Land accumulation link—the aff’s arguments about sustainable agriculture and carbon syncs are the vanguard for colonial repossession of land for capitalists

Max, associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. “1 Great Transition – or Fortress Eco-Nationalism?” A People’s Green New Deal. Pp 35-39. LS

GREAT TRANSITIONS AND LAND CLIF and the Rifkin GND are largely silent on agriculture. But land use is key for their plans, as large capital wants to alchemize arenas now simply poisoned and pulverized with “externalities” into new assets and new use-values, from organic CO2 pumps to capitalized nature. To put a green spin on such world-scale ecological-financial engineering, hand-of-god fantasies about Half Earth are gaining ground, imagining half of “Nature” immured from hordes of polluting souls – the annoying human components of the “Anthropocene” – through wide-scale conversion of human-inhabited areas to CO 2 -drawdown farms and fortress conservation in which the wealthy world can luxuriate through luxe safaris, while clustering humans into the other half.51 This would be a bad idea even were it to be carried out by liberal humanists who carry in their intellectual satchel endless unseen and unexamined colonial baggage. But big finance and meta-social engineers are not letting melioristic if slightly misanthropic liberal biologists decide what should be done with land which is not remotely “empty” but filled with biodiversity preserving Indigenous people, pastoralists, and peasants. They have their own ideas and bankroll their own platforms upon which to publish them. Mark Lynas, for example, on the website of the Gates-funded Cornell Alliance for Science, demands that “we” intensify agriculture, and corral off half of Earth to stave off starvation.52 As we shall see, food production is not an issue and will not be an issue, so arguing for further industrialization of agriculture might be the Gates agenda, but has no humanist-scientific grounding – nor does fortress conservation itself.53 Elsewhere, the Nature Conservancy and its partners posit a “financing gap” of close to a trillion dollars to put an appropriate value on ecosystem services, including biodiversity – a new arena of commodification for capital currently sitting in low or negative return bonds, and another state “crowding in” of investment.54 Another use of nature is biofuels. The means to empty out such lands are Half-Earth fantasies and primitive accumulation of pastoral and grazing lands. By now, it has become faddish to focus on the merits of vegetarianism and veganism for climate change and health alike. Tellingly, then, when it comes to agriculture, these ruling-class institutions reduce the ecological and nutritional Armageddon of industrialized agriculture to methane and other CO2 and CO2-equivalent emissions from large ungulates. As with all colonial atrocity, this civilizing mission is said to be for love of humanity. They hide behind the scientific parapet of the EAT-Lancet report, and demand “plant or culture-based meats,” which now rely on tremendous inputs of energy, and according to lifecycle assessments, may be more carbon-intensive than cows.55 Such Frankensteinian lab-meats, grown in mammoth vats or bio-reactors, do have the merit of something rustic and landrace cows, goats, bison, and sheep do not: they are patented, the property of private corporations, and have big venture capital behind them clamoring to enclose and commodify what is now primarily a petty commodity or peasant-based form of production and turn it into a new high-tech monopoly. They also claim the newly liberated land could be reserved for “increased forest cover and biodiver sity or if needed to bioenergy production.” However, as shown below, the technology is hardly neutral. If the problem is industrial animal agriculture, why not simply produce meat using non-industrial methods? And if the problem is we can’t produce enough, we ought to match up consumption with capacity for metabolically restorative forms of animal husbandry, rather than imagine that US leftists can simply “nationalize” venture capitalist enterprises, which will gobble up ever more energy at a moment when the crucial issue is suppressing, not boosting, aggregate energy use. Furthermore, EAT-Lancet calls for potential “afforestation”: putting forests where they have historically not existed. Or reforestation, referring to restoration of felled forests.56 They sidestep that, historically, afforestation has been the green veil behind colonial advance.57 Even now, planting trash-tree monocrops that may rampage over existing ecologies, severely damaging water tables, is a mechanism of colonial destruction of ecosystems, as in Palestine.58 Additionally, the Edenic vistas of the past which justify such massive socio-ecological engineering may be largely imaginary.59 Europe may never have been the land of blanket forests that lurks behind ideas of large-scale reforestation to put landscapes back to their “natural” state. Finally, these damages are not at all hypothetical: converting grazed grasslands into monoculture timber plantations has pushed the alabaster Indian Gaolao cattle breed close to extinction, destroying gossamer ecosystems and starving households of incomes.60 Once again, we should consider where bad ideas come from. They are not just the fruit of bad thinking. We should follow the money. The report was backstopped by EAT, a non-profit founded by the Stordalen Foundation, funded by Norwegian hotel billionaires, and the Wellcome Trust, on whose Board of Governors sit inter alia Eliza Manningham-Buller, president of the imperial think-tank Chatham House, and Richard Gillingwater, the chair of the renewables conglomerate SEE.61 Others like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development