imperialism – Page 5 – Ashley Dawson

In an appearance before the U.S. congress today, Obama administration deputy special envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing testified that America intends to hold the South African government to its pledges to cut carbon emissions. This despite the U.S.’s abstention in the vote on the $3.75 billion World Bank loan to build one of the world’s biggest coal-fired power plants.

This comes on top of the Obama administration’s recent decision to deny mitigation funds to Bolivia and Ecuador in response to their refusal to sign up for the sham Copenhagen accord.

As an article in the Guardian cogently points out, “Pershing’s comments align with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting some of the burden for dealing with climate change from the industrialised countries which have historically caused most emissions to rapidly emerging countries, such as South Africa, India, China and Brazil.” Shifting the burden are the keywords here.

Speaking of South Africa, I also wanted to note an interesting article on the blikkiesdorps or slums created by government clearance programs in advance of the World Cup. As the Olympics in Vancouver demonstrated yet again, sporting mega-spectacles almost always lead to increasing homelessness and diminishing civil liberties. The World Cup in South Africa is unlikely to be any different. Sad really – I was in South Africa during the unsuccessful bid to win the games back in 2000 and remember how decimated people were when the national bid was rejected. I’m afraid that people’s expectations are likely to be quickly deflated.

Last night I attended an orientation session for the New York delegation to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Boliva. The forty-odd members of the delegation were an extremely exciting bunch of grassroots activists, the majority of whom came from the Bronx, although other boroughs were also represented. I’m extremely excited to be attending the conference, and will be blogging about it here and on the Social Text website, where we’ll be debuting a new live blogging feature.

Our NYC delegation seems particularly important to me given the decision taken late last week by the U.S. State Department to deny economic assistance to countries opposing the (virtually meaningless) Copenhagen accord. I say meaningless because the accord was so watered down. The accord takes the heroic step of “recognizing” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but contains no commitments to cut emissions to achieve that goal. It’s gutless and meaningless, in other words.

Those who watched the Copenhagen conference closely will remember that the Obama administration tried to ram this fig-leaf of an accord down the throats of vulnerable poor countries by making $30 billion of promised mitigation funds contingent on acceptance of the accord. The resistance of Bolivia and Ecuador to this poisoned apple means that they are now faced with a refusal on the part of the U.S. to dispense aid for the very grave environmental damage caused by the behavior of industrialized countries over the last 200 years. Check out this article for more on the U.S.’s strong-arm tactics. For more on Copenhagen in general, check out the online forum I curated for Social Text.

I hope that the NYC delegation will organize a very public protest against this U.S. policy while we are in Bolivia. We in the (over)developed world bear such disproportionate responsibility for climate injustice. Now the U.S.’s policy has become belligerent as well as mendacious. Time to speak up!

The World Bank yesterday approved a $3.75 billion loan for a new coal-fired power plant in Limpopo, South Africa. Named Medupi, the 4,800 megawatt plant will draw on South Africa’s abundant sources of coal to provide power for an increasingly power-hungry nation. It will be one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the world.

But who precisely will control and who will benefit from this power? What is the World Bank doing funding the fossil fuel industry to the hilt when we clearly have to make an immediate transition to sustainable energy sources?

These questions are particularly germane since the South African national power company, Eskom, took out substantial international loans during the early years of apartheid from 1951-1967 to build power plants that provided some of the world’s cheapest electricity exclusively to large corporations and whites, while saddling the country’s entire population with the significant debts associated with these loans. South Africa is still grappling with the debt of the apartheid era.

Admittedly, as a recent piece by Andrew Revkin on the “energy gap” and the climate crisis points out, access to energy is an increasingly important issue globally . As Revkin argues, the world’s growing population is already marked by yawning inequalities of access to energy supplies that might provide reliable sources of light at night and heat for cooking. Yet little research is being done to develop clean, sustainable sources of power. In fact, almost precisely the opposite is the case: according to a recent report by the Environmental Law Institute, the U.S. spent approximately $72 billion on subsidies for fossil fuels while supporting renewables with only $29 billion during the period from 2002-2008.

The World Bank decision on the loan to South Africa continues such unsustainable trends. Medupi will emit 25 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Although the South African energy minister Dipho Peters argues that, with 25% of the country still lacking access to power, Medupi will fill a much needed demand. Yet such populist rhetoric obscures the fact that the majority of the plant’s power will benefit large, transnational corporations, many of whom had secret, apartheid-era agreements with the racist regime that completely shield them from costs associated with construction of the plant and repayment of the World Bank loan.

If local people are unlikely to benefit much from the power generated by Medupi, they will inevitably suffer from its dangerous side-effects. As with all coal-fired power plants, local air quality will decline, sulphur dioxide levels will skyrocket, and mercury residue in the area’s water, air and land will increase. According to Earthlife Africa, the plant would also be responsible for diminished access to water and land degradation in what was formerly a predominantly agrarian area. Anticipating these damaging effects, residents of Limpopo filed a complaint with the World Bank inspection team earlier this week, apparently to no avail.

