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The emergence of the climate

Justice movement and the COP-15
Student: Mark Bergfeld
Course: MA Media, Culture and Society
Supervisor: Sandra Moog













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Abstract
In this paper the author utilizes his own experience as an activist in the climate
justice movement and his participation in the protests, actions and events around
the COP-15 in Copenhagen to analyze to what extent the politics of those involved in
the climate justice movement in the Global North benefit or impede its development.
Hereby, he draws upon Barkers and Tillys definitions and conceptualisations of
social movements. Particular emphasis is given to the fact that social movements
are distinct from organisations yet that organisations play a role within these
movements.

Central to his analysis he critically evaluates to what extent the actors conceptions
of climate justice impact upon their political practices and the wider movement. By
extending his inquiry to NGOs, state actors, autonomists and socialists climate
justice no longer remains an ambiguous term or solely a political discourse but
ultimately finds its expression in the events surrounding Copenhagen.

He looks at the various concepts of climate justice to determine which offers the best
possibility of uniting broad sections of society in a movement against climate
change. The question whether alternative conceptions of climate justice aid in
building a broad and effective movement against climate change in the Global
North is at the centre of his analysis. He concludes that agency must play a role in
building a movement against climate change in the Global North. Trade unions and
the organized working-class can fulfil that role in times of economic and ecological
crises.

The research questions are as follow: 1) To what extent to the politics of those
involved in the climate justice movement in the Global North benefit or impede its
development. 2) To what extent do their conceptions of climate justice impact upon
their political practice and the wider movement? 3) Can alternative conceptions of
climate justice aid in building a broad and effective movement against climate
change in the Global North?


Keywords: climate change, social movements, political sociology


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Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Climate, politics and movements

2. Chapter one: Climate protests in the Global North
a) A popular mobilisation to tackle climate change
b) Copenhagen calling
c) Mobilising for climate justice
d) Teamsters and turtles: together at last?

3. Chapter two: Contesting Climate Justice
a) Climate justice as (re)distribution and development
b) Rights-based climate justice
c) Struggle-based climate justice
d) Time and politicstowards a working concept of climate justice for the Global
North

4. Conclusion: Whither Climate Justice?



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Introduction: Climate, politics and movements
The past two decades has seen the gradual, incremental development of a global
movement against climate change. At various points the process has proceeded more
quickly than at others. But the single biggest period of growth was unquestionably
during the run-up to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference,
commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, which included the 15
th
Conference of
the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC).
The UNFCCC process, which is intended to reach an agreement on reducing carbon
emissions and limiting or halting global warming, has occurred against the backdrop
of a sharp increase in carbon emissions and global temperature. The process is not
working. However, the movement against climate change has been unable to
capitalise on its failure and take the issue of climate change out of respectable
politics and into the realm of social transformation (Gough and Schackley 2001:
339).
In 2009, as COP15 approached, the various wings of the climate movement were able
to mobilise huge numbers of people into campaigning, protesting, letter writing and
many other activities to call on world leaders to bring a halt to the increase in carbon
emissions. But COP15 ended with no binding targets.
I do not want to explore the science of climate change in any great detail in this
dissertation other than where it pertains directly to the questions I am addressing.
Rather, I will explore how the various strands of the climate movement contributed
to the mobilisations and how their political standpoint influenced those
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mobilisations. In doing so, I hope to try to clarify how politics is important to the way
in which we mobilisenot simply in terms of numbers, but in terms of how the
demands put forward, and how those demands connect to the lived experience of
ordinary people, plays a big role in the development of the movement. This is
particularly clear in connection with our understanding of climate justicea major
rallying call at COP15, but a highly contested concept.
In doing so, I hope to show how the successes and failures of the movement can be
built upon to develop a conception of climate justice which can unite a clear
understanding of the need to build a political movement with a strategic vision of
how that movement can achieve its goals.
In order to discuss this, it is necessary to briefly clarify what is meant by a
movement. I wish to take up the conception offered by Colin Barker, following
Marx, that a movement is defined by the following key points:
1) The emergence of movements is a collective achievement. In some
conditions, forms of resistance to oppression and exploitation remain largely
individual By contrast, a movement entails some form of mutual
organization, implying the formation of not just collective identities but
collective projects. A movements emergence transcends atomized ways of
coping with problems engendered by capitalisms workings.
2) Social movements are distinguished from some other forms of collective
organization by their characteristic organizational shape. They arenetwork-
like entities Its perhaps easier to define a movement by what it isnt:
movements are not the same as organisations, although organisations may be
part of them.
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3) Movements are also simultaneously fields of argument. What is the
movements meaning and purpose? What situation is it seeking to maintain or
change? How are its boundaries defined? Who are its opponents, and why and
how are they organized? How should the movement define and how pursue its
objectives? What strategies, tactics, repertoires of collective activity should it
deploy? How should it respond to specific events and crises? All these and
other matters are open to ongoing contestation and debate among a
movements varied adherents.
4) Participation in such arguments is not restricted to movement adherents. A
movements opponents have good reasons to try to influence how it interprets
and seeks to change the world (Barker, 2011).
Movements, then, are organised networks that seek to alter the world around them
through some form of collective action. But they are heterogeneous formations,
within which debates about strategy and tactics (in Tillys formulation, the
Repertoire of Contention) constantly occur. And they are constantly under the
influence of outside forcesthose with which they find themselves in contention.
With this in mind, it is possible to understand the various strategies, political
standpoints and mobilising aims of the various actors within the disparate climate
movementfrom lobbyists and large non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the
right wing (often very close or even part of the ruling class structures of the state)
through to the more radical NGOs of the centre ground and the left wing, consisting
of socialists, anarchists, autonomists and others who would loosely consider
themselves revolutionaries. All these forces have acted, sometimes working
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together, sometimes against each other for many years to develop the climate
movement, as it exists today.











