If you get into enough arguments about slavery in the United States, you will encounter people making the claim that reparations aren’t owed, because black people in the U.S. are better off than black people in Africa. Often, this will come with the implication or outright statement that poverty and political instability in present-day Africa is due to some innate deficiency in black people. This is, in case it wasn’t clear from the start, and argument rooted in white supremacy, and like all such arguments, it relies heavily on ignorance and/or dismissal of history. Among other things, it ignores that the continent of Africa wasn’t simply plundered for slaves, and otherwise left alone. It was divided up by European empires, and almost the entire population of the continent was enslaved in their own homes, all to generate wealth for already-wealthy European aristocrats.
The reality is, that never changed. “European aristocrats” has expanded to include billionaires in other regions, like the United States and China, but for much of the continent, every effort at actual self-determination has been met with violence from the imperial powers of the world. One of the worst-hit regions, if not the worst-hit, is what’s currently known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). King Leopold the Second of Belgium laid personal claim to the Congo, and enslaved its entire population for the sole purpose of enriching himself. The Belgian government eventually caught on, and was outraged that the profit from the enslavement, murder, and mutilation of countless humans as going to the king, rather than to the coffers of the Belgian government.
The Congo did gain its independence in 1960, but the leader of that movement, Patrice Lumumba, was promptly tortured and assassinated. His body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, his bones ground, and the dust scattered to prevent any grave site from becoming a source of consolation or inspiration. While Lumumba’s death stood out for the viciousness, assassination is routine result of an African leader fighting for actual independence, and for a better future.
Colonialism did not end. At most, it changed forms, but when it comes to the DRC, that change seems to be barely perceptible. Where Belgium once brutalized and exploited the country for rubber, now many countries and corporations exploit it for minerals, chief of which is cobalt. Congo supplies 63% of the global cobalt supply, without which, we would not have the lithium-ion batteries in our phones and electric cars. China controls and profits from most of that, but since my audience is probably more familiar with USian billionaires, I want you to think about the wealth that has come from just those batteries in that country. Elon Musk became the richest man in the world, for a bit, and it was Tesla that bought him his “Iron Man” reputation. How many other billionaires have been made from smartphones? And hey – if hard work and playing by the rules pays off in a capitalist world, does that mean that the Congolese people mining that cobalt are also doing well?
Of course not. Why would I even ask me such a question? Haven’t I been paying attention?
This is why electric cars are not an acceptable “solution” to climate change. We can’t just swap out power sources, and continue on as we have been. We cannot condemn uncountable millions of people, for centuries to come, to hopeless lives of body-destroying toil, and call that a “solution. If it was good that the atrocities of the past were ended – and it was – then it is good that the atrocities of the present be ended. Complaints about the size of the change are no more acceptable today than they were in the past. One cannot claim that the economy must be preserved “for the greater good”, when that economy’s normal function depends on such murderous exploitation.
Check this excellent book.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
by Siddharth Kara
Wait a minute!
Why can’t electric cars be a solution to climate change but not a solution to imperialism, colonialism, racism, and capitalist exploitation?
I am fully on board with the inability to continue as we have been, but I don’t think it’s somehow wrong to say that colonialism and the other problems you describe here are interrelated with but distinct from climate change itself?
I mean, if you go around answering the question, “Well, but what’s one manifestation of climate change that the average person can see?” with “pan-African slavery and the existence of billionaires” you’re going to confuse more people than you convince, I think.
It’s not meant to be a solution, it’s meant to replace highly-polluting ICE cars.
Much less polluting over their lifetime.
Put it this way: would you claim “This is why electric stoves are not an acceptable “solution” to climate change. We can’t just swap out power sources, and continue on as we have been.”? I think not.
We shouldn’t — obviously we can — but of what relevance is this to electric cars as such?
There is no unavoidable reason electric cars can’t exist without condemning uncountable millions of people, for centuries to come, to hopeless lives of body-destroying toil.
Australia supplies more lithium than any other place, and it doesn’t do it with people living hopeless lives of body-destroying toil. This shows it’s not a necessary part of the process of resource extraction.
In short, I think the problem you bring up (and I don’t minimise it at all) is more the result of economic, political, and social factors than of the technology.
[CD, haven’t seen you around much. I see we still think somewhat alike, but 🙂 ]
Because climate change isn’t meaningfully separable from the system that created it, and continuing to keep society in service to the interests of billionaires will prevent us from fully dealing with the problem, or from adapting to the chaos that can’t be avoided.
Hey, JM!
Yeah, I haven’t been around as much, but also yes, we do seem to think similarly in a lot of situations. Hope you’re well!
