The Joker and the G20
Watching the news about the G20, and talking to friends who were there, I’ve been thinking more and more about the nature of the opposition to justice and progress in our world, and what it will take to create effective movements. So here’s a question: what if one of the things that is holding back an effective and transformative movement for social justice, ecological sanity and deeper prosperity is that the status quo that this movement would seek to change has such mediocre, farcical and confusing villains?
Three parts:
1. Heroes and villains
2. Who is our super villain?
3. Application: G20 and beyond
1. Heroes and Villains
“This town deserves a better class of criminal, and I’m going to give it to them.”
I think that’s the most interesting line spoken by Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Dark Knight. What separates criminals into classes? The Joker, standing in front a massive pyramid of cash that he just torched, immediately puts into words the answer he’s just given with his actions: unlike the greedy thugs that he is replacing, the Joker doesn’t care about money. He cares about delivering a message. This exchange also makes me strongly suspect that the Joker was born into a wealthy family, but that’s a side point.
A more interesting question: how can a city deserve one class of criminal or another? The Joker answers that one as well, although only implicitly. The city has Batman, who is a different class of hero. Batman has a message about individual heroism and altruism (although he is very confused about the consequences of its practical application by strangers), and the Joker has a message about individual cowardice, selfishness… and powerlessness to the chaotic whims of the world. So what’s at stake in their conflict is the nature of humanity – not a pile of treasure, or even a body count. That’s why the Joker’s modus operandi is to put people into horrific ethical and moral dilemmas. The Joker puts Batman through hell. Batman defeats the Joker physically, but that is besides the point. Batman only really defeats the Joker, however temporarily, when he selflessly decides to accept the public’s hatred because he believes, given the particular circumstances, that it will serve the public interest.
The presence of Batman made the city worthy of the Joker (as far as the Joker is concerned), and in turn the Joker gives Batman an opportunity to become something more than a pumped up vigilante.
Among the most important roles filled by villains is the development of heroes. I can’t think of any great hero that didn’t have at least one great villain. Super Man would have been a terrible hero if all he did was fight giant stupid lizards. The Joker is interesting, Bane (a hulking villain that managed to break Batman’s back) is boring. The best villains are almost always more super-smart than super-strong because intelligence gives the villain the tools to pose questions to the heroes that can only be answered through character development. In contrast, the only thing interesting about Bane is the way that Batman develops in response to having his back broken.
Bane: surprisingly boring, even with that mysterious giant lizard in the background
The same principles hold true for our non-super-powered lives. While we don’t have our own personal super villains, we do have countless ways to suffer and struggle. There are only a couple of times in my life that I have suffered in a meaningful way, maybe only once for an extended period, and those episodes have profoundly changed me. I no longer share George Bush’s conviction that things always work out for the best (this attitude, like the Joker’s contemptuous indifference to money, is another classic marker of people born into a family that has never had to suffer because of an acute lack of money).
Everyone’s heard that what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. But, that’s actually not the most important part. Suffering gives us opportunities to become better people. We can learn a lot, from empathy to patience to gratitude, when we suffer and struggle. What doesn’t kill us can actually make us nicer. Can.
We normally focus on how our positive relationships with friends, family, mentors, etc. have helped us to develop as people. This focus is incomplete. Our opposition is just as important in shaping who we can be. The good news is that if we are perceptive enough, and brave enough, we can choose who we will become from the options made possible by the particular nature of our suffering and struggle.
2. Who is our super villain?
Previous generations have had some serious super villains. Hitler out-villains anybody in a comic book. The Joker has better one-liners, but Hitler forced much harder questions about the nature of humanity. Of course, real world suffering and struggle is rarely so tied to a single super-evil person. The opposition to progress and justice usually comes dysfunctional and/or exploitative systems – from the Great Depression to the struggle for Civil Rights to authoritarian communism. The Greatest Generation was so great because they struggled through the Great Depression, defeated fascism and then built the biggest middle class in history. Who are our super villains?
From my (Canadian) perspective, the closest thing our generation has had to a comic book super villain in recent years is Osama bin Laden. What makes bin Laden such a powerful villain is that he invited the West to compromise its own ideals and confirm his view that we are hypocritical conquerors, and the West largely accepted that invitation. I’m having a hard time thinking of an example of when it’s a good idea to do exactly what the super villain wants you to do.
bin Laden’s trap reminds me of the Joker’s climatic in the Dark Knight – he’s rigged two packed ferries to explode, and in each boat there is a detonator for the other boat. To add to the shenanigans one of the boats is full of prisoners, while the other is full of what looks like a lot of middle-class people. What would you do? The West pushed the red button, and bin Laden has been laughing from his life raft for almost a decade now. If it’s not too painful, try imagining where we would be today if 9/11 was treated as a crime in need of policing, instead of a foreign assault in need of military invasions. What if the trillions spent on those invasions had instead been put into breaking the West’s addiction to oil?
The villain created possibilities, the West chose badly.
