20th June, 2010

D. Raghunandan

THE horrific on-going disaster caused by oil spewing out from British Petroleum’s (BP) well in the Gulf of Mexico is going from bad to worse, showing little signs of abating. It is already by far the biggest oil spill in the US and rapidly becoming one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in the US if not the world. The oil slick is spreading by the day and threatening new areas. The federal government has banned fishing in more than 37 per cent of the US part of the Gulf of Mexico, double the area under a fishing ban imposed mid-May.

BP is responding in a manner typical of large multinational corporations (MNCs), especially oil companies, trying to minimise the damage while spending as little money as possible, evading legal liability, and treating the whole episode as primarily a public relations issue. BP is once again showing that Big Oil is the dirtiest of businesses, in more ways than one.

The US administration under President Barack Obama is facing its toughest test yet. Its credibility has come under severe pressure, with the public taking a dim view of the slow and inadequate response of the federal government and what appears to be collusion with BP. Obama is discovering that oratory and rhetoric are assets in a campaign but can boomerang in the face of poor results on the ground. The poor response of the US government under then President George W Bush to Hurricane Katrina came to typify the incompetence, cronyism and lack of caring of the Bush administration. Will the BP oil spill, again affecting the state of Louisiana, prove to be President Obama’s Katrina?

Let us look at what has happened to date.

OIL GUSHER

Normally the term “oil spill” suggests an oil tanker breaking-up or developing a leak. The BP disaster is quite different and should really be called an oil gusher.

On April 20th, an explosion on BP’s “Deepwater Horizon” off-shore oil rig in the US exclusive economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico about 66 km off Louisiana left 17 workers injured and 11 missing, presumed dead. The explosion led to a rupture in the well about 5000 feet below sea level from where oil and gas have been gushing out ever since.

The quantity of oil that has spewed out is still being debated, largely because BP itself has made widely varying statements even while it has prevented independent scientific investigations to estimate the quantum of leakage claiming that this was “not relevant to the response” and that such attempts “might distract from efforts to stem the flow”! Amazingly, the Obama government and even its different scientific agencies such as the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have not insisted on conducting their own assessment, nor have ensured full access to data. Scientists, media personnel and others have been prevented from conducting studies in the spill region not only by BP personnel but also by the US Coast Guard which stated they were “acting under instructions of BP”, lauded BP’s efforts and even conducted joint press briefings, all till June 1 when the Administration decided this cozy relationship was not going down well among the public and announced a track-change putting the onus more sharply on BP.

BP initially estimated that the well was gushing 1000 barrels (160,000 litres) of oil a day. NOAA reached an estimate about 5 times higher at 5000 barrels per day based on early satellite imagery. Under intense media, public and Congressional pressure, a US government team under the US Geological Survey conducted surveys and tentatively estimated a much higher leak rate of 800,000 to 1.8 million gallons (3 to 6.8 million litres) per day. The official Technical Group later put the estimate at a lower 500,000 – 800,000 gallons per day but this was based on merely a 7 minute low-quality undersea video provided by BP showing the oil gushing out, a video feed now being transmitted live by order of Congress. Even at these more conservative figures, 25 to 40 million gallons of oil would have spilled out into the Gulf to date. The previously largest US oil spill, from the Exxon-Valdez tanker in Alaska in 1989, was of 11 million gallons (itself dwarfed by the largest ever spill from a Mexican off-shore rig in 1979 also in the Gulf releasing 140 million gallons of oil).

