‘Tick Tock’: Daimler Truck Workers Use Strike Threat to Win Big

By Dan DiMaggio

May 17, 2024

Source: Labor Notes

Image by UAW

North Carolina heavy truck and school bus manufacturing workers won 25 percent pay increases and ended wage tiers after an energetic contract campaign and strike threat against Daimler Truck.

The United Auto Workers unionized these plants in the 1990s and early 2000s—but since then, wages had stagnated. Starting pay was low, and the plants were stuck on different wage scales. At Thomas Built Buses, the largest school bus manufacturing site in the U.S., assembly workers topped out at $24, $5 less than their counterparts at Daimler’s Mount Holly truck plant.

The new contract establishes a common wage grid across all 7,400 workers at the four North Carolina plants, as well as parts distribution centers in Atlanta and Memphis. It’s another win for the UAW under President Shawn Fain, elected a year ago on a platform of “No Tiers. No Concessions. No Corruption.”

The union’s newfound militancy—showcased in the escalating strikes at the Big 3 last fall—was again on display. The UAW made clear that the April 26 contract expiration was a firm deadline.

The message was, “You’re either going to meet our demand or we’re going to be on strike,” said Corey Hill, president of UAW Local 3520, which represents 3,000 workers at the plant in Cleveland, North Carolina. “Tick tock Daimler, you’re on the clock.”

Workers made their own red T-shirts (many with colorful variations on the “Tick Tock” slogan), and wore them in force on Wednesdays, sharing the photos widely on social media.

Practice pickets in front of each plant in the weeks leading up to expiration drew hundreds of workers chanting, “Tick Tock! Tick Tock!” In the Mount Holly plant, workers even periodically started chanting while at work.

‘OWED US A RECORD CONTRACT’

Daimler workers were fired up. “This company owed us a record contract,” Hill said.

Daimler has made $20 billion in profit since the last contract in 2018, while any union gains in that deal were quickly eaten up by inflation. Meanwhile other local employers were raising pay.

“This used to be the best job around,” said welder Ben Smith, a member of UAW Local 5287 at the Thomas Built Buses plant in High Point. “That’s no longer the case. People know it’s not the only game in town—it’s a sellers’ market for labor.”

Right now there’s a strong market for heavy trucks, and the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill has allocated $5 billion for school districts to buy electric and low-emission buses.

“It was a good time to stand our ground and make the company pay up,” said Smith.

The union’s public campaign drew local media attention, as well as the support of local businesses, who hung signs showing their support for the workers. “Being public and talking about our stories, that makes these companies face what their decisions are,” said Hill.

As the clock inched toward expiration, the UAW scheduled a public announcement for 10 p.m. April 26, promising to announce a strike or a record contract. “We all assumed we were going to be getting marching orders for picketing,” Smith said.

But shortly before, the company started moving on the union’s key demands. “I think the company saw how ready we were to strike,” Smith said, “and then caved at the last minute.”

Daimler has used the threat of sending work to its two truck manufacturing plants in Mexico as a bludgeon against North Carolina workers.

“We were compared to Mexico all the time,” said UAW Local 3520 President Corey Hill: “‘How are you gonna cut costs down here? What are you going to do?’”

The company has had a plant in Santiago, in the state of Mexico, since 1991. Workers there build business-model trucks, like those used to deliver bread and beer.

In 2009, Daimler opened another plant in Saltillo, in the border state of Coahuila, which manufactures Class 8 semis—the same trucks built at the Cleveland plant. Saltillo is also home to a Stellantis truck plant; General Motors has an assembly plant in nearby Ramos Arizpe.

“Years ago, we were a premier plant, but as they built in Mexico, the wages went down,” Hill said. The company’s message was, “If you don’t like it, we’ll take it to Mexico.”

After dealing with multiple rounds of layoffs, in 2010 the UAW won some job security protection: a guarantee that a certain number of trucks would be built at the Cleveland and Mount Holly plants each day.

This year, the union was able to increase the guaranteed build rate: 80 trucks per day at the Cleveland plant (on a monthly average), up from 78 in the last contract.

Both Mexican plants are represented by the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), a notoriously corrupt, employer-friendly union with deep ties to the country’s political elite. Hill hopes that Mexican workers will cast off the CTM in favor of an independent union, to fight alongside the UAW to win big improvements at Daimler Truck.

“I would love to see an independent union inside those plants,” he said.

EXPIRES IN 2028

Going forward, the UAW said wages will be negotiated as part of the master agreement, rather than in separate bargaining between the company and each local union, which Daimler had used in the past to play the locals against each other. “The company will never again use the scheme of ‘local bargaining’ to create unfair and inequitable wage increases and wage decreases based on its ability to play the local unions against each other,” said the UAW in a summary of the contract.

The wage increases will be frontloaded: everyone gets 16 percent in the first year of the contract, and many workers will receive even more. The progression to top rate is standardized and shortened from nearly six years to four. Shift premiums, formerly tiered, are now 7.5 percent across the board; tiers for vacation accrual are also eliminated.

Workers won a cost-of-living adjustment with the same formula that the UAW won at the Big 3 last fall, as well as profit-sharing. Those are both firsts at Daimler, which controls more than 40 percent of the North American market for long-haul trucks, sold under the Freightliner and Western Star brands.

The UAW won a new holiday, Juneteenth, and blocked the company’s attempt to increase workers’ health care costs.

Smith, who has been at Thomas Built for just under two years, said he’ll go from making under $24 an hour now to over $40 by the end of the contract, when he’s at top rate.

The contract was ratified in a 94 percent yes vote. It expires on March 3, 2028. The UAW has called on unions to align contract expirations for May 1, 2028 (or as near as possible), to bring maximum pressure to bear on employers and politicians.

The Inexorable Rise of the Belgian Workers’ Party

By Nico Biver

May 17, 2024

Source: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung



European Parliament elections in Belgium are once again taking place in the shadow of national parliamentary and regional elections. One could, therefore, expect similar results in both sets of polls.

In 2019, the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB/PVDA) first succeeded in winning one of Belgium’s then 21 parliamentary mandates (today 22). With 14.6 percent of the vote in the country’s French-speaking region, Wallonia, Marc Botenga became the first radical leftist from Belgium to make it into the European Parliament. The 5 percent attained in the larger Flemish-speaking region, however, was not enough to win a seat.

According to polls, the amount of votes going to the Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, and Liberal parties — nowadays divided according to language — will only continue to sink further after falling below 50 percent for the first time in 2019. Losses will also be felt by the Green Party, which fared well in 2019, while the far-right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest, or VB) and the far-left PTB are expected to make gains.

Given that the VB together with the right-wing nationalists of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) were almost able to secure an absolute majority in Flanders, forming a government at the federal level may prove to be even more difficult than before. As it is, the current government — made up of seven different parties and successfully formed a whopping 494 days after the 2019 elections — has no majority in Flanders.
The PTB’s Political Prospects

The PTB, however, has no cause for concern at the moment. All polls indicate that they will win three mandates in the next EU Parliament. In the national elections, they are polling at 15–20 percent in Wallonia, 20 percent in Brussels, and in Flanders they exceeded 10 percent in the summer of 2023.

Nevertheless, in polls in Wallonia and Brussels the PTB has been stagnant since 2020, and have only made modest gains in Flanders. Membership growth has also slowed down, with 23,000 members in 2020 and only 25,000 in 2024. This most likely has to do with the fact that in recent years COVID-19, the war in Ukraine and migration issues have taken centre stage, dividing the social and political landscape. As a result, the party’s campaigns on social issues have struggled to capture public attention.

Internationally, the PTB is also unique in many respects. The formerly Maoist party has, since its change of course at the turn of the millennium, maintained relations — now as a Marxist party — with a wide spectrum of other left-wing parties. Although it is not a member of the Party of the European Left, the PTB participates in their electoral campaign, and its MEP Marc Botenga belongs to the European Parliament’s Left group.

The PTB’s positions on EU policy are certainly shaped by the nationalist dispute at home. It is the only Belgian party united across language lines, and actively campaigns against the division of the country by Flemish nationalists. This flies in the face of excessive federalism and the so-called language dispute, which have long been weakening the workers’ movement in Belgium, distracting the people from capitalist plans to privatize and break up social security and welfare systems.