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Chapter one: Climate protests in the Global North
The enormous global mobilisations against climate change that occurred in the run
up to the COP15 summit represent the high point of the movement against climate
change so far. But the content of the demonstrations varied greatly from country to
country. In this chapter, I wish to contrast the nature of the mobilsations in London
and Copenhagen. Specifically, I wish to explore: 1) how did the desire of the
organisers of London protest to keep their aims well within the realms of
establishment politics prevented the widespread articulation of a radical alternative;
2) how the more radical intentions of the many of those involved in organising the
Danish protests opened up a space for much more radical demands and methods to
be articulated, and; 3) how can the successes and failures inherent in both these
approaches might inform the development of the climate movement in the future.

A popular mobilisation to tackle climate change
On December 5, 2009 the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition (SCC) held The Wave
demonstration in Central London, attracting between 50,000 and 100,000 people. It
was loud and lively, with people chanting songs and slogans. Many had brought their
own placards and banners along. Only a year earlier the annual demonstration
against climate change had been attended by less than 10,000 people. During The
Wave the streets between Hyde Park and Parliament Square turned into a sea of
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blue as protestors followed the call from SCC to wear blue clothing. Many had even
painted their faces blue.
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Unlike the major anti-war demonstrations which had filled the streets in London in
2002 and 2003 The Wave had no closing rally with speeches by political and
cultural figures. Instead, the demonstration was supposed to end with the people
surrounding parliament and creating a huge Mexican La Ola wave to symbolise the
flooding of Parliament which could occur if no deal were reached at the Fifteenth
Conference of the Parties to the UN (COP15) talks in Copenhagen the following week.
In fact, The Wave never took place. The organisers packed up their equipment
before the tens of thousands protestorsmainly family with childrenarrived at
Parliament Square. People kept pouring into Parliament Square for hours to come,
only to keep marching and make their ways in smaller blocs to the other side of the
River Thames and into the side streets of Whitehall.
This did not mean that the demonstration was devoid of politics. In the run-up to the
COP15 talks the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition demanded that the world leaders to
take urgent action to secure a fair international deal to stop global warming
exceeding the danger threshold of 2 degrees Celsius and called for a green
economy with the creation of jobs (SCC, 2009). The demonstration was led by then-

1
From the beginning of November Essex University Students Union was already holding organising and
mobilising meetings and even called its very own Wave demonstration on campus, attracting students who had
never engaged in campus activism. At the local level there had neither been any (grassroots) environmental
network nor any explicit climate change group. The Students Union had an Ethics and Environment Officer who
previously only took care of recycling matters on campus but never had been part of building the movement.
However, it was the Students Union which pushed the mobilisation and paid for the transport. Thus a Students
Union with a previous record of campaigning and activism rooted in anti-fascist and anti-war work now could
easily employ its resources to mobilise for The Wave demonstration. Not only did the Students Union put on
transport for students to attend the demonstration it also sponsored my journey to Copenhagen in order to bring
the experiences back onto campus. The group of protestors I accompanied throughout the demonstration were
part of the Essex Students Union. Before The Wave they had joined the Campaign Against Climate Change rally
and feeder march to demonstration.
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Minister for Climate Change and Energy Ed Miliband, who had called for a popular
mobilization to tackle climate change (Porter in Daily Telegraph, 2008).
But crucially, these demands were not articulated on the protest itself. It was left to
the intervention of relatively small organisations of the radical left to raise political
demands in order to relate politically to the demonstrators. The large mainstream
NGOs, with a total membership base of 11 million in the UK, had followed-up
Milibands call but the demonstration was effectively rallying support and
cheerleading for the UK government and the worlds leaders to sign a deal at COP15.
Since the late 1990s mainstream NGOs have been mobilising people, in particular
their members and subscribers, onto the streets before major summits of the G8,
World Trade Organisation or, most recently, the COP15 talks. Most famously, in
2005 the NGO coalition Make Poverty History (MPH)
2
spearheaded by Oxfam
mobilised thousands for the G8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. In the run-up to the
demonstrations many activists and more radical NGOs were angered at Oxfams
close ties to the government and the decision to disband MPH after the
demonstration despite the fact that poverty was demonstrably not history and that
governments subsequently failed to live up to their pledges.
3
At The Wave history
repeated itself.
As Colin Barker has argued, social movements do not only challenge capitalism and
the status quo. They can also accommodate to and be incorporated into it: The
movement form is capable of overthrowing capitalism, but is equally capable of