For the progressive movement, Bush was the villain of this young century, but his apparent stupidity meant that there was nothing “super” about him. Before the invasion of Iraq I thought the Bush Administration was filled with brilliant strategists whose imperialism I fundamentally disagreed with. I remember being shocked when the US didn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I thought Hussein would be an idiot not to have some weapons. I thought the whole WMD thing was a brilliant use of framing – that it was used to sucker people into asking the wrong questions and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And, it was amazing how easily people accepted the premise of the question by assuming that if Hussein had WMD then Iraq should be invaded. I thought Hussein had WMD and that it was crazy and self-defeating to invade Iraq. The failure to find WMD was the first indication to me that the Bush Administration was actually incompentent – either because there were WMD, and, like bin Laden, they just couldn’t find them, or because they had managed to trick themselves into believing there were WMD because it was convenient. As the occupation of Iraq turned into more and more of a fiasco, and the occupation was then followed by one embarrassing debacle after another, it became harder and harder not to think of Bush as the Homer Simpson of imperialists. I don’t think a stupid villain has ever made heroes smarter.
Homer Bush, Imperator of Incompetence. Are you going to raise your game to fight this guy?
There are many reasons that progressive movements in the US are struggling today, but I think learning a lot of the wrong lessons from the struggle against the Bush Administration is one of the biggest, and least explored. If your explanation for the terrible state of your country is that it was run by a conservative idiot then the logical answer is to elect a brilliant progressive. Americans rose to that challenge by helping Obama build the most sophisticated and participatory election campaign in history. Okay, so with Bush replaced is it mission accomplished, question answered, problem solved? If you think the problem is a bad + incompetent individual in power then the problem should be solved, shouldn’t it?
Here’s where things get ugly, and a bit sad. Post-election, progressive movements largely go home and wait to hear the good news of epic feats from SuperBama, their Avatar of Hope. In contrast, conservative movements explode with energy and organization and hit the streets. Dominant elements of the elite institutions and networks of American society, the institutions and networks that have established and maintain the dysfunctional and exploitative status quo, leap into action with all their might to limit and contain reforms at every turn. A majority of progressives are content to spectate. In this context, it’s actually amazing how much Obama, with a lot of help and pressure from Nancy Pelosi’s leadership in the House, has managed to achieve. American progressives are now responding to the half-measures and compromises by becoming increasingly depressed and cynical, further limiting the chances that Obama will have the transformative presidency they expected.
SuperBama is a construction, the inverse of Homer Bush, but it has actually diminished Obama’s real leadership abilities. Super heroes are almost always terrible leaders. An essential quality of good leadership is the ability to raise the game of the people they lead, both as individuals and as organizations. Super heroes almost never do this. Quite the opposite, they use their individual prowess in ways that almost always disempower the people that they protect, making them lazier and weaker than they could be if they banded together to confront the villain. Super heroes reduce regular people to the role of spectators, limiting their possibilities to develop. Generally, the most you can expect from a super hero leader is that they will be able to keep a small group of other super heroes from total dysfunction. One can learn a lot more about leadership from a high school coach. SuperBama, a fictional entity that was stupidly encouraged by the Obama campaign, has been immensely damaging to the real Obama’s message and practice of collective organization and empowerment.
The super hero comes from a culture that worships at the altar of individuality, a culture that simply ignores what effective leadership looks like, as it is practiced day-in-and-day-out by millions.
Before moving on I just want to point out that this is why the growing trend towards celebrity and cult of personality for activist leaders almost certainly does more harm than good. Too many organizations are reduced to a handful of people barely able to keep the peace between themselves while everyone else spectates. I’m young though, maybe it has always been this way.
YES HE CAN! YES HE CAN! YES HE CAN!
Imagine if progressive movements had looked past Bush’s bumbling and asked harder questions about how he came to power, how he was able to maintain that power, and whose interests his actions served. This would have led to different questions about Obama as he took office, questions about how he could be held accountable, how progressive forces in Congress could be supported, and how the vast conservative movement, with its diverse capacities, could be countered. If we understand our opposition, our “villain,” to be a complex of institutions and attitudes that establish, and are reinforced, by a dysfunctional and exploitative status quo, then just electing a new leader is obviously inadequate.
Here’s the kind of question that arises from that type of thinking: since dominant institutions and elite networks are going to oppose reform that might threaten their interests, how can we push Obama, and the Democratic congress, farther than they are going to want to go? Actually, to be fair, many progressives did think through these questions, but they were in the minority and their views did not guide the action of the progressive movement in Obama’s first year in office. Bush was a “bad” villain in the sense that he didn’t inspire our heroes to become greater, but a lot of the fault for that lies with our progressive movements for failing to learn the right lessons from the suffering and struggling we did under his reign.
So back to the original question: who’s our super villain?
We live in a time of unprecedented collapse in our respect and trust for our institutions. We tend not to trust our governments, our corporations, our churches, our schools, our unions, our scientists, our security forces, etc. etc. This trend has been present for decades, but I get the sense that we’re moving into a new phase. Corruption (and its twin, unaccountability), in all its many forms, is something that we have gotten used to, but the level of stupidity that we see today still has the capacity to shock.
In some contexts, recognizing stupidity is a more subversive act than recognizing corruption. No one was surprised when the financial collapse revealed Wall Street to be greedy. At its base, the sub-prime mortgage crisis was about extracting money from poor people and foreign investors. What was surprising was that the Masters of the Universe were stupid enough to blow up their own firms. In The Big Short author Michael Lewis makes this point about Wall Street: you want Wall Street to be greedy, as long as it’s being greedy for you, you don’t want Wall Street to be stupid. In this context, the BP oil spill is just another flailing riot of greed, stupidity, and – although we’re still waiting for this part – unaccountability. I mean, can you imagine the generation that defeated Hitler being this totally unable to plug a hole with the resources that we have today?
