The evolution of the climate movement: from radicalism to complacency

It is worrying to note that a large part of the environmental militancy seems to be more focused on maintaining the few privileges it possesses

In 2018, the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C marked a turning point in the climate movement. This report warned of the catastrophic consequences of global warming and urged the international community to take radical action. This call to action triggered an unprecedented wave of mobilisation, giving rise to a new generation of movements that not only put the climate crisis at the centre of the institutional and social debate but also intertwined it with other struggles such as labour, decolonial, feminist and anti-speciesist.

Over time, however, the initial enthusiasm for these movements has waned. What began as a radical challenge to the hegemonic powers has been transformed into a series of initiatives more oriented towards complacency and group therapy. In many cases, organisations seem content to engage in protests that are more akin to marketing campaigns aimed at recruiting new activists than a real challenge to the status quo.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

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• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

‘The energy transition has not yet begun’

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, historian of technology, science and the environment

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (France, 1977) is a historian of science, technology and the environment and professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has just published Sans Transition. Une Nouvelle Histoire de L'énergie (‘Without Transition.A New History of Energy’). He is also the author, with Christophe Bonneuil, of The Anthropocene Event: Earth, History and Us (Points Histoire) and The Joyful Apocalypse. A History of Technological Risk (Seuil).

In your opinion, the energy transition is not happening. What is the problem?

The transition is the idea that we will change ourenergy system in 30 or 40 years to deal with the climate crisis. But if we look at it historically, we see how scientifically biased this notion has been...

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Was Karl Marx a Degrowth Communist?

In a recent issue of Monthly Review, Michael Löwy observed that the last few years have witnessed “a growing coming together of ecosocialism and degrowth: each side has been appropriating the arguments of the other, and the proposal of an ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ has begun to be adopted as a common ground.” The rationale behind this convergence is relatively straightforward. On the one hand, a central tenet of ecosocialism has been that any viable socialist project will need to pursue ecological sustainability and substantive equality as two interdependent parts of a dialectical unity. In the context of the twenty-first century, this entails reducing the global social metabolism’s total material and energy throughput while satisfying universal social needs. This in turn requires bringing about a convergence between different regions and social segments through reductions in the profligate waste propping up the capitalist system, redistribution of social wealth and decision-making, the free dissemination of ecological knowledge andsocially beneficial technological innovations, and operationalisation of principles of self-determination and autogestion. On the other hand, advocates of degrowth have increasingly recognised that any attempt to break with the fixation on economic growth and establish an alternate, more equitable conception of social wealth requires a decisive break with capital accumulation as the ordering principle of society, and therefore a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of social metabolic control. The resultant convergence, ecosocialist degrowth, indicates two important correctives to widespread misconceptions. On the ecosocialist side, the degrowth modifier indicates a conscious, planned project of metabolic restoration, while on the degrowth side, the ecosocialist modifier points to a transformative project rather than a simple, one-sided negation of growth.

It is in the context of this convergence that the English-language translation of Kohei Saito’s Japanese bestseller, Capital in the Anthropocene, has just been published as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. This comes more than a year after the publication of the English translation of Marx in the Anthropocene, which—confusingly—was originally published in Japanese after Capital in the Anthropocene. Marx in the Anthropocene has been described as an “academic text,” and is aimed at Marxists, whereas Slow Down targets a broader audience, selling over five hundred thousand copies in Japan alone. The two books largely overlap in their general argument for what Saito has dubbed “degrowth communism,” but aspects of his argument that are mentioned only briefly in one book sometimes receive fuller treatment in the other. For instance, Marx in the Anthropocene offers virtually no discussion of how degrowth communism might emerge from existing social struggles and movements, leaving the issue of transition virtually untouched. Slow Down, in contrast, identifies a handful of movements that prefigure or point to aspects of degrowth communism, including municipalism (his primary source of inspiration), rebellions by care workers, Buen Vivir, and food sovereignty. Citing the well-known 3.5 percent rule of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion, he argues that only a small part of the population needs to “rise up sincerely and nonviolently to bring about a major change to society.” Saito suggests that this number could easily be met by the kinds of movements he mentions together with “people sincerely concerned with climate change and passionately committed to fighting it.”

