Lund University academic: ‘To Halt Climate Change, We Need an Ecological Leninism’ – ‘State power should definitely be used’ to ban SUVs & private jets

From quite early on in the course of the pandemic, commentators began to draw comparisons between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis. However, I argue that such direct comparisons are flawed in the sense that the current pandemic constitutes a specific event, whereas global warming is a secular trend. Nevertheless, we miss the essence of the COVID-19 outbreak if we fail to recognize it for what it is, namely one extreme — but long expected — manifestation of another secular trend: the rise in the rate of infectious diseases jumping from wild animals to human populations. This is a trend that has increased over past decades and is projected to accelerate in the future.

The most important driving force behind the production of pandemics is clear in the scientific literature and it is deforestation — which is also the second biggest contributor to global climate change. The place in which you find the greatest biodiversity on Earth is in tropical forests, and this biodiversity includes pathogens. These pathogens, which circulate among nonhuman animals in wild habitats, do not generally pose a problem to humanity as long as humans stay away from them. However, the problem arises as the human economy makes deeper and deeper incursions into these habitats. The clearance of forests for logging, agriculture, mining, and the construction of roads creates new interfaces where humans come into contact with wildlife. Through these interfaces, animal pathogens are able to mutate and leap into human populations through a process called zoonotic spillover.

…

These are just some of the causal links between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis. While a distinction has to be made, the two trends of global warming and global sickening are interlaced by a variety of different causal factors and, as such, constitute two dimensions of one broader, unfolding ecological catastrophe.

There was a moment in March 2020 when many of us in the climate justice movement felt a degree of surprise to find that governments in Europe and elsewhere were prepared to basically shut down their entire economies in an effort to contain the pandemic. This is striking, given that the same states had never contemplated undertaking any kind of intervention in the economy for the sake of the climate crisis. The primary reason for this lies in the different timeline of victimhood manifested by these two crises.

Now, overall, the pandemic has played out similarly to that of global warming in the simple sense that those who have suffered most and those who are most likely to die are the working class — most particularly working-class people of color and those in various hotspots in the Global South. The rich, meanwhile, have been able to self-isolate with ease by escaping to additional homes in the countryside and have been able to access private health care.

However, there is one major difference: the anomaly that COVID-19 also hit the rich at an early stage, with capitalists, celebrities, and political leaders falling ill, people who have no vulnerability to the climate crisis at this stage. Unlike the impact of global warming, the transmission of coronaviruses follows aviation lines and, to put it simply, rich people fly more than poor people. While the pandemic was spread by other channels upon arrival in different countries, aviation provided the primary entry point for the virus, giving rise to the paradox that rich people were among the first to contract the virus.

…

I think that, generally speaking, governments are pursuing these policies in the expectation that the crisis will soon be over and that we can bounce back to business as usual. So far, I do not see any of the initiatives to tackle COVID-19 going beyond keeping the system alive. Nevertheless, this is an opportunity in the sense that it has brought about a temporary cessation of many of the most environmentally damaging activities, mass aviation has been suspended, carbon emissions have declined, fossil fuels are remaining in the ground, and so on. This is a moment where we can say to governments: “If you were able to intervene to protect us from the virus, you can intervene to protect us from the climate crisis as well, the implications of which are much worse.” The current juncture therefore provides us with an opportunity to oppose the return to business as usual, to push for the transformation of the global economy and the launch of something like a Green New Deal.

Nevertheless, we have to be honest about the situation we find ourselves in. COVID-19 has brought about the sudden obliteration of the climate justice movement in terms of everything that had been built up by the end of 2019. Since early 2020, COVID-19 has completely paralyzed all the most promising developments in the environmental movement — Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände, and so on — this is a situation of grave disaster. Prior to this, there had been a growing momentum toward aggressively disrupting business as usual, and while there have been attempts to temporarily move these actions online, there is simply no way to exert the same kind of pressure through digital means. One cannot substitute direct action and mass organization by holding up signs on Instagram. In my view, the digitization of politics has been detrimental to the radical left and beneficial to the far right, so further digitization will bring nothing good for us.