The quickest big reduction possible in my pollutastic homeland would be for all jobs that can be done by telework to be converted to full telework. The change in the greater Los Angeles area alone would be staggering. But, y’know, petrol execs and car manufacturers and elon musk can’t have that, so …
I was going to make a long post leading up to this sentence, but I think it stands well enough by itself: A traffic jam is still a traffic jam, whatever fuel is powering it.
Yeah I had a paragraph about traffic jams and the time wasted commuting by car, the high resource cost of personal cars regardless of power source, and so on, but I decided I wanted to just focus on this aspect of it.
Some person on Twitter took this to mean I prefer gas cars, which is an interesting take, and he seemed to think that if we remove cobalt from batteries, the problem will go away.
For those who are unclear, there’s every reason to believe that this exact same kind of murderous exploitation will happen with any resource that’s needed, in a capitalist economy.
Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
[related]
I watch a number of what I consider ethnographic documentaries, sometimes under the ostensible presentation of a travelogue.
Here’s an example relating to cocoa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ89onsiWTM&t=18m15s
Here’s another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFyTycG7qYM&t=9m13s
(Chocolate!)
Somewhat tangential, but lately I’ve been noticing just how many cars are simply sitting around. Everywhere I go, there are rows upon rows of cars.
Seems like a lot of time and effort went into making a high-tech piece of machinery… just so it can sit around and not do anything useful.
And this is why we’ll never fix climate change, because of this idiotic dogma with no basis in reality. This is just as stupid as saying “because acid rain isn’t meaningfully separate from the system that created it” or “CFCs and ozone depletion isn’t meaningfully separable from the system that created it”. You are the enemy, and a naive, romantic fool. Listen to the world’s leading scientists, and not to college dropouts like Amory Lovins.
Come on. Tell me the difference between my two examples and your example. In both of my cases, technological advancement allowed us to fix the problem without a radical overhaul of society. We could do the same thing again for climate change. It wouldn’t even be that hard. We just had to overcome the wrong-headed-ness of people like you.
Dr James Hansen:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf
You are the problem.
Neither of those examples were as foundational to the system as fossil fuels, and capitalists fought tooth and nail to prevent those bans, to weaken them, and to roll them back. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the clean water act just got gutted, and they’re trying to end child labor laws. Under capitalism, there will always be a profit incentive to undo every good thing we’ve ever done for the world, or for humanity.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-04-04/ozone-cfcs-increased-atmosphere-banned-montreal-protocol-climate/102172590
“We could do the same thing with climate change” reads about like the Green Party folks who say “if everyone just voted the way I want them to, we could fix this.”
As I’ve said in the past, Hansen’s focus on climate science doesn’t make him an authority on sociology. As I’ve also said in the past, I wan an expansion of nuclear energy, I just also want it to account for the changes in the climate that we know are coming. I didn’t enter the conversation in the 20th century, when there was a shot to STOP warming, I entered around 2010, when it was clear that we will now have to find ways to live with some amount of warming, which means different conditions – conditions that historically cause the power plants that YOU think are perfectly fine to shut down. Apparently, that’s no problem, to you.
My understanding is that some newer plants are less vulnerable to floods and heat waves, so I’m more in favor of them. You know what would make it a *lot* easier to make the transition? Not having to meet the power requirements of profit-driven overproduction.
But thanks for demonstrating that you have an easier time imagining the end of the world, than the end of capitalism.
But hey – you can take comfort in the fact that the majority of the english-speaking world is more dedicated to keeping capitalism than to dealing with climate change, so we get to see that separability you insist is there unfold.
I can’t wait.
Bait and switch, or moving the goalposts. At first, you said “inseparable”. Then you said “foundational”. Those have different meanings. You can change a foundation without changing the structure on top of it. You can use nuclear power and synthetic gasoline from atmospheric CO2 without overthrowing the capitalist system.
You are part of the problem when you say inseparable. You are saying “it’s my way or nothing”. You are the problem. You’re acting like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum where you want it all right now and you won’t make any compromises.
PS: one Chernobyl accident per year is miles better than climate change, and our western reactors circa 1970 are miles better than Chernobyl.
PPS: and yes, I can more easily imagine runaway climate change than the end of capitalism because I’m seeing runaway climate change right now and I’m not seeing the end of capitalism right now. Again, what is this about? For you, it looks like this was never about climate change and it was always about your personal crusade to radically restructure society. You should change the name of this blog to something with Marx in its name. And I say that as someone who often calls himself a radical Marxist. I’m sympathetic to your goals. I am not sympathetic to your tactics and strategy.
You are also seeing capitalism’s utter failure to deal with climate change at any level. In many ways it’s actively opposing climate action. And a dramatic restructuring of society is happening whether we try for it or not. Once again, it is too late to stop the warming. It’s going to keep warming for decades to come at minimum, which means that if we don’t change society in a major way, we’re still fucked, because as things are, another few decades of warming will force restructuring by killing off a lot of people.