Worse than the sheer volume of oil, the leak is not on the surface but deep under the sea. Scientists have recently found that large plumes or clouds of oil have formed deep under the sea and are moving quite far. As we go to press, NOAA has reluctantly confirmed that such plumes indeed exist (having earlier joined BP in denying any such phenomena) but claimed they have low concentrations of oil. Several plumes, some as large as 16 km by 4.8 km and 100 metres thick, have been noted, some even 130 km away from the well and sometimes occurring at different depths on top of each other. These plumes comprising oil droplets may cause even more damage to marine life than surface oil because far more species live deeper down and also because oxygen supply would be stifled, one research team estimating it at 30 per cent less than normal. Marine biologists are critical of BP, and of US administration agencies, for not having envisaged and tracked these plumes earlier since their formation after undersea blowouts has been predicted in the scientific literature for years. In the BP oil gusher, chances are that chemical dispersants used to thin out the oil for subsequent clean-up may have actually helped the plumes form, another sign that BP has been fumbling its way along the disaster with no prior preparedness or plan.

TACKLING THE SPILL

There are two broad levels at which the oil spill requires to be tackled. First, to contain the effects of the spill on the surface. Second, to try and stop the leak itself.

Containment measures largely comprise spreading booms or inflatable tubing that float on the surface of the water and physically block the spread of the oil or, in some types of booms, soak it up. Oil will usually stay on top of the water for some time till it gets broken down by the wind, waves and ocean currents., and this oil can be either sucked or skimmed off the top by special ships. So far more than 2 million feet of containment boom and another 2 million feet of absorbent booms have been laid out, and more than 15 million gallons of oil-bearing sea water have been removed.

Chemical dispersants are also used to break down the oil enabling its biodegradation. About 750,000 gallons of dispersant have been used on the surface and another 300,000 gallons at varying depths. However, this procedure is not without risks especially to marine life and, as we have seen in the Gulf, may even have contributed to formation of plumes below the surface. To the best of one’s knowledge, biological agents have not so far been used in the BP disaster. More than 22,000 personnel have been deployed in these operations. Sand banks have also been prepared along certain stretches of coast to prevent ingress of the slick inland or into coastal wetlands and marshes.

Yet for all that local residents are clearly unhappy with the progress. More than 40 per cent of the incomes of people in coastal belts of Louisiana and neighbouring states come from tourism and fishing, both of which have been badly affected, especially the shrimp catch in shallow coastal waters and marshlands. This region contains 40 per cent of US coastal wetlands. Scientists are worried that these fragile coastal belts and wetlands are likely to suffer considerable damage that cannot yet be determined. Water samples all along the Louisiana coast have shown oil and, in some places, the booms near the shore seem to be keeping the oil in by blocking tidal flows as much as they are keeping oil out!

At the time of the rig explosion, the plan had been to plug the well with a cemented cap for later production. The same basic idea was pursued after the well burst but with several variants all of which essentially failed to plug the leak. First a “top hat” procedure --- where a massive concrete dome was lowered over the blow-out preventer (BOP) that had failed to engage as it should have after the explosion --- was tried but did not succeed. Then a special mud was forced down at high pressure, to be followed by cement once it had kept the oil down and settled, but the procedure could not overcome the upward pressure of the oil and gas. Then a so-called “junk fill” was tried replacing the mud with assorted materials. Lastly the well’s riser pipe was cut and a cap forced on to it with a pipe leading up to the surface where the recovered oil is being stored, with BP now proposing to flare it. One ship on the surface is currently handling the oil being pumped up and another one is expected to join soon to help augment processing capacity.

However, because the cut in the pipe is rough and the cap fits poorly, only a portion of the oil gushing out is being collected in this manner. BP started with the claim that it was tapping off around 10,000 barrels or 260,000 gallons per day then upped the claim to about 300,000-600,000 gallons per day which would mean that around half the total oil gushing out from the well is still leaking out into the Gulf.

BP and federal government officials have repeatedly said that all these are only intermediate palliative measures, and that the only real solution to the problem is to drill a relief well besides the ruptured one so that the oil rises up the new well rather than the old one. This is perhaps correct, but the very fact raises a host of questions about how much BP and the US government knew about the blow-out, damage likely to be caused and steps that could have been taken to prevent it or to tackle the problem once it had arisen.