The PTB has a similar view of independence movements, such as the Catalonian, and the plans of some radical left-wing parties to have their respective nations leave the EU or abandon the euro. They do not see the strengthening of the nation-state as a viable option for resisting the policies of large-scale capitalism. In their view, this would only make it more difficult to fight against its power. Given that companies operate on the European level, it would seem that left-wing parties would also have to do so, and therefore network as much as possible. Nevertheless, the PTB rejects the plans of other left-wing parties to make the EU more socially oriented and democratic, because they simply do not consider the EU to be reformable.

In 2018, Marc Botenga criticized both approaches as too parliamentary and not anti-capitalist enough: “On the one hand, both focus more on the government than on power and underestimate the significance of countervailing power and extra-parliamentary action. On the other hand, both lack ambition, and the only prospect they offer is capitalism managed in a better way.”

Last year, he added that he considered “the [EU] treaties are incompatible with most left-wing policy… At the same time, we’ve seen that whenever the pressure is high enough and the balance of forces shifts, these rules are pushed aside very quickly.” He noted the example of the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it possible to override certain EU treaties.

In the event of a change in government, the PTB does not see the solution in the abandonment of the EU or the euro, but rather in non-adherence to the EU treaties, which stand in the way of left-wing politics. They would instead seek to establish EU-wide solidarity with the country in question.
MPs on a Workers’ Wage

The PTB’s improved electoral prospects can also be traced back to their success in the 2019 election, when their number of MPs soared from eight to 37. This meant that public contributions to the party grew from 2.3 million euro in 2018 to 6.2 million in 2022, making the PTB the third-wealthiest party in the country, despite ranking ninth among all parties. This is due to the contributions paid by elected representatives, high membership fees, and many party donations, which in Belgium cannot exceed 500 euro per/year, enabling the party to quadruple its expenditure on staff and public relations.

It is of great financial advantage to the PTB that not only their full-time staff but also their elected representatives are content with the salary of a skilled worker, or the equivalent of their previous income. According to the party’s political reasoning behind this approach, anyone who runs for office under the PTB should not be able to get rich off their position or enjoy a significantly higher standard of living than the average citizen. Chairman Raoul Hedebouw describes it as follows: “If you don’t live the way you think, then you start to think the way you live.”

This is also the reason why the party introduced a policy whereby workers keep only a 20-percent cut of their daily parliamentary allowances. The remainder, as well as all expense allowances for municipal representatives, are transferred to the party’s coffers.
Popular Politics without Populism

There are many reasons for the PTB’s success. It focuses on popular, mostly socio-economic demands that concern not only marginalized groups, but also most of society. These include free healthcare, an increase in the minimum pension, inflation adjustments, and the introduction of a tax on millionaires. Through months of campaigning with petitions, demonstrations, book releases, conferences, and so on, the PTB has not only advocated for these goals, but also aims to achieve at least some of them. Groups on the municipal level support street campaigns through parliamentary initiatives, but play no independent role themselves.

The PTB attacks the privileges of parties and politicians, and through its MPs’ renunciation of the bulk of their daily allowances and the financing of social projects such as the “Medicine for the People” clinics, the PTB can leverage the public’s loss of trust in their representatives to their advantage. However, their populism does not go so far as to embrace reactionary demands, as the Danish Social Democrats and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) do on issues of migration. Instead, the PTB sticks closer to the methods of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), which almost completely avoided controversial topics such as migration and crime in their campaigns in Styria, Salzburg, and Tyrol.

In the lead-up to this year’s elections, the PTB asked over 100,000 people to identify areas in which they expected the most from politicians. Their answers will form the focus of the electoral campaign — as long as they do not conflict with their own fundamental political convictions. Regarding contentious topics such as migration or the war in Ukraine, the PTB comments only reluctantly, and refrains from campaigning or organizing parliamentary initiatives on these subjects. The party, however, rejects the tightening of EU asylum regulations, and calls for citizenship to be automatically granted to migrants after five years of residency in Belgium.

In order to effectively tackle the climate crisis, the PTB advocates for rigorous measures, especially against the biggest CO2 producers in the economy. At the same time, they are also careful not to make any demands that could be perceived as having a potentially negative financial effect on segments of their potential voter base. This is why the party generally rejects taxes on fossil fuels and also organizes campaigns against increased parking fees.

Their political success, however, is primarily due to their perceived internal unity and their relatively high personal appeal. The primary public spokespersons for the party are chairman Raul Hedebouw, parliamentary party leader in the Chamber of Representatives Sofie Merckx, General Secretary Peter Mertens, and Flemish parliamentary party leader Jos d’Haese. To this team we can add a fifth member, political director David Pesiteau.

There is only one woman in the top leadership of the PTB and only 13 women among all 37 representatives. This is perhaps the reason why they have less support among women voters. This year, however, the electoral lists are all balanced according to quotas.

In order to improve their communication with society, the PTB relies not only on personal contact established through polls or at info booths, parties, and strikes, but also their massive presence on social media. In the French-speaking region, the PTB spends more than any other party on Facebook advertising. Both of the party’s Facebook pages have a combined total of 309,000 followers — more than La France insoumise in France or Die Linke in Germany, and that in a country with a population of only 12 million.

This form of political communication has led to the PTB gaining significant support among the working class and lower-middle class, particularly in Wallonia and Brussels. An analysis of the 2019 EU Election Study confirms this. Throughout all areas of Belgium, 19 percent of middle class respondents voted for the PTB or were sympathetic to the party, as was the case with 33 percent of those unemployed, 18 percent of those with the lowest standard of living, and 28 percent of those with the second-lowest standard of living. The fact that the poorest respondents were not the largest group is primarily due to competition from the VB in Flanders.

This can also be seen in terms of level of education: 14 percent of respondents with a low level of education and 15 percent of those with an average level supported the PTB. Among academics, the party scored below average at 8 percent. This also explains why the PTB receives below-average results in university towns and must settle for an average of 11-percent approval among those under the age of 25.

As with most other parties of the radical left, their share of the vote is significantly lower in the countryside than in cities. In Wallonia, the PTB reached 17.9-percent approval in cities with more than 100,000 residents, whereas they only managed 10.6 percent in parishes with fewer than 5,000 residents.
Unchecked Flemish Nationalism

It is worth noting that, despite their geographic and cultural proximity to France, the right-wing populists in Wallonia have thus far had little success. This is due not only to the fact that they have little to offer voters, but also because of the PTB’s policies, which have managed to garner support among classes that elsewhere tend to favour right-wing populists. However, it also has to do with the country’s history. Political scientist and PTB expert Pascal Delwit points out that there is no Belgian or Wallonian sense of national identity, although there is a very strong Flemish national identity. It is therefore rather remarkable that the PTB, at least according to polls, has reached second place in Flanders.

With its coal and steel industries, Wallonia was originally the wealthier region of the country, while agrarian Flanders was at a disadvantage. This gave rise to a reactionary Flemish nationalism that even collaborated with the German occupiers during World War II, thereby forfeiting any political role until the 1960s. Today, however, Flanders is the wealthier of the two regions, and the N-VA and VB make use of wealth-based, jingoistic ideologies in their political strategy, which they weaponize against the poorer region of Wallonia.

Flemish nationalism is primarily fuelled by three components: economic policy, which is positioned against poorer Wallonia; migration policy, which is particularly anti-Muslim in nature; and protectionist policies, which have adopted an anti-EU position. As with the 2019 elections, immigration is once again the most important political topic in Flanders, and both radical right-wing parties, N-VA and VB, are currently polling at 45 percent and 49 percent, respectively.

According to polls, the more right-wing VB has meanwhile surpassed the N-VA to become the strongest party in Belgium currently. The VB’s MEPs belong to various far-right groups in the European Parliament. VB works in the Identity and Democracy group together with the Austrian FPÖ, Le Pen’s National Rally in France, and the German AfD. Meanwhile the N-VA is part of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, and cooperates with the Polish PiS, Fratelli d’Italia, and Vox in Spain.

An election survey conducted in Flanders this year by scientists at the University of Antwerp revealed that the VB is winning votes from all other parties, although least of all from the PTB, which itself mainly draws in votes from the social-democratic Vooruit party, the N-VA, and the Green Party. In Flanders, VB is especially strong among voters with lower levels of income and education, whereas the PTB is particularly successful among voters with average income and education levels.
The Risks of Governing

The main risks facing the PTB, as identified by Pascal Delwit, include the (unlikely) establishment of a radical right-wing force in the French-speaking region, not to mention the PTB’s own alleged refusal to join any governments.