2
Ashok Sinha, the main organiser of Make Poverty History, was also a leading organiser of The Wave
demonstration.
3
Justin Forsyth Oxfams former Director of policy and Campaigns went on to become Tony Blairs special adviser
on International Development; Shriti Vadera, an economic adviser to Gordon Brown, has been central to the
development of public-private partnerships and is on the Oxfam board of trustees. John Clark, another former
campaigns manager at the charity, left Oxfam for the World Bank and has advised Tony Blair on Africa. When
Oxfam interviewed candidates for Forsyth's replacement, half those on the interview panel were advisers to New
Labour ministers.
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accommodating to it, or re-fashioning the status quo without undermining its
fundamentals. This is as true of trade unionism as of ecological movements,
feminism, gay liberation or national liberationor indeed neoliberalism (Barker,
2006: 21). The close ties between SCC and Ed Miliband should not come as a
surprise.
The different organisations within SCC emphasized their support for different world
leaders. Christian Aid, for example, mobilised 4,000 of its members to The Wave
demonstration. They targeted Douglas Alexander, then Secretary of State for
International Development, who in return promised Christian Aid members that he
would be fighting for an ambitious deal that works for the worlds poorest people
(Christian Aid, 2009). Members of Christian Aid did not see themselves as protesting
against world leaders inability to take any responsibility for the climate crisis or the
ineffective UNFCCC process: they demonstrated on behalf of those people in the
developing countries who do not have a political voice and those people whose voices
are marginalised by the media. The parallels with MPH are again made plain:
representing a supposedly dispossessed and powerless population overseas while
explicitly rallying support for the government and their international development
schemes.
Greenpeace and its members, who usually engage in a form of militant lobbying,
rallied and marched in support of US President Barack Obama. Unlike his
predecessor George W Bush who had refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol and is
directly associated with the oil corporations, Obama represented a sea change within
the UNFCCC process. Promising the creation of 600,000 green jobs during his
election campaign, he represented those ruling class circles and people in the US who
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were interested in moving beyond coal and oil into an era of green capitalism such
as Milton Friedman, who argued in 2008 that [m]aking America the worlds
greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or nave moral indulgence. It is now a
core national security and economic interest. (Friedman 2008:23). After the huge
demonstration in London, the Greenpeace blog read: My spirit lifted Saturday
morning when I saw the news that Obama has committed to attending the final days
of the Copenhagen conference and it just got better from there. (Greenpeace, 2009)
The numbers at The Wave clearly showed that the large environmental and
developmental NGOs were following a more activist strategy in the run-up to
Copenhagen. Pusey and Russell go as far as to argue that these groups and the UK
government have jumped on the social movement bandwagon (Pusey and Russell,
2010). But successful social movements require a development of a discourse that
identifies both a common identitythe usand the target of the protestthe
otherat a transnational level (Della Porta, 2007: 7).
Far from polarising the discourse between an ineffectual ruling class and a wider
movement against climate change, the organisers of The Wave protest sought to
incorporate the energy of those concerned by climate change into the official
structures of the negotiations and thereby neuter them. The protest sought not to
articulate an alternative strategy for dealing with the climate crisis, but rather to
legitimate the UNFCCC process.
4