It is increasingly easy to see our most powerful institutions as being run by incompetent people who are out to benefit themselves, and who will escape accountability because they are part of elite networks. Indeed, part of the reason that Obama’s “post-partisan” rhetoric resonated with young people is that we don’t tend to trust either the public or the private sector and so the traditional left-right divide just doesn’t seem that relevant. But, where does that leave us? Instead of facing off against a diabolical super villain, we are confronted by an amorphous and resilient blob of greed and fail.
How do you fight the blob? The blob is so confusing and ridiculous that it’s hard to know what to target or what to do.
3. Application: G20
Okay, so let’s bring this back to the G20. To begin, some highlights:
1. Despite the fact that there was 20,000 police, and they had a billion dollar budget, they still failed to contain 200 Black Bloc protestors from going on a 90 minute rampage, and then they turn around and arrest 900 people engaged in largely peaceful protests the next day.
2. The police chief tries to justify the harsh crackdown by displaying weapons that prominently include the confiscated gear of a Live Action Roleplayer who just wanted to get his nerd on. Other “weapons” include a bicycle helmet and golf balls.
3. The above mentioned Black Bloc manages to, in the eyes of many Canadians, justify the security expenditure. And, images of burning cop cars drown out the message of the other tens of thousands of protestors about the bad decisions that are actually going on inside the G20.
4. The G20 leaders themselves punt on the most important issues of the day, and under pressure from conservative governments and financial markets they instead agree to slash public budgets in the midst of a global recession – an action which will only make the recession worse. The only consolation is that many of these governments wont keep their word.
Greed? Check. Fail? Check. Unaccountability? We’ll see.
Let’s start with the hero-villain dynamic at work in the relationship between the Black Bloc and the police. Obviously, each side sees themselves as the heroes and the other as the villains. Dressed in black and equipped for street fighting the two sides mirror their opposition. From the police perspective, the Black Bloc are asking the following question: can you contain us without compromising democratic values and making yourselves look like unaccountable thugs? Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. The most violent elements of the protest empower the most violent elements of the police, and help them to justify themselves – but I bet most of the cops aren’t happy about that. And, in the near-term, there is a huge need to hold the police and government accountable and I am grateful to all of the people who are leading the charge on that.
The flip-side of this relationship is superficially similar for the rest of the protestors. Faced with a violent police crackdown can the rest of the protestors maintain their non-violent approach, and get their message through? I think they did pretty well on that front, especially in that video of the crowd singing Oh Canada and sitting down, just before they get charged by riot cops. However, I think that we can do better. If I ever get the opportunity I’m going try to and circle and contain a Black Bloc with the rest of the crowd. Why? Because, there is a more subtle question being asked of the protestors, one that isn’t being asked by the police.
The more subtle question is about who has legitimate authority to make decisions that effect their community. One of the reasons that the police and the protestors both try to criminalize each other is that they are fighting over the answer to this question. I cringed when I saw the cop car burning because I can imagine what’s going through the mind of the average Canadian – probably something along the lines of: I might not like my own government all that much, but I don’t want to live in a world where the cop-car-torchers are in charge.
The amorphous blob of greed and fail that currently runs Canada, the United States, and much of the rest of the world wants to maintain its monopoly on power by convincing people that there are no alternatives to their inept rule. Part of the reason that it is a mistake to identify the police as the villains is that it misses the people and institutions that are actually making decisions in our society, and, especially if the response to the police is violent, it only reaffirms the authority of those institutions and the elite networks that run them – because your average person will pick order over chaos ninety-nines times out of a hundred. Again, I want to be clear that I am very glad that people are working towards police accountability after the G20, what I’m worried about is that we miss the larger lessons about the daily dysfunction and exploitation in our societies that was so proudly on display during the G20.
Back to the Joker and Batman (or Osama bin Laden and the US) – I think a useful way to think about what the right thing to do is to imagine what the villain wants us to do, and then do something else!
To that end, I think we need to create new orders – new ways of governing and organizing our society that can be created from the bottom-up while we work for better policies and accountability from the top-down. Progressive movements don’t need a better class of criminal to fight against, we need to do a better job of identifying dysfunctional and exploitative systems and then challenging and replacing them. The worst systems rely on our implicit consent to function, and we need to make it possible for people to withdraw their consent.
Some examples –
In politics, one piece of the puzzle could be creating systems for people to participate in meaningful dialogue with their fellow citizens to develop government policy, challenging our dependence on the party system.
In economics, one piece of the puzzle could mean expanding the sphere of the economy that uses profit for social and ecological purposes, challenging the institutions that abuse societies and ecosystems for nothing more than profits.
We can experiment, scale alternatives up and knit them together. I can’t think of a better way to respond to the grim fiasco our generation is inheriting.
I’ll close with a question – watching the G20 what have been your thoughts about the nature of the opposition to progress and justice in our society, and what do you think progressive movements can learn from it? The link for leaving comments is up at the top of the post under my little picture.
I have not been sacrificed by a cult
If you want to leave a comment, the link is back at the top of this post under my name.
Climate crews … for everyone?
