by Naomi Klein
The issue was so prominent that when the editors of Time magazine announced their 1988 “Man of the Year,” they went for an unconventional choice: “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth,” read the magazine’s cover line, over an image of the globe held together with twine, the sun setting ominously in the background. “No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more,” journalist Thomas Sancton explained, “than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home.”24
More striking than the image was Sancton’s accompanying essay. “This year the earth spoke, like God warning Noah of the deluge. Its message was loud and clear, and suddenly people began to listen, to ponder what portents the message held.” That message was so profound, so fundamental, he argued, that it called into question the founding myths of modern Western culture. Here it is worth quoting Sancton at length as he described the roots of the crisis:
In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature—the soil, forest, sea—was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who, after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants, in the words of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience.25
The diagnosis wasn’t original—indeed it was a synthesis of the founding principles of ecological thought. But to read these words in America’s most studiously centrist magazine was nothing short of remarkable. For this reason and others, the start of 1989 felt to many in the environmental movement like a momentous juncture, as if the thawing of the Cold War and the warming of the planet were together helping to birth a new consciousness, one in which cooperation would triumph over domination, and humility before nature’s complexity would challenge technological hubris.
As governments came together to debate responses to climate change, strong voices from developing countries spoke up, insisting that the core of the problem was the high-consumption lifestyle that dominated in the West. In a speech in 1989, for instance, India’s President R. Venkataraman argued that the global environmental crisis was the result of developed countries’ “excessive consumption of all materials and through large-scale industrialization intended to support their styles of life.”26 If wealthy countries consumed less, then everyone would be safer.
But if that was the way 1989 began, it would end very differently. In the months that followed, popular uprisings would spread across the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc, from Poland to Hungary and finally to East Germany where, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. Under the banner “the End of History,” right-wing ideologues in Washington seized on this moment of global flux to crush all political competition, whether socialism, Keynesianism, or deep ecology. They waged a frontal attack on political experimentation, on the idea that there might be viable ways of organizing societies other than deregulated capitalism.
Within a decade, all that would be left standing would be their own extreme, pro-corporate ideology. Not only would the Western consumer lifestyle survive intact, it would grow significantly more lavish, with U.S. credit card debt per household increasing fourfold between 1980 and 2010.27 Simultaneously, that voracious lifestyle would be exported to the middle and upper classes in every corner of the globe—including, despite earlier protestations, India, where it would wreak environmental damage on a scale difficult to fathom. The victories in the new era would be faster and bigger than almost anyone predicted; and the armies of losers would be left to pick through the ever-growing mountains of methane-spewing waste.
Trade and Climate: Two Solitudes
Throughout this period of rapid change, the climate and trade negotiations closely paralleled one another, each winning landmark agreements within a couple of years of each other. In 1992, governments met for the first United Nations Earth Summit in Rio, where they signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the document that formed the basis for all future climate negotiations. That same year, the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, going into effect two years later. Also in 1994, negotiations establishing the World Trade Organization concluded, and the new global trade body made its debut the next year. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, containing the first binding emission reduction targets. In 2001, China gained full membership in the WTO, the culmination of a trade and investment liberalization process that had begun decades earlier.
What is most remarkable about these parallel processes—trade on the one hand, climate on the other—is the extent to which they functioned as two solitudes. Indeed, each seemed to actively pretend that the other did not exist, ignoring the most glaring questions about how one would impact the other. Like, for example: How would the vastly increased distances that basic goods would now travel—by carbon-spewing container ships and jumbo jets, as well as diesel trucks—impact the carbon emissions that the climate negotiations were aiming to reduce? How would the aggressive protections for technology patents enshrined under the WTO impact the demands being made by developing nations in the climate negotiations for free transfers of green technologies to help them develop on a low-carbon path? And perhaps most critically, how would provisions that allowed private companies to sue national governments over laws that impinged on their profits dissuade governments from adopting tough antipollution regulations, for fear of getting sued?