UNSAFE WITH OFFICIAL SANCTION

It has been clear from the very beginning that BP was not only complacent and ill-prepared for the disaster, but had also knowingly cut corners, circumvented safety measures and ignored safety procedures in active connivance with the governmental regulator, the Minerals Management Service (MMS).

The most glaring avoidance of safety precautions was the decision by BP not to install an automatic shut-off valve which should have shut down the flow of oil from the well into the riser pipe immediately after the explosion on the rig. Such cut-off valves are mandatory and standard equipment on European off-shore drilling rigs as British Petroleum well knew. Yet the MMS went along, and also gave exemption to BP from conducting an experimental site analysis because the chances of an oil spill were “minimal or non-existent.”

Since the explosion, BP executives have been repeatedly pointing to the difficulties of operations at depths of around 5000 feet below the sea even though these were well known and should have been anticipated. Yet the fumbling and ad hocism of BP measures since the disaster as described earlier have shown that it had no emergency plans and no equipment on stand-by to deal with a problem if it happened, like a high-rise building with no fire escape and no fire extinguishers. BP chairman Tony Hayward coolly admitted that "what is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit" to deal with this kind of well blow-out even though these are familiar and not uncommon in the oil industry.

Incredibly, the MMS has approved 27 new offshore drilling operations since the April 20 explosion, exempting all but one of them from environmental review. To add insult to injury, two of the new operations approved were submitted by BP, which made the same assertions on drilling safety as it had for Deepwater Horizon despite all that had happened since!

President Obama has belatedly said that he would end the “scandalously close relationship” between regulators and the companies they oversee. The MMS chief Elizabeth Birnbaum has since resigned, but people are wondering why Obama had not noticed the deep conflict of interest built into the very structure and role of MMS before. MMS is responsible for leasing off-shore drilling rights, permitting and overseeing operations and collecting royalties, all of which make it develop vested interests in the commencement, continuation and profitability of off-shore drilling rather than a prime responsibility for workers’ safety and environmental protection.

It has also not gone unnoticed that Obama, in March this year, had proposed to allow expanded drilling for oil in the Gulf, the Atlantic and the Arctic, the very things he had criticised his rival Republican candidate John McCain for during the presidential campaign. Obama now wants to appear tougher against BP and other oil giants, and is making a big noise about making BP pay every penny required, and “kicking a**”! But will the bluster actually translate into action?

The Obama administration is said to be working on a new law to raise the limit on liability claims from $10 billion to $75 billion but with the US government having already spent an estimated $20 billion, this may still be far below the actually costs. More importantly, will Obama show the guts to take on Big Oil, and can he muster the legislative support required? Many Senators and Representatives are already towing BP’s line, trying to minimize the damage and shifting blame. Federal agencies such as NOAA, MMS and the Coast guard seem to be acting in collusion with BP although of late at least putting on an appearance of trying to distance themselves. Evidence suggests that Obama is unable or unwilling to exert real pressure on BP, not able even to secure accurate data about the spill whose quantum will of course be critical in determining the extent of damages BP is likely to pay out. Big Oil clearly has longer arms than the law in the US.

31st May, 2010

Amit Sen Gupta


THE publication of a claim that scientists have created “life” from “four bottles of chemicals” in the American journal, Science, has attracted considerable attention. Reactions have been varied, with one commentator even hailing it as “one of the most important scientific achievements in the history of mankind”. Others have been more muted and many researchers in the field of biotechnology have questioned whether it is appropriate to claim that “life” had actually been “created” in a laboratory. Many other reactions have come in from religious groups decrying “man’s attempt to play God” and from those raising concerns that the release of “synthetic” organisms pose a threat to nature.

CRAIG VENTER: BIO-ENTERPRENEUR ICON

Perhaps the publicity around the claim would have been less extragavant if at the centre of it there was not a person called Craig Venter. A larger than life figure in the field of biotechnology, Craig Venter has been described by one commentator as a “bio-enterpreneur icon”. It is an accurate description, for Venter is better known as an enterpreneur working in the field of science, rather than as a person working at the cutting edge of science. So, while analysing the very important claim that Venter makes, his persona and past history needs to be factored in.

