By HENRI ACSELRAD*

The reluctance of elites to take measures compatible with the precautionary principle in climate matters seems to suggest that the (lack of) Lifeboat Ethics is in operation today

What diagnoses are in dispute in the debate on climate change? When it comes to North-South relations, we see “the South” sometimes being blamed, sometimes “the North”. In other words, on the one hand, a conservative neo-Malthusianism that blames population growth in less industrialized countries versus, on the other, the developmentalism of less industrialized countries, which claims to reduce the “ecological footprint” of the global South in relation to voluminous emissions from richer countries.

Even within the least developed countries, agents of large corporations blame the poor for “holding back development” and preventing so-called “clean” energy dams. Critics of extractive capitalism, in turn, accuse the world's rich of using too much energy for luxury consumption and Southern developmental coalitions for promoting the export of commodities that embody cheap energy, water, deforested areas and soil fertility for the economies of the North. Critics of the energy-intensive model also point the finger at the capitals that control the fossil fuel industry; The way in which, when climate catastrophes occur, the poor pay the price of the profits of fossil capitalism and the consumerism of the rich stands out.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, it became clear that low-income black communities in New Orleans paid the costs of concentrating public resources on financing the invasion of Iraq; that the evacuation plans did not pay attention to the so-called “low mobility” population, which shows that factors such as race and class were fundamental dimensions of that catastrophe. It is known that in the great drought of 1995, in Chicago, also in the USA, poor and older black people, socially isolated and deprived of mobility resources, were fatal victims.^[1]

Research carried out in Brazil shows how the lowest-income populations, black and indigenous communities are the most environmentally unprotected, living in vulnerable conditions and subject to floods and diseases. This was even confirmed in the COVID-19 pandemic, as in the floods in Rio Grande do Sul. Ditto, in the case of the Tsunami in Asia, given the absence of an emergency plan for less developed countries.

Hurricanes, Tsunamis and other disasters that cause ruptures in the socio-ecological relations in which the living and working conditions of the most dispossessed are embedded exemplify the socio-nature of “climate injustice”, an atmospheric expression of environmental injustice. It can be plausibly assumed that agents of economic power have, in relation to the evils of climate change predicted by the IPCC's mathematical models, patterns of behavior analogous to what they have demonstrated in the face of climate catastrophes that have already occurred so far.

Whether in the context of North-South relations, or in the context of ongoing socio-territorial struggles within industrialized or less industrialized countries, we see a process of dispute over the appropriation of scientific fact.^[2] In political spheres, the IPCC evidence that is considered legitimate and worthy of justifying policy changes still seems to count little. Public opinion, fueled by the mainstream press, seems, in Europe, to have had some weight. Most government officials – with the exception of extreme right-wing deniers – have declared themselves environmentalists since they were children, although they are strongly pressured by farmers to abandon measures restricting the use of pesticides and other environmental regulations.

In other words, there is evidence that government officials have presented themselves as environmentally concerned only when the ecological argument justifies profits for their own countries' capital, currency for their monetary balance, promises of jobs for voters or additional force in the geopolitical plot. It is worth remembering that Mrs. Thatcher converted to the environmental cause, in particular that of global warming, in 1984, as an implacable enemy of the miners' union organizations, attracted as she was by the prescriptions that advocated the end of coal burning.^[3]

There are signs of adherence to ecological arguments by hegemonic forces when these seem to serve to reinforce current models such as sugarcane agribusiness, nuclear and hydroelectricity, for example. This is symptomatic of the statement by an authority in the Brazilian electricity sector that a so-called “environmental paradox” exists, according to which the “bureaucratism” of environmental licensing bodies makes “it simpler to produce electrical energy by burning coal and oil, which contribute to the greenhouse effect than using water”.

There is a reference to the greenhouse effect, with the use of a threat of multiplication of thermoelectric plants, to seek to weaken the already weak Brazilian environmental licensing system and to hold quilombolas, indigenous people and those affected by dams responsible for global warming, when they mobilized for example, to contest the hydroelectric plants on the Madeira River.

There is, therefore, on the one hand, on the part of the hegemonic forces, an “organized irresponsibility”, as certain authors say, but “classist”.,^[4] It should be added: few resources are, in fact, destined to protect or remedy the risk suffered by “less mobile” social groups – such as the poor, black people and ethnic minorities – accused as they are “of knowing that they live in risky areas and of wanting them to taxpayers pay for their residential choice” (argument used by the mainstream conservative press in post-Hurricane Katrina articles).

