climate change reading

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism '. . .: No Logo: Takin¥ Aim at the Brand Bullies

Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate

I EV£RYT:H1NG

Capitalism VS. The 'Climate

NAOMI KLEIN

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"We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honeSt with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this pi_net."

-Rebecca Tarbotton, Executive Director ofthe RainforestAction Network, 1973-20121

5 7 '9 10 8 6 4 The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Klein,. Naomi,)970- This changes everything ; capitalism vs. the climate [Naon;ti Klein.-First

Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.. . pages em

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Environmental economics. 2. Environmental policy-Economic

aspects. 3. Climatic changes-Economic aspects. 4. Global environmental change-Economic aspects. 5. Capitalism. 1. Title.

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ISBN 978-1-4516-9738-4 ISBN 978-1-4516-9739-1 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-4516-9740~7 (ebook)

"In my books I've imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the gla- ciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and ASia to create salt seas, pumping melted ice from Antarctica north to provide fr.ater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it back "bove water, and (hardest of all) comprehensively changing capitalism:'

-Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, 20122

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12

SHARING THE SKY I 389

nt levels .of US. consumption for nearly two hundred years.' Indeed, .of the coal that the industry plans to export to China would come mines presently planned for this part of the world, all of it impacting, e form or another; the Northern Cheyenne. The industry wants the under and near their reservation, and, as discussed, it wants to build oad skirting their reservation to get that coal out-which, together he mine, would threaten the Tongue River, a key water source. e Northern Cheyenne have been fighting off the mining companies

.the early 1970s,.in part due to an important Sweet Medicine prophecy ,is often .inserprered to mean that digging up the "black rock" would on a kind of madness and the end of Cheyenne culture. But when I isited the reserve in 2010, the region was in the throes of the fossil fuel y, getting hit from every direction-e-and it wasn't clear how long the .. ' nity's anti-coal forces were going to be able to hold out. 'frer an ugly battle; coal opponents had just lost a crucial vote at the Land Board about the proposed new coal mine at Otter Creek, just the boundaries of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation (this was

.' e -visited by the Lummi carvers on their ceremonial totem pole jour- Otter Creek Was, the biggest new coal mine under consideration in nited States, and at this point it seemed certain to go ahead. At- en.was.shifting-to opposing the construction of the artery needed to coal out of the mine, the proposed Tongue River Railroad-which Iikelv.impact Cheyenne burial grounds. Like the tar sands pipelines, become a "chokepoint" battle: without the railroad, rhere would be e 9£ getting the coal out, and therefore no point in blinding the new

SHARING THE SKY The Atmospheric Commons and -the Power of PayIng Our D

"The forest is already 'developed,' the forest is life." -Franco Viteri, Sarayaku iiiader; Ecuadori "

"How, in the Nort~, could anything .Iike this ever ,be pO$Sible? How, giv~n th~ madness that has ~me upon.the.)Vealthycountries,:ope,in whi,ch.ideologues, and elites have casta mytlJology of 'debt crisi~' and 'bitter. medicin~' and 'aus .. '. terity' Over all claims to the com~n~ealth, could, the North ever a~pt the .... n~ity of large-scale fina .. cial a"d techJloklgical. investments in a cliDlate, .'. ,mobilisation, including massive SI,lPPllrt to the South? • _ • HoW, given, t~

. North's ·fear of a rising Asia, and it$ stubbor!1 ,in~iste!1ce th~Uhe South. is ~q . unwilling and unable to restrain its own ~mission$" will the .NO,rth ,~v~r ~ to see tlJe implacability of the logic,...the fear Of.8 fo~losed future-\,YI)'~ most deeply animates thdouth's. !1eg9tiators? And ~ow, giy~n that1~e NQt1h!s blindness on these points is an almost perfect, ready-made excuse for its own; continued free-riding, can there be any path to rapidly increased global ambi· i Hon that does not begin in the North?"

-Sivan Kartha, Tom Athanasiou, and Paul Baer, climate researchers, 20122 < t back in 2010, the railroad fight hadn't succeeded in galvanizing the

Cheyenne in opposition and it also looked likely to go ahead. hile, on the neighboring Crow Reservation, there was a plan to

a. coa1,to,liquids' plant, a noxious process that turns coal rock into a pollU111tlg fol1I'l1' of liquid fuel, which emits twice as much carbon as gasoline when burned. The Australian company behind the plant, called th~'ptoject "Many Stars," had commissioned a famous Crow o.create its1ogo: two tepees against a starry sky," t Sierra Club's . Mike Scott described his work to me as "triage"-

I saw this new kind of partnership in action while reporting on one & highest-stakes fronts of the fossil fuel wars.Jn southeastern Montana. T underneath the rolling hills dotted with cattle, horses, and otherw sandstone rock formations, sits a whole lot of coal. So much that yo see it in seams on the side of the road. The region has enough coal to

390 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING SHARING THE SKY I 391

racing to try to stop or slow one terrible idea after another. .His partn Alexis Bonogofsky, told me at the time, "There is so much going on, pee don't know what to fight." 5 From their goat ranch outside Billings, the p would go off in different directions every day, trying to beat back yet a other offensive in the fossil fuel frenzy.

Bonogofsky's official job tittle is "tribal lands program manager" for National Wildlife Federation, which in practice meant helping Indigen tribes exercise their legal rights in order to protect the land, air, and wa The tribe with whom she was working most closely was the Northern Che enne, both because they were in the bull's-eye of new coal development because they had a long history of using the law for land stewardship.F instance, the Northern Cheyenne broke legal ground by arguing that th right to enjoy a traditional way of life included the right to breathe de air. In 1977, the EPA agreed and granted the Northern Cheyenne Resew tion the highest possible classification for its air quality (called Class lund the Clean Air Act). This seemingly bureaucratic technicality allowed the tribe to argue in court that polluting projects as far away as Wyoming were a violation of its treaty rights, since the pollutants could travel to the No em Cheyenne Reservation and potentially compromise its air and wat quality.

Bonogofskv.In her familiar plaid flannel shirts and cowboy boots, w spending many hours a week in her white pickup truck, driving from: ranch to Lame, Deer, the small, scrubby town at the center of the N em Cheyenne Reservation. There, more often than not, she would end in the converted Mormon church that houses the tribe's environment protection offices, meeting and scheming with the department's tough a tireless director, Charlene Alden.

Alden has been an anchor of the Northern Cheyenne's long batt against coal and she has won some major victories, like stopping the dum ing of untreatedwastewater from coal bed methane directly into the Tong River. But when we met, she wasn't sure how much longer: she could hol off the pro-mining forces.

The problems were,as much internal as external. The tribe had 'elected former coal miner as tribal president and he was determined to open up - lands to the extractive industries. On the day I arrived, pink "flyers

peared on the community bulletin board announcing that in the elections ming up in ten days, tribal members would be polled on their views about eveloping the reservation's coal and methane. Charlene Alden was furious about-the flyers. The wording was biased,

and she .s~id the process violated several election rules. But she also knew why some of her people were tempted to take the money. Tribal unem-

'. ployment was as high as 61: percent, and by some estimates significantly her. Substance abuse was ravaging the reservation (a mural at the center

of town depicted .crystal meth as an evil-eyed green snake being-fought off with sacred arrows). And these problems had been plaguing the community fdr-a. very long time. In 1995, Alden made a video that aired on the ABC current affairs program Day One, cohosted by Diane Sawyer, which for its time was a breakthrough in Indigenous representation on network televi- sion. Formatted as a video journal, the piece was a meditation on historical auma that. showed shocking footage of Alden's own sister drinking the

toxic cleaning liquid Lysol out of a plastic jug; "Cheyenne champagne," it was called.'