The PTB certainly has some rather difficult hurdles to overcome if they are to enter into a coalition of any sort. In the French-speaking region, where coalitions with the PS and the Green Party would be mathematically possible, election campaign banners display the motto “Le choix de la rupture”, which means, more or less, “Choosing to break away”. The party is also talking about breaking away from current politics in the EU election.

In Flanders, however, the reigning slogan, “We always stand by your side”, has a less militant tone, presumably because power is not on their side in that region. Nevertheless, the same four issues are always highlighted under both of these banners: taxation of multimillionaires, defence of purchasing power, abolishment of privileges for politicians, and strict caps on emissions for major polluters.

In 2019, the PTB demanded a minimum pension of 1,500 euro via a petition campaign in which 180,000 signatures were collected. The demand has since been implemented. Furthermore, at the beginning of the electoral campaign, when the PTB also raised the minimum wealth threshold for the millionaire tax they had been calling for to 5 million euro in order to protect medium-sized businesses, the social democratic PS outflanked them on the left and even accused them of having given up “the fight against the ultra-rich”.

The predominantly social democratic FGTB/ABVV trade union federation has repeatedly called on the parties of the Left to form a coalition government. Whether this happens or not, however, is not solely up to the PTB. The PS, which has for months accused the PTB of political uselessness because of their unwillingness to assume any responsibility for forming a coalition, will have to demonstrate whether they want to realize their left-wing demands or remain in a coalition with the liberals. Whether the PS can be persuaded to change their tune ultimately depends on the election results of the PTB.

Nico Biver lives in Marburg and has worked for various MPs in Die Linke. He is also a journalist and documentarian, examining the history and present of the global radical left.

Non-Alignment Today

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

May 16, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


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The original non-alignment movement occured in 1961 following the Bandung Conference (Indonesia) held in 1955, which was attended by 29 countries, almost all of which had recently been liberated from European colonialism. They accounted for 54% of the world’s population, but their weight in the world economy was almost nil.

In 1955, non-alignment meant wanting to decide on the national development model without having to adhere to either of the two rival models in force at the time: the communist Soviet bloc and the capitalist Western bloc. The concept of the Third World stems from this aspiration. The rivalries between them were beginning to crystallize in the Cold War. The differences between the two models were so great that they pointed to two civilizational models. In fact, the idea of the “new man” had emerged since the beginning of the 20th century in Europe as a new civilizing idea, both in the Soviet version and in the fascist and Nazi versions, and pointed to something ideologically very different from the capitalist norm which, after 1918, was increasingly dictated by the USA. The differences between the participants are well known. The use of force and war to resolve conflicts, which had dominated international politics since the 19th century, was the most unanimous issue. The Soviet bloc had a comparative advantage in that, since the Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku (Azerbaijan) in 1920, it had recognized the role of colonial liberation movements in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. But, as S. Gopal points out, non-alignment was above all a state of mind, the spirit of Bandung. African-American journalist Richard Wright, who was present in Bandung, describes the atmosphere in Bandung thus:

“Only brown, black and yellow men who had long been made agonizingly self-conscious, under the rigors of colonial rule, of their race and their religion could have felt the need for such a meeting. There was something extra-political, extra-social, almost extra-human about it; it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces. And the call for the meeting had not been sounded in terms of ideology. The agenda and the subject matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants. The conditions under which these men had lived had become their tradition, their culture, their raison d’être”.

The then young countries of what is now known as the global South wanted to assert their national interests through cooperation in order to focus on them and not on the interests dictated to them by the global North. These interests included anti-colonialism, anti-racism, getting out from underdevelopment, and expanding areas of peace.

From the outset, the Non-Aligned Movement was contested by the US, since the ideas of neutrality, neutralism or non-alignment were anathema to the US, while the USSR was pushing to intensify its anti-imperialist orientation. As a result, disagreements grew and the movement lost relevance, which worsened with the end of the Cold War.

In 2024, the geopolitical and economic situation in the world is very different from 1955. What sense does it make today to talk about non-alignment? Non-alignment between what and for what? A brief overview of the current geopolitical situation will help us define the possible political content of non-alignment. I anticipate that the new non-alignment is as necessary today as it was in 1955, albeit with very different political and ideological content. I distinguish between weak non-alignment and strong non-alignment.

The geopolitical context

We live in a multipolar (or even bipolar) world, although very different from the world in 1955. Today, the two poles of geopolitical attraction are the US and China and the rivalries between them are intensifying. A new Cold War is emerging, not at all like the one that existed between the Soviet Union and the USA. In this regard, 1955 and 2024 are distinct in three main ways.

1.While the differences between the two poles were enormous in 1955, one communist and the other capitalist, to the point of pointing to different civilizational options, today these differences are much smaller. It’s true that the speeches and self-description of the regimes point to very different realities, but in reality the differences are considerably less. It is enough to remember that until very recently China was considered a strategic partner of the US, something that was never the case with the Soviet Union. Although there is debate about the nature of China’s economic regime (communism, socialism, state capitalism?), China’s evolution over the last thirty years and the role it has played in the globalization of the economy make it increasingly clear that we are dealing with two variants of the same capitalist model: on the one hand, multinational capitalism with globalized financial capital (USA) and, on the other, state capitalism with state control of the financial sector (China). Seen from this perspective, the two systems have more in common than you might think. The differences are important, but they occur within the same model of capitalist economic development. The socialist option as it was envisioned in 1955 has disappeared. And with it, its opposite has also disappeared from the economic lexicon: today we don’t speak of capitalism, but of market economy, as if the markets, which have always existed, had always been capitalist.

2.The second difference from 1955 is that at that time there was a radical difference between democratic countries (because they were multi-party) and autocratic countries (because they were one-party), even though the latter claimed to be another kind of democracy: popular democracy, developmental democracy. Today, the differences are much more tenuous given the degradation of liberal democracies over the last thirty years. It’s no stretch to say that while China is a one-party autocracy, the US is a two-party autocracy. In fact, this was stated with extraordinary foresight by President Julius Nyerere in 1991: “The United States is a democracy by some definition and not by others. It’s a plutocracy, but the native gets the vote; so it’s a democracy! But the United States is very lucky. There are two parties; but they’re really one party! Both parties agree on the basic national objectives. Internally, both of them are highly capitalist. Externally, both of them are imperialist. So, their policies don’t differ very much. It was not Kennedy who planned the Bay of Pigs. It was planned by Eisenhower and Kennedy carried it out, that is, tried to carry it out. So they basically agree.” Obviously, the differences are significant, especially on the domestic front, but in terms of geopolitics they translate into the difference between a monolithic autocracy and a pluralist autocracy.

3.The third difference from 1955 is the emergence of the ecological issue. At that time, the issue was no more than philosophical speculation in the Global North, and when it was dealt with by the countries of the Global South, it was called something else, such as the struggle for land, agrarian reform or the control of mining operations. The situation has changed radically since then and today China alone is responsible for the second largest percentage of carbon dioxide emissions, after the USA. For their part, the countries of the global South have focused their demands on the historical responsibility of the countries of the global North and, if they do not distinguish themselves by being more active in the processes of ecological transition, it is because they are often victims of these processes when adopted by the global North, the so-called energy colonialism. In short, in this area too, the two poles seem more similar than different. Non-alignment between the two poles may mean nothing more than choosing between the storm and the flood. In view of this, the new non-alignment today has many dimensions, all of which are urgent. I distinguish between two main ones, which I call, for lack of a better term, weak non-alignment and strong non-alignment.

Weak non-alignment

As I explained in my summary above, today’s multipolar world is a single system with two main variants. These include the growth of a Cold War, which, because it is unregulated (contrary to the case of the previous one), could at any moment slide into a hot war. Weak non-alignment takes place within this system without challenging it as a whole. But don’t think that the options are weak or don’t involve risks – quite the opposite. Weak or intra-systemic non-alignment has two main characteristics, both of them implying activism.

Active neutrality. Not supporting and doing everything to prevent the outbreak of war between the two blocs. Active neutrality is what used to be called neutralism. It is not just a matter of staying out of conflicts in an isolationist way and not trying to intervene in them. On the contrary, it implies active intervention policies to promote peaceful solutions and prevent wars from occurring. Given the globalization and interdependence of the economy and the world, active neutrality will be more effective if it takes place regionally and not on behalf of isolated countries. Active neutrality is asymmetrical. No one in the global South believes that China wants a war with the US. History teaches us that rising empires advance by creating zones of influence through unequal but reciprocal benefits. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is today’s most powerful affirmation of this. No one in the global South believes that Russia is a militarily expansionist country. On the contrary, it has been historically a victim of European expansionism, having been invaded twice since the 19th century by two European powers, Napoleon’s France and Hitler’s Germany. Russia is defending itself against a new form of expansionism, this time Euro-North American, NATO. In fact, the Russian-Ukrainian war, like the Israel-Palestinian war, has the same objective of stopping the USA’s great rival, China, by neutralizing its most important allies, whether Russia or Iran. Empires in decline, such as the US, assert themselves through war, when they are not even dominated by the permanent war machine fed by the military-industrial complex. Today, the US has eight hundred military bases around the world.

