"The fact that [Gandhi] can emerge as an icon of the climate movement - not to mention 'our scientist of the human spirit' - attests to the dept of the regression in political consciousness between the twentieth and the twenty-first century."
"The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power."
"The insistence on sweeping militancy under the rug of civility - now dominant not only in the climate movement, but in most Anglo-American thinking and theorising about social movements - is itself a symptom of one of the deepest gaps between the present and all that happened from the Haitian Revolution to the poll tax riots: the demise of revolutionary politics. It barely exists any longer as a living praxis in powerful movements or as a foil against which their demands can be set. From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s it has been defamed, antiquated, unlearned and turned unreal."
"'Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.' as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist."
"the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] understood oil as a material base for the hostile trinity - US imperialism, Israeli colonialism, Arab reaction - and sabotage as a way to 'strike at the ligaments of empire.'"
"There is a very tight correlation between income and wealth on the one hand and CO2 emissions on the other. It has been demonstrated from Canada to China: a diminutive share of the population accounts for a wildly outsized portion of the gas released. To be rich in the world today is to come out on top in the distribution of the 'unequal ability to pollute', as Dario Kenner names it in his Carbon Inequality."
"'Can we really equate', [Agarwal and Narain] asked, 'the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live? A quantum of methane from a ruminant or paddy might have the same radiative forcing as a quantum of CO2 from an SUV... but the moral substances are like chalk and cheese."
"The rich could claim ignorance in 1913. Not so now. A group of American and British criminologists have consequently argued that conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime. It is aggravated by the circumstance, secondly, that the main source of luxury emissions - the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving - is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations. To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke."
"On the standard view, which also seems to be King's, an inanimate object can undergo violence by virtue of being property - standing in a relation, that is, to a human being, who can claim to be indirectly hurt when it is hurt... But this indirectness is also what sets property destruction apart, for one cannot equate the treatment of people with the treatment of the things they own... There is, however, one exception, one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, namely that which hits material conditions for subsistence: poisoning someone's groundwater, burning down a family's last remaining grove of olive trees or, for that matter, firebombing a paddy field in an Indian peasant village because it emits methane would come close to a stab in the heart."
"The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence - the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology."
"Look at it which way you will, from the angle of investment, production or consumption, it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home. A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks."
"There is no way a movement can ever get its hands on fossil fuel combustion. 'No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in direct actions,' the energy is beyond reach, because people 'do not help produce it. They only consume.'"
"'The fight is, definitely, not yet lost - in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.' If fatalists think that mitigation is meaningful only at a time when damage is yet to be done, they have misunderstood the basics of both climate science and movement."
"Climate fatalism is for the jaded and the deflated; it is a 'bourgeois luxury', in the plain language of one Swedish critic."
No comments:
Post a Comment