It was desperation like that which made it possible for mining compa- ies like Arch and Peabody to gain a ready audience when they sailed into wn promising jobs and money to fund new social programs. "People say have high unemployment, we have no tax base. If we go ahead and do

is-we can have good schools, a good waste system," Alden told me. And ere is'no question that "the tribal government has no money at aU." But e worried that sacrificing the health of the land for coal dollars would nly further alienate Cheyenne people from their culture and traditions, ry likely causing mote depression and abuse, not less. -"In Cheyenne, .the rd for water is the same as the word for life," she said. "We know that if e start messing around too much with coal, it destroyslife,"? The only way to br~ak the deadlock, Alden had come to believe, was to

rove to the next generation of Cheyenne leaders that there is another path ut of-poverty and hopelessness-cone that does not involve handing over he land for which their ancestors paid so dearly. 'And she saw no end to the possibilities. As we were speaking, a col- gue popped into Alden's office and told her that someone had broken to the building the night before and stolen an electric heater. Alden-was

392 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING SHARING THE SKY I 393

not surprised. It was fall, the nighttime temperatures were dropping, and req houses are notoriously drafty, most of them having been built from govern- ment-issue kits in the 1940s and 1950s. You can see the hinges connecting the walls. Residents blast the heat-Ieven turn on their ovens for backup} only to have it fly.through the cracks in the walls, windows, and doors. As a result, heating bills are staggeringly high~$400 a month is average, burl met people with bills that topped.$1,000 in winter. And since the heat was " coming from coal and propane, it was contributing to the climate crisis that was already hitting this region hard, with persistent droughts and massive ••• wildfires.

To Alden, everything was wrong with that picture-the expensive bills; . the crummy housing, the dirty energy source. And it all pointed to the tre .. " mendous untapped opportunities for models of development that ~€Sfl~P~; rather than violate, Cheyenne values. For instance, the converted ch~rch where we were sitting had just been fitted with new windows as part of-an energy conservation program arid Alden was thrilled with the' r~sults: th:e new windows saved heating costs, let in more: natural light, and.installmg them had-created jobs for community members. But the scale was so small, .•. Why couldn't there be a program to install windows like these in all the houses on the reservation?

An NGO had come in a few years ago and built a handful of modeL. homes made of straw bale, an ancient form ofarchltecture J;fVlr keeps build· ings cool in summer and warm in winter. Today, Alden reported. with some .•.. amazement, those families had minuscule electricity bil~"$19 a month instead of $400!" But she couldn't see why the tribe needed outsiders:,(Q· build homes that are based on Indigenous knowledge, Why not train tribal' members to design and build them and getfunding to do it across the reser •. vation? There would be a green building boom in no time andthe traip,e.es could use their skills elsewhere too. Montana, meanwhile, provides excel- lent conditions for both wind and rooftop solar.

This-takes money though, and money is what the Northern Cheyenne do not have. There had been hopes that President Obama would signifi1 cantly increase funding for green jobs in disadvantaged comrrainities; bu:t those plans had mostly been shelved in the wake of the economic crisis; Bonogofsky, however.was convinced that finding ways to help·th~ NortM.,

.•• ern Cheyenne fulfill their aspirations for real economic alternatives to coal was just as important as helping to pay fot their anti .. coal lawsuirs, So she and Alden got to work.

. About a year after my visit to the church, Bonagofsky called to say that they had managed to scrape together 'some money=-from the Environmen- tkl Protection Agency and from her own NGO-for an exciting new proj- ect, Henry Red CI'Oud, a Lakota social entrepreneur who had won awards for his work bringing wind -and solar power to' the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, was going to teach a group of about a dozen Northern Cheyenne to install solar heaters On their reservation homes. The heaters are worth $2,000 each and they would be going in for free, cutting heating bilk by as much as half. Did I want to come back to Montanai

. My return, trip could hot have been more different from the first. It was spring of 2011 ,and those gentle hills around the reservation were now cov- ered itt tiny yellow wildflowers that somehow made the grass look video: game green. The trainings were already under way and about fifteen people had gathered on the lawn of'a home to learn how if simple box made mostly of dark glass could capture enough heat to warm an entire house.

Red'Cloud, a natural leader with. a gift for making his courses feel like a meeting of friends, effortlessly wove technical lessons about passive solar . ystems with meditations about how "solar power Was always part of Natives' ay of life. Everything followed the anpetuWi taw()'fU1waka, the life-giving orce of the.sun.It ties in with our culture, our ceremony, our language, our

gS."8

Each installation began with Red Cloud walking around the house hold- g up a pocket Solar Pathfinder that told him where the sun would hit on ~ry day ofthe year. The solar boxes are placed on the sides of the build- gs and need at least six hours of daily radiant sunlight to run effectively. couple of houses were nestled too tightly against trees and mountains to e "them strong candidates. For these, roof panels might be used instead,

. t another power source entirely.

SHARING THE SKY I 395 394 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

? closely about where we live, to pay attention to things like when the sun .' shines and-when the wind blows, where and when rivers are fierce and where they are weak. * And it's true: renewables, at least the way Henry Red

• •• Cloud sees them, require us to unlearn the myth that we are the masters of nature-:-the "God Species"-and embrace the fact that we are in relation-

. ship with the rest of the natural world. But ours is a new level of relation- ship, one based on an understanding of nature that far surpasses anything ourpre-fossil.fuel ancestors could.have imagined. We know enough to know how much we will never know, yet enough to find-ingenious ways to .amplify the systems provided by nature in what feminist historian Carolyn Merchant has-described as a "partnership ethic." 11

It is this collaborative quality that resonated most powerfully with Red . Cloud's students. Landon Means, a recent college grad who had just moved back to the reservation, told me that he saw in solar energy a shift in world- view that WaS about "working syaergistically" with the earth, "instead. of

;. just using it." This insight seemed to hit hardest with the young Cheyenne '.' men who had spent time working.in the coal industry and were tired of sup- pressing core parts of their identity to earn a paycheck. During the lunch break on the first day of the training, Jeff King, one of the Cheyenne stu- idents, confessed that he was still working in Gillette, Wyoming---gf0und. zeeo of the Powder River Basin coal boom. He described it balefully as the "carbon capital of the world" and clearly wanted out. He hadn't intended to

• drive trucks to coal mines for a living; a decade ago he had been one. of the "most promising. Cheyenne students of his generation and had gone to Dart- mouth on scholarship to study art, which he describes as "a calling." But the coal boom sucked him in. Now, he said, he wasn't sure how he could go back to Gillette. He huddled with a couple of friends to discuss starting their own solar companv to serve the reservation.'!

. One of the last houses to get a solar air heater was on a busy street in downtown Lame Deer: As Red Cloud's students .measured, drilled, and naro.ooered, they started to draw a crowd. Kids gathered to watch the action.

Red Cloud, a former metalworker who used to earn his living on la industrial.sires, clearly enjoyed this flexible aspect to renewable power; called the fiddling and adapting he does "Indianizing" and reminisced !}b~. ". <building his first wind turbine out of a 1978 Chevy Blazer that was rusti . on the rez, Watching him pace around these homes, a twinkle in his eye struck me. that this need to adapt to nature is what drives some people, about renewables: even at a very.large scale, they require a humility th the antithesis of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing power of the atom. They demand that we adapt ourselves to the rh of natural systems, as opposed to bending those systems to our will brute force engineering. Put another way, if extractive energy sources NFL football players, bashing away. at the earth, then renewables are; ers, riding the swells as they come, but doing some pretty fancy tricks aIo the way.