There’s a saying that I’ve heard a whole bunch of times now from movement types. It goes like this: there’s two kinds of power in this world: people and money. This statement is usually followed by another, something like this: and we’re never going to have the most money, so we better make sure we have the most people.
The thing is: it’s actually harder to organize people than it is to organize money. Creating a large organization of connected, motivated and trained volunteers who are rooted in many communities is a very hard thing to do. Obama’s campaign was famously good at this. The Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament group has been really exceptionally good at laying the foundation for this with all of their facebook chapters in communities. It is also very hard to get this kind of organization back once it has been lost, as I fear Obama is now starting to learn. The key point here is that it’s not just how many people you “have,” it’s how well organized, connected, motivated, trained and supported they are.
In contrast, once an organization has a lot of money it is relatively much much easier to use that money to exert influence. Buying ads is perhaps the best example, because it is precisely what politicians spend the most money doing.
The challenge for many large environmental non-profits is that they have a hard time doing either of these things. It is hard for them to pull in money, especially if they rely on grants, and they spend long periods in survival mode as they struggle to pull in enough money to support their staff. They also tend to have a very hard time building and maintaining a strong on-the-ground volunteer presence. Why? I think there are a lot of reasons for this, and I’m also not really sure. (What do you think? Please tell me in the comments.) Whatever the reasons, it is a fact.
Ask yourself this: when Harper and Prentice make horrible decisions for the climate, as they did in late January, why don’t you see people in the street, and why is the response in letters to the editor and call-ins to radio shows so weak? This weakness does not reflect the polls about these issues, and it certainly doesn’t reflect our experience of talking with so many people who care and want to act. The point is: the big environmental non-profits in Canada, especially at the national level, seriously struggle to get people to do more than sign an online petition.
In the lead-up to Copenhagen a group of us used facebook and email to build a national campaign that focused on “Climate Crew Mondays.” For about six weeks crews in around a dozen communities across Canada would do a flash mob, with a different theme each week, and then they would finish by calling targeted MPs with a message about that theme. At the same time, facebook events and pages connected to the campaign were asking people who couldn’t make the flash mobs to call, and there was a big viral email sent out each week that asked people to call as well. The impact was obvious from listening to the voices on the other end of the phone: they were getting a LOT of calls. We later heard from MPs that the campaign had a big impact, particularly in getting the Liberals to join with the NDP and Bloc to pass the Copenhagen Motion.
The campaign was a big trial-and-error experiment, and as with any experiment, there were parts that did not work as well as they could. In particular I think we could have gotten a lot better use out of the video content that we were producing. On the whole though, the campaign was a huge success in terms of the number of calls that it generated to MPs, the number of people who were politically engaged for the first time, and the amount of fun that people had doing the whole thing.
Now that Copenhagen is receding into memory there are several national campaigns that want to work with the climate crews. This could be a problem – what if a power struggle over the climate crews divides the movement? What if the folks who actually made the climate crews work on the ground are turned off by the in-fighting? What do the on-the-ground leaders want to do anyway? Who is going to pay for stuff? I have a feeling that this is the path that, once followed, has led so many of the big enviro non-profits to lose their volunteer capacity.
Say we present the climate crew leaders with options about which campaigns they could work on. Say the people coordinating the campaigns work together to make them as complimentary, in time, space and resources, as possible. Say the coordinators and the crew leaders work together to develop some simple resources that make it easy for people to start a new climate crew in their community. Say everyone works together to provide training and support for anyone from the crews. Say we improve our communications infrastructure so it is easier for people to find climate crews, start climate crews, and its easier for everyone to talk to each other without spamming up a huge listserv?
What if we create a a large organization of connected, motivated and trained volunteers who are rooted in many communities – and who can choose what calls to action (and what organizations) they will respond to? The volunteer organization that is conspicuously absent at the national level would now exist, but none of the environmental non-profits would “own” it. This would be an organizational commons – not owned by anyone, but collaboratively self-organizing and ready to respond quickly, and continuously learning and building its capacity.
There are, of course, many practical issues to think through – many of those issues relate to money.
What do you think?
A political science degree in one cartoon
I’ve been slow on updates lately. By way of apology I present you with the greatest political cartoon of all time. The cartoon is by Kate Beaton – beatonna.livejournal.com
Are you ready for it?
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Obvious lesson for the ten year deal – how to keep leadership function connected and integrated into the wider movement. Less obvious lesson – need for the sexy.
Motivation and Adventure – A prelude
After a conversation last week with James Rowe (a colleague in Environmental Studies who has recently finished his Phd and is a wildly popular instructor) I’ve been thinking of things a bit differently.
The concept of a ten year deal is meant to get us to think about time scales and reciprocal commitment. In short – people’s willingness to undertake a big effort if they don’t think they will be chumps.
Rowe and I are in similar places – near the end of one stage of our academic careers and thinking about what we want to do next. Both of us have the privilege of having conventional options that would be financially rewarding, and would be widely recognized as success. On the other hand, we are looking at options that would make a much bigger difference to the world but offer far less money and much greater risk to our social standing.
Obviously this is part of how societies maintain themselves in a particular pattern of organization – it is much easier for people to just recreate that pattern than it is to change it. Some tools, like student debt, are particularly effective for driving these choices and getting people to pick the status quo over meaningful creativity. There’s a lot to this point, but for the moment I want to focus on risk.