4
The UNFCCC process has now existed for nearly twenty years. During that time carbon emissions have
rocketed. The only conclusion is that it is an ecologically ineffective institution that cannot tackle the climate crisis.
NGOs though continue to argue that without their involvement the climate would be in a far worse situation.
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However much The Wave dwarfed previous climate mobilisations in the UK and the
rest of the Global North, it would be incorrect to argue that the demonstration
represented a break with the lobbying tactic and a turn to collective action.
It was not the first time that NGOs claimed to represent a wider social movement
from the inside by sitting at tables with decision-makers behind closed doors and
actively upholding the hegemony of a transnational institutions. At the annual
meeting of the IMF/World Bank in Prague in September 2000, the same NGOs that
had been part of the emergent anti-capitalist movement started to engage in dialogue
with the World Bank and IMF over reform proposals despite the fact that the
majority of the anti-capitalist movement believed that these institutions were
anything but legitimate (Callinicos 2003: 86).
Unlike many actors within social movements who occupy antagonistic positions to
institutions such as the World Bank and IMF (or even the UNFCCC process itself),
NGOs strategically seek dialogue and will engage with decision-makers in
conflictual co-operation (Walk and Brunngrber 2000:276). NGOs are structured
like private business enterprises without any democratic leadership and are
dependent either on state funding or large private donations (or both), so they must
always be able to showcase their successes and keep their donors satisfied.
However, social movements are not simply made up of NGOs and their members.
They are popular and heterogeneous responses to exploitation and oppression. The
Wave demonstration was an expression of a deep feeling that large numbers of
people in the Global North and the UK want to do something about climate change.
But these people moving into action, many for the first time, understandably looked
towards the existing structures of climate activism in order to articulate their hopes.
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This meant that, when the COP15 process was revealed as a massive capitulation, the
movement was left disoriented.
In January 2010, when it had become clear that COP15 had failed, the Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which had mobilised thousands of its members
and subscribers to London for December 5, started targeting decision-makers with
personalized letters to maintain pressure to drive the international negotiation
process forward rather than increasing its efforts of mobilising people onto the
streets.
5

The repertoire of contention (Tilly and Tarrow, 2006) employed by NGOs displays
a process of de-mobilization, turning away from a serious engagement with climate
politics. Having rallied support for the worlds leaders such as Gordon Brown, Ed
Miliband or Barack Obama, the NGOs were unable to deal with the failure of the
COP15 talks to agree binding reductions in carbon emissions and, in turn, the mass
of their supporters were left demoralised at the possibility of action to tackle climate
change. As De Lucia writes:
Their demands are watered down and re-oriented so that discontent is absorbed
and kept within the framework of action, providing the hegemonic social group
with a mechanism to manage the demands of dissent and to transform
potential resistance: by adhering to some of the demands in some diluted form,
it draws these groups within its bloc (De Lucia, 2009: 237).
In fact, the deal which was reached at Copenhagen failed even to secure demands in a
diluted form. As Jonathan Neale argues:

5
Personal e-mail discussion with Richard Budden, member of staff for RSPB
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In the Kyoto agreement all the countries had together negotiated by how much
each would have to reduce its emissions. In the Copenhagen accord, each
country will volunteer whatever figure it chooses for reductions to the UN by 31
January 2010. There had been a long debate about whether there would be
legally binding targets after 2012, or just politically binding targets for
emission reductions. In the accord there is nothing binding at all
Within two months the scale of the damage was clear. By 31 January 55
countries, responsible for 78 percent of global emissions, had sent in their
proposed cuts to the UN and in effect signed up for the Copenhagen accord.
This meant the international negotiation process had been badly damaged, and
perhaps smashed. Most of the governments of the rich countries, however,
added that they would only meet their promised levels of emissions cuts if there
was an internationally agreed binding treaty. Because Copenhagen was
precisely not that, they meant they would not meet the promised cuts (Neale,
2010: 42, 43).
In the wake of the Copenhagen accord, the SCC coalition was disbanded. But this did
not lead to the supporters of SCC drawing more radical conclusions. The annual
climate camp, an event organised by autonomists and anarchists as a radical, direct
action base, attracted less than 400 activists, far less than in previous years. Since the
NGOs had abandoned the field of battle, it was left to the smaller, radical wing of the
climate movement in Britain, to organise the annual demonstration. The Campaign
against Climate Change demonstration in December 2010 attracted less than 3,000
people. Clearly, there had been a massive drop in engagement with collective action
around climate chang
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Copenhagen Calling
Historically, there has been a sharp contrast between the nature of climate protest in
the developed and developing worlds. In the Global South large protests for climate
justice often went hand in hand with the anti-capitalist movement. Behind this lay
two important factors: 1) the implantation of the trade union movements and NGOs
within civil society was far less advanced than in the developed states, requiring
larger and more frequent mobilisations to ensure their legitimacy was recognised by
the state, and; 2) the developing nations were not only in geographical regions more
prone to the destabilising effects of climate change, but their underdevelopment left
them less able to deal with these changes than the countries of the Global North.
So, on 28 October 2002, thousands of activists marched for climate justice in the
streets of New Dehli, India, during the COP8 talks. Fishers, farmers, their respective
unions and indigenous peoples affirmed that climate change is a justice issue. They
issued a statement promising to build alliances across states and bordersrejecting
the market-based principles that guide the current negotiations to solve the climate
crisis: Our World is Not for sale! (Roberts, 2009: 386).
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At the COP6 talks in 2000 at The Hague, Netherlands, the picture was very different.
Friends of the Earth supporters built a giant dyke from sandbags decorated with
letters from their supporters. The chairman of the COP6 meeting as well as many
other prominent political leaders publicly came to the protest and gave their
support to this direct action (Gough and Shackley 2001: 339).