Active neutrality requires non-participation in military pacts, whether promoted by the US or China. It requires distancing oneself from either of them militarily and promoting peaceful mediation and negotiation initiatives, especially from a regional base, be it Africa or Latin America. The economic power of some of the countries of the global South may be enough to have some impact on stopping the looming war.

Active non-alignment. This concept was recently coined in a book by Carlos Fortin, Jorge Heine and Carlos Ominami, (Eds), Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order: The Active Non-Alignment Option (2023). First of all, it should be pointed out that active neutrality and active non-alignment are two interdependent policies – the more intense and tense the military rivalry between the US and China, the less room there is for maneuver for the countries of the global South to carry out active non-alignment policies.

Taking Latin America as the focus of their analysis, the authors point out that the adjective “active” has a strong meaning because it implies the policy of a region that today has a significant weight in the world economy and strong relations with both China (the main investor) and the US. In line with what I argue here, active non-alignment would force Latin America out of military agreements with the US because these will increasingly be geared towards forcing Latin America into active alignment with the US in all areas – military, economic, international institutions, etc.

Two complex issues emerge. On the economic front, the situation is dilemmatic. While the US continues to advocate the economic relevance of neoliberalism despite all its failures and the emergence of extremist versions (Javier Milei in Argentina, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador), China proposes a non-neoliberal capitalism with strong state intervention and state control of financial capital. In this area, it is difficult to foresee a third way. On a political level, the US is currently demanding not only alignment, but vassalage, both in Europe and Latin America. What’s more, after Hugo Chavez, Latin America has never again had a leader interested in an autonomous policy for the continent. The hope now lies with Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, undoubtedly one of the most respected leaders in the world. But Lula is obliged to focus on the country’s internal problems, given the level of destruction and institutional degradation during the Bolsonaro period and the fact that Lula has the majority of the legislature against him and only insincere tolerance from large sections of the Armed Forces.

With regard to active neutrality, perhaps the African continent has an advantage over Latin America (despite the growing US military presence in Africa), while Latin America has an advantage in active non-alignment. An articulation between Africa and Latin America could be promising in this area. For its part, India will be attentive to this development and, if it gets actively involved, the proposal of active non-alignment (perhaps combined with active neutrality) will have another strength.

Weak non-alignment contains a tension that will tend to increase over time. Just as in the original non-alignment the Soviet bloc offered advantages that were difficult to reject, so it is now with China. In fact, the idea of non-alignment is often associated with the global South and the most consistent organization of this geopolitical space is the BRICS+, in which China plays a major role. To what extent is it possible to talk about non-alignment? To some extent, India, while still belonging to the BRICS, is showing an autonomy that could be followed by other countries. As more countries (forty candidates) join the group, the political heterogeneity will also increase. In the field of weak non-alignment, we are moving towards an asymmetrical solution of greater proximity to China, but maintaining distances determined by national interests or regional loyalties. If, in essence, this is a conditional alignment, I’m sure China will accept it. The same would not be true of the US, which today, more than ever, demands unconditional alignment.



Strong non-alignment

Strong non-alignment is based on the idea that we live in a time of transition between civilizational paradigms, between the paradigm of Western civilization whose global domination began with European colonial expansion and one or more emerging paradigms that have yet to be determined. We are therefore in a time of interregnum in the sense given to it by Antonio Gramsci: the old paradigm has not yet completely died and the new one has not yet shown itself in a credible way, a time of monsters or morbid phenomena, as Gramsci added. From this paradigmatic perspective, we live in a globalized capitalist society in which officially recognized rivalries aim to perpetuate the system by changing protagonists. The changes are long-term, secular, but they can also result from catastrophes that accelerate historical processes. In most cases, the changes are quantitative for a long time and take place undetected by the geostrategic radar. At some point, however, the world is faced with a qualitative paradigm shift.

However, it is the changes within each of the variants that are significant for the human collectives that have been socialized into them, and so the dissatisfactions, demands or aspirations of these collectives rarely call into question the variant as a whole. For this to happen, external agents are needed, which in American counter-insurgency is called regime change. The asymmetry between the two variants (US and China) is that the ascendant variant (China) doesn’t need to resort to this strategy because it has other mechanisms of attraction at its disposal which, without requiring acceptance of the Chinese system, neutralize any hostility that may exist towards its political regime or its geostrategic processes and interests. In any case, the change of variant does not alter the permanence of the current civilizational paradigm based on infinite economic growth and the exploitation of labor and nature. Strong non-alignment aims to change the paradigm and therefore proposes both distance and non-alignment from either of the two current variants. As the current paradigm was born in the global North, strong non-alignment, although mostly promoted by social movements in the global South, aims to end the latter, as a logical consequence of the end of the global North. There is only a global South because there is a global North.

The specificity of strong non-alignment is the epistemic question. Basically, it’s a question of what kind of knowledge should guide us in understanding the current paradigm and in establishing the framework for its transformation. Weak non-alignment is satisfied with the epistemologies developed in the global North based on the exclusive priority of modern science/technology because it was this epistemology which, together with modern law and the modern state, legitimized the construction of the Western capitalist paradigm whose foundations weak non-alignment does not question.

On the contrary, strong non-alignment questions these foundations and, in order to do so, it cannot resort exclusively to the knowledge that underpins them. Strong non-alignment requires new epistemologies that I have called epistemologies of the South, in which the South is neither geographical nor even geopolitical. It is above all epistemic and is present in the social struggles that take place in both the geographical South and the geographical North. Very briefly, the epistemologies of the South consist in the processes of validating knowledge other than scientific knowledge, knowledge born in the struggles against modern Western domination – capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal domination – on the part of the social groups that have suffered most from this domination: workers, colonized peoples, indigenous peoples, peasants, women. In their struggles, a plurality of knowledge has always circulated, including scientific knowledge, but also ancestral, popular, and vernacular knowledge. These non-scientific knowledges have been despised, suppressed and banned by the epistemologies of the global North, a process which I call epistemicide. The epistemologies of the South consider that modern science (itself internally very diverse) is a valid and indeed precious knowledge, but that it is not the only valid and precious knowledge, and that it must therefore be able to dialogue with other knowledges. The epistemologies of the south aim to recover these knowledges otherwise insofar as they can help us to think about and legitimize the new civilizational paradigm. It’s not about unconditional, romantic adoption or celebration of some golden age of the past to which such knowledges may be related to. It’s about investing in the epistemic diversity of the world in order to make possible a future that is fairer in relations between humans and more equitable between humans and nature.

Proposals for a strong non-alignment

1. We have the right to be equal when difference makes us inferior; we have the right to be different when equality mischaracterizes us.

2. There are no rights without duties. Duties must exist in proportion to the ability to prevent the violation of human rights and must be demanded in proportion to the consequences that may result from such a violation. Duties cannot be limited to the ethical sphere. They must be enforced by existing and future legal systems.

3. The rights of nature, understood as the vital principle that sustains human and non-human life on the planet, are recognized. The corresponding duties are incumbent on the State, communities, and citizens. The most serious violations of these rights constitute a new crime against humanity/nature: ecocide.

4. Respect for life and dignity implies recognizing the infinite diversity of ways of knowing and living (in) the world and conceiving of life, dignity, living well, and living well together.

5. The right to education must be understood as the right to know the world diversity of ways of knowing as well as rights and duties among human beings and in their relations with nature. Education, in general, and universities, in particular, must be reformed in order to intervene effectively in the dispute over narratives about the paradigmatic transition that is to follow in the next decades.

6.The different development models, including alternative development models, must give way to alternatives to development: de-mercantilization, decolonization, de-patriarchalization, and democratization. The programmed obsolescence of industrial products is prohibited.

7. The commons are all goods that must be shared by all human beings, men and women, without discrimination, as they are essential for life to flourish and dignity to prevail. The right to free access to fundamental common goods such as water, air, space, forests, rivers, seas, seeds, public space, culture, education, health, electricity, information, communication and the internet is recognized.

