\u2019 Likewise, poor people in the Himalayan mountains died in their thousands as a result of\u00a0last month\u2019s floods<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Alaska, a source of enormous oil extraction, record temperatures in the 30s left\u00a0thousands of fish dead.<\/a>\u00a0The effect of global warming on the oceans is to push marine life towards the poles by 7 kilometers each year, as numerous\u00a0species attempt to find cooler waters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The impact here in South Africa, from East London to Durban, was a disaster for the local fishing industry last month, as billions of sardines which annually swim to shore\u00a0stayed away<\/a>\u00a0due to warmer waters.<\/p>\n

Can Shipping Survive the Climate Chaos it\u00a0Causes?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

And here along the Indian Ocean, more local climate damage comes from \u2014 and is also visited upon \u2014 the shipping industry. In the world\u2019s largest coal export site, South Africa\u2019s Richards Bay harbor, an idiot captain of the China-bound\u00a0MV Smart<\/a>\u00a0(sic<\/i>) tried to exit the port in 10 meter swells on August 20 with a load of nearly 150 000 tonnes of coal and 1700 tonnes of oil. He promptly split the huge ship in half on a sandbank.<\/p>\n

This followed by hours the strategic offshore sinking of a Nigeria-bound cargo ship,\u00a0Kiani Satu<\/a>, which had run aground a week earlier, further down the coast, close to a\u00a0nature reserve and marine protected area. As plans were made to\u00a0extract 300\u00a0hundred tonnes of oil<\/a>\u00a0from the boat, more than 15 tonnes spilled, requiring the\u00a0cleaning<\/a>\u00a0of more than 200 oil-coated seabirds.<\/p>\n

The maniacs whose ships now rest at the bottom of the Indian Ocean can identify with the fly-by-night owners of the MT Phoenix, after that ship\u2019s\u00a0willful self-destruction<\/a>\u00a0off the Durban North Coast holiday resorts exactly two years ago. Taxpayers spent $4 million pumping out 400 tonnes of oil and then towing the Phoenix out deeper to\u00a0sink<\/a>. A few weeks ago, that salvage operation\u2019s contested audit resulted in the\u00a0implosion<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0the SA\u00a0Maritime Safety<\/em>Authority.<\/p>\n

These are just some surface-level indications that our shipping industry is utterly ill-prepared for the rise of both overall sea levels and the \u2018monster waves\u2019 which\u00a0accompany climate change<\/a>.\u00a0The\u00a0Columbia University Earth Institute<\/a>\u00a0now projects \u201csea-level rise of as much as six feet globally instead of two to three feet\u201d by 2100, with higher amounts (three meters) possible if further ice sheets crack from their foundations.<\/p>\n

As one of Oprah\u2019s producers,\u00a0Susan Casey<\/a>, wrote in her book,\u00a0The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean<\/i>, \u201cGiven that 60 per cent of the world\u2019s population lives within 30 miles of a coastline, wave science is suddenly vital science, and the experts are keenly aware that there are levees, oil rigs, shorelines, ships and millions of lives at stake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her experts need to visit South Africa, because\u00a0ours<\/i>\u00a0are apparently asleep at the wheel, as they now plan an extreme makeover of Durban\u2019s harbour.\u00a0The shipping mania that made China such a successful exporter \u2014 and wiped out so much of South Africa\u2019s manufacturing industry \u2014 has generated vessels that can carry more than 10 000 containers (which in turn require 5800 trucks to unload), known as \u2018super post-Panamax\u2019. They are so named because the Panama Canal\u2019s current limits allow only half that load, hence a\u00a0$5.25 billion dig<\/a>\u00a0will deepen and widen the canal by 2015, with a $40 billion Chinese-funded competitor canal being considered in nearby Nicaragua.<\/p>\n

Most ports around the world are following suit, including here where\u00a0$25 billion<\/a>\u00a0is anticipated from national, provincial and municipal subsidies and loans for South Durban\u2019s port\/petrochemical complex \u2014 the origin of our status as the most polluted African suburb south of Nigeria. The project is mainly managed by Transnet, a huge (but hot-to-privatize) transport parastatal agency, and is the second main priority in the country\u2019s\u00a0National Development Plan<\/a>which claims that from handling 2.5 million containers in 2012, Durban\u2019s productivity will soar to 20 million containers annually by 2040 \u2014 though these figures certainly don\u2019t jell with the industry\u2019s much more conservative projections of demand.<\/p>\n