Risk is an essential part of adventure, and adventures are fun. Adventures are the kinds of things that you remember for the rest of your life. Adventures are often best when they are undertaken in groups, and certainly adventures produce some of the strongest groups out there. Adventures are also one of the most important ways that we develop our potential and character. I think we can usefully think of a ten year deal as a huge adventure whose purpose is to save the world. It’s funny to put it that way, but it’s true.
Thinking in terms of adventure places an emphasis on motivation. On the one hand, we want a ten year deal because it would be important to address climate change. Put this way it is a necessary sacrifice, rewarding because of the larger goal that it’s helps us to achieve but filled with cost and penalty. On the other hand, the ten year deal would be a grand adventure, filled with good friends, excitement, and a chance to test and improve ourselves. These two sources of motivation are not mutually exclusive. Both kinds of motivation are important and could re-enforce one another.
A final note on motivation: most of our present ideas about motivation are just totally wrong. In this wildly “favourited” TED Talk, Dan Pink explains that the more you pay people the worse they perform at tasks that require any kind of lateral thinking and creative initiative. This, obviously, goes right in the face of dominant practice of paying CEOs bazzilions of dollars for their “leadership.” Extrinsic rewards, like money or threats, are good for motivating people to do things that require focus and repetition. Intrinsic rewards, and here Pink highlights autonomy, mastery and purpose, are much more effective for getting people to perform well in work that requires creativity and flexibility.
The counter-intuitive conclusion from this is that maybe by choosing the adventurous path over the status quo path – and thus almost certainly making less money – we would actually be setting ourselves up for much better personal performance.
I’ll stop there. Next post will explore the adventure idea further in the context of a ten year deal with a focus on the barriers that keep us from embarking on this kind of adventure – barriers that include logistics (money!) and ego.
A question for now – when have you felt the most motivated?
Post-Copenhagen Policy Summary from Andrew Cuddy
The following was written by Canadian Youth Delegation policy super-star Andrew Cuddy. All credit goes to him, and thanks to him for allowing me to post this on the internet (and thus liberate it from email).
The Post-Copenhagen Climate Movement, thoughts from a youth delegate…
Halfway throughout the second week of Copenhagen, I was befallen with a sense of utter despair upon realizing that the negotiations were about to end in failure. I was fortunately able to find hope in those last few days was by focusing on 2010, and the prospect that it would be the year in which the climate movement secures a Fair, Ambitious, and Legally Binding (FAB) post-2012 deal.
Here, then, are my thoughts on where the movement should be going, both internationally and in Canada.
The Future of the Negotiations:
(1) The emissions reduction commitments of countries for 2020 must be increased. The UN has projected that the pledges currently on the table will lead to 3°C of warming.[i] Developed countries’ pledges do not even meet (even when potential ‘loopholes’ are ignored) the lower-end of the IPCC’s recommended range of 25-40% below 1990 levels, while developing countries’ pledges almost meet the upper-end of the IPCC’s recommended range of 15-30% below business-as-usual.[ii]
(2) The US must pass domestic climate legislation; all else depends on it. Many hope that the Copenhagen Accord will prod the US Senate to pass climate legislation, while others fear that moderate democrats will be more focused about their November midterms and thus be unwilling to take any political risks.
(3) China must be convinced that it has nothing to fear from a FAB deal. China had any global emissions reduction target removed from the Copenhagen Accord and refused international verification of its commitments. China must be convinced that the former will not result in it being called to take on deeper pledges in years to come and that the latter will not infringe on its ‘sovereignty’.
(4) The UNFCCC must continue to be the site of the negotiations. Some have suggested that Copenhagen reveals the failure of the UNFCCC consensus-based process that allows a few countries (e.g. Sudan and Saudi Arabia) to block progress. Instead, that handful of countries that account for 85% of emissions should negotiate in a forum such as the G8/G20, as the argument goes. Unfortunately, if the most vulnerable (small islands and Africa) are not at the table, then it is unlikely that the Big Emitters will be motivated to reach a FAB deal. Going forward the UNFCCC must choose countries to host the COP that are more adept (Mexico perhaps?) at bridging the North-South divide than Denmark was.
They are––of course––also a host of unresolved debates that the movement must grapple with.
- What should the legal architecture of the post-2012 regime look like? Should the weak Copenhagen Accord simply be discarded with all efforts focusing on the official negotiating texts? If not, will the Kyoto Protocol survive?
- Should environmentalists continue to use messaging that despite being ‘accurate’ and/or ‘justified’ does not resonate with much of the public (e.g. financing as climate “debt”)?
- Will the movement continue to be divided between those who believe that truly radical political/socio-economic change is required to get the reductions science demands and those who believe that reforms will be sufficient and/or are all we can get?
The State of Play in Canada:
Most of the public now realizes that Canada’s stance on climate change is harming our cherished international reputation.[iii] Unfortunately, Harper/Prentice’s main argument that Canada must–– out of economic necessity––“harmonize” with the US on climate policy and thus cannot increase our 2020 emissions reduction target of 3% below 1990 still resonates with many moderates.
Two counter-messages are necessary.
(1) Canada is already “failing to follow” the US.