6
At the COP6 in Den Haag (2000) there was no demonstration. There was, however, a Climate Justice Summit,
which offered a critique of the market-based solutions to tackle the climate crisis.
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At the COP14 in 2008 in Poznan, Poland, around 1500 protestors came together to
demonstrate for climate justice. Whilst the notion of climate justice had gained
traction within the UNFCCC negotiations themselves since COP13 in Bali in 2007
and the creation of Climate Justice Now! (CJN),
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mobilisations for climate justice
had as yet remained small and isolated.
The Planet FirstPeople First demonstration on 12 December 2009 was to change
this. Some 538 organisations, 160 of them Danish and hailing from 67 countries in
total, supported the demonstration.
8
Organisers were optimistic and expected
40,000 people to answer the call to demonstrate for a fair, ambitious and binding
deal. On the day, 100,000 people turned up in Christiansborg in central
Copenhagen to march ten kilometres to the Bella Centre, where speakers from
different campaigns, organisations, and struggles made their voices heard. As Neale
describes it,
The march was long, loud, cold, bouncy and energetic, about half Danes and
half foreigners. No one had expected 100,000. For most of the activists
gathered from around the world, this was by far the largest climate
demonstration they had ever seen. It mobilized way beyond the ranks of the
environmentalists. There are only two million people in metropolitan
Copenhagen and this was the largest demo in Denmark for 30 years (Neale,
2010: 48).
The confines of the nation-state and locality which had dominated most
environmental movements for so long were being left behind (Della Porta, 2005: 28).

7
Gerlach and Hinde illuminate how movements organise themselves as a net, network or what they call
reticulate. The core of the movement consists in nodal points within the network. These nodal points are
constituted of activists, many of whom belong to more than just one organisation, campaign or network.
8
See website http://12dec09.dk/content/english for full list of supporters.
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It illuminated that people in the Global North who were not immediately affected by
climate change could be mobilised in large numbers for climate justice. This was a
direct response to the perceived deficiencies within the UNFCCC process and the
NGOs top-down strategy of lobbying and advocacy.
This was not a simply a red demonstration in which trade unionists, communists,
socialists and other anti-capitalists took it to the street. There was no minimal
consensusa pluralistic, but effective political, concretely anti-neoliberal
consensuson what the target or who the enemies were (Passasakis & Mller,
2010). From the outside it was difficult to differentiate whether some on the protest
were merely rallying support for the worlds leaders like The Wave had been or
whether it indeed did constitute an antagonistic position. Placards reading Blah,
blah, blah, Act now! and There is no Planet B blurred the positions to the media
and the outside world.
But the majority of the demonstration though did not come to cheerlead the worlds
leaders. Unlike at The Wave, anti-capitalists, the radical left and critical NGOs had
formed a bloc called System Change not Climate Change. This bloc was the largest
one on the demonstration and had been organised by the critical NGOs of CJN and
the direct action network Climate Justice Action (CJA).
9
The slogan meant that the
bloc was united around a critique of climate change as the product of capitalism and
the current socio-economic order.
Here, protestors explicitly rejected green capitalism and market-based solutions for
tackling the climate crisis with their banners, chants and slogans. Autonomous
groups and anarchists who had joined the demonstration tried to form a black bloc

9
The decision was taken at a CJN strategy meeting in mid-2009 in Bangkok. In an article that I wrote for the
German journal Marx21 I called the demonstration anti-capitalist carnival (Bergfeld, 2010b).
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which ended with 900 people being arrested and thousands having to sit on cold
concrete in sub-zero temperatures.
10

