By Jay O'Hara
To the outward eye, the climate movement looks to be back on its heels, reeling from the ascendancy of a fossil fuel regime, the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the zombie Keystone XL and the threatened departure of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. And there’s not much I can offer, as a climate organizer, to dissuade one from that opinion. The one major effort thus far was a massive march on Washington, D.C. that was planned when most expected Hillary Clinton to be in the White House. So we’re left wondering: What the hell are we supposed to do now?
Into this breach steps Jeremy Brecher’s slim new volume “Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual.” Neither glitzy, eloquent nor subtle, Brecher methodically lays out an interlocking vision of direct action within a constitutional legal framework to build the powerful nonviolent climate insurgency necessary to turn the ship around. “Against Doom” smartly connects disparate threads of the existing climate movement and pulls them together with strategic vision. I finished the book fired up with a clearer sense of where my own work with the Climate Disobedience Center, as well as my Quaker faith community, fits into an unfolding climate insurgency. And I’m ready to get back to the pipeline valves, coal piles, construction sites, boardrooms and courtrooms where we have the opportunity to stem the tide of climate cataclysm.
Brecher puts all this in perspective right up front: Before Trump, the Paris agreements represented merely “the illusion that world leaders were fixing climate change” — with ineffectual emissions reduction targets of only 2 degrees Celsius (non-binding) and 1.5 degrees (aspirational). As such, Trump is only a refreshingly honest manifestation of the movement’s failure to muster sufficient power to achieve its ultimate aims. The illusion of the efficacy of an inside politics game somehow survived the failure of cap-and-trade among the major environmental groups, and those groups refocused on the Obama administration’s potential for executive action. At the same time, the national fight against Keystone XL and grassroots resistance by frontline communities across the country and globe have laid the groundwork for a strategy of insurgency.
Insurgency
The strength of “Against Doom” lies in getting to the next layer of strategic sophistication about what a plausible insurgency strategy looks like. While many activists may say that “increasing the negative consequences of continuing fossil fuel extraction and burning” is the aim of their tactics, Brecher starts in a very different place. He argues that “The most important targets of the climate insurgency are the hearts and minds of our friends and neighbors locally, globally and virtually. The goal is to encourage them to organize themselves and act to protect the climate.”
Brecher makes the implicit case for a movement of nonviolence by putting “costing the fossil fuel industry money” fifth on his list of eight ways to build climate insurgency. He argues that a “by any means necessary” approach to shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure will alienate rather than encourage the participation of those we need. The first fight we have to win is the fight to get the rest of the troops off the couch: to activate and mobilize those who say they agree with us, but are — as of yet — unmoved to take action. Implicitly, he argues that maintaining nonviolent discipline is necessary to unlocking the potential power of our soft supporters. Several times in the book, Brecher musters a slew of public polling data to say that support for dramatic climate action is broad, but weak. Therefore, it isn’t hard to extrapolate from that data the kinds of actions — like a covert campaign of industrial sabotage — that would send those soft supporters running to embrace the status quo. Instead, they need to bring the fight to their churches, unions, governments and other institutions that form the “pillars of support” for the fossil fuel industry. In that sense, Brecher is making the case for an insurgency that is transparent and inviting.
Brecher also gets the insurgency’s objective right, which is to motivate anyone with some piece of the fossil fuel lever in their hands to make policies and choices that meet the admittedly high bar of averting cataclysm. This is where we can draw the most distinct line between what is establishment environmentalism and climate insurgency. For nearly a decade, environmentalists have mistakenly focused on passing a cap-and-trade bill, regardless of whether it met the objectives of sufficiently reducing emissions. Signing a global treaty became the goal, rather than getting commitments to emissions reductions that would limit warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Both of these events saw the environmental establishment laud policymakers and negotiators for their great accomplishments. Most recently, the League of Conservation Voters endorsed Hillary Clinton, the pro-fracking presidential candidate, and gave Bernie Sanders a 6 percent score on their annual report card — despite the fact that he was running a campaign that took science seriously and declared climate to be our most serious national security threat. The existing climate movement isn’t immune to this tendency either, as it is constantly confronted with people who want to be positive and focus on solutions. As a means to confront this issue, Brecher insists that “it is not the role of the climate insurgency to determine in detail the specific pathway institutions will take to eliminate fossil fuels.” That is something many different groups — both “inside and outside the climate insurgency” — need to figure out. “The role of the climate insurgency,” Brecher writes, “is to make clear the negative consequences — from climate change and from movement action — that will befall those who do not take such measures.”
Please continue this article here: https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/climate-insurgency-against-doom-jeremy-brecher/
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