We live in an era of continuous “emergencies” described with apocalyptic words that have the effect of frightening and paralyzing people’s thoughts and personal actions, and depressing them: the Covid-19 syndemic, the war in Ukraine with announced nuclear danger, the phenomenon of migration and climate collapse.
Due to the profound malaise I am feeling in the face of the incredible degenerative escalation of the debate on the climate and ecological crisis, I will therefore outline a reflection because it is right to call things by their proper name, in a historical period where confusion reigns supreme.
In the current climate debate there are two positions that are generating yet another polarization of the debate: that of climate denial, which presents itself as vulgar and offends the intelligence of many; and that of the climate emergency, which is increasingly consolidating as a media full of inaccuracies, toxic narratives and misleading news.
The issue of climate change today is treated as an “emergency” by the media. Capitalism has always called “emergency” what it needs to justify repressive policies. Also, in this case, transmitting the ecological crisis as an emergency factor serves to induce fear and paranoia, but above all to subtly provide “social reassurance”: [If] it is an emergency, sooner or later it will end… When in reality this is not true. A structural factor remains and then can lead to its points of no return, its contradictions. Why is this narrative conveyed today?
Climate collapse is upon us and it can be seen from many factors (degradation of the territory, drying up of fertile soils, intensive monocultures, intensive breeding and technological development with its abnormal ecological footprint). Perhaps some do not remember, but in the last twenty years, systematically, in Western countries, those who dealt with and raised awareness on the issue of pollution, on the importance of changing the development model, were defined as “pauperists”, “against the progress”, and ridiculed as nostalgics of primitivism.
I vividly remember when the words “environmentalist” and “ecologist” sounded like insults in people’s ears. It is only since 2015, with the Cop21 in Paris, that something has started to move at the level of collective sensitivity up to the Fridays for Future movement. Yet the narrative on the environment has changed a lot in the last five years and has increasingly taken on a neoliberal imprint, passing off as an “environmentalist” what an “environmentalist” is not.
Today there is a real mass greenwashing operation, where the big capitalists are proposing a toxic narrative for which, under the guise of saving the environment (which they have defaced and abused until today); they are telling us that it is technological development that saves the environment. This allows the big capitalists to regenerate their brands, to open new markets and also to regenerate their exemplary image in front of the world. So these toxic narratives serve to consolidate “green capitalism”, as the Bolivian socialist president Luis Arce explained very well; the “green economy” made with adult and minor slaves in the Congo and with the extractivist and destructive model of the environment; the “net-zero washing”, or what the biologist Silvia Ribeiro has called “climate colonialism”. Financial capitalism has invented, together with the giants of fossil energy, the world market for the exchange of pollution permits.
British Petroleum (BP), in exchange for a generous contribution to make agricultural production increasingly ecological in the Mexican state of Veracruz (40 dollars for each of the 133 farmers of the Coatlila community and for those of 58 other communities) obtained 1.5 million carbon credits on 200,000 hectares, which it can sell, at (worst-case scenario) four times what it pays to communities. It is the masterpiece of greenwashing, with which the big polluters delay, mystify and evade action in favor of climate protection while doing big business at the same time.
As Ribeiro writes: “Instead of reducing the gas emissions that cause climate chaos, they pay some communities or ejidatarios [agricultural communities born with the Zapatista revolution of 1910 to which the state assigned land in usufruct, ndt] to continue caring for their forests, or they pay others to plant monocultures of soybeans, oil palm and other crops; crops that presumably absorb carbon dioxide and would “compensate” for the fact that companies continue to pollute.”
Furthermore, today green capitalism and the green economy want to make the expressions “ecological transition” coincide with “digital transition”, two things that long-standing ecologists know very well to be completely distinct. The aim is to open up to technocratic solutions on the climate and to the implementation of technology, to the point of re-proposing nuclear energy as a “sustainable” source. But we know that indefinite development, the myth of “progress”, the reductionist-dualist-extractive mentality, the mantra of “economic growth” and the dystopian technophilia of Californian billionaires (Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc…) including the colonization of space (defined by Musk as the largest commercial enterprise since the discovery of America) are the root of the ecological crisis.
Some data:
It takes 13 tons of water to produce 1 smartphone
15 tons of water are needed to produce 1kg of beef
Silicon Valley has a carbon footprint of 6, meaning if the world were like Silicon Valley, 6
planets would be needed
40% of climate-changing emissions are produced by the agro-industry
Space colonization will materialize as a way to extract minerals, gas and lithium from
colonized planets.
Silicon Valley and Big Food are two sides of the same coin and technophilia, like the technocratic solutions to the climate crisis proposed by the capitalists, is the continuation of the ecological crisis. Changing everything to change nothing, if not to make things worse. Vandana Shiva denounces this idea very well: [she is] against GMOs, against the engineering of Nature (gene editing, genetic engineering, geoengineering), against the chemicalization of life, the promotion of ultra-processed foods grown in the laboratory (clean meat and plant-based meat) .
As militants and activists, we have the political and linguistic duty to say that the ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION has nothing to do with the DIGITAL TRANSITION of the UN Agenda 2030 (see the reflections of the ecojournalist Nicoletta Dentico in this regard). The ecological transition, as argued by the ecophilosopher Gloria Germani, will take place when we change our lifestyle, question the model of development, and production, as well as the industrial society itself and the knowledge bases on which all Western and Western Cartesian-Newtonian science is based; its anthropocentrism. Today more than ever it is a semiotic and political duty to start from this distinction, to create new political imaginaries and free ourselves from the colonization of the imaginary operated by both industrial society and the mass media.