Reflections on Cochabamba, Geoengineering, and Framing the Climate Crisis on the Road to Cancun…

The news this week from the climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany suggests that the world is on track for a catastrophic 4-degree increase in temperatures by 2100. (Four degrees Celsius in temperature rise renders our planet essentially unrecognizable and unlivable.) This is a frightening forecast for what’s in store on the road to COP 16, the next round of international climate negotiations slated for December 2010 in Cancun, Mexico.

But there is another road to Cancun, made by social movements who attended the historic Cochabamba Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April. The Cochabamba conference was convened by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen talks and the regressive agenda laid out by the United States and their allies in the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord.’ (For my take on Copenhagen see the April/May issue of Left Turn Magazine). Cochabamba was an attempt to stake out another pole in the international climate discourse, led by Southern governments and social movements, that pins the responsibility for climate change directly on the over-consumptive northern countries and transnational corporations, and asserts the rights of Mother Earth.

From Copenhagen to Cochabamba

At the invitation of the Bolivia UN Mission in New York, I had the great honor of attending historic Cochabamba meeting, and accompanied the delegation of Grassroots Global Justice and the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN).

SmartMeme’s main piece of work at Cochabamba was to support IEN’s organizing around forest-offset schemes known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). Carbon offset schemes like REDD are opposed by peasant movements and Indigenous Peoples around the world on the grounds that these programs are designed to create a multi-billion dollar market for transnational corporations, while displacing forest-dependent communities and making no meaningful impact on slowing climate change. (For a great introduction to forest offset impacts in Brazil, see the new 20-minute film from Frontline, “The Carbon Hunters.”)

The REDD struggle is a critical front of the global Indigenous Peoples human rights struggle – this is ultimately a multi-billion dollar scheme to move Indigenous Peoples out of their traditional homelands and lease those forests to polluting industry to enable them to continue to pollute. At the heart, this is the struggle against the commodification of nature, and a struggle to assert that trees, air, and people’s homes and life ways cannot be traded in a marketplace to offset pollution.

Unlike Copenhagen, the Cochabamba conference elevated these kinds of concerns about the human rights impacts of both climate change and climate policy, and proposed strong negotiating positions (50% emission reduction under the Kyoto Protocol in the upcoming Cancun COP-16 talks, and targeting 1 – 1.5 degrees C of warming).

The good news is that the Cochabamba conference rejected REDDs and “market mechanisms that violate the rights of Indigenous Peoples, States, and Nature.” The conference adopted a Peoples’ Accord on the Rights of Mother Earth with strident, strong positions on the necessary actions to safeguard the future and build a just transition off of fossil fuels.

The bad news is Bonn, and that the United States has essentially committed to do nothing to fundamentally address the climate crisis in terms of transitioning off of fossil fuels. As we enter this next round of climate negotiations at COP 16 with the sunset on this edition of the Kyoto Protocol looming in 2012, now is the time for the climate justice movement to be rethinking our framing. We are losing critical ground while extreme proposals like geoengineering (i.e. planetary engineering) are gaining support using the narrative of government inaction and a quick fix.

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The Cochabamba conference was titled, “The World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth,” and this framing – The Rights of Mother Earth – was the most enticing and provocative aspect of this historic meeting for smartMeme. Indigenous Peoples and social movements gathered together under this banner, combining a rights-based frame with the affirmation of our sacred relationship with the planet, and the pan-Indigenous creed of respect for Mother Earth (or “Pachamama” in much of the Andes).

As we all know, global warming is happening at an alarming rate, and changes are inevitable. Weather patterns are changing, and countless ecosystems and communities are impacted directly – from the Arctic to Africa to the Amazon. Dramatic, comprehensive, collective action must be taken…the fight now is about What kind of action? Who decides? Who profits? And who pays?

From a framing perspective, how define the problem is inseparable from how we imagine the solution. As my colleague and design studio-mate Kenneth Bailey says, in a design process “description embeds prescription.” The way we cognitively pattern the problem determines what solutions are possible – and in the climate justice fight, this is at the heart of the battle for the story.

