Save Democracy, Save The Planet
Author Kate Aronoff [courtesy of Aronoff]
Kate Aronoff (@katearonoff) is one of our leading thinkers on climate change, and her concerns extend not just to saving a warming planet, but to rescuing democracy along the way.
I recently chatted with her about her new book Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back, a lively journey through the history of climate politics, and a radical analysis of the types of solutions that would not only make power greener, but redistribute it.
You note in your book that white supremacy and climate change denialism have had many advocates in common. Why is this the case?
For as long as the fossil fuel industry has existed, it's been dependent on one form of minority rule or another. If you look at like the history of the oil industry, which involved wealthy Brits going to the Middle East and forging contracts with local governments or networks of elites to drill for oil and then just totally exploiting these fields and pulling resources out of those countries, that is just how the fossil fuel industry has worked for a very long time.
The industry’s practice has not only been to not give people a say over how resources are being exploited or how that wealth is shared, but really to create pretty awful looking regimes around labor.
Capitalism is built up around the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to understand the last 200 or so years of history without looking at how those projects are really intertwined.
In the U.S., it takes on this really specific form where you have fossil fuel magnates – people like Charles Koch who inherited his father's business empire that has a big refinery business – become friends with someone like James Buchanan, who gets his start fighting back against Brown v. Board of Education.
There's a natural coherence between those two projects. It goes … beyond the fact that they're both wealthy white men eager to preserve a very profitable business as usual. They’re specifically reacting against various types of democracy.
We know that coal companies and oil and gas companies really aggressively looked to kill unions in part by pitting Black and white workers against one another and by pitting various white ethnic groups against one another. It’s a tried-and-true tactic for fossil fuel executives who really have an interest in making sure democracy is stamped out. And James Buchanan and Charles Koch are upset about the project of desegregation, of Black people getting voting rights in this country. They really have a lot to agree on in that respect.
One of the decisions you make in the book is to use the phrase “eco-apartheid,” which invokes anti-colonial struggles. Why?
The countries which have contributed the least to the problem and are being hit the hardest also have the least power in the world system.
The early neoliberals were reacting in no small part to national liberation struggles, seeking a claim to natural resources, which, to that point, had been exploited by privately owned companies in the West. There's this huge pushback to a more democratic world order, which starts to emerge in that time. There were very different visions for what the UN could be in the 1970s, for example, that did not come to pass in part because of people like Henry Kissinger trying to cement the theoretical world order and keep the power of Western governments of former colonizers on top.
And that's where we are. And so by the time climate change enters the public debate in the late ‘80s and the ‘90s and these conversations at the UN started taking off, it's a pretty toothless body without the sorts of enforcement authority that could actually keep emissions down – make it so that the Paris agreement isn’t voluntary.
It’s made it so that the people calling the shots in international climate negotiations are, by and large, very wealthy countries like the U.S., members of the EU. If it were one country, one vote, we probably would have solved climate change a long time ago, but that is not how the UN is set up and certainly is not how things like the World Trade Organization or IMF and World Bank are set up.
The solutions you discuss frame fighting climate change as a project of deepening democracy. Why are those complementary?
You can look at the ProAct in the U.S., which has brought together socialists and workers in the building trades. It helps break down really bad faith “jobs vs. environment” debates and also builds the structural power of working-class institutions, which can fight to make our domestic politics better. So it’s not necessarily either having a union in your workplace or trying to change the WTO. I think those things are really complementary.
And you suggest a bunch of reforms along those lines.
Yes, it's a really exciting project to think about: What does a more democratic energy system look like?
The second half of the book is basically a series of non-reformist reforms. So thinking about something like nationalizing the fossil fuel industry, on the one hand it's a practical if politically ambitious path toward decarbonizing. But it's also a path toward democratizing our energy system.
Putting workers on the boards of these companies to have a real say in what a transition off of fossil fuels looks like has pragmatic political reasons. Because coming in and shutting down a coal plant in a community where there are not really other jobs on offer, that had been on the losing end of decades of disinvestment, of course is going to spark a lot of backlash.
These fossil fuel companies that have been managed for-profit for so long, to have those be venues for democratic decision-making about where our revenues are going, where our solar panels are going, where our wind turbines are being placed and who's making money off of them. I think that's an opportunity to build a kind of power dynamic in a clean energy economy that looks very different from the one that has existed in fossil fuels.
You might also enjoy