The slogan System Change not Climate Change drew upon the anger that people
felt over both the ecological and economic crises. It is exactly for the reason that the
anti-capitalists, the critical NGOs and the radical left with its broad church slogan
managed to have an impact on the demonstration and actions around the COP15 and
within the Bella Centre itself, when Hugo Chavez very clearly aligned himself with
the social movements and the sentiments of the slogan by inverting the slogan to
Change the system not the Climate in one of his speeches to the UNFCCC. This
clearly showed that the anti-capitalists and radical left had managed to politicise the
COP15 negotiations in an unprecedented way. This was confirmed a week later when
the Klimaforum Declaration, to which more than 50,000 people had contributed,
reaffirmed that commitment.
Colin Barker has argued that: Movements represent a kind of collective focusing of
attention and energy on transforming, more or less, the parameters of a specific
question, in opposition to other forces: dominant or subaltern classes, parties,
movements, states etc (Barker 2006: 15). CJN and CJA were successful insofar as
they reconfigured climate politics as a whole. To argue that [the] problem was the
sheer diversity of political sentiments encapsulated by the banner system change not
climate changesuch a broad church is arguably too simplistic to articulate and
communicate the multitude of perspectives (Apocalypse Anonymous, 2010),

10
For a very good account of the police repression in Copenhagen during COP15, see Rovics, 2010. Despite its
theoretical shortcomings regarding why the police engaged in disproportionate measures, it gives an insight to
how tense the atmosphere was. I was myself stopped and searched by the police at least ten times. At the
German-Danish border, the Campaign against Climate Changes coach was held for more than five hours.
Rovics writes: People were handcuffed in uncomfortable positions for many hours on the frozen pavements, not
allowed to move, not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants, which added to the danger
posed by the freezing temperatures. Elderly people were arrested along with teenagers. (Rovics 2010: 6)
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discounts the very fact that the slogan did connect with a wide layer of activists who
had come to Copenhagen. The climate justice movement succeeded in building a
strong foundation to in order to build a broad movement with a minimal consensus
around the slogan. It leaves the necessary room for interpretation and imagination
which can draw different organisations together in a loose way thus exploiting the
political opportunity that Copenhagen presented. Whether organisations mean an
energy system beyond fossil fuel production or a working class revolution, the slogan
encapsulated both without making unity on the question of reform or revolution
binding upon affiliates.
11

Social movements are always heterogeneous, full of debate and also an arena of class
struggle. The climate justice movement may claim to want to change the system but
not necessarily have a programme on how to do this. Yet actions and movement
institutions such as Klimaforum, Climate Camp, squats, Peoples Assemblies et al
provide the basic framework for the constitution of a new society. The collective
action and repertoire of contention displayed by the movement stood in stark
contrast to the action of the worlds leaders in the Bella Centre where the
negotiations were happening. However, these actions and events did not rise from
nowherethey involved co-ordination and coalition building, paying attention to
pre-existing social ties, mobilising structures and social networks.
In 2007, when the COP13 in Bali failed, a group of critical NGOs formed a loose
network under the banner of Climate Justice Now. This was where global justice
activists and radical environmentalists first came together. One could argue that this

11
The discussion of reform versus revolution appears in every movement. Whether it was the split between the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1903; the famous debate between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein or
even the collapse of the Second International. In recent years and movements the debate has come up again
and the problems are similar to those that presented themselves a hundred years ago. Movements can deal with
a tension between reformists and revolutionaries. For a tactical discussion, see Trotsky, 1922.
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new coalition simply arose out of the anti-capitalist movement and directed its
energies to the field of climate politics. Patrick Bond however argues that CJN has
not simply involved the rebranding of existing radical networks but rather
constitutes a new transnational red-green movement. He goes on to say that it will
necessarily be anti-capitalist if it addresses the problem with the seriousness
required (Bond 2010: 24).
12

Indeed, CJN constitutes a new network, but old networks and movement institutions
such as the World Social Forum were used to educate activists about climate justice
and mobilise for Copenhagen. The World Social Forum in Belem in 2009 constituted
an important stepping-stone in that direction when activists drafted the Belem
Declaration for Climate Justice.
13
CJN writes:
Our demonstration [could] mobilise more than 100, 000 people in Denmark to
press for climate justice, while social movements around the world mobilised
hundreds of thousands more in local climate justice demonstrationsThe
movement for system change not climate change is now stronger than when we
arrived in Denmark Copenhagen will be remembered as an historic event for
global social movements. It will be remembered, along with Seattle and Cancun,
as a critical moment when the diverse agendas of many social movements
coalesced and became stronger, asking in one voice for system change, not

