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Jindrich Novotny / DER SPIEGEL |
The Warsaw conference demonstrated that the "climate summit"
model is broken and, more importantly, that capitalism itself is driving
us to the brink. Protests are not the solution -- it's time to fight
the system using its own weapons.
The municipal utility company in the city of Potsdam is currently
wooing new customers with a special "BabyBonus" offer. The slogan reads,
"We value little energy robbers! Welcome to the world!" Every newborn
receives a credit of 500 kilowatt hours of electricity, allowing him or
her to revel from the start in a world where everything, especially
energy, will always be available in abundance. These babies may later
find they're in for a surprise.
When the United Nations Climate Change Conference
wrapped up in Warsaw the weekend before last, it did, despite what most
observers and disappointed NGO representatives believe, yield a result.
It just wasn't officially announced: the termination of the at-least
symbolic general agreement that urgent action must be taken to counter
global warming. In other words, climate change has been definitively
removed from the global policy agenda.
The intense concern over climate change triggered by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
reports in 2007 and widely popularized by Al Gore's movie, "An
Inconvenient Truth" -- a concern that led even Angela Merkel to make an
appearance in the Arctic as the "climate chancellor," decked out in a
red all-weather jacket -- actually dissipated a while ago, but no one
wanted to say so out loud.
The United States' lack of interest in an international treaty is
dressed up by its argument that gas extracted by fracking is more
climate-friendly than coal, while in Japan, the Fukushima disaster and
resulting phase-out of nuclear power has provided those responsible with
an excellent argument for why the country now needs to burn more coal
in order to stay economically competitive. Hannelore Kraft, governor of
the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, feels much the same way
about her own state. And Australia, Canada, Poland and Russia have never
really grasped why global warming should stop anyone from burning
everything the oil rigs, mines and pipelines have to offer in the first
place.
Capitalism Triumphant
To put it another way: The primacy of economics has prevailed. It no
longer seems to matter how we're supposed to get through the rest of
this century if the world grows warmer by three, four or five degrees
Celsius. National economies require an ever-growing dose of energy if
their business models are to continue functioning, and, in the face of
this logic, all scientific objections to the contrary are just as
powerless as the climate protest movements, which are, in any case,
marginal.
At this point, we could act as if we've seen it all and argue that in
the course of human history many cultures failed because they did not
adapt their success strategies to new conditions. The Vikings left
Greenland in part because they clung to animal husbandry despite
practically having to carry their cows out to pasture in the spring,
because the lack of winter feed had left the animals too weak to walk.
The Vikings would have just needed to come up with the idea of eating
fish instead, but to them that seemed as inconceivable as renouncing the
idea of growth does to nations today. The Vikings believed they could
not live without cows, just as we believe that a high quality of life
rests on expansion.
Those babies in Potsdam are being hooked on this concept from birth.
True, babies born today will still get to experience a bit of this
wonderful world of fossil fuels and miraculous growth. For two decades,
perhaps? Three?
New Race for Survival
The economy's refusal to set limits has set off a new race: that of
which society in this world of limitless resource exploitation and
unchecked pollution will be able to remain within its comfort zone the
longest. Economically powerful societies will have a considerable head
start over those who embraced capitalism later or have the misfortune of
being located in the wrong part of the world or are so-called "failed
states" who do not have legal protection for their citizens or obstacles
to the appropriation of land, water and raw materials of all kinds. The
late sociologist Lars Clausen spoke presciently of "failed
globalization."
We have to assume that expansive strategies will intensify as
scarcities increase -- and as these scarcities are economically desired.
The scarcer a resource, the greater the unmet demand for it, and thus
the higher the asking price. And the more the balance shifts to the
disadvantage of the consumers, the more favorable the conditions become
for the suppliers. Scarcity is thus, in principle, good for business.
The capitalist economy, in fact, had great success with this
principle. No other economic system in history has generated and
distributed more wealth in such a comparatively short a span of time.
But when expansion is the central problem-solving strategy of an
economic and societal system, and when that system is finite, it will
eventually encounter a fatal trap when it begins to consume that which
it itself requires.
Existing Strategies Have Been Powerless
The task then becomes to extract as much out of it as possible, while
we still can. In this sense, the alarmism of environmental activists
and climate researchers actually adds fuel to the fire, because it calls
attention to the fact that the party may soon be over. Perhaps this
solves the puzzle of why "Earth Summits" and climate conferences to save
the planet take place incessantly, even though none of these have ever
lead to real change, let alone to a reversal of the trend.
It demonstrates the utter powerlessness of the intervention
strategies which have been employed so far. It couldn't be otherwise, in
fact, in a system organized around the division of labor. Any form of
protest that doesn't interfere with the existing business models, and
which is able to perform well in the economy of attention, quickly
establishes its own economic segment. To put it cynically, such protest
creates its own "concern industry," with its own experts and industry
professionalization, its own career paths and PR divisions.
A science that produces troubling findings, as climate research does,
differentiates itself as its own discipline, experiences booms in the
creation of institutes, commissions and councils, yet in practical terms
hardly disrupts the economic metabolism that is responsible for the
troubling findings in the first place. We could even say that neither
climate research nor climate conferences reduce CO2 emissions, but
rather blithely contribute to their annual increase, because they are
part of the larger system.
'Economy for the Common Good'
This means we need a method of searching for new strategies that
can't be coopted by the sleek, but unfortunately destructive, principle
of capitalism. Imagine, for example, what might happen if a large number
of businesses make the improvement of the common good -- instead of an
increase in their profits -- the goal of their commercial efforts.
There are in fact already more than 1,400 companies, if small ones,
in German-speaking countries that have made a commitment to the concept
of the "economy for the common good," an idea developed a few years ago
by Christian Felber, the Austrian co-founder of Attac. Around one third
of these companies have annual balance statements to show it.
In the medium term, the "economy for the common good" movement aims
to make such accounting legally binding. The principle is that the more
common-good "points" a business achieves, the more legal benefits it
should enjoy. For example, companies with a positive common-good balance
could benefit from lower taxes, obtain loans from national banks at
lower interest rates and be given priority in public purchasing and the
awarding of contracts. This reversal of the existing incentive system
would serve to make products and services that are produced and traded
fairly, and are environmentally sustainable, cheaper than ethically
problematic products and nondurable, disposable items.
The appeal of this approach lies in the fact that -- as with the many
energy and consumption cooperatives, ethical banks, swapping platforms
and venues for giving things away that have sprung up in recent years --
there is no longer a reason to generate additional surplus, once enough
has already been produced. This counters capitalism's logic of
valuation far more effectively than any sort of symbolic act, because
such experiments in alternative economic practices intervene directly in
the economic metabolism. Rather than continuing to generate more and
more arguments, they generate new facts.
The Argument for Divestment
Another, even more effective, instrument for creating this sort of
change is the "Fossil Free" divestment campaign launched last year by
American environmental activist Bill McKibben. This movement is based on
the simple idea that entire industries' commercial foundation can be
destroyed if funds are withdrawn from them. Private financial investment
alone already amounts to a considerable sum. But serious clout could be
achieved if the endowments of American colleges and universities, the
assets of church organizations and city budgets, were no longer invested
in companies that destroy the foundations of future human survival.
Such initiatives are now active at nearly 400 American schools,
colleges and universities. Four colleges and 10 cities, including
Seattle and San Francisco, have made the decision to divest. The
campaign has also spread to Europe, where University College London just
joined the movement.
We only need to think of the wealth of assets held by foundations
here in Germany to see just how much capital could be divested from the
wrong purposes. This is especially true if we follow a traditional
capitalistic mode of thinking and further consider that the businesses
affected by this divestment would no longer present good investment
opportunities even for those investors who don't care how their returns
are generated.
Seen from this angle, Warsaw's cold termination of the existing
agreement can also serves as an opening for more effective
counterstrategies. Perhaps even those determined to believe the best
will understand that governments can't be counted on to effect this
change, and that domination-free discourse is not the adequate mode for
addressing the destruction of the foundations of human survival.
Welzer, 55, teaches social psychology at Flensburg and St. Gallen
Universities. He is director of the "FUTURZWEI" foundation in Berlin, an
international affiliate of which will shortly be launched under the
name of "FUTUREPERFECT". His most recent book is "Selbst denken. Eine
Anleitung zum Widerstand" ("Think for yourself: A Handbook for
Resistance").