…

The level of intervention required is both softer and harder than what has been implemented to combat the pandemic. No one is calling for a lockdown to address climate change, no one is calling for house arrest for entire populations or for the economy to grind to a halt from one day to another. On the other hand, what is required is a fundamental transformation of the energy system and production in a sustained manner over the longer term, not simply a temporary hiatus to the status quo. In order to stabilize the rise of global temperatures at 1.5°C, emissions will have to be reduced by 8 percent a year until you meet net zero. This sort of change is totally impossible to do simply by tinkering with market mechanisms or introducing some carbon taxes; rather, it will require a massive expansion of state ownership and comprehensive economic planning.

…

State power should definitely be used to prevent luxury emissions perpetrated by the rich — private jets should be banned outright, as should SUVs and other vehicles that consume completely indefensible amounts of fuel. This is low-hanging fruit for the climate justice movement, as these sources of emissions are among the least socially necessary. …

But some forms of consumption will indeed have to be limited or abolished outright — this cannot be done through markets or appeals to ethical consumption, but only through state regulation.

Such an increase in state power brings with it the danger of bureaucratization and authoritarianism. Indeed, there is already a trend in this direction, with Hungary, for example, using the pandemic to undermine democracy and increase state coercion. Nevertheless, if you have an energy transition brought about by popular forces from below, with social movements having power over the state bodies driving the transition, then this danger can be held in check. While it may seem utopian at this stage, it is important to make the proposition of closing down institutions designed to survey and control populations and repurpose them to attack capital, closing down the sources of global warming and zoonotic transmission. In the book, for example, I propose that we abolish border agencies and turn them into institutions for cracking down on the wildlife trade.

I find the whole idea behind these techno-utopian perspectives to be completely juvenile and out of touch with material realities. The notion that we are on the verge of a realm of unprecedented material abundance is one that cannot be rationally sustained given the severe material constraints that are closing in upon us in virtually every respect, including soil depletion, diminishing freshwater cycles, and rising sea levels. Even if we were to cease all emissions in this very moment, we would face severe climatic repercussions for a long time to come.

I develop the idea of ecological war communism in the book as a counterpart to the long-standing idea that World War II provides a model for countries to follow in dealing with the climate crisis, a notion that has recently resurfaced in the discourse surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. My argument is that while World War II mobilization provides a useful analogue, it has some limitations, not the least of which is that the war effort was based on the prodigious consumption of fossil fuels and that it left the position of the capitalist class largely intact.

Addressing the climate crisis and preventing zoonotic spillover, meanwhile, requires emergency action that goes against the vested interests of very powerful factions of the dominant classes and facilitates the rapid transformation of economies. War communism provides an analogue that can be played with — not in the sense of copying everything that the Bolsheviks did during the Russian Civil War, any more than the example of World War II leads us to address global warming by dropping another atom bomb on Hiroshima. Rather, war communism provides an example of a rapid, state-driven transformation of production and the organization of the economy in the face of massive opposition from the dominant classes. A green transition will also require a degree of coercive authority to be imposed on fossil fuel companies that have so far done everything in their power to postpone and obstruct climate change mitigation.

Given that capitalism will need to be challenged for any meaningful transition to occur, the socialist legacy offers a set of resources to draw upon. The problem with social democracy is that it has no concept of catastrophe — rather, it is premised on the opposite, namely the notion that we have time at our disposal and history on our side, meaning that we can move by incremental steps toward a socialist society. Whatever its historical veracity, this is certainly not the case now. We find ourselves in a situation of chronic emergency, with crises striking at an accelerated rate and thereby imposing a completely different timeline than that faced by, for example, Swedish social democracy during the 1950s and 1960s. It is therefore necessary to look to part of the socialist legacy that has an idea of catastrophe. Anarchism is also insufficient to this task, given that it is, by definition, hostile to the state. It is incredibly difficult to see how anything other than state power could accomplish the transition required, given that it will be necessary to exert coercive authority against those who want to maintain the status quo.

The obvious choice when looking for a tradition that has a concept of using state power in a situation of chronic emergency is the anti-Stalinist Leninist tradition. Built into this tradition is also an insight into the dangers and contradictions of state power that arises from the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution. The whole strategic direction of Lenin after 1914 was to turn World War I into a fatal blow against capitalism. This is precisely the same strategic orientation we must embrace today — and this is what I mean by ecological Leninism. We must find a way of turning the environmental crisis into a crisis for fossil capital itself.