The Carbon Fundamentalist Narrative

To borrow a meme from my colleague (and smartMeme board member) Gopal Dayenenni at Movement Generation, the pervasive mindset in climate politics is steeped in “carbon fundamentalist” narrative. This story insists that the problem we are facing is merely a surplus of atmospheric carbon, and the way to deal with it is to effectively manage the amount of carbon being omitted, ideally by reduction, but if that proves politically infeasible, then through offsets. This problem-solution-action frame has given rise to the international carbon market – and the carbon-offset-industrial-complex. It also leads to obsession with charts, bright lines, and light bulbs, and the murky logic of techno-fix proposals that will magically save us without ever having to lift a finger to phase out fossil fuels.

An underlying assumption of this narrative is that carbon emissions are disconnected from place. This story says “We are in a global crisis, so pollution from a coal plant in Kentucky is the same as anywhere else, and carbon-eating trees in Brazil can make up for it.”

While the message that we have a surplus of carbon is not untrue, it is hardly meaningful for people, which limits its effectiveness on a narrative level. The carbon fundamentalist narrative is also inherently problematic as it focuses on emissions in the abstract, disconnected from the eco-systems, neighborhoods and nations where fossil fuels are mined and burned (most often poor communities and communities of color), and where offset projects displace people and disrupt communities (most often in the rural global South).

It also is carbon-blind – seeing all carbon as the same, weather it comes from Exxon-Mobil or a Brazilian farmer’s diesel tractor – which leads to policy solutions that are ahistorical and unjust, and do not address the roots of the problem: the fossil fuel industry. If we focus exclusively on carbon, we lose the focus on real places and real people, and on the real culprits.

This narrative is very dangerous, and is getting more so. As the international climate negotiations falter, and with four-degrees in the sightlines of Bonn, false-solutions and geoengineering mega-projects are gaining more and more traction.

The Urgency Frame & Geoengineering

The carbon-fundamentalist narrative has increasingly co-opted the “urgency frame.” As the crisis escalates and the window for meaningful action is closing, environmentalists and others are ringing the alarm bells ever louder. Campaigns like “TckTckTck” emphasize that time is running out, and frame around the lack of time and the severity of the crisis.

And there is no doubt, the situation is urgent. It is very urgent, especially in Alaska Native territories, in Sub-Saharan Africa, Tuvalu, or anywhere on the Gulf Coast. But what is of concern to me is that the urgency frame does nothing to explain the roots of the problem and is thus easily co-opted by any big, dramatic so-called “solution,” regardless if it is just, or even if it is a good idea.

The carbon fundamentalist narrative coupled with the urgency frame actually enables and promotes proposals like geoengineering, proposals that are gaining a lot of traction from philanthropists, venture-capitalists, and governments in the lead up to Cancun.

Now, what do we mean by “geoengineering”? Our friends at the ETC Group explain in their 2009 report “Retooling the Planet”:

Geoengineering is the intentional, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s oceans, soils and/or atmosphere, especially with the aim of combating climate change. Geoengineering can refer to a wide range of schemes, including: blasting sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays; dumping iron particles in the oceans to nurture CO2 -absorbing plankton; firing silver iodide into clouds to produce rain; genetically-engineering crops so their foliage can better reflect sunlight.

University of Calgary physicist and geoengineering advocate, David Keith, describes geoengineering as “an expedient solution that uses additional technology to counteract unwanted effects without eliminating their root cause.” In other words, geoengineering uses new technologies to try to rectify the problems created by the use of old technologies, a classic techno-fix.

The Geoengineers in Bolivia and Beyond

In addition to 17,000 people from social movements across the world, a bold trio of geoengineering proponents from a company called CloudWorld.co.uk also attended the Cochabamba conference, hoping to gain support for their plan to release sulfates into the atmosphere above the Arctic. We had a heated conversation about how to best address the climate crisis.

Their logic was straightforward, and chillingly compelling:

The climate crisis is reaching a point-of-no return.