In 2001, Venter was in the centre of another widely reported event – the mapping of the human genome. The unveiling of the map of the human genome was greeted with the accolades that it deserved. But, for the first time in the history of science, the details of such a pathbreaking event was published separately by two different sets of scientists in two different journals! The two sets of scientists represent, respectively, the public funded Human Genome project, and a private company called Celera Genomics. Celera Genomics was a company that Craig Venter had started in 1996. The former published its results in the journal Nature, and the latter in the journal Science (the same, incidentally that has now published Venter’s recent work!).

The story of the human genome project provides us clues about how Craig Venter sees science and its utility. He left the premier public funded research institute in the US -- the National Institute of Health (NIH) -- in 1991 because he wanted the institute to patent individual genes that were then being discovered, in the early days of the human genome project. His biggest opponent at that time was James Watson, part of the Watson and Crick duo who first explained the structure of DNA – the basic building block of life that makes up the genome of any living organism. Watson is famously know to have said at that time that the patenting scheme was "sheer lunacy" and that "virtually any monkey" could do what Venter’s group was doing. In 2001, the public funded Human Genome project (in which many countries including India collaborated) published its data at the same time that Celera Genomics did. Many commented that this had saved science from a huge disaster -- because if Craig Venter had been the first to publish he would have made sure that the information available through the decoding of the human genome would have been locked in by thousands on thousands of privately held Patents.

WAS LIFE REALLY CREATED?

Let us fast forward to 2010 and examine what Craig Venter and his team have achieved. Venter claims that his team has created life from four bottles of chemicals. Let us try to understand what was actually done. Venter’s team first analysed the entire genome of a single-cell bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoide. This was a huge exercise, which took about 15 years, cost $40 million and required 25 researchers to accomplish. The genome is the portion of any living cell (bacteria are single celled organism but complex organisms such as humans are made up of by millions of cells with specialised functions) that contains the code that tells the cell how it should function. The code is written into the genome by millions of permutations and combinations of four basic sugar molecules – in bacteria these sugar molecules are adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. In the case of the Mycoplasma mycoidegenome that Venter’s team worked with, over a million bits of code (1.08 million bits to be exact) in the bacterium’s genome was recorded in a computer. Exact copies of each bit of code was then synthesised artificially and assembled together by techniques that are now available. To differentiate the genome from a naturally existing one, “watermarks” were added – a few sequences that do not have any useful code written into them but were a form of signature added by the team to stamp their ownership over the synthetic genome. The final step involved the transplanting of the synthetic Mycoplasma mycoides genome into recipient cells of a related bacteria (Mycoplasma capricolum). To ensure that the recipient cell did not reject the newly inserted genome a gene responsible for producing a “restriction” enzyme in the recipient cell had to be inactivated. To put it in Venter’s own words, “on March 26, the synthetic genome was "booted up" -- and it worked! The new bacterium started doing what bacteria do best – i.e. it started replicating and making copies of its own self.

Can we say that Craig Venter’s team actually “created” life? If we cut through the hype of newspaper reports, the answer is no. What the team of scientists did was not insubstantial, but they definitely did not create life. They diligently copied millions of instructions in an existing bacterium and then inserted these instructions into another existing cell. There should be no hesitation in accepting that it was a huge computational exercise. But it was just that and no more. The team blindly copied the code without any means to know what each bit of code actually meant. It was like making an exact copy of the Mona Lisa on a different canvas, without the copier being able to claim that he had been transformed into Leonardo Da Vinci. For while the copier could claim to have made an exact copy, unlike Da Vinci he would still not have acquired the knowledge of how each brush stroke would blend into the next. In other words, he would not know how to make another masterpiece on his own. The same is true for Venter’s team. If they do not have an existing genome to copy from, they cannot create another synthetic genome.