It was precisely this need to adapt ourselves to nature that James W steam engine purportedly liberated us' from in the late 1770s, when it fre . factory owners from having to find the best.waterfalls, and ship captai from worrying about the prevailing winds. As Andreas MalI:U writes, first commercial steam engine "was appreciated {or having no ways ovpla of its own, no external laws, no residual existence outside that brought fo by its proprietors; it was absolutely, indeedontologiq:dly subservient toth who owned it." 9

It is this powerfully seductive illusion of total control that a great III boosters of extractive energy are so reluctant to relinquishclndeed at climate change denial conference hosted by the Heartland. Institute, newables were derided as "sunbeams and friendly breezes'l-=the subtex« cleat: real men bum coal.'? And there is no doubt that moving to ren: ables represents more than just a shift in power sources but also a fun . mental shift in power relatioTlS between humanity and the natural world . which we depend. The power of the sun, wind, and waves can be ham. to be sure, but unlike fossil fuels, those forces can never be fully possesse . us. Nor do the same rules work everywhere.

So now we find ourselves back where we started, hi dialogue with ture. Proponents of fossil and nuclear energy constantly tell us that te ables are not "reliable," by which they mean that they require us .. to t

:i" Renewables are, in fact, much more reliable than power based on extraction, since those energy models require continuous 'new inputs to 'avoid a crash, whereas once the initial investment has been wade in renewable energy-infrastructure, nature provides the raw materials for free.

396 I THIS CH,ANG'ES EVERYTHING

Old women asked what was going on. "Half the cost of electricity? Really? How do I get one?"

Red Cloud smiled. This is, his marketing strategy for building a solar revolution in Indian Country. The first step, he says, it to-get "a few solar, ' panels over on Grandma's house. Everyone sees Grandma arid says, 'What is that? Iwant thattoo}" Alexis Bonogofsky, meanwhile, beamed from the, sidelines. "This has been probably the best week I have ever had at this job-s-it felt different," she-cold me as the training wrapped up: "It feels' like' something has changed.":"

In the coming, months, several members of the initial group continued tolL train with Red Cloud and others joined them, making pilgrimages to his: school, the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center on the Pine Ridge Res- ervation. } eft King quit.his coal job, in Gillette and set about getting a solari business off the ground. The money wasn't as good but, he said, "I have direction now,"

One of Red Cloud's star students turned out to be a twenty-nine-ye old woman named Vanessa Braided Hair, who more than held her a with the power tools in the .mostlv male class. She worked seasonally a firefighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in the summer of 201 battled an unprecedented wildfire that burned over 230 ,square kilomete (90 square miles) and destroyed nineteen homes on the Northern C enne Resetvation alone. (As the Associated Press reported at the time,' fire "ripped through as if the Iand-had been doused with gasoline.") Brai Hair did not need anyone to-tell her that climate change was an existent' crisis and welcomed the chance (to contribute to the solution. But it W deeper than that. Solar power, she said" embodied the worldview in whi she had been raised, one 'in which'I'You don't take and take and take;' you don't consume and consume and consume. You take what you need! then you put back into the land." 14

Red Cloud tells his students that deriving energy in a way that 1>' and protects the natural world is not just about employment. It's a COQ. ' ation of "what the ancestors shed blood for, always fought for......c.the ea

SHAR'ING THE SKY I 397

And he says he is training them not just to be technicians but to be "solar warriors." 15

I confess that when I first heard that I thought it was another example of Red Cloud's: marketing flair. But in the months and years that followed, I watched his prediction come true in the lives of the young people he had taught. In 2012) with his training still under way, the fight against the mines and the coal train on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation-the fight that had seemed all but lost in 20W-sprang back to life. Suddenly there was no shortage of Cheyennes willing to hold protests,'dernand meetings with regulators,' or make impassioned speeches at hearings. And Red Cloud's solar warriors were front and center, dressed in red "Beyond Coal" Tehirts and, declaring themselves "Idle No, More," a reference to the movement that had started in Canada and had swept through Indigenous communities across' the continent.

At a' technical hearing for the proposed massive coal mine at Otter Creek, Vanessa Braided Hair pulled no punches: "I want you to know that many people do not see anvdifference between your agency and Arch Coal," she told a panel of squirming officials, including the head of Montana's De-

,. partment of Environmental Quality. Lucas King, twenty-eight, and another Red Cloud student, told-a different hearing on the Otter Creek mine, "This is Cheyenne country. It has been for a long time, longer than any dollar has ever lasted. I don't expect you guys to understand us. You don't. And pm not saying I understand you. But I know you guys understand 'no.''' He p0hcluded his remarks by saying: "Please go back and tell whoever you have to that we don't want-it, It's not for us. Thank you." The room broke out in 'pplause-. A new generation of warriors had been born." Today, the-mood among dirty-energy opponents in 'SoutheasternMon~ na is positively iubilant, They speak about "when') they will stop the rail- d, not if. Which, ,if true, means ,the Otter Creek mine cannot proceed.

, d there is far less talk of mining on the Cheyenne Reservation itself. e plan for a ocal-co-ltquid plant on the Crow Reservation is also dead. ike Scott from the Sierra Club has been working with Crow members on ilding a wind farm. What this part of the world has clearly shown is that there is no more nt' weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real

398 I THIS CHANGES EV.ERYTHING

alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to' energize the fight against the old one. There are also powerful precedents for this: in two of the countries with the largest commitment to decentral- •• ized, community-controlled renewable power-s-Denmark and Germans- ..••• these energy victories, trace their roots back to the antinuclear movemen~l In both.countries, communities were forcefully opposed to the risks asso . ated with nuclear power plants, .but they knew that to win, they ne . an alternative. So instead of just saying no, they demanded govern . policies that would allow the communities in question to ge~eral1~' t~ own clean power and earn revenue in the process • Large-scale vlctone~ '~l these, however, are hard to. achieve when the communities lack ;pobti power. It's clear from the European examples that renewable energy can a viable alternative to extraction fodndigenous.people around the w it can provide skills training, jobs, and steady revenue streams for impov ished communities. But opportunities are consistently lost. ,

For instance, the Black M~sa Water Coalition; .founded in 2001 b group of Navajo and Hopi youth in Arizona, won a pivotal battle in 2; when it helped shut down the notoriously polluting Mohave Genet Station as wen as the Black .Mesa Mine; But coal mining and coal-p generation .continue on Navajo territory, helping to light up .and p water to large stretches of Arizona, 'including Phoenix, along WIth pa Nevada and California. The mining puts the water supply at risk but Black Mesa activists know that there is no hope of shutting it aU: down they are able, to provide tangible alternatives to -their people. So in they came up with a highly detailed proposalto oonvert- land that the ing industry had abandoned, land still likely contam~ated '~d depl and use it to host vast solar arrays that could power not Just their reserv but also large urban centers. Since the infrastructure and transmission are already in place, thanks to the coal industry" it would -be just a, . of converting the power source. Asjihan Gearon, executive directorn coalition, puts it, "Why not tum those lands into something posit~v~ could bring in monetary income to the people who live in that reg! begin that transition away from coal?" But under this plan,' the Na not an outside-multinational energy ccrapanv=-would be the owner, power they produced and sold to the grid. And the money generated"

SHARING THE SKY I 399

be able to support traditional economies, such as Navajo weaving. That is what made-the plan different: this time; the arrangement would be non- extractive in every sense-:."..the poisons would .stay in the ground, and the money.and skills would stay in the community,"

Yet haIfa decade later, this elegant plan is still struggling to get off the ground. As always, a-major barrier has been funding. And that is a prob-

not only for Black Mesa but for everyone concerned about climate , ange-because if the Navajo cannot show that clean energy can provide route out 'of poverty and 'toward real self-determination, then the coal ' in& will continue, to everyone's detriment. Part of the job of the climate

