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A Question of Priorities


by Keith Kahn-Harris    
January 9, 2008 at 8:28 pm

The climate change denial blog has an interesting post from Roman Krznaric entitled ‘Does The Left Really Believe in Climate Change’. Krznaric recounts his attendance at a leftist conference on Latin America that he attended last year in London. He recounts that not only did none of the speakers mention climate change as a factor to be considered in Latin American politics, but support for Chavez in Venezuela appears to condone his reliance on oil to fund the ‘Bolivarian revolution’.

Krznaric says that

I can’t help concluding that the Progressive Left doesn’t yet really believe in climate change.

He gives the following reasons for this:

One factor concerns hope. For the first time in years there is a sense of hope about Latin America amongst the Progressive Left. Neoliberalism is in retreat and left-leaning governments are being elected throughout the region. Chavez is challenging the US and the multinationals, and having an impact on poverty reduction. Bolivia has its first indigenous President. But none of this, I believe, is an excuse for ignoring climate change.

A second factor is that many activists and policy-makers continue to keep human development issues separate from what they think of as ‘environmental’ issues. If you are interested in tackling poverty in the favelas of Rio, it is quite normal not even to consider that climate change is a related issue. I think there is a real need for development agencies and activists on the one hand, and environmentally-oriented organisations and campaigners on the other, to merge their thinking to create a new Ecological Humanism, so that climate change and social justice are considered interdependent issues.

A third, possibly deeper factor, is psychological denial. As individuals, we have an extraordinary capacity to shut our minds to the realities of issues that we think are frightening or insurmountable. Climate change is one of them. The good news is that people in rich countries are starting to overcome their denial and accept that climate change is not only happening, but will change their own lives, and that they have to adapt to and embrace the changes. The bad news is that most of them remain in denial when it comes to the world’s poorest countries. As a recent Oxfam report points out, the rich world is sorely lagging behind in its response to the need for developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change link..

The time has come for us to take our struggle against denial a stage further, and recognise that climate change is a reality not only for ourselves, but for the world’s poorest people in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions.

This article is absolutely right that in many left wing and liberal circles, climate change is nowhere near higher enough up the agenda. It’s also right to skewer the neo-Bolivarians for their short-termist relianceon petrodollars. But I can’t help thinking that the source of the problem isn’t so much denial or the other reasons Krznaric gives, so much as a more intractable problem with politics itself.


Unlike many on the right, outright denial that human-created climate change is happening is rare on the left. I also think that most people on the left accept that – in principle – there is a major problem that needs to be addressed. The problem is that too often climate change is treated as just another important issue. There are many worthy causes in the world and no one can involve themselves in all of them. Politics and activism therefore require choices to be made. Climate change competes with a whole series of leftist causes – Israel-Palestine, Latin America, human rights etc. Some make the decision to put climate change near the top of the list, some relegate it further down.

Yet the problem is that climate change is not just another issue. For one thing, its consequences can effect every other issue. For another, most activists agree that the window of opportunity for effective action is extremely narrow. This is, in short, THE issue.

But I’m not suggesting that we should trest all the other issues in the world as unimportant and unworthy of our time. Indeed, this is precisely what Krznaric is condemning when he criticises those Venezuela activitsts who are too blind too see the problems in oil-reliance. Instead, what is required is something much more challenging. That is, to find a way to see climate change in everything we are fighting for.

Sometimes it is not so difficult to imagine how to do this – critiques of US policy in Iraq dovetails nicely into critiques of oil-reliance more generally; there is also a climate change ‘angle’ in Israel-Palestine when you look at the iniquitous way in which declining water resources are shared in the region. Sometimes though it’s tough – where, for example, is the climate change angle in fighting for the rights of low paid workers? Here what is required is an appreciation of connectedness and the subtle ways in which we are all bound together in a crisis-ridden globalised world. So climate change creates refugees, which creates cheap and illegal labour in western countries, which creates pressure to keep labour costs down.

In short, what we need is a rejection of both reductive single-issue monomania and of treating politics as a smorgasbord of tempting causes from which we can happily choose.