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Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modelling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundariesillustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.

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The Ecological Rift in the Anthropocene

—An interview with John Bellamy Foster on ecology, ecological imperialism and potential solutions to the ongoing planetary crisis

Whatever solutions there are to the present planetary crisis must, in historical-materialist terms, arise from concrete social formations, on the basis of which the new revolutionary transformations will take place. What is common to all such strategies is a focus on a path to sustainable human development in which capital accumulation is no longer the determinant force in society. The very definition of socialism in the twenty-first century is that of a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. Here too we find the conditions for the maximisation of freedom in general.

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Planetary justice: a systematic analysis of an emerging discourse

Justice concerns have been central to contemporary social and ecological debates for decades but have only recently made inroads into the Earth system centric discourses on the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries. Our focus here is the emerging discourse on planetary justice which has aimed to be a corrective to this lacuna. Our goals in this paper are to delineate the general parameters and novel contributions of planetary justice while also recognising the emergent variability within this discourse.

In order to accomplish these goals we analyse the discourse through three interrelated analytical themes: First, how approaches to planetary justice envision scope across different human practices and categories of humanity and nature. Second, how they envision scale across space and time. Third, how they envision the ecosocial purpose of planetary justice.

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Narrating the Amazon

As the largest tropical forest and one of the biggest carbon sinks in the world, the Amazon plays an indispensable role in keeping our planet habitable. Although the threat facing the Amazon region is well-known, it is hard to truly grasp the severity of the situation through scientific facts alone. Inter-cultural exchanges and discarding longstanding colonial perspectives can help bridge that gap.

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Navigating desires beyond growth

The critical role of fantasy in degrowth’s environmental politics and prefigurative ethics

As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement contests the hegemony of economic growth. Much scholarship has sought to unpack degrowth’s proposals to reduce matter and energy throughput and to promote socio-ecological justice, democracy and wellbeing. Few studies, however, examine how the movement sustains itself. In this article, therefore, we explore the role fantasy plays in the movement’s emergence and sustenance. We draw on semi-structured interviews and officially-disseminated documents to examine the discourse of degrowth through a Critical Fantasy Studies lens, arguing that fantasies structure supporters’ desires and sustain the energy lying behind their environmental politics and actions. We suggest that the fantasy of ‘mutual dependence and care’, in particular, affectively fortifies their efforts to contest economic growth’s hegemonic norms and, in doing so, bolsters degrowth’s distributed modes ofpolitical action while also allowing its members to cultivate a prefigurative ethics of engagement.

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The European Green Deal on rural agriculture, energy transition and neo-colonial collapses in the Global South

The European Green Pact aims to address the economic contradictions between agribusiness and the declining primary sector, which are causing irreparable damage and fracturing nature. We also analyse the double standard of the Deforestation-Free Supply Chain Law, one clearly evident in the EU and the other, hidden, and extra-territorial, in the Brazilian Amazon. Added to this is the unlimited demand for the extraction, production, and consumption of strategic materials of geopolitical interest. In contrast, the EU deliberately ignores the limited storage capacity of mines in peripheral countries of the Southern Cone, the Sahel Belt and the rising hegemonic power of China. The energy transition, under the Ukrainian and other ongoing wars in the planetary geography, increases the exponential demand of the periodic table of minerals for security, defence, arms purchases and endless wars. Not yet enough, investments in climate mitigation have been directed towards NATO interests. This has led to an increase in eco-environmental cascades, especially in Southern Europe, plus another continental threat of global reach, the approaching breakdown of the AMOC Current under the indifference of EU politicians and rulers.

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