12
Bond is right to say that the climate movement necessarily needs to be anti-capitalist. Yet there are many
variants of anti-capitalism. For a good account of the different anti-capitalisms present in the movement see
Callinicos, 2003.
13
New movements should not be viewed in isolation from previous social movementsthey must always be
seen as inheriting the history of struggles that preceded it. Just as the 1905 revolution in Russia and its
establishment of Soviets (workers councils) laid a blueprint for the seizure of the factories in 1917, social
movements today use many of the same democratic institutions which were born in struggle during previous
rounds of mobilisation.
22

climate change We will take our struggle forward not just in climate talks, but
on the ground and in the streets, to promote genuine solutions (CJN, 2009).
14
















14
The idea of a cycle of protest which is invoked here first appears in Tarrows work 1989. In this view protests
come in waves, with peaks and lows. Interactions between different aspects within a movement intensify or
decay. A description of what this means in practice can found in Rosa Luxemburgs The Mass Strike (1906) in
relation to the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.
23

Mobilising for climate justice
Whether Press TV or CNN,
15
media attention began to focus on the Reclaim Power
Demonstration on 16 December which was aimed at bringing together delegates from
within the Bella Centre with protestors in a Peoples Assembly aimed at
delegitimising the UNFCCC process. Strategically, the demonstration aimed to set a
totally different agenda and kick-start the new movement. Protestors would enter
the conference area and disrupt the summit sessions. Delegates on the inside would
lead a mass walk-out from the summit so the Peoples Assembly could take place
with everyone together.
16

In the early hours of the morning protestors assembled at Tarnby train station south
of the Bella Centre to join one of the four blocs. Around 3,000 protestors had come
to join the blue bloc, which would follow the police pre-approved route.
17
A broad
spectrum of groups were involved in the bloc: Ya Basta, Jubilee South, Via
Campesina, and other NGOs organised in CJN, as well as different political parties
such as Grne Jugend Deutschland or the British Socialist Workers Party.
Demonstrators quickly organised human chains around the demonstration out of
fear that the police would infiltrate the demonstration and provoke violence. As the
speaker wagon started to shout that the police should stop the provocation when the
police closed in on the demonstration caused people to drift away as they were scared
of being arrested. Many Danish people had stayed away from the demonstration due
to the heavy-handedness of the police in the days prior to the event. It soon became

15
CNN wrote on its page A vast and influential network known as Climate Justice Action (CJA) are also
coordinating what is probably the most hotly-anticipated action of the week (CNN, 2009).
16
Tadzio Mller outlined this strategy at the CJA meeting in Christiania.
17
Diversity of tactics is one of the organising principles of the demonstration. Protestors had organised a bicycle
bloc that was confiscated by the police during the night. There was the green bloc, which organised in small
affinity groups and would go its own way and enter the Bella Centre.
24

very clear that there was no possibility of the demonstration succeeding in entering
the Bella Centre. It also became very clear that the numbers had dropped
significantly since the 100,000 strong protest to just a few thousand.
Sudden splits had emerged between the worlds leaders, but the NGOs could not
resolve their own contradictions: 1) that of being socially closer to the decision-
makers than to grassroots activists (Walk and Brunngrber, 2000: 165), and; 2)
between their own radicalisation while being subject to an active programme by
neo-liberal governments and international agencies to shape NGOs to their own
ends (Nineham, 2006). The day before Obama arrived, 80 percent of all NGOs,
including the Friends of the Earth International delegation, had been excluded from
the negotiations. As President Connie Heedegard stood down as the chair of COP15,
the rifts within the Bella Centre led to complete breakdown.
Whilst protestors were being batoned, tear gased and and pepper sprayed outside of
the Bella Center delegates led by the Bolivian government,
18
as well as NGOs
organised in CJN, were starting to disrupt the sessions on the inside.
19
Delegates
wanted to join the protest from the inside had been threatened with arrest. However,
around 200 delegates led by the Bolivian delegation to the UN were waiting for the
protestors to get to them. When they tried to march across the bridge they were
batoned. Six police vans and two rows of police in riot gear separated protestors from
the delegates.
This new relationship between social movements, NGOs and progressive
governments, between the inside and outside, was aptly called diagonalism. Unlike