The above does not imply that sometime in the future we shall not have the knowledge and the technique to really create life from first principles. What it does, however, show is how far away we still are from being able to do so. For, in order to do so, we would need to know exactly what each of the over a million codes in the genome does. Only then can we create the bits, knowing their functions, and then assembling them to create an artificial organism whose functions and characteristics we would have defined. Remember that here we are discussing the synthesis of the most primitive one-celled form of life. Imagine how much more complex it would be to attempt to synthesise multi-celled living beings which can each have millions of cells, each with millions of buts of code. Hence it is mere speculation to infer that Venter’s accomplishments would lead to the synthesis of a wide range of useful products such as bacteria to tackle oil spills or to produce medicines.

In some ways recombinant technologies used to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs), where the genetic code of useful characteristics of one organism are identified and then inserted into another organism, is much nearer to the process of creating an entire new organism. Today this technology is still very primitive, and we are barely able to use it to identify, extract and insert one or a few (among millions) characteristics.

UTILITY OF & CONTROL OVER SCIENCE

Let us turn to the real issues that need to be addressed in the wake of what Venter’s team has accomplished. There have been the usual “knee jerk” reactions about the need to stop “messing” with nature and the need to restrict research in areas about the consequences of which we do not know enough. Such doomsday prophecies have two problems. While we have started “messing” with nature at the cellular level only recently, we have been doing so for the last hundreds of thousand of years – ever since the human species left the trees and started changing nature to suit its needs. Settled agriculture, urbanisation, industrialisation, etc., have been changing much of nature as it existed for centuries and more. Yes, we are reaping the consequences of some of our actions – as best evident from the looming climate crisis. But does the answer to that lie in our going back to living in the wild and foraging for roots and berries? We would argue that the answer lies, rather, in increasing our knowledge about nature, so that we are better able to decide how much we can extract from nature and still keep the planet habitable and able to provide to every inhabitant of the planet what she or he needs. Further, if all that we do in science was to be predictable, we would not be doing science! Which does not mean science should not have boundaries. But such boundaries need to be negotiated between the concern that we need to know more and that we should not use this knowledge to create something that can cause irreparable harm.

Of more immediate concern, as regards the feat achieved by Venter’s team, relates to how the knowledge that has accrued will be used and controlled. The use or misuse of knowledge can have boundaries only if it is open to public scrutiny and not bottled up in private hands through secretive means. This is of particular importance given Venter’s earlier track record of wanting to create knowledge monopolies through patents. It is incorrect to characterise what Venter’s team has done as an invention. Nothing new has been created. Rather, we have seen the demonstration – albeit at a hitherto unknown grand scale – of how we have the technique available to copy one of nature’s products. Athena Andreadis, Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, writing in the Huffington Post, puts Venter’s work in clear perspective when she says: “The Venter work is not a discovery, let alone a paradigm shift. It's a technological advance and even then not of technique but only of scale. The experiment is merely an extension of a well-known principle that every biology lab uses routinely: namely, that bacterial genomes can be modified almost at will (barring a few indispensable regions) and in such ways as to turn the bacteria into potent mini-factories for specific proteins. The Venter bacterium is actually pedestrian because it carries an exact duplicate of a naturally occurring genome. Its only artificial aspects are the molecular "flags" that its makers included in the synthesis to mark the artificial genome for further tracking - standard operating procedure in all such modifications”.

But such labeling of his work is unlikely to deter Craig Venter from using the opportunity to fence off large areas of research through applications for broad patents. This is already being talked about. John Sulston, chair of the University of Manchester’s Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, said to the BBC recently: “I’ve read through some of these patents and the claims are very, very broad indeed… I hope very much these patents won't be accepted because they would bring genetic engineering under the control of the J Craig Venter Institute. They would have a monopoly on a whole range of techniques.” John Sulston is someone who would know well what he is talking about, having previously worked on the human genome project and having been a bitter opponent of Craig Venter’s attempt to patent the work related to the mapping of the human genome in 2001.