(i) The US Congress is currently considering legislation that will not only meet but exceed their 2020 target[iv]; Canada continually delays releasing the details of its plan and leaked cabinet documents obtained suggest that Canada does not even intend to meet its target.[v]
(ii) The US invested 14 times more per capita in renewable energy than Canada over the past year[vi] and Canada has become the only G-7 country without a national-level program to support renewable energy.[vii]
(iii) The US legislation is clear that it does not consider oil and gas as an Emissions-Intensive, Trade Exposed sector and will not give special treatment to the Tar Sands.[viii] Prentice has stated that Canada is considering special treatment by way of far lower targets for the Tar Sands––Canada’s fastest growing source of emissions.[ix]
(2) Canada can and must do more than the US.
A recent economic modeling report by the Pembina Institute found that Canada could reach the more ambitious 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 target while still growing its economy 23% from now to 2020, in contrast to 25% under Canada’s current target.[x] This being even if the US did not also raise its ambition. There are also dire economic costs if the global effort does not limit warming to 2°C, such a loss in global GDP of 5-20% and over $200 billion of Canadian assets that at risk.[xi]
But taking action on climate change is more than an economic issue. Canada currently has one of the highest levels of per capita emissions in the world, taking up more than its fair share of atmospheric space. Climate change will negatively impact those with the least responsibility for the problem, developing countries and future generations. Acting out of sync with the US on climate change is––like with so many other issues––a moral imperative.
[i] Oxfam International: Climate Shame, Get Back to the Table, 2009.
[ii] oxfam
[iii] Macleans: ‘Suddenly the World Hates Canada’, 2009.
[iv] World Resources Institute: EMISSION REDUCTIONS UNDER CAP-AND-TRADE PROPOSALS IN THE 111TH CONGRESS, 2009.
[v] Climate Action Network Canada: Fact Sheet: Leaked Canadian Cabinet Documents, 2009.
[vi] Pembina Institute: Backgrounder: Canada vs. U.S. Investments in Renewables and Energy Efficiency, 2009.
[vii] http://www.pembina.org/media-release/1944
[viii] Climate Action Network Canada: Fact Sheet: Leaked Canadian Cabinet Documents, 2009.
[ix] Climate Action Network Canada: Fact Sheet: Leaked Canadian Cabinet Documents, 2009.
[x] Pembina Institute: Climate Leadership – Energy Prosperity, 2009.
[xi]Nicholas Stern: The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 2006; WWF-Germany and Allianz Group: Major Tipping Points in the Earth’s Climate System and Consequences for the Insurance Sector, 2009.
Differentiating advantages
Before I get into this post I want to thank everyone who has read and commented on my first real post for this blog (A Ten Year Deal For A New Decade). The comments were great fuel for the next post on that line of thought, which should be done within the week.
Right now I’m working on the part of my thesis that is about the opposition to efforts to deal with climate change. While thinking about the differences between the tactics of pro-climate action forces and anti-climate action forces it occurred to me that differentiating by “tactics” doesn’t really do a good job of getting at the heart of what makes these forces so different, and by extension, what makes the anti-climate action forces so incredibly effective at delaying efforts to, literally, save the world.
Thinking about the different kinds of advantage makes us, in turn, think about the kinds goals and organization that we’re going to need to make a ten year deal successful. So, to explore this idea let’s say there are three kinds of advantage: tactical advantage, strategic advantage, and systemic advantage.
1. Tactical advantage
Rallies, research and reporting, coordinated phone calls, canvassing, stalling negotiations, kissing ass (I mean this in a nice way), media stunts, sit-ins – these are all tactics. I’m using examples because I’m not going to pretend to be able to give a good dictionary definition of tactics here. Basically, tactics are the things that you do to try and achieve a goal.
Tactics tend to be relatively fast, relatively easy to observe and understand, and are often useable by opposing forces – for example, I’ve been in a scrap that featured dueling phone-mobs trying to see which side was going to get the most phone calls into MPs.
It’s worth noting that within the climate movement different organizations often define their niche by their attempt to master a particular tactic or set of tactics – Greenpeace with banner drops and other media stunts, Pembina and Suzuki Foundation with research and reports, Wilderness Committee with big rallies.
Bottom line: the side with more efficient and flexible tactics tends to get the tactical advantage over time. On the whole, I think the pro-climate action forces have the tactical advantage over anti-climate action forces. What’s my proof for this claim? Well let’s take one very specific case study: have you ever seen a funny right-wing viral video? Didn’t think so.
2. Strategic advantage
Strategies are a collection of tactics, and the resources needed to execute those tactics, that are chosen and combined to achieve a larger goal. So an organization that wants to ban bottled water on a campus could combine a petition with a couple of information events and class-room speaking and finally a meeting with administration into a strategy that would need a lot of people’s time but not much money or other resources to execute.
There is no shortage of articles and resources on strategy out there – so I will limit myself to just mentioning two things that tend to separate good strategies from bad ones. First, good strategies tend to invest in building up their resources and capacity so that they get more and more powerful over time (email list circulated at information event is used to get volunteers to hand out petition). Second, and this only applies if there is a force opposing the strategy, good strategies make it harder for the opposition to successfully execute their strategy (anticipate beverage contractor trying to cut the administration a better deal for bottled water sales by publicly accusing them of trying to buy off the admin).
Strategies tend to unfold on longer timescales than tactics, and they can be plainly visible or subtle to the point that it is impossible to figure out exactly what’s going on. The strategies of pro-climate action forces and anti-climate action forces are different because they have different goals. Perhaps more importantly, the strategies also tend to be different because they have different resources – the pro-climate forces have more people, the anti-climate forces have more money.