8. Food sovereignty must be one of the guiding principles of agricultural policy. Indigenous peoples, people descendants from slaves, and peasants have the right to their ancestral territories and their subsoil.

9. Universal basic income is one of the important instruments for combating the growing vulnerability of workers and their families, especially in view of the impact of artificial intelligence on production processes.

10. Health is a public good, not a business. Vaccines are a common, public, and universal good. They must be produced with the interests of the people in mind and made available for free and universal access. As soon as a pandemic or an emergency of equal severity is declared, all embargoes and economic sanctions that prevent the affected countries from protecting the lives of their citizens are lifted.

11. The industrial relocation of goods needed to guarantee the protection of life in the recurring emergencies that are likely to characterize the coming decades must be ensured. For the same reason, small businesses and local shops should be the main forms of distributing products to consumers.

12. Due to its ecological footprint, the international tourism industry should be less and less important in terms of wealth creation and job creation.

13. The right to urbanity is just as valid as the right to rurality. A new type of relationship between the countryside and the city is urgently needed. The countryside does not precede the city, nor does the city represent a higher stage of coexistence than the countryside. Cities must be resized and given a new meaning and dignity.

14. The public debt of peripheral countries must be canceled whenever its weight prevents them from meeting the above objectives. As soon as a pandemic or emergency of equal severity is declared, all embargoes and economic sanctions that prevent the affected countries from protecting the lives of their citizens must be lifted.

Conclusion

Weak non-alignment is the necessary condition for thinking about strong non-alignment. In turn, strong non-alignment is the utopian horizon towards which weak non-alignment must aim if it is not to become a placebo for the ills that internationalist good conscience suffers from today. Without a post-Western horizon, the struggles of non-alignment will not prevent capitalism from becoming increasingly violent towards humans and nature.


It is a question of redistributing fear and hope more equitably. Nowadays, large majorities have too much fear in the face of the vicissitudes of their daily lives and too little hope that things will get better, while a tiny minority has too much hope that the world will continue to guarantee them their privileges and too little fear that it won’t, because they are convinced that they have eliminated or co-opted their enemies. Strong non-alignment assumes that it will not be possible to restore hope to the large majorities without instilling fear in the very small minorities.





Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.

Denser Housing Can Be Greener Too

By Yolanda van Heezik, Christopher K. Woolley , Jacqueline Theis , Maibritt Pedersen Zari May 17, 2024

Source: The Conversation


Image by Adam Jones, Creative Commons 2.0

Cities across Aotearoa New Zealand are trying to solve a housing crisis, with increasing residential density a key solution. But not everyone is happy about the resulting loss of natural habitats and biodiversity.

Some homeowners in Dunedin, for example, are vehemently opposed to potential higher-density development in their area. They fear the loss of nature and increased use of concrete and other non-permeable surfaces it might entail.

One developer acknowledged the “juggling act” councils can face when trying to balance the need for more homes with preserving natural environments.

The issue isn’t going away, given the national shortage of affordable housing and the growing emphasis on increased density under the National Policy Statement on Housing and Urban Development.

However, we argue that incorporating nature within built environments is not just possible, it’s essential.

Density with biodiversity

Urban nature helps buffer the devastating impacts of increasingly frequent and serious climate-related events in cities, such as flooding and heat waves.

By embracing nature-based solutions, we can lessen the impact of these events while enjoying biodiverse surroundings (which are also beneficial to human wellbeing).

Initiatives in other countries can be a guide. Melbourne, for example, has a goal of planting 3,000 trees a year to achieve a 40% tree canopy cover by 2040. This is to combat increasing temperatures and improve biodiversity.

Toronto has policies to address air quality, the urban “heat island” effect, and stormwater management. The most significant is a green-roof bylaw requiring all high-density developments to have 20-60% of their roof area vegetated.

Unfortunately, New Zealand has not been good at creating biodiverse residential developments. Higher density often results in less green space and more hard surfaces.
Urban nature has value

Our research group, Aotearoa BiodiverCity (part of the publicly-funded People, Cities, Nature research programme) explores how to achieve more biodiverse cities through better and more strategically designed medium-density development.

As part of this ongoing and yet-to-be published work, we have examined 25 developments of different sizes across four New Zealand cities. This revealed considerable variation in how well developers had integrated biodiversity. The majority were glaringly deficient in healthy, ecologically meaningful vegetation.

Our analysis revealed that shifts to medium-density often mean a loss of nearly two-thirds of the original permeable area, including green spaces vital for stormwater management and biodiversity.

We’ve discovered numerous barriers and challenges to achieving nature-rich cities. Fundamental is a lack of national policy and regional strategies that specifically consider biodiversity in residential development.

Instead, the focus is on protecting significant indigenous habitats, reflecting an apparent assumption that biodiversity in residential areas has no value. In fact, it has enormous potential to contribute to city-wide biodiversity, and is vital to human wellbeing and climate change adaptation.

Set targets and measure outcomes

The lack of guidelines also creates large differences between council standards for developments. How much space is left for planting, for example, is dictated by the maximum building coverage on a site. This can range from 35% in Upper Hutt to as high as 50-60% in Lower Hutt, Wellington and Dunedin.

When district plans and residential design guidelines do call for maintaining or increasing vegetation, there are no specific biodiversity goals or targets. Nor are there plans to measure and monitor biodiversity during or after construction.

Professionals working on urban built environments reveal a tangle of barriers to implementing greening strategies. Cost is a big one, with developers perceiving a safer return on investment from prioritising dwellings or car parking, despite many people being willing to pay more for homes in greener neighbourhoods.

Design guidelines, including landscaping specifications, are often subject to developer discretion. This can mean they adhere to few environmental mitigation measures, and potentially neglect the natural environment.

More broadly, New Zealand has few precedents for incorporating green elements in denser developments. Solutions such as vegetated roofs and water-sensitive urban design are seen as experimental and risky rather than mainstream.

Strengthening council district plans to include requirements for preserving and enhancing urban green spaces should be a priority. This would include clear and attainable biodiversity targets, with quantifiable outcomes.

A new tool to score developments

Our team is developing the New Zealand Biodiversity Factor (NZBF), an assessment tool tailored for residential neighbourhoods. Once available, it will offer clear guidance on integrating nature into new developments, and provide performance scores and practical improvement suggestions.

Using urban design principles sensitive to biodiversity, the NZBF will score developments on a variety of features: extent of permeable area, vegetation quality in public and private spaces, and street layout.

Driveways and roads are the “monsters” eating up valuable permeable space. Prioritising good public and other transport options over car parking outside every home helps create a more biodiverse living environment.

Loss of permeable space can be mitigated at the planning stage by exploring housing layouts, building higher, and fostering greener urban landscapes.

Councils have many things to consider beyond biodiversity, of course, as well as limited financial resources for maintaining natural areas. This could be offset by enabling residents to manage their own neighbourhood green spaces, as has been successfully implemented overseas.

But attaching biodiversity targets to residential development will be a necessary first step. As urban populations grow, we’ll have to adapt to higher-density living. That does not mean we have to miss out on nearby nature.

The Strategy of the Green New Deal from Below

By Jeremy Brecher

May 17, 2024
Source: Strike!




The Green New Deal from Below pursues strategic objectives that implement Green New Deal programs, expand the Green New Deal’s support, and shift the balance between pro- and anti-Green New Deal forces. Not every action is likely to accomplish all of these objectives, but most actions aim to accomplish more than one of them at the same time.

The first set of objectives aim to make concrete changes that accomplish the goals of the Green New Deal. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is an objective of many actions, ranging from insulating urban housing to shutting down mines and power plants. Reducing injustice and inequality is similarly a goal of actions ranging from ensuring access to climate jobs for those who have been excluded from them to putting low-emission transit in vehicle-polluted neighborhoods. Another objective is improving the position of workers through such means as incorporating labor rights in climate legislation, establishing training and job ladders for climate jobs, and actively supporting the right of workers to organize and exercise their power. Green New Deal projects usually aim to accomplish these purposes synergistically, for example by designing climate-protection policies that also reduce injustice and empower workers on the job.

Green New Deal projects generally embody another set of objectives: educating and inspiring people. This happens through direct educational efforts like workshops, community forums, webinars, educational materials, and making known what has been accomplished elsewhere. Many programs involve basic education on climate, justice, and labor issues.