,. 'ovement, then, is to make the moral case that 'the commooities who have ffered most from unjust resource relationships should be first to be sup- rted in their efforts to build 'the next, life~based economy now. And that, means a fundamentally new relationship, in which those mmunities have full control over resource'projects, so that they become ortunities for skills training, jobs, and steady revenues (rather than one- payments) •. This point needs to be stressed because far too'rnany large- le renewable energy projects are being imposed on Native lands Without er consultation and consent, replicating old colonial patterns in which ts (and skills and jobs) go to outsiders. The shift from one power sys- to another must be more than a mere flipping of a switch from under- d to aboveground. Itmust be accompanied by a power correction in h the old injustices that plague our societies are righted once and for That's how you build an army of solar warriors.

need to provide tangible economic alternatives to extraction is not pressing in Native communities, of course. The impossible choices by the Navajo Nation and the Northern Cheyenne are intensified tis of the same nonchoices offered to a great many low-income com-

'.1ties where the present is so difficult and the pressures to provide the S oflife are sogreat that focusing On the future can seem like an impos- \luxury. Holding on to family farms in the face of fierce competition Big Ag, for instance, is so tough that there is never any shortage of

4.00 I, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHI.NG SHARING THE SKY I 401

farmers and ranchers willing ro make some extra money by leasing land tO~ fracking or pipeline companies=-even if that means-going to war with theltt neighbors who oppose these practices, and even if it means imperiling thehl own water supply and livestock. Desperate people do .desperate things. .

The same goes for many ot'the workers ' who want to build those pipe- lines, frack that gas, or work in polluting refineries. Manufacturing in NO America is as battered as' fa~ily fanning" which means that well-payi union [cbs are so scarce that people.will fight for whatever jobs are on 0 no matter how dangerous,' precarious, or polluting to themselves, their fa ilies.-or their own communities-The solution, as the more, visionary sect of the labor movement understand, is to fight for policies that do not fo workers to make those kinds of choices.

For instance, a 2012 study from th~ Canadian Centre for Policy Alt natives compared the public value from a $5 billion pipeline-s-the ro cost of Enbridge's Notthern Gateway-and the value that could be.deri from investing the same amount in green ,economic alternatives. Itfe that if $5 billion is spent on a pipeline, it produces mostly short-term c" .. struction jobs, big private sector profits, and heavy public costs for environmental damage. But if $5 billion.is spent on public transit, b ing retrofits, and renewable energy, .economies can gain, at the very 1 three times as many jobs in the short term, while simultaneously helpi reduce the chances of catastrophic warming in the long, term, In fact number of jobs could be many times more than, that, according to the ,i tute's modeling. At the highest end, green investment could .create four times more jobs than just building another pipeline.P

The problem, of course, is that while companies like Enbridge are ting dollars on the table to build pipelines, governments are unwilli make comparable sums available for these alternatives. And yet in a minimal national carbon tax of $10 a ton wouid raise $5 billion a, the sum in question-and unlike a one-off pipeline investment, it woul so year after year." If policy options like that were on the table! the jo environment dichotomy would all b~t evaporate.

Which is another reason why today's climate movement does not the luxury of simply saying no without simultaneously fighting for a,' of transformative yeses-the building blocks of out next economy

provide good cleanjobs, as well as a social safety net that cushions the hard- ships for those inevitably suffering losses.

Don'.t Just Divest, Reinvest /. . ' .' As discussed, the resources for this just transition must ultimately come

" from the state, collected from the profits of the fossil fuel companies in the brief window left.while they are still profitable. But until a shift in the po- litical tides makes that necessity a reality, there are ways to start funneling much needed resources to the next economy right now. This is shaping up to be the most exciting aspect of the: growing fossil fuel divestment move- menu increasingly, participants aren't just calling on public interest institu- ions like colleges and municipalities to sell their holdings in the companies at are wrecking the planet, they are also asking them to reinvest .that oney in entities that have a clear vision for the healing process. Dan Apfel, former head of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, d a key advisor to the movement, argues that "our colleges, other chari- s, pension funds, and foundations must be the ones, to lead, the way." He ints-out, "Five percent of the money in these public purpose and publicly Iated Institutions adds up to about $400 billion. Four hundred billion dol- s in new investments could stimulate real climate solutions, help create e market for further investments, encourage policy change and sustain nancial returns long into the future."2o Already, the group of foundations and wealthy individuals that has

ined the fossil fuel divestment movement (see page 357) has taken the itional step of moving the funds that had been profiting from fossil fuel parries and reinvesting them in the clean tech sector (the initiative has om~ known as "Divest-Invest"). Some colleges are taking a similar ap- ich. As economic analysts Jeremy, Brecher, Brendan Smith, and Kristen eran note, "Duke University in North Carolina has invested $8 million e-Self-Help Credit Union, in part to fund affordable green housing.

leton College in Minnesota and Miami University in Florida are direct- investment into renewable energy funds." 21 1I'hese big investors are taking a solid first step; even better would be

if they dedicated a share of their investments to projects that go deeper: •.• not just switching from brown energy to green energy but supporting ••• cutting-edge projects that are designed to bolster local economies, improve ••• public transit, and otherwise strengthen the starved public sphere. Criti: . cally, smart reinvestment strategies can even give the communities at the front lines of fossil fuel extraction the economic tools they need to resist carbon pollution at source-like the Black Mesa Water Coalition's plan for a municipal-scale solar utility) or the solar co-ops 'employing growing nurns bers of African American and- Latino workers in Richmond, California} who might otherwise see no optionbesides the Chevron refinery. Brecher; Smith, and Sheeran elaborate On these kinds of creative possibilities f01' how the divestment movement can "leverage its power to build a new sus) tamable economy for both the planet and local communities":

Institutions should think in much more positive terms: How can their money maximize the transition to a new sustainable economy? Here's one place to start: There are hundreds of community investment funds, socially oriented banks and credit unions, union pension funds, and other financialvehicles that have long experience in investing for social purposes. There are thousands of co-ops, worker- and community-owned businesses, non-profits; municipal initiatives, and, other enterprises that are engaged on a small scale in creating a-new economy.

These are the elements of a growing sector of enterprises devoted to public purposes with augmented control by- workers and employees. They are insulating and 'solarizing buildings; expanding public transpor- tation; developing low-carbon equipment and techniques for schools and hospitals; developing new recycling systems for handling waste. They are thereby also creating community-based economies that vide economic security, empower local and workplace democracy, and" ward off the running away of jobs. But this is a 'sector that is generally starved for capital. Expanding the resources :to grow this sector as rap- / idly as possible should be a priority for dlvesrors."

402 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil .

SHARING TilE SKY I 403 ~

Companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in tum, increases suspicions in the in- . estment community that fossil fuel· stocks are overvalued. The benefit of

i accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy m the start, is that it has the potential to tum the screws on theindustry ch tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is better Ie to compete directly with fossil fuels, while bolstering the frontline land fenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their

ommunities.

