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Climate Justice
Historically, a small number of rich nations have produced the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing Climate Change
- and since a huge amount of deforestation, fossil fuel extraction and emissions resulting from producing exported consumer goods [like in china] happen in the less developed world so that people in the rich nations can sustain their unsustainable lifestyles - alot of the emissions that come from this part of the world are basically keeping rich nations rich and keeping poor countries exploited.
New Zealand is the 5th worst greenhouse gas emitter in the developed world per person. Within New Zealand it is the wealthy who emmit most.
The world economy is built on the self-expansion of alienated labour but the burning of fossil fuels has also been intrinsic to industrial expansion, providing energy for the machines that labour uses. Shifting weather patterns are not a form of direct control, like military invasion or economic constraint, but they exacerbate the already appalling divisions between rich and poor.
"Any movement based around climate change has to be enmeshed in the rest of the problems of the world’s movements. Likewise any movement for a liveable future needs to take on climate change" - Paul Sunburn - part of the Climatre Camp UK writers collective
We can’t treat climate change as a separate issue: like everything else, power relations run right through it. Any movement based around climate change has to be enmeshed in the rest of the problems of the world’s movements. Likewise any movement for a liveable future needs to take on climate change. Climate change is not a cause; it’s a symptom (albeit one with the potential to kill off the patient). Equally the impacts and interconnectedness of climate change will undermine any success we might have in other areas. Looking at it this way round, we can see that climate change has the potential to link us not just as victims of disaster but as people fighting together.
The climate crisis demands that we, as residents of the Global North, ask what kind of world we want to live in, and recognize that the answer is as much a social issue as it is an environmental one. Climate Justice is more than a theoretical goal—it is a practice in the movement against climate chaos. No effort to create a livable climate future will succeed without the empowerment of marginalized communities. No justice will be found without an end to policies long-pursued by the wealthy countries which treat communities—from Iraq’s oil fields to Indonesia’s palm oil plantations to Appalachia’s coal fields—merely as resource colonies.
The vast political space opened up by climate change will either be filled by business people and industry selling the latest shiny, plastic, bury-it, green-it, burn-it, off set-it, sell-it solutions or by people who have a critique of capitalism and can see enclosure and intensification as both an inevitable expression of capital and a changeable reality.
There’s no doubt that a global social movement with climate change as one of its central concerns is the only way to tackle human-induced climate change. The Climate Camp is an active part of that movement and a place where it can constitute itself.
There’s going to be a climate camp from 16 to 21 December 2009, celebrating these possibilities and challenging the fossil fuel economy not by 2020 or 2050, not upon a timeline set by the market but in the here and now. So if you can, come and join us for some serious climate action.