Another justification for the project was articulated by World Bank vice-president for Africa Obiageli K Ezekwesili, who said recently that the project is vital for providing access to energy and fighting poverty. But, as Sunita Dubey from the activist group Groundwork argues, South Africa’s energy crisis is a product of sweetheart deals between Eskom and large corporations, which provide these large firms with some of the cheapest electricity in the world.

The approval of the World Bank loan, a vote from which the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands all abstained from, is a huge defeat for South African and international climate justice movements. It is also a great setback for efforts to promote a shift away from unsustainable energy sources. Although it’s important to acknowledge that the will to power is likely to figure increasingly prominently in a world in which billions of people lack the most basic amenities of modernity, we cannot simply focus on producing more power. The Medupi defeat should underline the urgency of building a stronger global movement for climate justice, one that targets the unsustainable energy policies of institutions like the World Bank in the same way that the global justice movement targeted their unjust structural adjustment policies. Sustained critique of the World Bank’s history of flawed energy sector lending policies – as well as local activism to challenge the adverse impacts of such policies – should be high on the climate justice movement’s list of priorities.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence, missing for over two hundred years, has just been found in the British National Archives. According to an article in the New York Times, a graduate student named Julia Gaffield found the document while following up a lead she’d found in the correspondence of a British official in Jamaica who’d been in Haiti during the time of the revolution.

It’s worth taking a look at this original copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The tone of defiance in the face of French imperialism resonates across the centuries. The document is begins with a bold declaration: “Liberty or Death.” This defiance, along with the document’s invocation of the immense suffering already meted out to the Haitian people by 1804, is particularly painful given the steep price that Haiti paid subsequently for such defiance of the world’s foremost imperial powers.

The rediscovery of this document should underline the importance of a socially just effort to rebuild the country following the devastating earthquake of last January.

“The first sign of a bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save the situation.” – CLR James

Ever since the effective collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, I’ve been thinking about how we represent survival and futurity in a conjuncture in which hegemonic ideology is so clearly bankrupt and the ruling classes in the world’s most powerful nations are so transparently unwilling to take the steps necessary to save civilization.

One the one hand, it seems important to note that, with the failure of Copenhagen, humanity (as well as most of the planet’s flora and fauna) is truly in dire straits. Heading into the conference, activists such as Bill McKibben joined scientists such as James Hansen to argue that humanity needed to agree on a plan to diminish atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350ppm in order to forestall run-away climate change (we are currently approaching 400ppm, with an increase of roughly 3ppm annually). Meanwhile, there seems little chance that any legislation to address climate change will get through the U.S. Congress, and the legislation that passed the House of Representatives is so toxic that it’s better left as a dead letter. In addition, lack of action in the U.S. gives developing countries such as China, which recently surpassed the U.S. in terms of cumulative emissions, a perfect excuse not to cut back their own atmospheric pollution. Finally, a recent analysis by scientists at M.I.T.’s Sustainability Institute concludes that the emissions reduction pledges agreed to at Copenhagen would allow global mean temperature to increase approximately 3.9° Celsius, a level that could see global warming run out of control. “Under the current proposals, global emissions of greenhouse gases would increase 0.8C a year between now and 2020,” the joint report warned. In short, we seem to be witnessing a scramble for the atmosphere akin to the scramble for Africa unleashed by inter-imperial competition during the European colonial era; we all know where such inter-imperial competition led.

On the other hand, it makes little sense to panic. As Neil Smith and Cindy Katz argue, apocalyptic rhetoric (environmental and otherwise) almost always plays into the hands of the forces of reaction. This is because apocalypticism essentially evacuates the political imaginary, implicitly ceding it to the Right. Sort of the way that the threat of a filibuster by the Republicans in the Senate has produced total gridlock that dooms any and all progressive legislation. Of course we need to develop both utopian and pragmatic responses to the current crisis if we progressive rather than neo-fascist solutions to the current crisis are ever going to gain any popular traction.

But if it’s true that millenarian thinking is dangerous, it’s nonetheless safe to say that we are currently living through a potent resurgence of the apocalyptic imaginary. Hollywood has been churning out end-of-the-world fictions – from 2012 to Avatar – with increasingly frenetic energy. I think this is an important phenomenon inasmuch as it at least registers the cul-de-sac into which ideologies of globalization and neoliberal deregulation (not to mention capitalism itself) have backed. Apocalypticism constitutes a distorted recognition of the crisis; better this that know-nothing climate change denialism. Against the know-nothing idiots in Washington who have been chortling in the past two weeks about the record snowfall and suggesting that this indicates that climate change is bunk, some sort of recognition of our calamitous future under a business-as-usual scenario is necessary.

