Climate Policy 2023: Walls, Guns And Prisons

Another climate jamboree is getting under way.

This one, in what appears a deliberate attempt to troll people with a fondness for habitable planets, is being run by an oil sheikh.

As the oil men thrash out another business-as-usual deal, I suspect we’ll be hearing again how little is being done about climate change.

That would be wrong.

A lot is being done. It’s just not branded as climate policy.

Seventy-four border walls now span more than 20,000 miles. As you read this, fifteen more border walls are being built.

Six times the number of border walls exist now than existed when the Berlin wall fell, a moment we were told would usher in greater freedom and openness. People, in fact, have never been more walled in and walled out.

These walls are being accompanied by the criminalisation of those who manage to evade them, as well as increasingly extreme deterrence policies. The UK wants to send all asylum seekers to Rwanda after they land on British shores. Many are currently being held on a giant prison boat in appalling conditions. In Australia, asylum seekers are processed on Pacific islands, some of whom have been waiting a decade for resolution.

Military budgets are ballooning. The latest US military budget was a record $842 billion. Planners at DC lobby group the Brookings Institute, contextualised this bloated number with the need to “secure oil supplies” in a climate disrupted future.

While the walls keep climate refugees out at home and the F-16s keep the oil flowing abroad, countries are introducing new anti-protest laws explicitly targeting climate protestors. In the UK, new laws mean peaceful climate protestors are being sentenced to years in prison just for disrupting traffic. Anti climate protest laws are sweeping Europe, even in Germany which is part-ruled by the Green party. Militarised police departments in the US and Canada have injured and killed eco protestors in recent years.

If you think this doesn’t look like climate policy, it’s because you’ve been thinking about climate policy in the wrong way.

You’ve been thinking about it in terms that prioritise collective safety, both within and between nations, via ending fossil fuel emissions, stopping pollution and protecting nature.

If instead you think about it in terms that prioritise industry profits, nationalism and geopolitical interests, you’d be getting somewhere.

If you understand that the priority is the maintenance of order, at home and abroad, so that the system can, in the worst case, still minimally operate in a scorched, flooded, food-poor future, then borders, missiles, repression, even new oil pipelines, all make perfect sense.

Cutting fossil fuel emissions is not the goal. If that had ever been the goal, fossil fuel emissions would not be at record highs.

The pandemic has lifted the veil on any pretence that our leaders and their institutions care about our collective safety. No. They are wedded politically, psychologically, financially and ideologically to this system, come hell or high water.

And both are coming. For many people, they are already here.

The challenge, then, for the elites is to navigate climate change while keeping this system intact.

I don’t doubt that the rich and the capitalist states that do their bidding would prefer the climate not to change. Of course they would.

But given the climate is changing, they aren’t going to accommodate systemic changes to address that fact.

What they’re going to do is double down on a system that has proven time and time again that it will keep them safe even in the face of climate disaster.

For the rich, the best investment they can make to lessen their harm from climate change is to support the current system.

When you realise this, you see why so little has changed despite decades of scientific warnings. If the world is going to be on fire, better to have a system that works for you when it happens.

In fact, the more libertarian capitalist the system, the safer the rich are.

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York, the only building able to maintain electricity and function was the Goldman Sachs headquarters. While some New Yorkers waited weeks for power to come back on, Goldman Sachs had pre-installed a giant power back up, so that every light in their skyscraper stayed on through the storm.

This couldn’t happen in a collectivist society. It wouldn’t be permitted. It would be grotesque. It would be a sign of failure, not of success. But here we are.

When Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s California mansion was in the path of a wildfire, they hired private firefighters to keep it from burning down. Private firefighting is an increasingly lucrative industry, complete with its own lobbyists.

Are there any better metaphors for our climate apartheid future?

Increasing numbers of people who can’t hire private firefighters, or who can’t up and move on a whim, are finding their homes are now uninsurable as fires and floods close in.

The truth is, under capitalist climate policy there is an incentive to weaken collective structures and increase the ability to privately prevision your own safety. (As an aside it’s a fantasy to believe we can have both. There is an inherent, fundamental tension between the two).

For this reason, the rich think (and with good reason) that basically they’ll be fine.

When a heatwave is forecast, they can just turn up the air-con. If the power goes out, they can fire up their private generators. If they don’t want to stick it out, they can hop on their private jet and head to more clement surrounds. Actually, you don’t even need a private jet to do this. First class will be fine, thanks.

What about their jobs, you might ask. They are footloose and fancy free. They direct from afar. Always have. The only people that ever had to work in offices, let alone go back to offices in a pandemic, were the plebs.

If their homes do burn down or flood, they have the resources to rebuild. If they don’t like the shifting climate vibes where they live, they can relocate.

In a very worst, end-of-organised-society, food runs out scenario, they can retreat to the well-stocked bunkers they built in the before times.

Will they be fine even in this future? For a while, probably. After months of isolation, they might start to have some dark nights of the soul and wonder what might have been. But by then, all the damage will have been done. They’ll be no societal-political room for acting on regrets they might have. I really don’t suspect they’ll have many.

Crucially, they’ll be no room left for us to act on any regrets we might have for not fighting back hard enough in the before times either.

The future, for all of us, will be foreclosed.

In a way, by this point, we will kind of be in it together.

So as we stare at an oil sheikh hosting a climate conference the year global temperatures hit levels not seen for millennia, we shouldn’t wonder what the hell is going on.

We should know this is the only way it could ever have been in this system.

Whatever happens at COP28 will not change the reality that capitalist states have no interest in changing the dynamics that underlie our world.

If that’s ever going happen, we’ll have to find another way to do it.