The side with the more effective strategy and the greater resources to execute that strategy will tend to develop the strategic advantage. So who has the strategic advantage? I think this is continuously contested and changing in different contexts. While the anti-climate action forces have much greater money resources the pro-climate action forces have shown themselves to be able to achieve strategic advantage when they focus their resources and out-think their opponents.
3. Systemic advantage
Systematic advantage operates at a higher level than tactics or strategies. Systems are the context for strategies and tactics – they are the relationships of people, institutions and ideas that constitute the sites of engagement and determine how things work in those sites.
The important features of systems can be really obvious – like the Senate’s filibuster rule which means that a super-majority is required to overcome Republican obstructionism, and this makes a few coal-state Senators in the US extremely powerful over US climate policy. The important features of systems can be less obvious – like the effect of those few coal-state Senators on international climate negotiations as they make it impossible for the US to commit to serious climate targets that would make the EU and rapidly industrializing countries willing to step up more than they already have – collectively giving us a real shot to prevent catastrophic climate change.
The important features of systems can also be almost invisible – like the way that almost every major polluting country is operating within a seemingly unquestionable assumption that further economic growth is more important than anything else, and that bringing about catastrophic climate change is therefore preferable to suffering a competitive disadvantage against a country that does less to limit global warming pollution than you do.
The only strategy to change a system that I have ever participated in was Common Energy’s collaborative planning process at UVic, which was organized by students outside of UVic’s formal processes. The idea was that traditional forms of university planning made it very difficult to build support for big ideas that would creatively incorporate many perspectives to address campus and regional climate issues in an integrated way. The strategy was a successful experiment, and really changing the system will require much more work along the same lines.
The side whose goals are more in line with the system, and whose resources are generated and made available by the system in greater quantities, will tend to get the systemic advantage. Systemic advantage is much longer term than tactical or strategic advantage. Gains made through strategic advantage can be wiped out over time by the side that has systemic advantage.
To me the Copenhagen Summit was visceral confirmation that anti-climate action forces have the systemic advantage – despite tactical advantage and enormous focus and strategic innovation of pro-climate action forces the anti-climate action forces were able to consistently win because things were tilted in their direction.
I don’t pretend to have a blue-print for describing the systemic advantage of the anti-climate action forces, or for the changes that would need to be made to change the system and tilt things in a pro-climate action direction. So I’ll just say this: a successful ten year deal needs to make system changes that make consistent tactical and strategic advantage both possible and meaningful.
What do you think the systemic advantage of the anti-climate action force looks like? What do you think are some its specific features? Oh and a bonus question: what’s your favourite tactic?
The “leave a comment” link is back up at the top of the post under my name.
A ten year deal for a new decade
It’s New Years Day, 2010, and a new decade is sweeping out in front of our imaginations. Today seems like a good day to take a breath, and think long term. In more personal terms, today is the day that I finish hibernating to recover from the emotional and physical drain of the Copenhagen Summit (and the months of campaigning that led up to it) and plug back in.
My hope for this blog is to foster a community interested in the following proposal for the climate movement and its practical implications: that we need a new deal within the movement if we are going to mobilize enough people, at the necessary levels of commitment, to prevent catastrophic climate change and create just and thriving societies.
Since giving things a name makes it easier to talk about them here’s a working title for this new deal within the movement: a ten year deal. A ten year deal is an agreement by people to make climate change and sustainability the organizing principle of their lives for the next ten years – knowing that many other people are also agreeing to do this and willing to work together in new ways.
Okay wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
This new decade is born in a moment of great disconnect for our movement – on the one hand, the locally-rooted/globally connected climate movement was incredibly successful in engaging millions and millions of people for the Copenhagen Summit, and on the other hand the Copenhagen Summit failed to deliver on even its most modest of promises. Instead of rising to meet the challenge of achieving the historic transformation that the scientific community tells us is necessary, the bar was continuously lowered to protect the most polluting industries in a handful of countries no matter the cost to everyone else, forever.
There are many lessons to be learned from this disconnect, but three stand out to me:
1. If we are going to peak global emissions within the decade we need to mobilize politically at unprecedented scale for collective action on climate change that will radically alter the emissions trajectory of rich countries and rapidly industrializing developing countries.
2. If we are going to make it socially, politically, and economically possible to reduce global warming pollution to near-zero by 2050 then we need to recreate and rebuild our economies and infrastructure from the ground up in ways that seem completely impossible now, and yet have nonetheless already begun through countless experiments which must now be accelerated and connected.
3. If we are going to achieve points 1 and 2 we need millions and millions of people mobilized, included and empowered to give more of their time, energy and money then we currently think is possible. To make that happen we need a new deal within the movement that gives people much more power, training and community – and the confidence that their investment of time, energy and money wont be wasted.
I don’t pretend to know what that new deal looks like exactly – but I think the time commitment is a key part, or at least it’s the easiest place for us to start thinking this through. So the ten year deal starts with a time commitment – but it would need to include much more than that. Right now we have tiny institutions with a few decision-makers and limited resources and then vast numbers of people who are engaged in relatively small ways – signing petitions, forwarding emails. If we are going to get people to give more then they need to get more – a successful ten year deal would need to be about a lot more than time.