What will the cultural politics of survival look like as we move into the dystopian future we are currently seeding? As Marc Abélès observes in his recent book The Politics of Survival, climate change and the crisis of the model of development disseminated globally by the U.S. over the last half century has placed a new paradigm of sustainable development at the core of emergent global geopolitics. This paradigm, to quote Abélès, “places the horizon of survival and threat at its center, orienting political action around that horizon.” How, Abélès asks, shall we define the politics of survival today? To this question, which I regard as the seminal question for our times, I would add that this attempt to define the politics of survival is a question of struggles for hegemony over what survival might mean, and who will be counted as human in projects to ensure survival. I will be reviewing Abélès’s book on the Social Text website soon. In the meantime, this post kicks off a series of incidental pieces that I will be writing focused on the cultural politics of survival.

Amid the many trials and tribulations of life in New York City, one of the quotidian boons has been the fact that my daughter has grown up with an African-American best friend. In fact, my daughter has always seemed color blind to me; she essentially takes this form of privilege for granted.

How different from my own experience. Most of the institutions I’ve inhabited since arriving in the U.S. from South Africa in the 1970s have been informally but nonetheless pretty thoroughly segregated. For instance, I currently teach in the largest urban public university in the world, the City University of New York (CUNY). According to a 2007 survey, New York City is 44% white, 25% African-American, 12% Asian American, and 17% Other; Hispanics and Latin@s, who may belong to any of these ethnic groups, make up 27.5% of the above classification. CUNY’s undergrad population is currently 27.2% white, 28.8% African-American, 27.4% Latin@, and 16.4% Asian Pacific Islander. CUNY’s student body, in other words, is even more diverse than the city’s population in general. CUNY faculty, however, are not. 64% are white, 16.5% are African-American, 10% Latin@, and 9.3% Asian Pacific Islander. As an African-American colleague of mine recently put it in an acerbic moment, the only time he spends all his time around white folks is when he’s at work.

Unfortunately, the stress of the present is taking its toll on my daughter. As she feels the intense pressure of competition with her peers to get into high schools in the city and surrounding region, I see racial animus coming out in my daughter. In what seems to be an argument that she’s rehearsed through conversations with friends, she recently railed against the fact that her best friend has been more aggressively courted by some of the same schools she’s applying to, and expressed anger that this was presumably because of her ethnic background. My attempts to explain the tokenistic character of what remains of affirmative action policies in the U.S., and the persistent structural racism that affects people of color in this country, have been met with mounting scorn.

I believe that my daughter will have access to life situations and educational resources that will transform this worrying trend in her thought. I’m certain that her life so far has prepared the foundations for anti-racist thought and behavior as an adult. But I nonetheless think that the recent animus that she’s expressed is characteristic of very disturbing trends within the U.S. and on a global scale.

The conditions are ripe for significant forms of racial backlash. A recent production by Big Noise Films called “White Power U.S.A.” tracks the resurgence of the white supremacist movement today. The film makes the point that although contemporary neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups are relatively few in number (30,000 hardcore supporters and 250,000 active sympathizers, according to watchdog organizations), they are actively and successfully building bridges into more “mainstream” wings of the conservative movement in the U.S. The film highlights, in particular, the broad resonance of anti-immigrant politics during a period of economic downturn, looking in detail at the Minutemen movement in Arizona, which is populated many hardcore white supremacists. A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security also warns that white supremacist groups are organizing with increasing success within the U.S. military, and notes that Right-wing extremism currently represents the greatest terrorist threat to the U.S.

The election of Barack Obama figures particularly prominently in contemporary white supremacist rhetoric. At meetings and marches of the Tea Party movement, the rhetoric of white ressentiment is everywhere apparent, in more or less coded form. The argument that Obama is not an American is pretty common at such rallies, as are calls to “take back America” (implicitly from the people of color who have captured it). This sort of rhetoric gets massively amplified when it is picked up by commentators on talk radio and the Fox channel. Precisely the issues that should be galvanizing a progressive movement – the economic melt down, the Wall Street bail out, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – are, according to white supremacist activists quoted in “White Power U.S.A.,” bringing people into their organizations.

I saw precisely the same conditions while living in Italy two years ago. There, the economic downturn and the splintering of the Left led to the reelection of Silvio Berlusconi, whose electoral coalition included the explicitly xenophobic Northern League in a much-empowered role. In fact, in the weeks after Berlusconi’s victory at the polls, I saw carabinieri, the Italian paramilitary police force, swoop down on a family of Roma window washers at a traffic light near where I was living. The inevitable outcome of this upwelling of race baiting politics was evident last weekend when race riots ripped apart a town in Calabria where organized crime syndicates was keeping immigrant laborers in sub-human conditions.

Given the strong likelihood that the downturn will endure and even intensify for average people in the U.S. and Europe, it’s pretty certain that we’re only seeing the beginning of this latest wave of racism.