So, while we continue to wait for humans to break one of the final frontiers of science – creation of life – we need also to be vigilant of the smaller skirmishes that threaten our ability to widen the boundaries of knowledge that deepen our understanding of the world around us.

21st May 2010

D. Raghunandan

THE climate crisis and efforts to tackle it have witnessed unprecedented mobilisation of popular movements, NGOs, think tanks, experts, intellectuals and activists, as was evident at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December. Of course, this “civil society” activism has embraced a very wide spectrum of opinion. Amongst the most vociferous, at various gatherings as well as on the internet, have been those who may be termed climate radicals for want of a better term. Over the past few years, there has been a quite dramatic “green-red” convergence of anti-capitalist, radical environmentalist and anarchist or at least non-organised movements. The position of this tendency was best captured by the slogan of “system change, not climate change”. At first glance, the idea that climate change cannot be combated unless and until its systemic causes are overturned may appear unexceptionable. On the other hand, most progressive movements believe that, given the advanced state of runaway climate change, it may not be possible to wait for system change before tackling the crisis and that the problem needs a multi-pronged approach.  However climate radicalism, which is of course not monolithic, has come to adopt many such extreme positions.

Events and pronouncements at and around the recently held World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held on April 20-22 near Cochabamba in Bolivia bear this out. But first, some background.

BACKDROP

The Copenhagen Summit failed to reach an internationally binding agreement within the Kyoto framework. Ostensibly to save the Conference from ending in a total blank, a so-called Copenhagen Accord, driven by the US, was arrived at by a group of high-emission nations including both developed and developing countries such as China, Brazil and India. The Accord was not endorsed by the Summit, both because of its content (widely seen as undermining the Kyoto Protocol) and due to the way it was arrived at (behind closed doors by a select few countries and totally by-passing the UNFCCC Working Groups process).

Opinion has been deeply divided on the Copenhagen Accord which has nevertheless, and in the absence of any other agreement, been signed by 110 countries so far. As of now, the US and some of its allies are pushing to give the Accord de jure status while there are definite signs that India, China and other large developing countries are pulling back from their earlier support for the Accord. Several countries, notably Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Cuba (from the ALBA grouping of countries), Sudan and some small island states have expressed their total opposition to the Accord. President Evo Morales of Bolivia denounced the Accord’s terms and the non-transparent process that produced it. He also hailed the activists massed and holding parallel discussions outside the Conference venue for moving more meaningfully towards tackling the root causes of climate change, which he identified as capitalism, over-consumption and the destruction of a holistic relationship with nature. President Morales later announced that he would be convening a Conference in Bolivia to take these ideas and alliances forward.

Climate radicals not only rejected the Accord outright but also the entire UN process as part of the global capitalist system which caused the climate crisis. Such groups favour an alternative grassroots process aimed at both formulating alternative solutions and shaping a new social system. This tendency welcomed Bolivia’s call for a Conference.     

The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba was attended by over 30,000 people with around 9,250 from outside Bolivia from 142 countries. Most of these latter were climate radicals, possibly with the exception of some groupings such as 350.org (a network calling for GHG stabilization at 350 parts per million rather than 425 ppm as called for by IPCC) which was labeled “liberal” by radicals.

A “Peoples Agreement” was arrived at and announced on April 22 which had been declared International Mother Earth Day by the UN last year at the instance of President Morales. The Bolivian government also made a separate formal submission to the UNFCCC in the form of a draft for the two Working Groups, attaching the Peoples Agreement and incorporating many of its points, but with significant changes in language.

Despite this apparent coming together of progressive Latin American governments and climate radicals, events and statements issued at Cochabamba, and discussions on the internet both before and after, bring out sharp differences and also pose many issues for other progressive movements and climate campaigns to ponder.