Another reason I think starting with time commitment is useful is that many people are already at this level of time commitment – but we rarely talk about it in these terms to one another within the movement, and we never communicate it to the public. Here’s a facebook note I made on Dec. 2 to float the idea of committing to ten years before I really thought of it as a part of a broader deal, really a social contract, within the movement:
—-If someone asked you to commit 10 years of your life to achieving climate justice (so you might get other jobs, but the main thing you did was work on climate justice) would you do it?
If many other people were making this commitment publicly what would that mean to you?
What would it mean to Canadians to see people making that kind of a committment?
I personally am willing to make that committment, I know many others are willing to do so – but we rarely talk like this as a movement.
What if we did?—-
People responded by saying that they already were doing this (especially if “this” was defined more broadly as a commitment to sustainability), and would be happy to make their commitment official and public.
Nouri Najjar’s response goes to the heart of why this kind of commitment is so important-
—Answer: we’d win.
There is power in perseverance. But there’s even more power in the knowledge of perseverance. The knowledge that what you face can’t be stopped. Very rarely do people challenge brick walls — that’s just not a fight you can win.—
I’d add to that things go both ways – it also incredibly important for people within the movement to know that the people around them are not going to stop, not going to be deterred. Our society has become so obsessed with celebrity and heroic leadership that we often miss the role of mutual inspiration – the way that groups of people inspire one another on a day-to-day to year-to-year basis.
So what do these inspired people give to the movement and what do they get? What does this movement’s institutions look like?
To get things going here is my first question for you: if you were going to commit ten years of your life to a movement what you want that movement to be like?
Edit: the “leave a comment” link is back up at the top of the post under my name
Learning from Copenhagen and letting it go
Note: this was originally written on Dec. 20, right after the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen.
And now it’s a new day. That’s how I felt this morning while I was waking up free of the worst effects of jet lag, sleep debt and a lung-cold.
So much time, energy and emotion was invested in the Copenhagen Summit because it was supposed to be “the end” – the moment when the world came together and created a deal that would set the solutions in motion, if not save the world entirely. The political strategy was that a strong global deal would empower people advocating for strong domestic action – regardless of what country happened to be domestic to them.
It didn’t happen, and in the process it has provided a lesson in raw power and resistance.
The Canadian and US governments came to the negotiations with targets that they and everyone else know would commit the world to climate catastrophe. The targets they brought are not shaped by science, not shaped by ethics and morality, not even shaped by a basic self-interested cost and benefit analysis – they are shaped by the power politics of countries where fossil fuel industries and anti-government ideologies have enormous sway. From Canada’s tar sands and anti-government minority government to America’s globally dominant oil companies with their lobbyists, campaign contributions and Manufactured Doubt Industry, to the conservative Democratic senators from coal states that hold US climate legislation hostage, the anti-climate action forces hold strategic levers in our politics. This is what raw power looks like, and I confess that it filled me with rage.
We could have had a bad deal that would have locked in these catastrophe targets if it wasn’t for the heroic resistance of some of the poorest countries in the world – led by small island and African countries who know they will suffer the worst catastrophes unless we peak emissions soon and get back down to 350ppm. These countries were backed up by global civil society, by tens of millions of people who rallied and organized to demand a fair, ambitious and binding deal that would peak emissions within a decade, provide support for the most impacted, and create a pathway to a global convergence of per person use of the atmosphere. I’ve never seen resistance like this, and it fills me with determination.
In Canada we set out to make climate leadership a major issue for Canadians, and to make sure that our government knows it. We’ve succeeded on both counts. Thousands of Canadians have taken civic actions for the first time. Millions of Canadians have been engaged by the issue and watched in horror as their minority government ruined their reputation and abdicated its responsibilities to protect its people and secure their prosperity. With countless phone calls and actions we’ve helped significantly shift politics in Ottawa, most obviously by getting the Liberals to join the Bloc and NDP in passing a motion that called for world class scientific targets to come from Copenhagen. As for the Conservatives, they are betting everything on the assumption that the movement will just dissipate now that the Copenhagen Summit is over.
They are wrong.
Things have changed. There is a massive and mobilized movement of Canadians who are not going away. We have watched our minority government choose catastrophe and we’re never going to stop until Canada is a climate leader. We have learned from the Copenhagen Summit that we need to develop raw political power. We can let go of the promise of the Copenhagen Summit knowing that the Summit is now a beginning, and not an end. We can turn rage into passion. We can turn our sadness into determination.
What started as a movement to tell our government what Canadians wanted in Copenhagen must now become a movement to develop raw political power – the ability to put a climate leadership government in power and ensure that it follows through with policies that work for the climate and benefit people. In the new year it will be time to build a political movement with thousands of organizers that can engage millions of people in civic action. In doing so we will collaborate with our friends in the US, jointly working on our shared political challenges.
But that’s at least a couple of weeks from now, now it’s time to enjoy a well deserved rest. Willpower is like a muscle, over time it is strengthened by use, but in the short term it can be worn out. Half an hour ago I almost lost it because my power cord was tangled up with other wires and I couldn’t get it to go where I wanted it to. Sleep, fun and community are the remedy for near burn-out, and so in retrospect I am very glad that the Copenhagen Summit was scheduled right before the holiday season.
For now we can rest knowing that we’re in it to win it, and thanks to all the work that we did this fall we’re about to get a lot stronger.