These questions were not debated by government negotiators, nor was any attempt made to resolve their obvious contradictions. Not that there was ever any question about which side would win should any of the competing pledges to cut emissions and knock down commercial barriers ever come into direct conflict: the commitments made in the climate negotiations all effectively functioned on the honor system, with a weak and unthreatening mechanism to penalize countries that failed to keep their promises. The commitments made under trade agreements, however, were enforced by a dispute settlement system with real teeth, and failure to comply would land governments in trade court, often facing harsh penalties.
In fact, the hierarchy was so clear that the climate negotiators formally declared their subservience to the trading system from the start. When the U.N. climate agreement was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, it made clear that “measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute . . . a disguised restriction on international trade.” (Similar language appears in the Kyoto Protocol.) As Australian political scientist Robyn Eckersley puts it, this was “the pivotal moment that set the shape of the relationship between the climate and trade regimes” because, “Rather than push for the recalibration of the international trade rules to conform with the requirements of climate protection . . . the Parties to the climate regime have ensured that liberalized trade and an expanding global economy have been protected against trade-restrictive climate policies.” This practically guaranteed that the negotiating process would be unable to reckon with the kinds of bold but “trade-restrictive” policy options that could have been coordinated internationally—from buy-local renewable energy programs to restrictions on trade in goods produced with particularly high carbon footprints.28
A few isolated voices were well aware that the modest gains being made in the negotiations over “sustainable development” were being actively unmade by the new trade and investment architecture. One of those voices belonged to Martin Khor, then director of the Third World Network, which has been a key advisor to developing country governments in both trade and climate talks. At the end of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Khor cautioned that there was a “general feeling among Southern country delegates . . . that events outside the [summit] process were threatening to weaken the South further and to endange
r whatever positive elements exist in” the Rio agenda. The examples he cited were the austerity policies being pushed at the time by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the trade negotiations that would soon result in the creation of the WTO.29
Another early warning was sounded by Steven Shrybman, who observed a decade and a half ago that the global export of industrial agriculture had already dealt a devastating blow to any possible progress on emissions. In a paper published in 2000, Shrybman argued that “the globalization of agricultural systems over recent decades is likely to have been one of the most important causes of overall increases in greenhouse gas emissions.”30
This had far less to do with current debates about the “food miles” associated with imported versus local produce than with the way in which the trade system, by granting companies like Monsanto and Cargill their regulatory wish list—from unfettered market access to aggressive patent protection to the maintenance of their rich subsidies—has helped to entrench and expand the energy-intensive, higher-emissions model of industrial agriculture around the world. This, in turn, is a major explanation for why the global food system now accounts for between 19 and 29 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. “Trade policy and rules actually drive climate change in a very structural way in respect of food systems,” Shrybman stressed in an interview.31
The habit of willfully erasing the climate crisis from trade agreements continues to this day: for instance, in early 2014, several negotiating documents for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial new NAFTA-style trade deal spanning twelve countries, were released to the public via WikiLeaks and the Peruvian human rights group RedGE. A draft of the environment chapter had contained language stating that countries “acknowledge climate change as a global concern that requires collective action and recognize the importance of implementation of their respective commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).” The language was vague and nonbinding, but at least it was a tool that governments could use to defend themselves should their climate policies be challenged in a trade tribunal, as Ontario’s plan was. But a later document showed that U.S. negotiators had proposed an edit: take out all the stuff about climate change and UNFCCC commitments. In other words, while trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump climate, under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump trade.32
Nor was it only the trade negotiators who blocked out the climate crisis as they negotiated agreements that would send emissions soaring and make many solutions to this problem illegal. The climate negotiations exhibited their own special form of denial. In the early and mid-1990s, while the first climate protocol was being drafted, these negotiators, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hashed out the details of precisely how countries should measure and monitor how much carbon they were emitting—a necessary process since governments were on the verge of pledging their first round of emission reductions, which would need to be reported and monitored.