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About the author
Keith Kahn-Harris is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He is a research associate at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College and the convener of New Jewish Thought. Also at: Metal Jew and www.kahn-harris.org
· Other posts by Keith Kahn-Harris

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4 responses in total   ||  



Reader comments

Why exactly do you assume that all these agenda must all be mutually consistent and compatible just because they all happen to be held by various elements of a self-defined progressive left? Unless you are suggesting there is some sort of perfect acquisition of “good” political beliefs conjured up with the magic words “progressive left”, then you might just as easily be left with a set of competing political beliefs. Perhaps you have to decide – whether the average Chinese family deserve access to a fridge in return for allowing the world to warm by 1 or 2 degrees, or perhaps living standards need to be halted because those 1 or 2 degrees are too crucial to gain.

in other words, what if the left really is a smorgasbord of specialist causes that all happen to oppose so-called “neo-liberalism”. If, for example, market forces turned out to be the best method of improving the global environment and western corporations started leading the way with green technologies, would the environment really be a left wing shibbolith for all that much longer?

2. Keith Kahn-Harris

Tough questions Nick. I’m not sure I can answer them just yet. I wanted to raise a question rather than an answer…

The problem of “climate change” (if there is one, and I’m not convinced) is really the problem of population growth, especially in pre-industrial, third world countries. What you are calling “human development issues” will make the problem worse, as will any form of carbon trading, which is really global wealth redistribution with a green hat on, and will only incentivise population growth. If you want to boil it down to a single, all embracing, coherent and interconnected issue, it is population growth
I agree that the pick and mix approach to “issues”, as opposed to the genuine ideological divides, is actually part of the problem, not part of the solution, but as the progressive left are champions of post modernism in all things, they must take the blame for that.

4. Philip Ward

Roman Krznaric uses his experience of one conference to launch a general attack on “the left”, questioning its belief in climate change. I think this is slightly ridiculous political point-scoring. Firstly, this gathering was not necessarily that
socialist: it seems to have been organised by the South-East region of the TUC. For all the author knows, the organisers took an explicit decision to exclude climate change for their own political reasons. The decisions of the organisers and the views of some of the participants don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of everyone at the conference.
There is no way you can use the fact that one possibly-left-wing conference failed to have a workshop on climate change to tar the whole of “the left”. Did the author attend every workshop to check that no-one discussed climate change?

One left-wing-supported event that is very important, as it represents one of the first attempts to get climate change discussed at the base of the UK trade union movement, is the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Conference at ULU on February 9th. For more details see http://www.campaigncc.org/ Readers who care to look on the web can find lots of discussion and left-wing activity on climate change.

On the question of Venezuela. Firstly, it might be useful to read here, what Green Party Principal Speaker Derek Wall says about Venezuela:

http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/green_venezuela_01456.html

I think he gets the emphasis about right. He shows how Latin America has been subject to US oppression and exploitation and how the Bolivarian revolution is challenging that. This revolution faces numerous enemies – including a large middle class, fired up by US propaganda and dirty tricks, and controlling large sections of the media. I think it is fair to say that if it wasn’t for the oil revenues, the revolution could well have collapsed. In my opinion, if the Bolivarian revolution leads to the overthrow of capitalism in Venezuela (still a very long shot), then it will be oil money bloody well spent. And it will do a lot more for defeating climate change to take a country out of the capitalist “endless growth” orbit, directly challenging US hegemony, than closing down a few oil wells. Who would the author rather met current oil demand (because that’s “all” the oil suppliers are doing)? The Saudi regime? The US and UK oil companies (Venezuela’s is nationalised)? Would he want extraction from the Alberta tar sands to be expanded as a result of
Venezuela shutting off its oil production, financing a government that has given up even on its Kyoto commitments and causing far greater pollution?

I really think these ill-informed knee-jerk anti-socialist responses should stop. We’ve had fifty years of them, starting with the likes of Ritchie Calder, moving through the Ehrlichs and up to the present. It is a myth that needs challenging that socialists have contributed nothing to fighting ecological degradation and climate change. I have one question for those who think socialism has nothing to do with climate change: how can capitalism exist without “growth”?


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