All of this points to something else that sets Blockadia apart from many revious social movements of its kind-In the past, people committed to so- . tal change often believed they had to choose between fighting the system d building alternatives to it. So in the 1960s, the counterculture splin-

. red between those who stayed in cities to try to stop wars and bash away inequalities and those who chose to drop out and live their ecological lues among like-minded people on organic farms or in manageable-sized ties like Bellingham, Washington. The activists and the exodus. Today~s activists don't have the luxury of these choices even if they

anted them. During these times of continual economic stress and exclu- , the communities on the front lines of saying no to dirty energy have overed that they will never build the base they need unless they can ~ltaneously provide 'economic alternatives to the projects they are op- ng. So after three years of just saying no to the Keystone XL pipeline, a p of farmers in Nebraska came up with just such a strategy: they built a , powered by-wind and solar, in the pipeline's path. And they pointed that the power generated from just that One bam would bring more gy to' the region than the oil in the pipeline that was headed for the rt terminal in Texas.23 On one level, the Build Our Energy Bam Was PR: t~e farmers were daring President Obama to tear down a renewable gy installation to make way for ditty oil. But it also showed their neigh- that; if the right policies are in place, there is another way to earn some h needed extra income without putting their land at risk. Similarly, after the British village of Balcombe in West Sussex was the of huge anti-fracking protests and angry clashes in 2013, a new power parry ~ormed caned REPOWERBalcombe. Its goal is "to supply the

404 I THIS CHANGEHY'ERYTHING SHARING THE SKY I 405

equivalent of 100% of Balcombe's electricity demand through comm owned, locally generated renewable energy"-with financing coming residents buying shares in the energy. co-operative. The fracking fight co tinues to play out in the courts, but solar panels are already on their way residents who were originally in favor of oil and gas drilling are joining t co-op, attracted to the promise of self-sufficiency and cost-saving.e' A c parable process is underway in Pungesti, the Romanian farming communi fighting fracking, The claims by Chevron's supporters that gas. extraction the only option for jobs in this poor region of the country forced fracki opponents to put forward proposals of their own-like a community wi farm, a processing plant for the-vegetables grown locally, and an abattoir f their livestock, all of which would add value to the livelihoods that are region's heritage.'

In short, some of the most tangible !esponses to the. ecological cri . today come not from utopian dropout projects, but rather are being for in the flames of resistance, by communities on the front lines of the bat against extreme extraction. kd at the same. time, many of those who, de cades ago, built alternatives at the local.level are finding themselves force back to the barricades. That's because. many of the most idyllic.pocke where the sixties-era dropouts went to build their utopias are. sudden under siege: oil and coal tankers threaten their shores, oil and coal trai threaten their downtowns, and frackers want their land.

And even in places that are lucky enough to have been spared (so fax all these threats, climate change is. demolishing the ddea that any. counter cultural pocket canprovide a safe haven. III August 2011, that became cle .... to the organic farmers in Vermont who had pioneered one of the, most a~r vaaced and sustainablelocal.agriculture systems in North America. 1'ro ably most famous is the Intervale, a network of urban farms in Burling that supplies roughly 10 percent of the city's fresh food, while at the sa time composting its waste and sustainably generating a significant portio .... of its power. But when Hurricane Irene descended on the state, floodwa ters destroyed not only historic, covered bridges but as Bill McKibben" ,a, Vermonter and staunch supporter of food.localization, said to me shortly after, "It washed away huge amounts of that beautiful local agriculture. 'fbI') Intervale in Burlington is suddenly under five feet .of Water. N othing , gets harvested there. There are tons of farms where the beautiful, rich topsoil is

now just covered with feet of s d.from the river." He took away from that experience the fact that "If we c 't solve the climate problem, then all the rest of this is for naught." 25

•••• 'I witnessed something Simir,' if on a smaller scale, in New York City one :year later in the immediate ermath of Super storm Sandy. While vis- iting;Re~ Hook, Brooklyn.one f the hardest hit neighborhoods, I stopped by the Red Hoo~ C(jmr~lUnity farm-an amazing place tha~' teaches kids from nearby housing psojects how to grow healthy food, provides compost- ingfota,huge number ofresiden s, hosts a weekly farmer's market, ' and runs ,.a Community Supported Agric lrure (CSA) program, getting all kinds of . preduceto people who need it. ot only was the farm improving the lives of people in the neighborhood, it was also doing everything right from a

C .. limate l=P~tive-tedUdngiod miles; staying away from pettal.u. m in- puts; sequestenng carbon rn th SOlI; reducing landfill by composting. But when the storm came, none of I hat mattered. The entire fall harvest was lost. And the urban farmers Lme' there=-srill in shock from seeing so much collective work gone to waste were preoccupied with the fear that the water that had -inundated.nhe fie ds had been so toxic that they would need to bring i~ new soil..

In short; dropping out and panting vegetables is not ail option for this generation. There can be no mf' re green' museums because the fossil fuels runaway train is coming for us' ne way or another. There may have been a t.im~ when en~agmg in resist ce against a life-t~reate.ning.System an. d bUlldmg alternatives to that sy tem could be meanmgfully separated, but today we have. to do both simultaneously: build and support inspiring al-

.. ternatives like the Red Hook Community Farm~and make sure they have a fighting chance of thriving by trying to change an economic model so treacherous that nowhere is safe. John Jordan; a longtime ecological activ- ist in Britain and France, describes resistance and alternatives as "the twin strands of the DNA of social change. One without the other is useless.I"

,. . The denizens of Blockadia live and know this. Which is why theirs is ." neitheramovement of negation (no to the miners/drillers/pipe layers/heavy haulers), nor' solely of protection (defending cherished but static ways of life), Increasingly, it is also a constructive movement, actively building an alternative economy based on very differerrtprinciples and values.

They are also learning-in a kind of people's inversion of the shock

406 I THI5.CHANGES EVERYTHING SHARING THE SKY. I 407

doctrine-s-that or(e of the most opportune times to build that next e omy may be in the aftermath of disasters, particularly climate-related . ters. That's because recurring mega-tragedies like Superstorm Sandy Typhoon Haiyan that kill thousands and.cause billions in damages. dramatically to educate the public about. the terrible costs of our CM system, driving an argument for radical change. that addresses the-r rather than only the symptoms, of the climate crisis. In the outpourin volunteerism and donations, as well as the rage. at any whiff.of profite these disasters also activate the. latent. and broadly shared generosity capitalism works so hard to deny •. Not to mention the fact that, as the d ter capitalists welt know, these events result in a whole lot of public being put on the table-s-an increasingly rare. event during times of relent economic austerity. -,

With the right kind of public pressure, that money can be .marshaledr just to rebuild cities and communities, but to transform them into models nonextractive living. This can go far· beyond the usualcalls for stronger walls: activists can demand everything from free, ,democratically contrs public transit, to more public housing along those transit lines, pow by community-controlled renewable energy-with the jobs created by investment going to local workers and paying a living wage. And unlike disaster capitalists who. use . crises to end-run, around democracy, a Peop Recovery (as many from the Occupy movement called for post-San would require new democratic precesses, including neighborhood, asse '" blies, to decide how hard-hit communities should be rebuilt. The ove ing principle must be to address the twin crises of inequality and eli change at the same time.

