Climate Strike

 I have written a preface for the Left Book Club Edition of Climate Strike. 

Preface.

Climate Strike is a sustained reflection on political strategy. Climate change is with us, causing harm and likely to intensify, so we are obliged to think as deeply as possible and act decisively to combat this threat. Between starting to write this book in 2019 and providing a preface for a new edition in 2022, the fundamentals remain the same yet perhaps there are some new lessons to learn?

I finished the book in 2020 when the covid pandemic hit. Indeed, the book is dedicated to Carole Chant and Ted Knight who both died in the spring of 2020. Carole was one of the first to be taken from us by the pandemic https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/fari-bradley-remembers-scratch-orchestra-s-carole-finer The book is haunted by covid, but I resisted making any instant judgements on the crisis and its implications for climate change politics in the original text. Rather than a hot take in 2020, I can now make a warm take in 2022. The pandemic is continuing and its implications will no doubt only be fully understood in decades to come.

A miasma of slow burning, ongoing crisis pervades Britain. A smell of decay. Government mismanagement has killed many of our loved ones here. Having escaped covid for nearly two years, I recently succumbed, two red lines on a test, my symptoms were slight but, writing this, my energy levels remain low. The weather gives continuing cause for concern, twin storms Dudley and Eunice are hitting the UK as I write, ripping out trees, cutting electricity and disrupting life. No single weather event can be linked unambiguously to climate change, but such events are more frequent and intense.

There have been suggestions that climate change and the pandemic have the same root cause, with exploitation of the environment leading both to rising carbon emissions and the clearance of forests, causing species infected with the virus to move into areas of human population https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02341-1. I am not qualified to judge this hypothesis. I do think the approach taken to the pandemic has lessons for the likely trajectory of responses to unfolding climate change.

Some governments have taken the problem of the pandemic seriously and limited deaths, from China to Vietnam to New Zealand, so called ‘zero covid’ strategies have been effective. Whether, by time you read this, they may be failing to cope with new variants, I cannot say. However reducing the spread of covid reduces mutation, and zero covid policies could have spared our planet’s inhabitants much suffering, had they been implemented more widely at the start of the crisis.

Covid has been a disaster for the USA and much of Europe. Complacency has led to an astonishing death toll. As I write, the US death figures are over 900,000 and in the UK over 160,000. Responses, including the first lockdown in March 2020 have been delayed and weak, with horrible cost. This parallels responses to climate change: an acknowledge of the problem, but with feeble action, leading to catastrophe looks likely.

In turn, astonishing to my mind, there have been vigorous protests by activists who have been variously opposed to lockdown, masks, and vaccines. While there may be some serious issues in terms of human rights when it comes to vaccine mandates, and it is always wise to consider the unintended consequences of action, in essence we have seen a pro-covid protest movement take to the streets. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin used to attack deep ecologists, claiming that they defended the rights of small pox http://libcom.org/library/social-versus-deep-ecology-bookchin. He would have been surprised to see vibrant protest movements acting as if they were the active advocates of a virus. 

There is a cross fertilization of right wing politics and some members of the green movement. Right wing political activists in a host of countries, including Britain and most visibly the US, are enthusiastic about reducing restrictions that protect life. The ‘economy’ and ‘freedom’ are defended, but we might ask rhetorically what freedom is there in failing to tackle a deadly pandemic?

On the green and left side of politics some have embraced the anti-vaccine movement. A criticism of the power of pharmaceutical corporations, a justified suspicion of the state and an embrace of preventative and alternative medicine, can mutate into a hostility to measures to protect the public from the pandemic. The examples are numerous, but I think of Adrian Oliver, at one time a Green Party councillor who worked as an office manager for the Party. He became a leading member and by-election candidate in 2021 for the Freedom Alliance, a political organisation opposing vaccine rollouts and lockdowns.

Covid doesn’t automatically translate into climate change accelerationism.  However covid sceptics are increasingly climate sceptics. This works in the following way: Governments bring in measures to deal with the problem, these fall far short of what is needed, but suspicion of government from a variety of directions creates counter movements who loudly demand they do far less. Green-inspired covid sceptics may attack electric cars and challenge the ‘great reset’. In the UK, elements of the right have established networks to attack net zero.

So to sum up, while climate change, as I argue in the book, is a product of capitalism, to gain either fundamental revolutionary transformation or more modest practical reform, a battle of ideas will need to be joined. I have been impressed by the tenacity of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain to put climate change on the agenda, yet I feel more sustained activism is necessary. While the future looks far from secure, with climbing C02 levels and toxic political mobilisations, there are signs of hope. The technical means to combat climate change, from satellites detecting methane leaks to rapidly developing sources of ever cheaper renewable energy, offer a little good news. Yet technical fixes only go so far. Changing the economy to protect both humanity and nature is a bigger challenge. A society that responds to the drumbeat of profit harms life; creating an alternative based on ecology, diversity and equality is both necessary and challenging. While conspiracy and right wing thinking may be a threat, a revolutionary politics based on rooted community action provides organised hope. The growth of base building alternatives, including Philly Socialists and the Welsh Underground, has been the most positive development for me since finishing the book. Transcending capitalism is necessary to transcend the climate crisis and there are signs that alternatives are growing from small beginnings. I hope reading this book will inspire you to get involved in such projects, boats that can take us to another shore that provides a sustainable, safe, ecosocialist future.