Climate Action was Never Enough

For many living in so-called Montreal, larger Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (ENGOs) such as Greenpeace, David Suzuki Foundation, or Équiterre operate as the entry point to climate action in civil society. This is often even more the case for those of white and of European descent. These ENGOs tend to give highly individualized calls to action such as signing petitions, making donations to their campaigns, or changing their personal habits. Such framing implicitly suggests that environmental harm can be reversed primarily through personal moral responsibility rather than collective political or structural change.

The moderate climate action movement

In Eve Croeser’s work, Ecosocialism and Climate Justice, she refers to ENGOs and related actors (such as scientists) as the “moderate climate action movement” (MCAM). The MCAM sees climate change from a siloed scientific standpoint, where messaging tends to be as apolitical as possible. The MCAM states that human-caused global warming is the pressing issue, with a central concern on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Because of this technology-centered scientific narrative, climate science tends to be viewed as apolitical, while actions on economic inequity and other social injustices tied to climate change are viewed as politically charged. 

This climate isolationism leads many groups to focus solely on simple, technical solutions to climate change, such as market-based carbon trading, technical infrastructure such as seawalls and the mass deployment of electric vehicles. The MCAM often centers its messaging around asking so-called leaders, mostly elected state officials, to “listen to the science.” The MCAM also tends to work hand in hand with both policymakers and business interests, often vying for a form of carbon accounting—the process of measuring and tracking greenhouse gas emissions produced by an individual, organization, or activity to assess their climate impact and guide emissions reduction efforts—that is void of social justice considerations.

Climate scientists tend to hold a similar carbon reductionist frame. They have a narrow view of the problem, often pointing towards technical shifts in energy balance and massive investments in technological innovations. Because of this technology-centered scientific narrative, climate science tends to be viewed as apolitical, while actions on economic inequity and other social injustices tied to climate change are viewed as politically charged. This embeddedness remains because the institutions they are part of still maintain racial, gender, and economic disparities that often limit access to a group historically favoured: white men.

Privileged access is an issue of representation (one that serves the people, not the elites)  that also effectively “limits the scope of inquiry and constrains the types of connections that are made among science, technology, and society.” This limitation of scope is then repeated and amplified through calls of recognition for scientific findings that enact one part of the larger systemic issue. While symbolic DEI initiatives are often the response to concerns about representation, they are insufficient on their own; meaningful change also requires equitable access to resources, material support, and a reorganization of institutional priorities.

This new wave of climate activism's fixation on urgency had some unintended consequences: they made it increasingly harder to have a more complex and inclusive narrative on the climate crisis.

Part of the entrenchment of a science-centric climate action can be explained by the long history of having to debunk climate denialism from the powers that benefit from fossil fuels. But climate denialism should not be an excuse to forgo justice considerations when pushing for policy change or climate action in the movement’s responses. In this case the enacted knowledge is an increasingly clear science behind the drivers of climate change: burning hydrocarbons. This move towards scientific clarity on climate rarely contextualizes the underlying systems that led to rampant fossil fuel consumption and how it supported current societal conditions and societal expansion, part of the truth that questions the system as a whole.

If we take these factors into account, the emergence of a new climate movement around 2018 was then limited by these over-represented narratives of techno-centric solutions firmly bolted on the pedestal of climate science. Many actions, such as strikes and roadblocks, were hard to quantify in gains when the message tied to most was to “act on climate,” “listen to the science,” or a more concrete, yet still imprecise appeal to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.” What all these actions had in common is that they appealed to elected officials, asking them to make better decisions, while also removing the opportunity for the public to have a more democratic involvement in the system beyond choosing which elected official represents them.

This new wave of climate activism's fixation on urgency had some unintended consequences: they made it increasingly harder to have a more complex and inclusive narrative on the climate crisis. Many new groups held messaging that framed action on climate change as urgent or an emergency, but none more than Extinction Rebellion (ER). While it is true that inaction on climate change has led to the IPCC declaring that humanity only had 10 years (if not less) to act, the urgency narrative created a form of aversion to deeper discussions on the political origins of environmental deregulation.

In efforts to raise awareness of humanity’s vulnerability to the climate crisis, the urgency-driven mindset can sometimes draw newly engaged individuals into mobilization efforts without encouraging deeper reflection on the root causes of the crisis. 

