Risk link—the aff’s use of emergency rhetoric around climate change is a justification for imperial violence under capitalism—this becomes a colonial boomerang which ensures serial policy failure

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 23-26. LS

A CLIMATE OF EMERGENCY AND RISING RISK How we describe a problem helps mold how we will address it. Notions of rising emergency and climate-related risk hide something pointed out by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”7 Lawlessness, disorder, threat, human insecurity, privation, deprivation, and suffering are the rule for most of humanity. Endless war, primitive accumulation, colonial genocide, neo-colonial depopulation and state-shattering are permanent emergency. The rhetoric of risk is not a recognition of the emergencies that batter the lives of the world’s majority population. The newly noticed threats, about which the core’s governments have blithely done nothing for decades, are to long-term accumulation: social stress in the South leading to drought and mass migrations, and now a chance of runaway warming. The World Economic Forum, for example, slots risks into “physical,” “regulatory and legal,” “market,” and “reputational”: perils to business. Such parochialism is risk and emergency from the very particular viewpoint of Western monopolies.8 If open and democratic debate about the distribution of wealth can be muffled under the smothering blanket of emergency, those who own the blanket and insist on asphyxiating discussion can preserve existing distributions of wealth. Other uses of emergency are the canary in the coalmine for an acceleration of the worst of current fortress nationalist regimes, those countries which are increasingly militarizing their littorals and southern borders to stem immigration from countries which they have often made unlivable. Worry about mass migrations is worry about whether the cloistered settler-states and the European capitalist heartland will remain safe. What will Australia do if Indonesia is inundated and monsoons fail across rural India? Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Central American isthmus are even closer to the US, and large-scale Central American migration is already taking place, as hurricanes and brutal heat smash vulnerable farmers in a strip of land long concussed by US interventions.9 Emergency and panic about amorphous threats to life in the Third World have always justified illegal US aggression, much as neo-colonial environmentalists fretted about the forests of the Bolivian Amazon in 2019, to try to blacken the globally unparalleled ecological advocacy of the Indigenous-led left political party MAS.10 Furthermore, the war always boomerangs back to where it started through settler-colonial frontier wars.11 Suspending law, civil liberties, democratic deliberation, and struggles for liberation amidst warnings of a falling sky or “terror” have been common in a post-9/11 world, the pretexts for deepening hierarchies of class and nation.12 Against a renewed imperialist urge to generalize the “state of exception” through new regimes of state–private accumulation, greened and global, we can process the sudden cacophonous concern for climate change amongst the planet’s wealthy and their court intellectuals. Take some examples. A recent Brookings Institute report discusses rising “droughts, fire” and natural disasters. These plagues translate to “risks to economies and livelihoods.” Furthermore, the “current growth path” pressures water, land, and biodiversity, causing “accelerated loss of natural capital.”13 Words like economies and livelihoods are kaleidoscopic. They hint at human needs for food, shelter, and the good life and conflate them with the well-being of the economy. In this discourse, it is simply assumed that the health of “the economy” leads to the health of concrete individual human beings. Their history is important: the blurry notion of livelihoods emerged in force at the Rio+20 Summit, which marked 20 years after the original Rio Earth Summit which set in motion world climate negotiations. At Rio+20, mandates for “sustainable development” of the world’s resources bloomed, alongside sterile calls for a “green economy,” and were adopted by consensus at the United Nations General Assembly.14 Yet in an imperialist world, that which all states agree upon as a program cannot have any emancipatory content. Neither economy nor livelihoods implies any particular distributional pattern: “Class, not as an institutional context variable, but as a relational concept, is absent from the discourse of livelihoods” argues sociologist Bridget O’Laughlin, which is why it studs such reports so frequently.15 They do not wish to question the existing maldistribution of wealth. Take another example: the Australian Breakthrough Institute, in a May 2019 report, Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach, offers a perspective from David Spratt, the institute’s in-house research director, alongside Ian Dunlop, a former international coal, oil, and gas industry executive, and the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.16 The foreword by Admiral Chris Barrie calls for “strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities” to combat the cataclysm of climate change (akin to kindred blurring devices like economies and livelihoods, “communities” fuses interests of the rich and poor within nations and is silent on diverging interests between nations). The report warns of “existential risk,” and urges “we must take every possible step to avoid it.” How? Under a scenario better than the current emissions trajectory, with an emissions peak at 2030 and an 80 percent decline by 2050, “Deadly heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in West Africa, tropical South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia,” displacing one billion people. Water availability would decrease in the dry tropics and subtropics, parching two billion. Agriculture would become “nonviable in the dry subtropics.” As watersheds and temperature bands within which humans millennially flourished drift north, social structures erected on a more or less stable climactic bedrock would shudder. We could “see class warfare” as the wealthiest “pull away from the rest,” shattered international trade flows, a retreat into autarky, collapses in economic interchange, and the inability of governments to govern. Such national security bureaucrats and military-defense intellectuals know climactic shifts threaten to shift the planetary ecology sufficiently severely to evaporate the gossamer logistical flows and political scaffoldings of global capitalism. They write, think, and plan accordingly. These reports are not the handicraft of melioristic humanitarians, but diamond-hearted strategists dumbfounded at the sluggishness with which most of their fellow ruling-class and governments have acted. To avoid the massive human migrations such a scenario would entail, the report calls for “a zero-emissions industrial system [to] set in train the restoration of a safe climate.” The predictable analogy they draw upon is World War II, the crucible of military Keynesianism and worldwide neo-colonialism. The report highlights the “national security sector’[s]” potential role in a vast mobilization of resources. The role of the military in a peacetime transition is unclear, although one chapter of World War II less discussed by its refurbishers, right and left, is the role of the military in suppression of labor unrest, or union agreements to avoid independent labor action.17 Furthermore, they propose enlisting the national security sector to assist resource and labor mobilization. Such help could mean anything, but gestures at forced labor recruitment. To carry out this program, they imagine a new social consensus, based on a triangular relationship between Parliament and “corporate leaders,” and community. The former will provide wisdom and “leadership,” the latter will provide support and internalize and normalize in “everyday discussion” the logical conclusions of emergency planning. What does that look like? A wholesale renovation of the technological and institutional infrastructure and architecture of fossil capitalism, the new product a lot of the same old capitalism but covered with honeyed rhetoric of sustainability, community, livelihoods, and resilience, so it can be smoothly swallowed by those who might balk at climate crisis as an occasion to socialize risk and privatize profit. There is a logical and political correspondence between the language and strategies they use to address the worsening emergency for humanity, and their positions in society: elite management, links to the most polluting forms of fossil capitalism, and the national security state. We would expect them to frame the problem, identify stakeholders, and propose solutions in ways that do not disturb the patterns of power and powerlessness from which they speak, and which they wish to preserve.