We must save the Arctic, or before warming sets off an irreversible feedback loop that will push the planet over the edge.

The only way to save the Arctic, and the world, is to shield the ice from the sun.

The way to do that is to mimic a volcano, clouding the atmosphere to shade the ice.

At this point, geoengineering has to be part of the program in order to avert humanitarian catastrophe.

Their story fits right into the urgency frame, is mired in the carbon fundamentalist narrative, and is nestled in the underlying assumptions of the dominant culture:

• Earth is a machine,
• The hubris that humans can fix the machine, and
• No one else will act and so a smart (white) man must go rogue and save the world (a la a Hollywood movie.)

But this is a disaster movie.

And the scary thing is – it’s not too far from reality. The ETC group reports that In March 2010, 175 geoengineers met at Asilomar California to establish “voluntary guidelines” for real world geoengineering experiments. The meeting was convened by a body associated with a private geoenginering company called Climos Inc who aims to carry out ocean fertilization trials. Other companies and groups in attendance made it clear that they also hoped to see real-world field trials in the near future.

And the field trials are happening. On May 8^th, the Times of London revealed that a company called Silver Lining – backed by the world’s richest man Bill Gates – would be conducting field trials for their “cloud bleaching” project in the Pacific Ocean.

The Times story begins:

“The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.”

That framing is revealing of the narrative equation that is starting to define the climate landscape: government inaction + urgency = geoengineering.

Hands Off Mother Earth!

Fortunately there weren’t too many takers for geoegineering in Cochabamba. I attended a fantastic side event by the ETC Group, which launched their new campaign called Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME). This new campaign calls on the UN for a worldwide ban on geoengineering, and reframes away from carbon, and towards the larger living system of Mother Earth, on which we all depend.

The Hands Off Mother Earth campaign features an interactive website where individuals can ‘lend a hand’ to the campaign, leaving messages and uploading images of themselves. The site features a public portrait gallery of individuals with open palms calling a halt to geoengineering.

“With rich governments and industrial interests jockeying for open-air geoengineering tests it is time to draw a line that should not be crossed.” affirmed Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group, Mexico. “Mother Earth is our common home whose integrity should never be violated by geoengineering experimentation - it should never be a laboratory for these risky and unjust schemes.”

HOME is already achieving success! Due to the great work by ETC and their allies, a proposal for a geoengineering moratorium will go to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at its next meeting in Nagoya, Japan this October.

I hope you will join me and smartMeme in this campaign by adding your hand to the photo-gallery, and lending your support to grassroots movements for climate justice that are addressing the root causes of climate change and building solutions from the ground up.

From Broken Machine to Mother Earth

If we are to succeed in debunking and halting dangerous false-solutions like REDDs and stop geoengineering, we must also fundamentally shift the framing of the climate crisis – away from the idea that the planet is an overheating machine, and towards the assertion that we are all interdependent on the living systems of Mother Earth.

The Cochabamba conference has helped the world to hear this message, but while the relationship with “Mother Earth” has always been central for Indigenous Peoples, can the “Mother Earth” meme reach the hearts and minds of the rest of the U.S. public? Perhaps with 50+ days of the tragic BP oil spill, consciousness is shifting – but we’ve got a long road beyond Cancun to make the necessary fundamental changes in the fossil fuel economy and the US culture of cheap oil dependence.

As COP 16 approaches, we must continue to resist carbon-fundamentalism and offer a new narrative of Climate Justice that can inspire transformative social change and protect the rights of Mother Earth, while blowing open the assumption – especially here in the US — that there will be a quick techno-fix that can save our planet.

The challenge for Climate Justice leaders now is to tell a better story of ecological justice and the real solutions that can transition us off fossil fuels for good. From Cochabamba to Cancun and beyond, we must change the story from techno-fix to fundamental change, and build the peoples’ movement for Mother Earth.

Tags: analysis, climate, climate crisis, doyle canning, ecological justice, ecology, Ideas, Meme, movement-building, social movements, strategy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 10:35 pm and is filed under climate, happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.