CLIMATE ISSUES

The declaration of the Peoples Assembly (http://pwccc.wordpress.com) calls for a global agreement to “return the concentrations of GHGs to 300 ppm [and] therefore the increase in the average world temperature to a maximum of one degree Celsius.” This position had been taken earlier too by several developing countries especially in Africa, the Caribbean and some island states but its basis has never been clear, nor has the IPCC agreed.

Of course, a 2 degree rise of temperature would mean huge damaging impact especially in poorer countries. But at the same time, there is almost universal agreement among scientists that average temperatures in the world are already at almost 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels and, even if drastic steps are taken immediately, temperature rise of 2 degrees C is virtually inevitable. GHG concentrations of pre-industrial 300 ppm levels and temperature rise of 1 degree C are simply wishful thinking, impossible to achieve even in the medium term (although actions over several decades involving sucking up huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere are remotely conceivable in the long term) and provide no practical guide to national or global emissions control regimes.

So maybe one should view this only as a tactical slogan to push developed countries to a more achievable target. The declaration’s demand that developed countries should reduce their emissions by 50 per cent without offsets during 2012-17 should also perhaps be seen the same way, since the IPCC only recommends 40 per cent reduction by 2020 and even the EU has offered only 20-30 per cent by 2020, both with offsets. All indications are, however, that radical groups are not really engaged with the UNFCCC global negotiations and view them with a jaundiced eye. At Cochabamba, as one sympathetic correspondent noted, “when UN representative Alicia Barcena took the podium…, she was met with a chorus of hisses and boos.” So these maximalist demands need to be taken at face value and any compromise would doubtless be seen as surrender.

The Declaration even asserts that the current discourse on climate change has been shaped “in complicity with a segment of the scientific community” as “a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.” While much analysis may not identify capitalism as such or use the term, the IPCC Reports representing the broad consensus of the scientific community and endorsed by over 180 governments, elaborate in some detail various social-structural factors such as patterns of industrialisation and industrial agriculture, use of fossil fuels in private transportation, lifestyles especially in developed countries and, overall, the escalation of the climate crisis since the commencement of industrialisation around 1750.

Progressive groups and campaigns around the world mobilise and pressure national governments and the negotiations process on the understanding that these are indeed consequences of the capitalist path of development and that systemic changes will indeed be required if emissions reduction targets are to be achieved, in the full knowledge that not all these demands will be met. As with other movements, there is an ultimate goal and various stages in between. For climate radicals, though, nothing short of an immediate system overthrow is acceptable or worth pursuing. So what kind of system change do the climate radicals want, what alternatives do they have in mind?

SOCIALISM EQUALS STATISM? 

The alternatives as articulated at Cochabamba, and in the debates on the internet, have a few notable strands.

Both Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in their speeches clearly stated that the alternative to capitalism is socialism. But the word “socialism” is itself conspicuously absent in the Peoples Agreement, not due to the sensitivities of moderates but rather to the deep-seated suspicion of the term among the radicals. In fact, tensions between the climate radicals and the progressive Latin American governments were visible throughout the conference. The Cochabamba conference was attended by a very few government leaders, from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Ecuador besides Bolivia, with Hugo Chavez being the only visiting head of state. Yet the suspicion of even these governments was such that some radical groups and indigenous peoples movements from Bolivia and nearby regions set up a parallel conference venue: the Peoples Assembly had 17 discussion tents on as many themes but “Mesa 18” saw sharp criticism of the Bolivian and other governments present and at one point police observers were posted near it!

Tadzio Mueller of Climate Justice Action grudgingly admitted that “while ten years ago the alter-globalisation movement had a very strong critique of institutions such as… governments” today they had decided that Bolivia for instance was “not permeated by neo-liberalism and was an actor they could work with” (quoted in Huffington Post, 29 April 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-s-eshelman/from-cochabamba-to-cancun_b_557293.html). Many other radicals strongly disagreed.