The emissions accounting system on which they settled was an odd relic of the pre–free trade era that took absolutely no account of the revolutionary changes unfolding right under their noses regarding how (and where) the world’s goods were being manufactured. For instance, emissions from the transportation of goods across borders—all those container ships, whose traffic has increased by nearly 400 percent over the last twenty years—are not formally attributed to any nation-state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their polluting impact. (And there remains little momentum at the U.N. for changing that, despite the reality that shipping emissions are set to double or even triple by 2050.)33
And fatefully, countries are responsible only for the pollution they create inside their own borders—not for the pollution produced in the manufacturing of goods that are shipped to their shores; those are attributed to the countries where the goods were produced.34 This means that the emissions that went into producing, say, the television in my living room, appear nowhere on Canada’s emissions ledger, but rather are attributed entirely to China’s ledger, because that is where the set was made. And the international emissions from the container ship that carried my TV across the ocean (and then sailed back again) aren’t entered into anyone’s account book.
This deeply flawed system has created a vastly distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions. It has allowed rapidly de-industrializing wealthy states to claim that their emissions have stabilized or even gone down when, in fact, the emissions embedded in their consumption have soared during the free trade era. For instance, in 2011, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while their emissions had stopped growing, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production overseas. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.35
Cheap Labor, Dirty Energy: A Package Deal
As the free trade system was put in place and producing offshore became the rule, emissions did more than move—they multiplied. As mentioned earlier, before the neoliberal era, emissions growth had been slowing, from 4.5 percent annual increases in the 1960s to about 1 percent a year in the 1990s. But the new millennium was a watershed: between 2000 and 2008, the growth rate reached 3.4 percent a year, shooting past the highest IPCC projections of the day. In 2009, it dipped due to the financial crisis, but made up for lost time with the historic 5.9 percent increase in 2010 that left climate watchers reeling. (In mid-2014, two decades after the creation of the WTO, the IPCC finally acknowledged the reality of globalization and noted in its Fifth Assessment Report, “A growing share of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions is released in the manufacture of products that are traded across international borders.”)36
The reason for what Andreas Malm—a Swedish expert on the history of coal—describes as “the early 21st Century emissions explosion” is straightforward enough. When China became the “workshop of the world” it also became the coal-spewing “chimney of the world.” By 2007, China was responsible for two thirds of the annual increase in global emissions. Some of that was the result of China’s own internal development—bringing electricity to rural areas, and building roads. But a lot of it was directly tied to foreign trade: according to one study, between 2002 and 2008, 48 percent of China’s total emissions was related to producing goods for export.37
“One of the reasons why we’re in the climate crisis is because of this model of globalization,” says Margrete Strand Rangnes, executive vice president at Public Citizen, a Washington-based policy institute that has been at the forefront of the fight against free trade. And that, she says, is a problem that requires “a pretty fundamental re-formation of our economy, if we’re going to do this right.”38
International trade deals were only one of the reasons that governments embraced this particular model of fast-and-dirty, export-led development, and every country had its own peculiarities. In many cases (though not China’s), the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were a major factor, so was the economic orthodoxy imparted to elite students at schools like Harvard and the University of Chicago. All of these and other factors played a role in shaping what was (never ironically) referred to as the Washington Consensus. Underneath it all is the constant drive for endless economic growth, a drive that, as will be explored later on, goes much deeper than the trade history of the past few decades. But there is no question that the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a central role in sending emissions into hyperdrive.
That’s because one of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe
in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. It was a journey that passed through Mexico and Central America’s sweatshop maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South Korea. But by the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects—modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams—all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words—and a climate nightmare.
A nightmare because there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions, or as Malm puts it, “a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions.” And why wouldn’t there be? The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce. So when the factories moved to China, they also got markedly dirtier. As Malm points out, Chinese coal use was declining slightly between 1995 and 2000, only for the explosion in manufacturing to send it soaring once again. It’s not that the companies moving their production to China wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.39