Campaigns like those for the Washington and Illinois clean energy and jobs acts involved long and extensive educational campaigns. But much of the inspiration and education provided by the Green New Deals takes the form of expanding the limits of what is believed to be possible by showing the power of people when they organize — and by constructing exemplary projects that inspire people to believe that more is possible. These exemplary actions produce powerful evidence for the value and feasibility of the Green New Deal.

Green New Deal from Below initiatives also support a shift in power. They bring into being organized constituencies and coalitions that can serve as political building blocks for more extensive Green New Deal campaigns. Green New Deal projects also create institutional building blocks, ranging from energy systems to transportation networks, that can become part of the economic and social infrastructure of a national Green New Deal. They help overcome the divisions and contradictions that weaken popular forces by engaging them around projects that embody common interests and a common vision. And they reduce the power of the anti-Green New Deal forces by dividing them, disorienting them, undermining their pillars of support, and even at times converting them.

The fight for the Green New Deal is inevitably entwined with the fight for democracy. Green New Deal from Below initiatives provide models for — and show the benefits of — popular democracy. Green New Deal from Below projects show that through collective action people can make concrete gains that benefit their real lives. They thereby contribute to building a base to protect and extend governance of, by, and for the people at every level. They represent a local embodiment of participatory democracy. And they create bastions for reinforcing representative democracy against fascism in the national arena.

The program of the Green New Deal, beneficial as it may be, is not in itself adequate to solve the deeper structural problems of an unjust and self-destructive world order. One of its strategic objectives, therefore, must be to open the way to wider, more radical forms of change.
Strategy on the Ground

Green New Dealers seek to realize these objectives in a world that is not of their own making, where powerful forces oppose their efforts. They have developed a multi-pronged strategy adapted to actually existing power relations.

The federal system of government provides obvious arenas for initiatives “from below.” While the power of state, county, and municipal governments is circumscribed by law and by the power of higher jurisdictions, experience shows that in fact the division of powers is flexible and can itself be challenged and changed. Cities and states have often won power over matters that they once seemed excluded from. For example, in the original New Deal era states engaged in such previously excluded programs as bank deposit insurance systems, publicly owned utilities, mortgage moratoriums; and bans on anti-strike injunctions.[1] Green New Deal states have similarly expanded their reach into previously federal domains such as regulation of tailpipe emissions and regional energy planning. And even within the established division of powers, Green New Deal states and municipalities have found extensive space for implementing energy, housing, transportation, healthcare, and many other dimensions of the Green New Deal program.

Acting in these arenas requires adapting strategy to the specific realities of the situation. For example, the powers of mayors, city councils, governors, and legislatures differ both constitutionally and in practice; what may seem unimaginable in one location may be achievable in another. Green New Dealers have used not only the institutions of representative democracy but, where they exist, institutions of direct democracy, for example in the “just transition” initiative in Washington state and several initiatives in California. Federalism and direct democracy provide a certain measure of dual power, in which initiatives can be taken even though they contradict national policy.

But Green New Deal from Below arenas are not limited to those established by governmental jurisdictions. Self-organization in civil society also provides locations in which power is developed and exercised. Unions, neighborhood organizations, ethnic and cultural groups, and other constituencies provide venues in which Green New Deal ideas and programs are contested. And they also can themselves implement Green New Deal programs like union training programs for green building maintenance, neighborhood-initiated solar gardens, and the plans for a community micro-grid in Boston’s Chinatown.

Green New Dealers operate within, alongside, and against the institutions and personnel of the political system. They are often active in supporting candidates. They are often members of political parties, usually the Democratic Party but occasionally third parties of various kinds. (If Green New Dealers are active anywhere in the Republican Party it’s a well-kept secret.) In some locations they form an identifiable Green New Deal wing of the Democratic Party. Candidates for mayor, governor, state legislator, and city councilor have run on Green New Deal platforms, for example Mayor Michelle Wu in Boston and Governor Jay Inslee in Washington. Pro-Green New Deal politicians have played a powerful role in building support for and implementing Green New Deal programs.

But the relation to elected officials and other political leaders varies. Politicians’ motives can range from personal commitment to the purest opportunism. In some cases, such as Mayor Wu in Boston, an elected official played a major role in bringing the Green New Deal coalition together and was widely accepted as the leader of a local or state Green New Deal. In the Somerville Green New Deal elected officials participated in forums and other activities developed by the coalition but organized labor remained in the lead. Frequently grassroots groups and coalitions recruit politicians to be advocates and to serve as champions for action in the legislative arena. In California Governor Gavin Newsom stood on the fence and was largely a target for pressure until at the last minute he endorsed a wide swath of Green New Deal-style legislation; thereafter he backtracked on some of the policies he himself had supported.

The initiative and support for Green New Deal programs often comes less from politicians than from coalitions of civil society organizations outside the formal political system. Even where political leaders have championed a Green New Deal vision, the impetus for actually designing and implementing Green New Deals has often come from forces in civil society. And at times Green New Dealers have had to pressure and even oppose political leaders who put themselves forward as champions of the Green New Deal – for example, self-proclaimed New York Green New Deal governor Andrew Cuomo, whose programs many Green New Dealers found woefully inadequate.

From its inception the Green New Deal has had an ambiguous and multifaceted relationship with the Democratic Party. Elements of the Democratic Party have supported, opposed, or maintained neutrality on the vision and policy of the Green New Deal. Green New Dealers have variously fought against, won over, and captured Democratic Party strongholds. Despite this tactical diversity, however, part of the Green New Deal’s overall strategy is to transform the Democratic Party both locally and nationally. This involves building a pro-Green New Deal bloc in the Democratic Party. And it involves using the Green New Deal program as a vehicle for bridging the environmentalist-labor divide within the Democratic Party.

Activists involved with the Seattle Green New Deal articulated many of these themes as they reflected on their experience of first winning and then implementing their city’s Green New Deal program. Youth leader Syris Valentine said, “This wouldn’t have happened without a strong grassroots campaign.” And Seattle 350 member Jess Wallach said their rapid success was due in equal parts to building robust relationships among community partners, maintaining public pressure on city officials, and forging an alliance with a supportive city council member. Taken together, these actions created a strong “inside-outside game.”

Faced with the wealth, concentrated power, and dominance of the political system and media wielded by its opponents, the Green New Deal pursues what is sometimes called an asymmetrical strategy – one that draws on different strengths and utilizes different tactics than its opponents. It outflanks its opponents by complementing action at the national level with action “from below.” It elevates perceptions of what is possible through collective action. It combines organization and action inside and outside mainstream institutions. It integrates program elements in ways that turn apparently conflicting interests into aligned ones. It draws together varied constituencies around common programs. It transcends the limits established by neoliberal orthodoxy. It makes action at a national level and a local level synergistic. And it creates concrete “facts on the ground” in the form of successful programs that are actually reducing climate-destroying pollution, creating jobs, reducing injustice, and improving people’s lives.

Can the Green New Deal overcome its opponents and achieve its objectives? There are no guarantees that it can. That depends on what people decide to do. As Gandhi once put it, “The matter resolves itself into one of matching forces.”

[1] For state New Deal programs, see Jeremy Brecher, “States of Change: What the Green New Deal Can Learn from the New Deal in the States,” Labor Network for Sustainability, November 9, 2020.

https://www.labor4sustainability.org/files/LNSpdf_States_nov2020.pdf

Jeremy Brecher is a historian, author, and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. He has been active in peace, labor, environmental, and other social movements for more than half a century. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work.

Big Oil and Civilization Don’t Mix

By Evaggelos Vallianatos

May 17, 2024

Source: Counterpunch


Image by Greenpeace Russia, Creative Commons 3.0


Prologue

On May 10, 2024, my friend Jay Jones, emeritus professor of biology at La Verne University, invited me to see a documentary he was presenting to his students and colleagues. The documentary, The Oil Machine, was done in 2022 by BBC. It is one of the best films I have watched on the origins of climate change. That is, the film explains the massive technologies necessary to extract oil from dangerous water like those of the North Sea. The film shows how oil companies drill the seas for petroleum. They then sell petroleum to the business and population of the planet, thus triggering the chaos and emergency of a warming planet.