More examples of state planning hubris: Transnet\u2019s $2.3 billion doubling of the Durban-Johannesburg oil pipeline is still not complete, but already massive corruption is suspected in the\u00a0collusion-suffused construction industry,<\/a>given that early costings were\u00a0half the price<\/a>. And notwithstanding their \u2018aerotropolis\u2019 fantasies, Durban\u2019s\u00a0King Shaka International Airport<\/a>\u00a0and the speedy Johannesburg-Pretoria-airport\u00a0Gautrain<\/a>\u00a0are both operating at a tiny fraction of the capacity that had been anticipated by state planners. The 2010 sports stadiums are such blatant white elephants that even arrogant local soccer boss Danny Jordaan felt compelled to\u00a0apologise<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Climate Denialists From Durban to Deutschland<\/b><\/p>\n

One reason they breed is that climate is not being factored into any of these carbon-intensive white elephants, as I have learned by fruitlessly offering formal Environmental Impact Analysis objections. As a result of a\u00a0critique<\/a>\u00a0I offered last November, Transnet\u2019s consultants finally considered prospects that sea-level rise and intense storms might disrupt the Durban port\u2019s new berth expansion.<\/p>\n

But Transnet\u2019s\u00a0study on sea level rise<\/a>\u00a0by Christopher Everatt and John Zietsman of ZAA Engineering Projects in Cape Town is as climate-denialist as the consultancy report last year by the SA Council on Scientific and Industrial Research\u2019s Roy Van Ballegooyen. Look, I do understand that \u2014 like the dreaded AIDS-denialism of a decade ago \u2014 the allegation of climate-denialism is a strong insult these days. But what else would you call a November 2012 report (mainly by Everatt) that cites five studies to claim we will suffer only a maximum 0.6 meter maximum sea level rise this century,\u00a0but based on data from 1997, 2004, 2006 and 2008 reports<\/i>. Five years old information is, in this field, ridiculously outdated.<\/p>\n

In South Africa,\u00a0de facto\u00a0<\/i>climate denialists are now led by a Communist Party leader: Minister of Trade and Industry,\u00a0Rob Davies<\/a>. Last week, Davies pushed through Cabinet approval to build yet another coal-fired power plant plus permission to frack the extremely water-sensitive\u00a0Karoo<\/a>, \u201cLand of the Great Thirst\u201d in the original inhabitants\u2019 San language.<\/i><\/p>\n

Awful precedents Davies tactfully avoided mentioning include the massive environmental damage and the corruption, labour-relations and socio-ecological crises at South Africa\u2019s main coal-fired powerplant construction site, Eskom\u2019s $10 billion\u00a0Medupi<\/a>\u00a0generator which at 4800 MegaWatts will be the world\u2019s third largest. Medupi was meant to be generating power in 2011, but due to ongoing conflict, may finally be finished only in mid-2014.<\/p>\n

Eskom\u2019s main beneficiary, also unmentioned by Davies, is BHP Billiton, the world\u2019s largest mining house, a firm at the\u00a0centre of South Africa\u2019s crony-capitalist nexus dating to apartheid days<\/a>. Eskom now subsidises this Australian company with $1.1 billion annually by gifting it the world\u2019s cheapest electricity.<\/p>\n

Another\u00a0de facto\u00a0<\/i>climate denialist is the German development aid minister,\u00a0Dirk Niebel,<\/a>\u00a0an opponent of Ecuadoran civil society\u2019s plan to save the Yasuni National Park from oil exploitation. According to\u00a0Niebel<\/a>, \u201cRefraining from oil drilling alone is not going to help in forest preservation.\u201d Of course not, but it could have been a vital step for Germany to make a downpayment on its huge\u00a0climate debt<\/a>\u00a0to the victims of extreme weather.<\/p>\n

The Yasuni campaign to \u201cleave the oil under the soil\u201d is excellent, and while there, deep in the Amazon on the Peruvian border two years ago, I witnessed the Oilwatch network mobilizing to\u00a0expand the idea<\/a>\u00a0(even to Durban where oil prospecting recently began offshore). Oilwatch generated a\u00a0\u2018Yasunization\u2019<\/a>\u00a0strategy for other fossil fuels, also promoted by the\u00a0Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade<\/a>\u00a0scholar-activist network based in Barcelona. Network leaders Joan Martinez-Alier and Nnimmo Bassey are also\u00a0heartbroken<\/a>\u00a0at Yasuni\u2019s apparent demise.<\/p>\n

But stupidly, the government of Rafael Correa \u2014 trained in the US as an economist, sigh \u2014always had the intention to sell\u00a0Yasuni into the global carbon markets<\/a>, a self-defeating strategy given the markets\u2019 tendency to both fraud and regular crashing; carbon prices today only about a quarter of what they were two years ago.<\/p>\n