Even if we do manage to swap out every goal and gas power plant for nuclear.
I disagree.
I also disagree.
There are two ways that lots of people could die in the future. One is lack of food or water, including lack of sufficient farmland, water, and fertilizer. This is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The second is heat waves that are sufficiently hot to kill a lot of people, which is plausible and maybe even likely in the near future.
Assuming we eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from energy supply, industry and chemical applications, and transport, I don’t see how switching to a different kind of economy and society is going to help us solve for either of these problems that could lead to massive die-offs.
Further, I think that some of your particular policy proposals are pipedreams, hugely counterproductive, and are especially harmful to the poor, such as attempting to “decentralize” energy supply.
Fundamentally, I don’t buy your basic premise that we need to organize into little coops and that’s the best and only way forward. Fundamentally, I think it’s flagrantly wrong. I think you’re grasping at straws and deluding yourself because you don’t have power and these delusions allow you pretend that you have power. It’s supremely counterproductive.
Speaking of straws, I don’t recall saying that’s how we should organize society. I think that community organizing is an important element of getting societal change, along with labor organizing, and I think that we should build with community in mind. I guess maybe you could twist that into “organize into little coops”, but it’s not how I see things.
An economy that values human wellbeing over profit won’t push overproduction, which is a big driver of habitat destruction, among other problems. Such a society is also much less likely to let people just die in the heat because they’re poor, if the resources exist to provide cooling. The current system is clearly entirely fine with that.
And no, socialism et al. aren’t a magic “everyone gets food” spell, but they are more likely, in my view, to allocate resources to food production and distribution, rather than to enriching individuals. It’s pretty clear that the leaders of the system we have currently are planning to hide in their bunker mansions when things get bad, and leave the rest of us to our fates.
Orly? Because it seems like that’s all you do. Even in this same post, that’s all you’re doing – defending some other (under)specified alternative to the current system.
So, you’re saying that we should do this other thing with some idea in mind of what that other thing is, or you’re saying that we should do something else without any idea whatsoever of what that other thing might be. On the first, you are saying how we should reorganize society. On the second, you’re just daydreaming without doing anything constructive. Pick one please.
I think you’re a bald-faced liar right now, and that you know damned well you are constantly offering concrete suggestions about how we should organize ourselves at small and organize society at large for the future. Why you’re doing these flagrantly dishonest semantic word games, I do not know. To dodge all responsibility and all critique from me? How convenient.
I’m sorry that’s the conclusion you’ve drawn. No, I don’t have a comprehensive plan to save society, but I’m not really trying to present one. I’m more advocating what I think has the best chance of people being able to figure one out by doing it.
Seriously. You’re just trolling me now with these semantic word-games.
And you are still part of the problem by saying that there is no solution to climate change by small incremental changes and the only possible fix is to radically restructure society in some unspecified / underspecified way.
In terms of organizing society, having more direct democracy does not equal people being organized into communes or whatever. I don’t think rooftop solar is going to provide all the power we need, it still seems like a good use of the space, to me, but I know you disagree.
I give examples of ways in which radical change is needed- overproduction, profit-based distribution, pollution, and maintained economic inequality come to mind as examples. Saying that we need to end them may be “underspecified”, but that makes it no less true. I’m in the process of figuring out what can or should be done about a wide variety of issues that I see as connected, and I’m writing about some of that as I go. Clearly this isn’t what you want from a blog, so I guess I’m a bit confused about why you’re reading mine. Regardless, if you think I’m lying about everything, I guess there’s no point continuing this conversation.
[meta + personal opinion]
Gerrard’s very raison d’etre is to agitate for centralised nuclear power plants.
Has been for years.
He is as dedicated as dedicated can be to this quest.
In the process, he rails against everything and anything that does not involve an all-out effort to build centralised nuclear power plants.
Pointless it is to say green-ideology inspired (as he sees it) weak-sauce stuff such as “As I’ve also said in the past, I wan an expansion of nuclear energy, I just also want it to account for the changes in the climate that we know are coming.”
The climate change, for him, is a justification for his obsession.
(Sorry, Abe. I know your question was rhetorical, but me being me and all, I wrote this. You might recall an instance some months ago where Gerrard and I had a bit to do, which was probably not a great look for the blog. Won’t be like that again, and sorry for that. Not for this, just clarifying things)
[can’t resist]
Yes, but an ICE car tends to be idling, whereas an EV only consumes power when moving. So right there is an efficiency.
(Or: idling ICE cars consume fuel even when not locomoting, and cars in traffic jams tend to idle — traffic stoppages, kinda depends on the circumstances)
(This, of course, any ancillary use such as heating/lights/wipers/internet aside)
Eh, I appreciate it.