For groups such as ER, this “culture of urgency,” as Fleur Zantvoort dubs it, reaffirms a need for action and mobilization, putting diverse understandings and practices of care below the need to preserve the “human” world, most often framed within the western colonial way of life. This subconscious hierarchy became a base for all ER chapters, as all that was needed for a new ER group to form was to abide by the initial principles and values without a critical lens. This hierarchization became apparent inside and outside the chapters. Each ER chapter was meant to have a regenerative culture subgroup, which, according to members, became nothing more than a list of self-care practices.

In efforts to raise awareness of humanity’s vulnerability to the climate crisis, the urgency-driven mindset can sometimes draw newly engaged individuals into mobilization efforts without encouraging deeper reflection on the root causes of the crisis. This entrenchment is further reinforced when the solution being offered consists only of convincing those in power to admit the lack of control of GHG emissions.

While there is a focus on ER’s specific practices here, many of them reaffirm narratives held by the MCAM, namely the one that sees humanity as a monolith in its imminent extinction, something that erases the racialized ‘other.’ This ‘othering’ sees individuals or groups who are socially constructed as fundamentally different based on perceived racial or ethnic characteristics, often in ways that marginalize or exclude them from dominant cultural, political, or social norms.

This erasure of complexity by mode of urgency strays the MCAM movement further away from “a justice-based approach that constructs climate change as a product of the colonial capitalist patriarchal system and/or inextricably intertwined with social justice struggles against racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism, and colonialism.”

An example stemming from so-called Montreal was when a newly formed youth section of ER became conflictual when “extreme leftists” argued for a broader analysis of the issues, including racism, police brutality, leading to the departure of “moderate” members. This marked a departure from the direction of the large ER group.

Towards Climate Justice

As a principle, Climate Justice emerged in part from the environmental justice (EJ) movement. The environmental justice movement was initially formed by Black communities around issues of environmental racism in the USA, motivated by how the mainstream environmental movement ignored dimensions of social justice and human rights. The EJ movement began to include the impacts of climate change in their organizing and became one of the points of origin of the climate justice movement. 

Another point of origin stems from the Conference of Parties (COP) for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Some points include the split of numerous NGOs from Climate Action Network International (CAN-I) during COP-13 in Bali in 2007, and the widespread disillusionment following COP-15 in 2009, which helped spur the 2010 Cochabamba People’s Agreement at the alternative climate summit organized by Bolivian President Evo Morales. Also seen as a point of origin is the manifesto for 27 principles of Climate Justice developed by NGOs for the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

A climate justice view sees climate change not as a crisis unto itself, but the symptom of a larger set of interconnected crises that can only be confronted through a mantra of ‘system change’. 

The evolution of a movement cannot simply be put to one moment or a short series. The previous examples omit a lot of the on-the-ground work by so many activists in bringing a justice-based narrative to spaces of climate action, but they do help find places to look for the aims and strategies and the underlying ideology. People leading a climate justice movement view the creation of social and ecological harms as coming from a minority of the human species, who hold a majority of the power structurally.

While the difference between a Moderate Climate Action Movement and a Climate Justice Movement cannot be perfectly categorized as a binary, there are some features to help place organizations on this uneasy spectrum. An anti- stance (anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, etc.) and deep commitment to ethics, along with a flair for rejecting proposals to the climate crises that are deemed ‘false solutions’ are common principles of a climate justice movement. A climate justice view sees climate change not as a crisis unto itself, but the symptom of a larger set of interconnected crises that can only be confronted through a mantra of ‘system change.’

the critique of climate action laid out above should not be a call to block all collaborations with reform-oriented groups. 

When mentioning the uneasy spectrum, it is important to complicate things a bit further. While NGOs are often constrained by the agendas of their funders—whether philanthropic foundations, individual donors, or governments—they can also pool resources, allocate discretionary funding for one-off projects, or form uneasy coalitions that allow more radical members to steer the organization toward grassroots-led initiatives.

NGOs were part of the original international iteration of climate justice, while professionalized spaces remain problematic when they only work towards reform in the current system. This showed that value-aligned individuals were and still are key to creating bridges that can support and sustain transformative movements. While understanding that the effectiveness of collaborations need to be constantly reassessed, the critique of climate action laid out above should not be a call to block all collaborations with reform-oriented groups. More often than not, the people in these groups have seen the ineffectiveness of their organizational mission, and want to play a part in the radical shift needed from inside.

The work of climate justice is to acknowledge the inherent humanity of these insiders and assess the effectiveness of coalitional spaces, especially the ones where NGOs will be challenged intersectionally, in relation to capacity, time and continuing on the path to liberation. 

Bibliography

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