Climate Totalitarianism: Some Quotations

In Africa must forgo gas exploration to avert climate disaster, warn experts

Call comes after former UN climate envoy urged African countries to exploit their natural gas reserves

Fiona Harvey and Matthew Taylor, The Guardian, June 14, 2022.

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Mohamed Adow, the director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank and 2020 winner of the Climate Breakthrough prize, said Robinson was wrong.

“For Africans to achieve the lives of dignity that energy access should bring, we cannot rely on the failed system of the last 200 years. We must leapfrog our thinking and make the investment into distributed renewable energy systems that won’t poison our rivers, pollute our air, choke our lungs and profit only a few,” he told the Guardian.

Making a distinction between voices from the west and those from Africa, he said: “Climate justice champions who actually live in Africa are very clear that we want access to energy for everyone – but equally we do not want to lock in climate catastrophe for everyone.”

He was joined by Nnimmo Bassey, the director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation in Nigeria. “Decades of oil and gas extraction on the continent has fed foreign markets and only muddied the water, built violence, and left the people in the cold and in the dark,” he said, highlighting the experience of Nigeria, the Niger Delta and Mozambique, characterised by pollution and profiteering by a few while local people remained impoverished.

He accused political leaders of ignoring these concerns: “Sadly, African politicians acting as middlemen to transnational corporations are happy to parrot this song despite local resistance and the realities of ecocide in the fossil fuel fields.”

Omar Elmawi, a coordinator at the StopEACOP campaign in east Africa, said: “Decades after exploiting fossil fuels in Africa, we have yet to improve energy poverty and countries have continued to drown themselves in unsustainable loans taken because of the promise of fossil fuel revenues.

“Corporations registered in the global north have continued to benefit from these dirty fossil fuels in Africa and all we are left with are the impacts on our people, nature and the climate.”

The issue of gas in Africa is likely to prove a flashpoint at the Cop27 UN climate summit this November in Egypt. Robinson’s views, first expressed in an interview with the Guardian, sparked a row at UN climate talks in Bonn, where countries have held meetings over the past fortnight in preparatory negotiations for Cop27.

Several African countries are thought to want to use Cop27 to argue for the continent to be allowed to exploit its gas, taking advantage of the fossil fuel bonanza that has followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Egypt is sympathetic, with the finance minister, Mohamed Maait, telling an audience in the City of London recently that poor countries must not be “punished”.

However, Guterres made clear in a speech on Tuesday morning at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna that no new fossil fuels should receive investment.

He said: “New funding for fossil fuel exploration and production infrastructure is delusional. It will only further feed the scourge of war, pollution and climate catastrophe. The only true path to energy security, stable power prices, prosperity and a liveable planet lies in abandoning polluting fossil fuels, especially coal, and accelerating the renewables-based energy transition.”

He did not refer to Africa specifically but indicated the continent was included, by adding: “Renewables are the peace plan of the 21st century. Cheaper, more reliable and fairer energy options are already available in the shape of wind and solar. This is true for all regions.”

He called for a tripling of investment in renewables, the removal of red tape that blocked wind and solar projects and for more of the underlying technology to be made available for use in poor countries through the sharing of intellectual property known as technology transfer.

It starts with exaggeration, continues with alarmism, and ends with totalitarianism. The “existential crisis” of man-made climate change.

“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.” (James Hansen, Guardian, February 14, 2009)

Totalitarianism

“When governments are confronted by collapse, they too often resort to totalitarian methods to keep order in the face of chaos. Given the increasingly precarious state of our climate, it is not hard to foresee governments resorting to permanent states of martial law. And it is not hard to imagine a short-term state of emergency morphing into a long-term state of siege.” (Ross Gelbspan, GRIST, April 27, 2010)

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership.”

“To engage with these challenges, we need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies. We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes.”

“The valorizing of homeownership and property rights results not only in increased exposure to climate-change-fueled fires, but also in our inadequate responses to them…. There is hardly any emphasis on more collective action or larger-scale spatial planning, except for reassessing traffic flow for evacuations. Any suggestion that we might discourage rebuilding on privately owned land is promptly tamped down.”

Discussions have surged over the last two years about the need for coastal communities to retreat further inland as they face rising sea levels—a seemingly more imminent threat. How should we broach the more uncertain risks of fire?”

“This is not an indictment of individual homeowners, who are only trying to find stability through the sole system that has been offered to them.”

“The vulnerable affluence of Porter Ranch and Granada Hills, and the exposed tranquility of Paradise, are two representations of the same westward-expansionist frontier thinking that underlies modern life in the United States. This is the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, transmuted through the urban, petrochemical century.

“Cheap energy—both the monetary price of subsidized gasoline and the hidden costs of fossil fuels—and the idealization of individual homeownership have created the scorching landscapes we face today.”

“Cheap energy is untenable in the face of climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned.”

“If we can reframe debates about the future of cities beyond rote acceptance of property ownership, it will free up space for us to think about new, more just, and climate-attuned modes of urban living. Responding to climate change in just ways entails radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting against or adapting to climate change impacts, and doing all of it without further marginalizing oppressed groups of people.”

“Given the scope and scale of the climate crisis, it is shocking that we are being presented with so few serious, comprehensive alternatives for how to live. We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.”

– Kian Goh, “California’s Fires Prove the American Dream Is Flammable.” The Nation, December 23, 2019.

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