One example of this kind of inverted shock doctrine took place in rural town of Greensburg,. Kansas. In 2007, a super tornado ripped thrb. the area, turning about 95 percent of the town into rubble. As.a r,esult extraordinary, community-led-precess that began just days after the dis. with neighbors holding meetings in tents amid the wreckage of their fo lives, Greensburg today stands as a model "green. town," often describet the greenest in America. The hospital, city hall, and school have all built to the highest certification level issued by Leadership in.Energy Environmental Design (LEED). And the town has become a destina

r hundreds of policy makers, anxious to learn more about its lew-energy ting and its cutting-edge green architecture and waste reduction, as well

. the wind turbines-that earn municipal revenue by producing more power an local residents need.27 •••. Most striking of all, this "living laboratory" is taking place in the heart

.' an overwhelmingly Republican-Voting county, where a great many peo- are entirely unconvinced that climate change is real. But those debates to matter little to residents; the shared experience of tremendous loss,

well as 'the outpouring of generosity that follow the disaster, have, in eensburg, rekindled the values of land stewardship and intergenerational nsibility that have deep roots in rural life. "The number one topic at

ose tent meetings was talking about who we are=-what are our values?" calls: Greensburg mayor Bob Dixson, a former postmaster who comes from long lineoffarmers. He added, "Sometimes we agreed to disagree, but we re still. civil to each other. And let's not forget that our ancestors were wards of the land. My ancestors lived in the original green homes: sod uses ...• We learned that the only true green and sustainable things. in eare how we treat each other." 28 Responding to -disaster with this kind of soul-searching is profoundly erent from the top-down model of the shock doctrine-these are at- ts not to exploit crisis, but to harness it to actually solve the underlying

blems at their root, and in ways that expand democratic participation er than the opposite. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became a ratcry for corporate interests -intent on capturing and radically shrink- the .public sphere, attacking public health and education and leaving city far more vulnerable to the next disaster. But there is no reason y future disasters cannot be laboratories for those who believe in reviv- nd. reinventing the commons, and in ways that actively reduce the ees.that.we will all be battered by many more such devastating blows

SHARI.IG THE S.KY I 409 408 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

From Local to Globd! Debts ." Besides, she-writes, surely "the most direct way to reduce emissions of tbon diexide was to leave fossil fuels in the ground." 30 'The Yasunf plan was based on' the premise that Ecuador, like all de- oping countries, is- owed a debt for the .inherent injustice of climate ge-;:-the fact that wealthy countries had used up most 'of the atmo-

e:d~·cap~city for safely absorbing CO2 before, developing countries had ance to I~dustrialb;e. And-since the entire world would reap the ben- of keeping. that carbon in the ground (since it would help stabilize global climate), it is unfair to expect Ecuador, as a poor country whose le had contributed little to the climate crisis, to shoulder the economic

den Jor giving up those. potential petro dollars. Instead; that burden uld be shared between Ecuador and the highly industrialized countries 8t responsible for the buildup of atmospheric carbon. This is not char- in other words: if wealthy countries -do not want poorer ones to pull

emselves out of poverty in the same dirty way that we did, the onus is on orthern governments to help foot the bill .

. This, of-course, . Is the core of the argument for -the existence of a "eli- te debt'v-ethe same argument that Bolivia's climate negotiator, Angelica $0 Llanos, had laid out for me in Geneva. in 2009, helping me to -how climate change could be the catalyst to attack inequality at its re, the basis for a "Marshall Plan for the Earth."31 The math behind the gument is simple enough. As discussed, climate change is the result of

, ulative emissions: the carbon dioxide we emit stays in the atmosphere approximately one to two centuries, with a portion remaining for a mil- ium or even more." And since the climate is changing as a result of hundred-odd years of such accumulated emissions, that means that the tries that have been powering their economies with fossil fuels since Industrtal Revolution have done far more to cause temperatures to rise those that just got in on the globalization game in the last couple of

. des'.33 Developed countries; which represent less than 20 percent of the rld's population, have emitted almost 70 percent of all the greenhouse pollution that is now destabilizing the climate. (The United States . e, which comprises less than 5 percent of the global population, now tributes about 14 percent of all carbon emissions.) 34

.... , And ~hile developing countries like China. and India spew large (and

On my first visit to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, the questi how to finance the kind of healthy economy anti-coal activists were ing for came up often. At one point, Lynette Two Bulls, who runs an nization that teaches Cheyenne youth about their history, told me tha had heard about something e:J<!citifig happening in, Ecuador. She wast about the call for the international community to compensate 'the co . for not extracting the oil in the Yasunf rainforest, with the money r going to social programs and a dean energy transition. It sounded like what was needed on the reservation and she wanted to know: if Ec could be compensated for keeping its oil'in the ground, then why eo the Northern Cheyenne be compensated forbeing carbon keepers for coal?

It was a very good question, and the parallels were striking. Yasunf i. tional Park is an extraordinary swath of Ecuadorian rainforest, home ito . eral Indigenous tribes and a surreal -number of rare and exotic animal has nearly as many species of trees in·2.5 acres as are native to all of . America). And underneath that riot of life sits an estimated 850· barrels of crude oil, worth about $ 7 billion. Burning that oil~and 1 the rainforest.to get.it=-would add-another 547 million tons of car' oxide to the atmosphere. Of course the-oil majors want in39

So in 2006, the environmental group' Acci6n Ecologica (the same that made an early alliance with the anti-oil movement in Nige . forward a counterproposal-the Ecuadorian government should agree sell the oil, but it should be supported in this action by the intematio community, which would benefit collectively from the preservation of diversity and from keeping planet-warming gases out of our: shared a sphere. That would mean partially compensating Ecuador for what it have earned' from oil revenues had it opted to drill. As Esperanza.M president of Acci6n Ecologies, explained, the "proposal establishes a edent, arguing that countries should be rewarded for not exploiting oil. ... Funds gathered wouid be used for the [renewable} energy trans and could be seen as payments for the ecological debt from North to So and they should be distributed democratically' at the local and global

410 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING SHARINIHHE SKY t 411

rapidly growin:g), amohnts. of carbon dioxide, they are not equally ireS sible for the cost of the cleanup, the argument goes', because they' contributed only a fraction 'Of the two hundred years of curnnlative,p tion that has caused the crisis. Moreover, not everyone needs carbonfs same sorts of things. For instance" India still has roughly 300 million living without electricity. Does it have the same degree of responsib cut its emissions as, say, Britain, which has been accumulating weal emitting industrial levels of carbon dioxide ever since James Watt' duced his successful steam engine in 1776?35

Of course not. That is why 195 countries; including the United'S ratified the United Nations Framework Convention-on Climate Ch 1992, which enshrines the principle of "common but differentiated re sibilities." That basically' meansthat everyone is responsible fotheing of the climate solution but the countries that have emitted more ave past century should-be the first to cut and should also help finance p countries to switch to clean development models."

Few dispute that climate debt is an argument with 'justice and inte tionallaw on its side. And yet Ecuador's attempt to put that principle r practice in the forest has been fraught with difficulties and may well Once again, being right, 'and even, having rights, is not enoughon to move the rich and powerful.

In 2007, the center-left government of Rafael Correa took up the Yas proposal and championed it, albeit briefly. on the world stage. Inside E dor, the Yasunf-ITT initiative; as the plan is known (named for the cove Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini oil fields inside the park), becam populist rallying cry, a vision for rear economic development that did require sacrificing some of the most cherished parts of the country. A 2 poll found that 83 percent of Ecuadorians supported leaving the Y: oil in the ground, up from 41 percent in 2008, a measure of how q a transformative vision can capture the public' imagination. But con, tions from developed countries wer<=: slow ,to arrive (only '$13 million $3.6 billion goal was raised), and in 2013 Correa announced mat -he going to allow drilling to begin)?