There seems to be a confident perception that evils will only affect the most dispossessed – a kind of NIMBY, “not in my backyard” – exclusive to the elites; that is, mechanisms by which decision makers possess the means to distance themselves from the ecological consequences of their own actions. But, more than that, in times of liberation from market forces, we can observe, more than ever, an appropriation of the environmentalist denunciation of capitalism for the purpose of boosting capitalism itself and business: after Hurricane Katrina, the actions of companies that won contracts for cleaning and restructuring the affected areas – the same ones that worked in the “reconstruction” of Iraq – rose by 10%.^[5]

In countries in the global South, the aim is to create financial assets linked to a carbon credit market that serves to justify the continuity of fossil capitalism, subordinating traditional communities to companies and greening the role of peripheries in the reproduction of extractive capitalism as we know it. .

Researchers have shown how real estate expansion in the southwestern United States and Baja California has commercialized thousands of square kilometers in the fragile ecology of deserts, betting on the rising cost of water and its desalination to fuel the uncontrolled suburbanization that real estate capital itself promotes. In other words, the burden of adjusting the new climatic and hydrological cycle fell, in this region, on the shoulders of subordinate groups, notably immigrant rural workers whose flow to the USA would tend to increase, justifying accusations that they were going to “steal water from Americans ”.^[6]

This type of process in which the costs of environmental degradation are systematically concentrated on the most dispossessed, even more so when part of the dominant interests manage to earn profits from this degradation, is compatible with the understanding of social movements according to which there will be no initiative from the powerful to face environmental problems, including climate problems, as long as it is possible to concentrate the harm caused by them on the poorest.^[7]

Its corollary, therefore, is that all efforts must be concentrated on the environmental protection of the most dispossessed, so that, by interrupting the systematic transfer of evils to them, elites will seriously consider the need to change models of production and consumption. .

From this perspective, quilombolas, indigenous people and peasants from the Madeira River, Tapajós and other areas of expansion of energy, agricultural or mining projects, contrary to what representatives of uncritical construction companies and developmentalists advocate, would be on the front line of the fight against global warming. global, favoring, due to its resistance, the search for new models of energy production and consumption and use of forests.

In his parable of the Lifeboat Ethics, the conservative ecologist Garret Hardin simulated a future situation, according to him predictable, in which, given the growth of the population, the “ship-Earth” would have to choose to whom to reserve the few available places in the lifeboats.^[8] Garret Hardin maintained that it was logical, in his social-Darwinist logic, to reserve these places for those who, according to him, have accumulated the most technology and civilization in humanity – that is, the populations of the most industrialized countries.

The least “productive” populations, from the point of view of capital, should, he makes us assume, be left out. The reluctance of elites to take measures compatible with the precautionary principle in climate matters seems to suggest that the (lack of) Lifeboat Ethics is in operation today – be it in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans, in areas facing desertification of Africa or, even if for supposed ecological reasons, in the strenuous work processes observed in Brazilian sugarcane fields or in wind “farms” which, in the name of the climate, disrupt the living conditions of people and traditional communities.

* Henri Acselrad is a retired full professor at the Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFRJ).

Originally published on LeMondediplomatique Brazil.

Notes

[1] P. Dreier, Katrina in Perspective: The disaster raises key questions about the role of government in American society. Dissenter, Summer 2005.

[2] H. Acselrad, Cities and social appropriations of climate change, IPPUR/UFRJ notebooks, vol. XX, n.1, Jan-Jul, 2006, pp.77-106.

[3] S. Boehmer-Christiansen, Global Climate Protection Policy: the limits of scientific advice. Global Environmental Change, 4(2), 1994.

[4] We call organized irresponsibility of class, race and gender the institutional dynamics that allow responsibility for the environmental impacts of projects involving large financial and economic interests to be systematically diluted and mischaracterized, with the damage specifically targeted at the most dispossessed, black, indigenous and women. H. Acselrad, The ´Social` of climate change”, Liinc Magazine. v. 18 n. 1 (2022) February 2022.

[5] Mike Davis, Heavy Weather. Folha de S. Paul. São Paulo, May 6, 2007. Caderno Mais, p. 4-5.

[6] Mike Davis, ibid.

[7] Such a perception certainly contradicts the entire range of actors and authors who have been assertive in supposing that capitalism finds itself facing “a double economic-ecological crisis”. The hypothesis that the ecological crisis is “of capital” – and not of those whose practices are destabilized by the dominant and expropriatory practices of capital – rests, as a rule, on a fetishized perspective of ecology.

[8] Hardin, G. Living on a lifeboat. Bioscience, v. 24, no. 2, Oct. 1974.

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