Edith Piaff commented in one e-mail exchange that the “conference was itself something of a legitimisation exercise for… President Morales. Talks about resistance to mega-projects such as dams and the exploitation of mineral resources in Bolivia were marginalised from the conference. Bolivia's socialist project has caused problems for many indigenous peoples through a development model that departs from traditional, more sustainable ways of life and marginalises people who have mineral resources under their lands.” In response to a criticism of her stance citing Evo Morales’ call for “communitarian socialism” she reiterated that “capitalism is just one problem of the general problem of domination.” Another prolific blogger, adding a sharper critique of the Bolivian government, said that “whatever Evo’s thinking, ultimately victory will come not from him but from the grassroots, including other anti-capitalist types from within the pink-tide states, the de-colonial left… against the rising pink tide and neoliberalism,” the phrase “pink tide” being an oft-repeated and rather derogatory reference to the new leftist governments in Latin America.

OTHER ALTERNATIVES

The alternatives envisaged have other dimensions too even if all are not fully articulated. The concept of Mother Earth Rights has many connotations for the radicals, whatever President Morales’ conception.

Any system that replaces capitalism should of course have equality between people and also ecological sustainability or, as the declaration has it, “harmony with nature”. But the formulation goes considerably further and speaks of “the right [of Mother Earth] to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue its vital cycles and processes free of human alteration” (emphasis added). The idea is elaborated by stressing the need to embrace and promote sustenance-based farming methods and other “ancestral models and practices” of indigenous peoples and rural farming peoples. There is much talk of “food sovereignty” but no discussion of how sustenance-level farming will produce surpluses to meet the food security of vast populations who today live and work away from the food production base. The nature-level production systems of indigenous or tribal peoples are clearly central, and also to some extent explain the radicals’ disappointment with Evo Morales Ayma, the world’s only indigenous head of state, who was roundly criticised for his support for mining and other policies of an “extractive state”.  One delegate was quoted as saying “both socialism and capitalism are resource exploitative ideologies that put the human before the earth. An indigenous perspective avoids this pitfall.”

There is a curious distinction between the Bolivian government’s formal submission and the speech of the Cuban vice-president on the one hand, and the Peoples Assembly Declaration on the other. The former talks of damage caused to the planet and the threat to human life, while the latter repeatedly speaks of the threat to Mother Earth itself and even calls for reparations to Mother Earth for the damage done to her. The planet has existed in different eras, much before the advent of human beings, at different levels of equilibrium, and will doubtless continue to do so even if humanity dies out due to climate change.

The climate radicals also display deep distrust of human social organisation, including of progressive governments, except for some idyllic past or a utopian non-state. Even the declaration’s call for climate debt reparations by developed countries to developing nations prompted considerable debate (correspondence April 26-30 in climate09-int.lists.riseup.net). Why should developing country governments, mostly representing the richer classes in these nations, receive these funds? Why should the poor in developed countries be forced to pay through taxation? Is not the “real contradiction between the poor and the rich of the world, some of whom live in the global South”, rather than between developed and developing nations? Imperialism and States, both vanish in this discourse.

It is therefore not surprising that the call went out in Cochabamba for “global greenhouse emissions to peak by 2015 latest and decline thereafter”. A global peaking year, whatever the date, in the absence of detailed carbon budgets spelling out emission levels for developed countries, has been repeatedly rejected by China, India and many other developing countries because this will only mean a cap on development for countries of the South while maintaining the obscene differential in living standards between North and South.

The Cochabamba Conference, bringing together several progressive Latin American governments and climate radical activists and groups has made an important contribution to the debates on climate change. Yet given the narrow range of opinions represented there, its impact on the international negotiations is likely to be limited. Further, the perspectives of “green-red” radicals appear to be getting more extreme, deviating even further away from those of other progressive movements. Perhaps the alliance witnessed in Cochabamba may not last as long, or be as effective, as those working towards the broadest possible alliance of progressive forces would hope for.