Local supporters of the plan, however, have not given up and Corr backsliding ha:s opened a-new Blockadia front: protestors opposing drilli

already faced arrests and rubber bullets and, in the absence of a po- Lsolution, Indigenous groups. are likely to resist extraction with their

. '.S. Meanwhile; in April 2014, a coalition afNGOs and citizen groups cted more than 750,000' signatures calling for the matter to be put to a

ional referen:dum (at the time of. publication, it seemed that Correa was ermined to block the vote and push ahead with drilling), As Kevin Koe- ; Ecuador program director at Amazon Watch, wrote in The New York . s, "Though the government should be held to account," this is not all ea's fault. "The stillbirth of Yasuni-I'TT is a shared failure." 38 This setback, moreover, is a microcosm of the broader failure of the in- ational climate- negotiations, which have stalled again and again over central question of whether climate 'action will reflect the history of o created the crisis. The end result: emissions keep soaring way past safe els, everyone loses, the poorest lose first and Worst. Giving up on real solutions, like the imaginative one first proposed to e the Yasunf, is therefore not an option. As with Indigenous land 'rights, vernrnents are unwilling to . live up to their international (and domes- responsibilities, then rnovements of people have to step into that lead- ip-vacuum and find ways to change the power equation, The right, as usual, understands this better than the left, which is why climate change denial crowd .consistently claims that global warming socialist conspiracy to redistribute wealth (the Competitive Enterprise titute's Chris Horner likes to say rich countries are being "extorted" by poor)." Climate debt is not extortion but climate change, when fully fronted, does raise some awfully thorny questions about what we in the lthy world owe to the countries on the front lines of a crisis they had le hand in creating. At the sarne time, as elites in countries like China India grow ever more, profligate in their consumption and emissions, itional North-South categories begin to break down and equally tough tions are-raised about the responsibilities of the rich and the rights of

e poor wherever they happen' to live in the world. Because without facing oSe questions, there is no hope of getting emissions under control where

counts the most. As we have seen, emissions in North America and Europe still need to me down dramatically but, thanks largely to the offshoring of production

SHARINIHHE .SKY I 413 412 I; THIS'CHANGES EVERYTHING

rtant wherever we live, there is nothing more important than helping , e that new structures in Asia are built to the highest standards of ef- cy. Otherwise, we are an~the'North, South, East, and West-in for rophic emissions growth.41

enabled by the free-trade era, they have pretty .much stopped growing the fast-rising economies of the Global South-with. Chtna.Jndia, Br" and South Africa leading' the pack-that ate mostly responsible. for. surge in emissions in recent years, whieh.iswhy we are racing-toward ping points far more quickly than anticipated.

The reason for this shift in the source of emissions -has everything to with the spectacular success multinational corporations have had in gl izing the bigh-consumption-based economic model pioneered in' we western countries. The trouble is, the. atmosphere can't take it. As th mospheric physicist and mitigation expert, Alice Bows-Larkin put it, interview, "The number of people that went through: industrializatioa first time around is like a drop in the ocean compared to the n· people going through industrialization this time." And to quote Pres' Obama in late 2013, if China's: and India's energy consumption imitates U,S. model, "we'll be four-feet under water."?

The truth is-and this is a hl:nnbling thing for cultures accustome assuming that our actions shape the destiny of the world to accept. real battle will not be lost or w<;m,by us. It will be won or lost by t movements in the Global South that are fighting their own.Blockadia-s struggles-demanding their own clean energy revolutions, their own gf jobs, their own pools of carbon left in the ground. And they are up ,aga powerful forces within their own countries that insist.that it is their 'I to pollute their way to prosperity and that nothing matters more than e nomic growth. Indeed, citing the rank unfairness of expecting develo countries to bear the .bulk of the burden for humanity avoiding eli catastrophe has become an enormously effective excuse for governments .; the Global South to shirk their own responsibilities.

For this reason, if we accept the scientific evidence that we need to fast to prevent catastrophic climate change, it makes sense to focus our' tion where it can have the greatest impact •. And that's clearly in the G1 South. To cite just one example:about a third of all greenhouse gas e sions come from buildings (heating, cooling, ;and lighting them). Build stock in the Asia Pacific region is projected to grow by a dramatic 47 cent by 2021, while remaining relatively stable in the developed w This means that, while making existing buildings more energy efficien

ere is, however" much that can be done in the industrialized north to tip the balance offorces toward a model of development that does not on endless growth and dirty fuels. Fighting the pipelines and export unals that would'sendfossil fuels to Asia is one piece of the puzzle. So

ii' battling new free-trade deals, reining in our own overconsumption, and lilsibly r€localizing our economies, since plenty of the carbon China is

in.g is going toward making useless stuff for us. -: But the most powerful lever for change in the Global South is the same in the Global North: the emergence of positive, practical, and concrete ternatives to dirty deveiopment that do not ask people to choose between gher living stahdards and toxic·extraction, Because if dirty coal is the y way to tum on the lights in India, then that is how those lights will be ed on. And if public transit is a disaster in Delhi, then more and more

. ple willHep choosing to. drive cars. , And there are ,alternativewmodeis.of development that do not require assive wealth .srrarification, tragic cultural losses, or ecological devasta-

; As in the Yasunf case, movements in the -Global South .are fighting rd fdt these alternative development rhodels~policies that would bring wer to huge numbers of people through decentralized renewable energy

, revolutionize ,urbaN transportation so that public transit is far more able than p~ivate cars {indeed, as discussed, there have been riots de- ding'free public transit in Brazil}.

:. i' 0~e proposal receiv.ing'increasing attention is for a "global feed-in tar- iff/! whi:ah' would; create an internationally administered fund to support Clean; eri.ergy transitions throughout the developing world. The architects of this; plan~con0niist Tariq Banuri and' climate .expert N iclas Hallstrom-> estimate that a $100 billion annual investment for ten to fourteen years

SHARING THE SKY I 415 414 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

"could effectively help ,1.5 billion people gain access to-energy, while t decisive steps toward a titnewable .energy future ,ih time to prevent all societies from suffering fromdimate catastrophe."42

Sunita Narain, director general of one of ,the most influential envi mental organizations in India, the New Delhi-based Centre for Scie and Environment, stresse~ that the solution is not for the wealthy worl contract its economies while allowing the developing world to polhit .... way to prosperity (even if this were possible). It is for developing court . to "develop differently. We do not want-to first pollute and then' clean So we need money, we need .technology, to he able. to do things ently."43 And that means the wealthy world must pay its climate debts.

And yet financing' a just transition in fast-developing economies not been a priority of activists in the North. Indeedagreat many Big' groups in the United States consider the idea of climate debt to be p cally toxic, since, unlike the standard "energy security" and green job guments that present climate action as a race that rich countries can it requires emphasizing the importance of international cooperation. solidarity.

Sunita Narain hears these .objections often, "I'm always being t especially by my friends in America-s-that .•. issues of historical-res bility are something that we shortld not talk about. What my forefathe is not my responsibility." But, she said in an interview, this ovedo fact that those past actions have a direct bearing on why some countries rich and others are poor. "Your wealth today has a relationship with: the . society has drawn on nature, and overdrawn on nature. That has to he back. That's the historical responsibility issues that we needto confro

These debates are; of course, familiar from other reparations batt In Latin America, progressive economists have' long argued that Wi em powers owe an "ecological debt" for centuries of colonial.land.g and resource extraction, while Africa. and. Caribbean governments at various points (most notably-the 2001'W~rld Conference Against ism in Durban, South Africa) caned for reparations to. be paid for tr atlantic slavery. After receding for .more than. a decade after the Dn conference, these claims were back in the news in 2013, when four Caribbean nations banded together to make a formal reparations

itain, France, the Netherlands, and other European countries that par- ipated 'in the slave trade. "Our constant search and struggle for develop- "nt resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and co- ialism," said Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, July,1013. The goal of reparations, he argued, was to break the chains of ndency once and for all. 45 The rich world, for the most part, pr:etty much ignores these calls, dis-