So now, because the erratic Correa doesn\u2019t have his hands on the cash yet, in part because he failed to address world civil society to put pressure on governments,\u00a0Ecuador\u2019s PetroAmazonas and China\u2019s PetroOriental will go ahead and drill. A fresh campaign has been launched to halt the extraction, starting with\u00a0one letter after another<\/a>\u00a0from Accion Ecologica, the eco-feminist lobby that initiated the project, joined by the eloquent leader of theConfederaci\u00c3\u00b3n de Nacionalidades Ind\u00c3\u00adgenas del\u00a0Ecuador<\/em>,\u00a0Carlos Perez Guartambel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Climate Activist Counter-Power Gathers<\/b><\/p>\n

Yasuni is a critical place to draw the line, for it is probably\u00a0the world\u2019s most biodiverse site<\/a>. But there are other vulnerable points of counter-power, too, as across the world, many more defenders of nature come forward against rapacious fossil-fuel industry attacks.<\/p>\n

South Africa has not been particularly climate-conscious, because the thousands of recent social protests are mainly directed against a state and capitalists which deny immediate needs, from municipal services to wages. Still, in Johannesburg, the Anglo American Corporation and Vedanta coal-fired power plant witnessed a protest of\u00a01000 community and environmental activists<\/a>\u00a0last month.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, a\u00a0Pew Research Centre<\/a>\u00a0poll found that 48 percent of South Africans worry \u2018global climate change\u2019 is a \u2018major threat\u2019, followed by\u00a0\u2018China\u2019s power and influence\u2019 (40 percent) and \u2018international financial instability\u2019 (34 percent).\u00a0Across the world, 54 percent of people Pew asked cited climate change as a major threat, the highest of any answer (in second place, 52 percent said \u2018international financial stability). Only 40 percent of the US populace agreed, putting it at seventh place.<\/p>\n

Yet even in the belly of the beast, more people seem to be mobilizing, and there are growing connectivities in the spirit that what happens in Yasuni is terribly important to the First Nations activists of western Canada (one of the finest blog sites to make these links is\u00a0http:\/\/climate-connections.org\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n

For example, fossil fuel projects have been fought hard in recent weeks by forces as diverse as\u00a0Idaho\u2019s\u00a0Nez Perce<\/a>\u00a0Native Americans,\u00a0Idle No More, and Wild Idaho Rising Tide; by\u00a0Nebraska farmers<\/a>; by activists from the filthy oil city of Houston who are contesting a new\u00a0coal terminal<\/a>; and in Utah where not only have conservationists sued to halt drilling of an\u00a0800 000 acre tar sands field stretching into Colorado and Wyoming, but 50 activists physically\u00a0blocked tar sand mining<\/a>\u00a0and construction at two sites last month.<\/p>\n

350.org<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0Bill McKibben<\/a>\u00a0recently mentioned the \u2018Summerheat\u2019 rebirth of US climate activism, \u201cfrom the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned, from Utah\u2019s Colorado Plateau, where the first US tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio.\u201d<\/p>\n

The growing movement has had results, says McKibben, in part through civil disobedience: \u201cIn the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone pipeline, convinced a wide swath of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is encouraging partly because summertime is a lull when it comes to challenging power in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, our political winter was mostly spent wondering whether the crucial Congress of SA Trade Unions would remain aligned to the government or\u00a0split<\/a>\u00a0in half. The more enlightened wing would logically move towards environmental, community and social struggles, leaving behind the likes of Rob Davies, just as US progressives (should) have shed any last illusions about slick Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

But not far from Durban, 100 years ago next month,\u00a0Mahatma Gandhi<\/a>\u00a0began preparing a non-violent mass assault on a white-owned coal mine in support of both Indian women\u2019s right to cross a regional border and workers\u2019 wage demands. The idea known as\u00a0satyagraha\u00a0<\/i>(truth force) went from theory to practice, as militant passive defiance gained concessions that, 80 years later, helped free South Africa from apartheid. This time, there\u2019s no 80-year window; we all have to rise to the challenge as fast as do the thermometer and the greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n

Patrick Bond<\/strong>\u00a0directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban:\u00a0http:\/\/ccs.ukzn.ac.za<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

…read more<\/a> <\/p>\n

Republished from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The northern hemisphere summer has just peaked and though the torrid heat is now ebbing, it is evident the climate crisis is far more severe than most scientists had anticipated. The latest report of the UN\u00a0Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change\u00a0\u2014 a notoriously\u00a0conservative\u00a0research agency \u2014 will be debated in Stockholm next month, but no one can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-63902","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}