are jumping on the regenerative-agriculture and “vegan” tractor, ensuring it does not enter red-marked domains such as agrarian reform on a global scale. That group, in its own words, is a global, CEO-led organization of over “200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world,” including Unilever, Nestle, and Royal Dutch Shell.62 Alongside the Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, they published a report behind the veil of the innocuous Food and Land Use Coalition, calling for “the right kind of investment in alternative proteins,” alongside REDD+ and carbon pricing.63 And indeed, the EAT-Lancet report makes many reasonable suggestions for dietary shifts. But within the Trojan Horse of erasing hunger through healthier food is a call for “a Half Earth strategy for biodiversity conservation,” and as they add, “In-vitro meat production from cultured animal stem cells is being developed as an alternative to traditional meat.” (Agrarian reform as an “alternative” to increase access to food in poor countries is not on the Lancet menu).64 Furthermore, the IPCC, merely mandated with supposedly non-normative technical evaluations, puts great stock in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage for many of its transition plans. Such plans are purportedly speculative. But they sketch out and in turn make reasonable or even thinkable certain futures.65 This is so even though the IPCC always assiduously notes biofuels enter direct contradiction with people’s need for food, the reason they have attracted the scorn of Third World peasant and popular movements. The Energy Transitions Commission, an industry future-sketching outfit committed to green growth, draws up similar plans for forests, fields, and grasslands. On the ETC sit a pantheon of those most invested in fossil capitalism: Dominic Emery, the Chief of Staff of BP, John Holland-Kaye, the CEO of Heathrow Airport, and Chad Holliday, the Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, the sectors most enthralled and in thrall to a permanent growth model, given gargantuan assets stored in the energetic source of future destructive growth. They do indeed gesture at how biofuels can compete with food, carbon drawdown, and biodiversity – a mandatory homage to the IPCC report, and a customary force field of caveats erected around any discussion of biofuels. But their program pointedly states, “Sustainable biofuels or synthetic fuels will need to scale up from today’s trivial levels to play a major role in aviation and perhaps shipping,” a slippage from cautionary notes to full-throttle embrace, inevitable if these programs are implemented. Likewise, the ETC national manifesto for the Australian leap to sustainability states, “Full decarbonisation for industries such as steel, cement and chemicals require the use of electrification, hydrogen, bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (CCS).”66 The EU’s energy transitions plan calls for massively increasing the biofuel mix in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like maritime and airborne transport.67 The plan from the US Senate’s Special Committee does too, alongside calling for afforestation.68 For India, where farmland for food has been dragooned into use for tropical export crops while Indian peasants starve, biomass is blocked out as a possible input into Indian metallurgy.69 Using land for growing biofuels and planting trees for the express purpose of pulling in CO2 from the atmosphere means not using such land for crops. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, shifting all of the world’s hydrocarbon use to biofuels would cut savagely into agricultural production and water use. Furthermore, the slippage is not hypothetical. One quarter of the bio-based industry (BBI) projects are based on agricultural biomass, while a huge portion of the money from EU projects goes to agriculture-based biomass initiatives. Just 10 percent of biomass-based industries paid coordinators have anticipated positive results from biodiversity, and just a hair more than a quarter anticipate more sustainable management of planetary natural resources.70 The ETC also leans hard on carbon capture and storage: grabbing the CO 2 as carbon sources are incinerated or otherwise deployed and injecting it into huge caves underground. More ambitious yet is deploying capture and storage sky-vacuums as carbon scrubbers, pulling CO2 directly from the atmosphere. In its big scope sketches, the ETC calls for capturing and storing “6 to 9.5 Gt of CO2 per year by 2050.” That would require building 20 Mt of capacity monthly for 360 months. In total, carbon capture and storage (CCS) now captures just 33 Mt carbon annually.71 A small hiccough: roll-out of CCS has stalled since it seems neither environmentally nor technologically prudent nor feasible. No less than BNP Paribas’s investment counselor warns the great majority of CSS projects reinject the gas into oil wells in order to enhance recovery, a kind of Ouroboros of fossil capitalism.72 But then, the ETC is helmed by the oil industry. Big money making more bad ideas. CSS apostles run cover for the fossil fuel industry’s desire to wring every last bit of profit from its petroleum holdings and infrastructure. Yet the broader buy-in relates to broader eagerness to maintain the physicalindustrial infrastructure of modern capitalism, and to justify massive state investment in CCS with an eye towards preservation corporate valuations. And the emerging use for the physical land bases of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as carbon farms and for biofuels will allow for CO 2 offsets of whatever cannot be decarbonized and may allow for the continuation of a fuel-based modern and hierarchical order, at least for a few of the planet’s people.