History of oil

Petroleum companies knew of the planetary climate warming effects of the burning of their product. Martin Hoffert, professor emeritus, New York University, said to FRONTLINE that while working for NASA in the mid-1970s, scientists figured out that the atmosphere of the planet Venus was pure carbon dioxide. This made the planet very hot. The temperature of its atmosphere, according to the latest science, is more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit and capable of melting lead. “It was a kind of unified idea,” Hoffert said, “in the terrestrial planets of our solar system that greenhouse gas warming was caused by high concentrations of carbon dioxide. At the same time, some research scientists were making observations of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere. And we have seen this curve of increasing carbon dioxide—it’s become a classic icon of the carbon dioxide problem—where CO2 keeps going up and up a few parts per million every year. And we can attribute that to greenhouse gases, primarily fossil fuel burning.”

Not merely NASA scientists but Exxon Mobil scientists agreed that burning fossil fuels was bad for the climate of the planet. One of the Exxon scientists, Edward Garvey, said to FRONTLINE that “If we didn’t reduce fossil fuel consumption in a significant fashion, we were going to be facing significant climate change in the future…. we knew that changes were going to be necessary. But I think Exxon was afraid we would change too fast. You just can’t shut off the fossil fuels because all of society depends on… [them].”

Exxon Mobil abandoned its research on climate change. It decided to keep making money and ignore the deadly consequences of manufacturing heat for the planet. It has been raising doubts on the cause and effect connecting fossil fuels and climate change. It sent a written message to FRONTLINE, saying: “Exxon Mobil has never had any unique or superior knowledge about climate science, let alone any that was unavailable to policymakers or the public.”

Despite the deceptions of Exxon Mobil, the idea of global warming was catching up with American politics. In a 1988 Senate hearing, James Hanson, director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, left no doubt that burning fossil fuels harmed the planet. “I would like to draw three main conclusions,” he said to the Senators. “Number one, the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. Altogether, this evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

Hansen confirmed the early scientific finding from the mid-1970s that human actions, namely the burning of fossil fuels, cause higher temperatures. So, climate change was anthropogenic. The 2022 BBC documentary was more powerful evidence that oil drilling was a perpetual political and technological process of planetary destruction. I was astonished by the gigantic machinery put to work for oil extraction. Humans looked like insects invading a nest through large cylindrical tubes. Yet these engineers are capable of establishing tiny metal stations in the middle of the vast and angry seas. They send their sophisticated drills and pipes to the buried oil, where they suck it to fill their infinite barrels. The barrels of oil sell and their oil burns to power factories producing goods and electricity as well as power countless machines: cars, trucks, busses for civilians and the military, leaf blowers, tractors, harvesters, ships, ferry boats, fishing boats, yachts, civilian airplanes and warplanes, helicopters, tanks, submarines, warships, etc.

Greenhouse gases

The burning of petroleum gives off greenhouse gases like heat-catching carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases capture and contain solar heat, which otherwise would have escaped into space. Greenhouse gases slowly release the energy they captured from the Sun, thus increasing global temperature with all that entails. Rising temperatures unsettle ecosystems and societies with dire consequences: flooding, rising sea levels, heat waves through land and seas, melting of ice, and droughts. These violent weather phenomena threaten life and civilization. For example, Bangladesh and its more than 170 million people find themselves almost under water.

Millions of human beings will become environmental refugees. The Oil Machine documentary warned that about 250 million refugees will be moving from the tropics to northern countries. Where are these refugees supposed to go for shelter and food and work?

Wildlife faces extinction. Humans have taken over most of the lands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, seas and mountains and coasts that housed and fed birds, fish, mammals, insects, and amphibians. Rising global temperatures multiply the human and natural enemies of wildlife and increases its rate of disappearance forever.

The Oil Machine did not say much about the unpleasant ecological effects of oil drilling, though looking at the expressionless face of a young boy looking into nothingness said it all.

Why should our youth come to grips with the monstrous nemesis irresponsible old people, billionaires, and corporations built? And what can a young person do — in 2024? Why should millions of innocent young boys and girls the world over have to think of heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods and fires? They never had a chance to shape the future, exactly like facing instant death from a potential explosion of a nuclear weapon. These facts drop us from civilization to another dark age.

What are we doing in the next 5 years?

One of the scientists interviewed for The Oil Machine was Sir David King, UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, 2000–2007. “I believe,” he said, “that what we do over the next five years will determine the future of humanity for the next millennium.” King is probably right, though he did not explain what it was necessary to be done in the next 5 years. Climatologists have warned repeatedly we must start by eliminating 50 percent of the fossil fuels no later that 2030. The global climate forum in Paris, in 2015, urged governments to get rid of 50 percent of their fossil fuels by 2030. Yet almost no government has kept that promise. In fact, oil-rich countries and giant oil companies are expanding their drilling. Such irresponsible behavior is unlikely to keep the global temperature bellow 1.50 Celsius above the temperature of the pre-industrial age of mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the largest polluters, China, the US, India, Russia, and the EU countries, have not promised to cut their greenhouse gases by 50 percent before 2030. And the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine are rapidly increasing the fossil fuel footprint on the planet. Thus, if the next five years continue to be engulfed by the lies of the fossil fuel industry, denying climate change, and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the next millennium will be a millennium of darkness and possible human extinction.

The oil octopus

The Oil Machine directed the attention of the viewer to the power, hubris, and giantism of the petroleum conglomerate. At the same time, it left no doubt how pervasive petroleum has become in human lives, from our reliance on petrochemicals (pesticides and synthetic fertilizers) for food production; powering the armed forces; and taking the infinite forms of plastics. These immortal products are nearly everywhere; from children toys to the packaging of our food, to plastic water and soft drink bottles, to a myriad little plastic drug bottles, to plastic covers for newspapers delivered at homes, to plastic dog poop bags, etc. The list is very long.

Epilogue

Big oil is chemical and political power that threatens civilization and our Mother Earth. We need to wake up and say no more. Young and old must join hands to protest the invisible tyranny of the concentrated power of fossil fuel billionaires. They don’t belong in a democracy with claims to civilization. Violent storms, hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves are “wreaking havoc and pushing millions of Americans out of their homes each year.” Even home insurance is failing all over the country. Science is on our side, however. Astronomers see the connections between the atmosphere of the stars they study and the atmosphere of the Earth. They express grief and disappointment with rising temperatures on our planet. Raisa Estrela, a NASA astrophysicist, is heartbroken over the degradation of wildlife. She said: “We have this beautiful diversity of life that took us more than 2.5 billion years to reach.” Scientists like Raisa should join in a national and international campaign to abandon fossil fuels and move fast towards energy alternatives like the Sun and wind. Elect politicians who are committed to sustainable public electric transport for livable cities and towns. The first time in my life I travelled by bullet train was in Chine in 2019. Why is the United States not constructing bullet trains? And fill towns and cities with electric trams? Are car companies still in charge of transportation? Protected bike lanes would also diminish polluting cars in the streets. And like Singapore, expand or build new electric subways to serve all neighborhoods. Owners of conventional petroleum-powered cars and trucks who insist on driving their vehicles should pay high fines, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Install solar panels on the roofs of all homes, parking lots, and all buildings, private and public. If “public” utilities are unhappy with solar power, tell them to reform or go out of business. State and federal governments can rapidly build the carbon-free transportation and electrification infrastructure.

These measures would start a broad dialogue on the purposes of science, democracy, and life in a changing climate and world. We certainly don’t want to move the Earth on the path of planet Venus. High levels of carbon dioxide in Venus made that planet inhospitable to life. We don’t want to see the same misfortune strike planet Earth, our only home in the universe.

Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.

The Race to End Fossil Fuel Production

Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it. Here are some exceptions.

By John Feffer

May 16, 2024

Source: FPIF

Las Nueve Niñas, XR Ecuador, anti-mining groups, and indigenous activists march through Quito to the national court to demand an end to illegal gas flares in Yasuní National Park. | Image credit: @udapt_oficial

Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.

Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.

Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.

Given all this Green rhetoric and crude (oil) action, it’s hard to find examples around the world where people are actually doing something to end fossil fuel production.

One of those places is Ecuador, which held a referendum last August about keeping oil under the ground of a certain plot of land in the Yasuní national park. “Yasuní is the most important park in Ecuador,” observes Esperanza Martínez, of Acción Ecológica in Ecuador. “It has been recognized as the most biodiverse region in the world, and it’s also home to many indigenous peoples.”

Thanks to the work of several collectives, Ecuadorans voted 54 to 37 percent in the August referendum to stop all operations to explore for and extract oil from Block 43—also known as ITT—within the park. Since the referendum, however, an election brought in a new president who has threatened to ignore the results of the referendum in order to raise funds to address the country’s security crisis.