. sing it all as ancient history, much as the.U.S. government manages to egard calls for slavery reparations from African Americans (though in spring of 2014, the calls grew distinctly louder, thanks to breakthrough

porting by The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, which once again rekindled e debate)." But the case for climate debt is a little ·different. We can bate the legacy of colonialism, and we can argue about how much slav- shapes modem underdevelopment. But the science of climate change

esn't leave much room for that kind of disagreement. Carbon leaves an istakable trail,. the eviden~e etched in coral and ice cores. We can ac- telymeasure how much carbon we can collectively emit into the atmo- re and who has taken up what share of that budget over the past two

ndred years or so. On the other hand, all of these various suppressed and neglected debts not separate from one another but are better understood as different pters in the same,' continuous story. It was planet-warming coal that wered the textile mills and sugar refineries in Manchester and London at needed to be fed with ever more raw cotton and sugarcane from the lonies, most of-it' harvested by slave labor. And Eric Williams, the late lar and Trinidad's first prime minister, famously argued that profits

. slavery directly subsidized the growth of industrialization in Eng- ; a process .. that we' now know led inextricably to climate change.

e .details of'Williams1s claims have long been vigorously debated, but work received additional vindication in 2013 when researchers at lversity College London released a database collecting information on identities and finances of British slave-owners in the mid-nineteenth tutyY The research project delved into the fact that when the British Parlia-

SHARING TH,E SKY I 417 416 I THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

ment ruled to abolish slavery.in its colonies in '1833, it pledged to co sate British slave owners for th~ loss of their human: properte--a ba form of reparations for tke perpetratersof slavery, not its victims. Th to payouts adding up to £20 million-e-a. figure that, according to, The dependent, "represented a staggering' 40 per cent of the Treasury's a' spending budget arid, in t~day's terms.calcnlared as wage values, equat around £16.5bn." Much of th~t money went dtr.ecdv into the coal-po infrastructure of the now roaring Industrial Revolution-e-from faotori railways to steamships. These, in tum, were the tools that took eoloni .

, I ~~. 1'1 .

to a markedly more rapacious stage, with the sears still felt to this day. Coal didn't create structural, inequalitv+ethe boats that enable

transatlantic slave trade.~dJlrst colonial land grabs were powered by and the early factories powered by water wheels. But the relentless predictable power of coal certainly supercharged the process, allowing' human labor and natural resources to be extracted, at rates previously, imaginable, laying down the bones of the modern.global economy,

And now it turns out that the theft did not end when slavery was . ished, or when the colonial project faltered. In fact, it is still in pr because the emissions from those early steamships and roaring fac were the beginning of the buildup of excess atmospheric carbqn, So an way of thinking about this hi{ltory. is that; starting two centuries ago; helped Western nations to deliberately appropriate other people's lives lands; and as the emissions from that,cop.l (and later oil .and gas) co ally built up in the atmosphere, it ~ave these same 'nations. rhe me inadvertently appropriate their descendants' sky as well, gobbling up of our shared atmosphere's capacity to safely absorb carbon.

As a direct result of these centuries of serial thefts-sof land1lab<1Jti atmospheric space-developing countries today are squeezed hetwee impacts of global warming, made worse by persistent poverty; and by need to alleviate that poverty, which, in the current economic syst be done most cheaply and easily by burning a great deal more car matically worsening the climate crisis. They cannot break this without help, and that help can only come from those countries a' porations that grew wealthy, in large part, as a result of those illeg] . appropriations.

The difference: between this reparations claim and older ones is not that e case is stronger. It's that it does not rest on ethics and morality alone: lthy countries do not just need to help the Global South move to a low- siens economic' path because it's the right thing to do. We need to do

.because our- collective survival depends on it. o At the same' time, we ,need common agreement that having been nged does not grant a country the right to repeat the same crime on even grander scale. Just as having been raped does not bestow the right rape, or having been robbed the right to steal, having been denied the. rtunity to choke the atmosphere with pollution in the past 'does not t.anyone the right to choke it today. Especiallybecause today's pcllut- know full well the catastrophic implications of that pollution in ways t early industrialists did not .

. ' So a middle. ground must be found. Fortunately, a group of researchers the think tank EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute

e attempted to do just 'that: they have developed a detailed and innova- model of what a rigorously fait approach to emission reductions might like on a global scale. Called the "Greenhouse Development Rights" work, it is' an attempt to better reflect the new realities of wealth and n-pollution moving to the developing world, while firmly protecting dght to, sustainable development and recognizing the West's greater onsibility for· cumulative emissions. Such an approach, they believe, recisely-whats needed to break the climate deadlock, since it addresses vast disparities found not only between but also within countries." em countries could be assured-that the wealthy of the Global South

. their part now and in the future, while access to what is left of the phenc commons would be properly safeguarded for the poor," ith ~is in mind, each country's fair share of the global carbon-cutting n is determined by two key factors: responsibility for historical emis- and capacity to contribute, based on the country's level of devel-

. ent, In an illustrative scenario, the United States's share of global ions cuts· needed by the end of the decade might be something like rcent (the largest of any single country). But not all of those reduc- would need to be done at home-some could be met by financing and rwise supporting the transition to low-carbon pathways in the South.

Movtng from Extraction to Renewal

413 I THIS CJlANGES EVERYTHING

And according to the researchers, with.every nation's share of the glob burden clearly defined ·and quantified, there would be no need to- rely ineffective and eas,Hygamed market mech~nisms like carbon :rading,.50

At a time when \:ich countries are crying poor and slashing social vices for their own people, asking governments to make those kinds ofi temational commitments can.sound impossible. We barely do the old k' of aid anymore, let alone'some ambitious new justice-based approach. there are, in the immediate term, plenty of affordable ways for North countries to begin to honor our climate debts Without going broke--fr erasing the foreign debts, currently owed by developing countries in change for climate action to loosening green energy patents and transfe ring the associated technological know-how.

Moreover, much of the cost does not need to come from regular payers; it can and should come from the corporations most responsible driving this crisis. That can .take the form of any combination of the p Iuter-pays measures already discussed, from a financial transaction tax" eliminating subsidies for fossil fuel companies, .

What we cannot expect is th~t the people least responsible for this ci' will foot all, or even most, of the bill. Because that is a recipe for c. . strophic amounts of carbon ending up in our common atmosphere. L the call to honorour treaties and other land-sharing agreements with digenous peoples, climate change-is once again forcing us to look at injustices that many assumed were safely buried in the past are shaping shared vulnerability to global climate collapse.

With many of the biggest pools of untapped carbon on lands cont by some of the poorest people on the planet, and with emissions risings rapidly in what were, until recently, some of the poorest parts of the w there is simply no credible way forward that does not involve-redressing real roots of poverty.

13

", THE RIGHT TO REGENERATE

, . "Stop calling me resilient. I'm nohesiJient. Because every time you say, 'Oh, they're resilient,' you can do something else to me!'

-'Tracie Washington, New Orleans-based civil rights attorney, 20101

"That woman Is the first environment is an original instruction. In pregnancy . '. our bodies sustain life .... At the breast of women, the generations are nour-

is~e4. From the bodies of, wom,en flows the relationship of those ge!lerations J,Qth to society and to the natural world. In this way is the earth our mother, the old people tell us. In this way, we as women are earth."

-Katsi Cook, Mohawk midwife, 200]2

" the beginning of this book, I wrote about how becoming a mother in an of extinction brought the climate crisis into my heart in a. new way. I feltthe crisis before, of course, as all of us do on some level. But for the

.st part, my climate fears expressed themselves as low-level melancholy, ctuated by moments of panic, rather than full-blown grief. At some point about seven years ago, I realized that I had become so vinced that we were headed toward a grim ecological collapse that I

s ,losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature. The more beautiful d striking the experience, the more I found myself grieving its inevitable s=-like someone unable to fall fully in love because she can't stop imag- g the inevitable heartbreak •

•....• ' Looking out at an ocean bay on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast,