GEOENGINEERING MONITOR
WHY SOCIALISTS
SHOULD OPPOSE
GEOENGINEERING
This article originally submitted to Jacobin in response to an article by their editorial board member, Peter Frase, but Keith has not received any response from them. Reposted here with permission from the Institute for Social Ecology.
A Socialist Case Against Climate Geoengineering
... Geoengineering has also found a supporter in Jacobin editorial board member Peter Frase. In an article from the “Earth, Wind, and Fire” issue, Frase raises the “prospect of geoengineering in a left context…as part of a larger portrait of eco-socialism” – calling on leftists to embrace geoengineering...
Far from bringing about an ecological transition, allowing the ruling class to gain control of the global thermostat would more likely result in new commodity frontiers and capitalist expansion, along with the development of new weapons to be used against opponents of empire – as the US attempted in Vietnam through weather modification. A review of the most prominent geoengineering technologies reveals that the impacts of deployment would disproportionately fall on peasant and poor communities in the Global South. Socialist support for geoengineering would be a striking reversal for a political tradition based on international solidarity with the oppressed and exploited...
Far from bringing about an ecological transition, allowing the ruling class to gain control of the global thermostat would more likely result in new commodity frontiers and capitalist expansion, along with the development of new weapons to be used against opponents of empire – as the US attempted in Vietnam through weather modification. A review of the most prominent geoengineering technologies reveals that the impacts of deployment would disproportionately fall on peasant and poor communities in the Global South. Socialist support for geoengineering would be a striking reversal for a political tradition based on international solidarity with the oppressed and exploited...
BECCS.... is likely to generate speculative investment in arable land, accelerating a land grab that has led to the dispossession and proletarianization of peasant and Indigenous communities in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia... leading courageous struggles for Indigenous land rights and popular agrarian reform, land defenders often face severe repression and criminalization. US and European leftists should be aiming to build links of solidarity with these movements, rather than providing support, if indirect, for the reactionary forces arrayed against them.