Another example of effective action, this time at the international level, comes from the organizers of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), an effort to roll back fossil fuels at the global level, reports. Currently, 12 countries have endorsed the initiative, including a number of small island states but also, most recently, Colombia.

“Colombia is the first continental country to sign, with more than a century of petroleum extraction,” one of those organizers, Andrés Gómez O, one of the FFNPT organizers, points out. “So, this is a very important game-changer in the battle.”

One of the backers of the this Treaty, the one with the largest economy, is the U.S. state of California, which has been a leader in the United States in terms of expanding the renewable energy sector. There is so much energy generated by solar panels on sunny days in California that sometimes the net cost of that electricity drops below zero.

But as Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch points out, California is also the largest importer of oil from the Amazon. In 2020, the United States imported nearly 70 percent of the oil produced by Amazonian countries, mostly Ecuador but a small amount from Colombia and Peru as well. And California is the state that’s importing by far the largest amount of this oil. So, shutting down the production of fossil fuels in Ecuador and elsewhere also requires addressing the largest consumers of those resources.

These three Latin American experts on the challenge of ending the international addiction to fossil fuels presented their findings at an April 2024 seminar sponsored by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. They not only discussed the appalling state of affairs in the world of energy and environment but also explained how some people are actually doing something about it.
The Example of Yasuní

The effort to preserve the biodiversity of Yasuní in the Ecuadoran Amazon and keep out the oil companies has been going on for more than a decade. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa floated a plan for international investors to essentially pay Ecuador to keep its oil in the ground. When the international community didn’t pony up the $3.5 billion, Correa abandoned his plan and pledged to move forward with drilling.

That’s when Esperanza Martínez and others began to organize the first referendum to keep that oil in the ground. They collected 850,000 signatures, 25 percent more than was necessary to trigger a vote. But the National Electoral Council threw out the petition, arguing that 60 percent of the signatures were fakes.

“We spent ten years fighting in tribunals and legal proceedings,” Martínez relates. “And what the National Electoral Council did was a fraud. We could prove that it was a fraud.”

The August 2023 referendum was a dramatic vindication for the Yasunídos. “Five million Ecuadorans said that it was right to leave the crude oil underground,” she continues. “This was a campaign that had never been seen before in the country to stop oil companies from extracting oil from the ground and preventing the negative impacts on the health and environment. We won!”

In the same referendum, voters also decided to stop mining activities in the “El Chocó” biosphere reserve in the capital city of Quito. The campaign, “Quito sin mineria,” opposed mining projects in the Metropolitan District of Quito and the Chocó Andino region, which comprises 124,000 hectares.

But the referenda on Yasuní and El Chocó were not the only elections that took place on that day in Ecuador. Voters also went to the polls to vote for a new president. In a later second round, businessman Daniel Noboa won. Noboa had supported the Yasuní referendum, pointing out that a ban on extraction actually made economic sense since it would cost $59 a barrel to extract the oil, which would sell for only $58 a barrel on the international market. After his election, he said that he would respect the results.

But then, in January 2024, he reversed himself, calling instead for a year moratorium on the ruling. Ecuador, Noboa argued, needed the money to address its worsening security situation: a surge in narcotrafficking, a skyrocketing murder rate, and a descent into gang warfare.

The Yasunídos argue that even this perilous situation should not affect the results of the referendum. “In Ecuador, nature is the subject of rights,” Martínez says, referring to the fact that Ecuador was the first country in the world in 2008 to include the rights of nature in its constitution. “The discussion is no longer if this part of the park should be closed or not, but how and when.”
Looking at the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is a powerful symbol of biodiversity all around the world, even for people who can’t identify the countries through which the Amazon river flows.

“It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest,” reports Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch in Peru. “It houses up to 30 percent of the world species and contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. It is home to 410 indigenous nationalities, 82 of them living in isolation by choice, all of them helping in global climate regulation.”

But the Amazon region also contains an abundance of natural resources: timber, gold, and fossil fuels. “Any just transition requires ending the extraction of oil—and not only oil—from the Amazon,” Hoetmer continues. “It also requires ending the system that is behind this extraction.”

The degradation of the Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point. The estimate is that when deforestation reaches 20-25 percent of the biome, the area can’t recover. Hoetmer reports that deforestation is now approaching 26 percent.

Fossil fuel extraction is contributing to that deforestation is several ways. Millions of hectares are currently slated for oil and gas extraction. The drilling itself requires deforestation, but so do the new roads established to reach those sites. Those roads in turn open the region up to other forms of exploitation such as logging and agribusiness.

Then there are the oil spills that contaminate vast stretches of land. Several major pipeline breaks have dumped oil into the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Ecuadorian environmental ministry estimates that there have been over a thousand “environmental liabilities” and over 3,000 sites “sources of contamination.” Between 1971 and 2000, Occidental Petroleum dumped 9 billion gallons of untreated waste containing heavy metals into Peru’s rivers and streams, leading to a lawsuit against the company by indigenous Peruvians that resulted in an out-of-court settlement. Colombia’s oil industry has been involved in over 2,000 episodes of environmental contamination between 2015 and 2022.

Shutting down oil and gas production in the Amazon requires looking beyond the producers to the investors and the consumers. California, since it absorbs nearly half of all Amazon oil exports, is a major potential target. On the financing side, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude campaign is working to stop new financial flows into, for instance, Petroperú, the country’s state-run oil company. Campaigners are targeting major banking institutions in the Global North, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America. Community-led protests have taken place in the United States, Chile, and Germany. By raising the costs of investment into Amazonian extraction, campaigners are pushing lenders to remove Amazonian oil from their portfolios.

Another strategy is strengthening territorial sovereignty in indigenous lands. “One of the processes that gives us hope is this proposed proposal to reconstruct the Amazon based on strengthening the self-governance of Amazonian people,” Hoetmer notes. “The notion of Autonomous Territorial Governments started with the Wampis peoples but has now expanded to over 10 indigenous nations. The Autonomous Territorial Governments defend their territories against illegal mining as well as land invasions and fossil fuel extraction, demand and build intercultural education, and negotiate public services with the Peruvian state.”
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty

Frontline communities particularly those from the Global South are paying the highest price of fossil fuel exploitation and climate change, yet they are the least responsible. All over the world and for decades, frontline struggles have shown leadership in resisting the plundering of their territories. Today, for many communities around the world—and for some whole countries—continued fossil fuel extraction and climate change represent an existential crisis.

In response to this crisis, an early proposal came from officials and civil society leaders in the Pacific for a moratorium and binding international mechanisms specifically dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in the Pacific. In 2015, in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change issued from the Pacific Islands Development Forum Third Annual Summit held in Suva, Fiji, decision-makers called for: “a new global dialogue on the implementation of an international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, particularly the construction of new coal mines, as an urgent step towards decarbonising the global economy.”

In 2016, following a summit in the Solomon Islands, 14 Pacific Island nations discussed the world’s first treaty that would ban new coal mining and embrace the 1.5C goal set at the Paris climate talks.

Initiated by island countries most at risk from rising waters, the movement for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has now been endorsed by a dozen countries and more than 2,000 civil society organizations as well as a number of cities and states like California and more than 100 Nobel laureates.

“Our treaty is based on other treaties that have talked about nuclear weapons, mines, and gasses like the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone-depleting substances,” relates Andrés Gómez O.

“What’s clear is that we don’t have time for business as usual,” the FFNPT organizers argue. “The International Energy Agency determined that there needs to be a decline of fossil fuel use from four-fifths of the world’s energy supply today to one-fifth by 2050. The fossil fuels that remain will be embedded in some products such as plastics and in processes where emissions are scarce.”Critical to this process is action by richer countries. “Countries that are better off economically can support other countries to step away from the fossil fuel system,” Gómez continues.

A key strategy, he adds, would be “the Yasunization of territories.” He explains that “this means, first, making this park a utopia for the country. Then we localize this approach in different provinces in Ecuador where we say, okay, in this province we have our own Yasuní.” This local approach has had some precedents. The Ecuadoran city of Cuenca, for instance, held a referendum in 2021 banning future mining project.

The treaty appeals not only to the environmental movement. By connecting the struggle to the experiences of local communities—the violence associated with extraction, the cancer cases, the oil spills—“we are not just interested in convincing the already existing movements,” he says, “We also have to move the whole society.”

He concludes succinctly: “We are not just about saying no—to fossil fuels, to extractivism. We are about saying a very big yes: to life!”



John Feffer is the author several books including the recently published North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories). For more information about his books and articles, visit www.johnfeffer.com