18
People from the Navajo nation in Arizona, Rainforest Action Group participated. Joshua Kahn Russell on
Democracy Now!: Once we got outside there was this beautiful North-South alliance of people who from the
inside felt silenced just as delegates all week felt silenced and came outside together to join the peoples
assembly. A coming together of social movements, a beautiful coming together.
19
Naomi Klein told the Guardian: Its a symbolic moment for people to turn their backs on the negotiations.
25

its predecessor horizontalism (which was common use in the anti-capitalist
movement and excluded parties which pursued a strategy in contradistinction to
other groups participating in the movement, thus contesting for hegemony within the
movement), political parties, progressive governments and hierarchical NGOs now
have started to participate in acts of civil disobedience and movement institutions in
an organised fashion. Only ten years ago this would have been unimaginable as all
governments subscribed (or were forced to subscribe) to neoliberalism. Further,
activists shied away from political parties and other hierarchical organisations as
these often co-opted social movements for their own electoral success. At Reclaim
Power, though, NGOs and revolutionaries were taking baton-hits and twittering
about it alongside each other. Traditionally the one knows their shit, the other knows
their gut, the one accepts reform, the other pushes for deeper change (Evans, 2010).
Diagonalism, however, is not without pitfalls. Heller and Robbe, both activists with
Friends of the Earth International, describe the difficulties presented by trying to get
a highly and centrally structured NGO, which forms coalitions in open dialogue with
different actors, to commit to an action with autonomous affinity groups. In fact
many of the Southern Friends of the Earth International activists could not make
sense of a network which no longer fits the body of a NGO, but is not yet a
movement Copenhagen itself forced us to make decisions as to which way we
would jump (Heller and Robbe, 2010).
One of the fears amongst activists from an anti-authoritarian and NGO background
is that diagonalism will end in the movement being either co-opted by a state (i.e.
Bolivia) or a political party. These fears are legitimate and need to be addressed.
26

The Reclaim Power demonstration though took place at a time when progressive
governments like the Bolivian and Venezuelan government had been brought to
power by social movements. European parties of the radical left like Die Linke, Bloco
Esquerda and Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste were born out of the first cycle or
proteststhe anti-capitalist and anti-war movement . These are parties that want to
see the destruction of the existing form of political and economic power and the
replacement of direct power by subaltern classes. The success of the movement will
to a part depend on the parties proposals within the movement.
Despite many protestors having been tear gassed, scared off and having left due to
the heavy handedness of the police the Peoples Assembly took place in freezing
temperatures outside the Bella Centre. Climate Camp activists alongside Philippine
fishermen were putting their solutions to tackle the climate crisis forward.
The Peoples Assembly was small, with only about 200 people participating. Yet as
the talks had broken down the peoples assembly represented a coming together of
forces from Global North and South which reject both green capitalism as well as
fossilistic capitalism. Neither would serve the interests of the vast majority of
people on the planet and would rather entrench neo-liberalism. This was not the
first time that NGOs and horizontal activist movements, and their different and
common roles, aspirations and strategies have met. It will not be the last (Heller and
Robbe, 2010).



27

Teamsters and turtlestogether at last?
On 30 November 1999 a new grassroots coalition of environmental and anti-
sweatshop activists, anarchists, and trade unionists took the worlds stage with mass
protests targeting the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Summit in the city of
Seattle. Due to internal divisions on the inside and street occupations, blockades and
direct action on the outside, the WTO was shut down successfullya highly visible
display of resistance to neoliberalism that marked the birth of the anti-capitalist
movement in the Global North. The strength of the protest derived from the coming
together of the activist left with organised workers the so-called turtles and
teamsters alliance.
The Reclaim Power action in Copenhagen stood in the tradition of the Battle of
Seattle. Lisa Fithian who had coordinated the actions ten years earlier had come to
Copenhagen. Michael Hardt, whose book Empire gained massive prominence within
the anti-capitalist movement, was stressing the importance of the struggle for climate
justice and pushing his new book Commonwealth at a CJA mass meeting in
Christiania. Last but not least, Naomi Klein had created a massive resonance with
her article published a week earlier:
There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the huge
range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and
the developing country governments ready to bring activists demands into the
summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over. It feels like, instead, as
though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that
builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes (Klein,
2009).
28

Yet the Reclaim Power action attracted just 3,000 people, and around 200 people
participated in the Peoples Assembly. This was partly due to the fact that the
demonstration was on a workday in the early hours of the morning and people need
to work. Secondly, police repression was going from bad to worse as the final days of
COP15 approached. Yet, there is another reason, one that is central to the debates
happening within CJA and Climate Camp. Yet in Copenhagen at the CJA meeting it
seemed of little relevance to the majority of people when I intervened and asked
Michael Hardt: One slogan comes to mind when one thinks of Seattle: Teamsters
and turtlestogether at last! However, at no single point did teamsters or trade
unionists participate in the actions or play a role in CJA. I see loads of turtles. But
where are the teamsters?
The breakdown of the COP15 talks made it clear that lobbying and expert work had
become obsolete. NGOs were no longer able to work toward their aims as they had
done for the last 15 years. Despite failing to break down the barriers and delegitimise
the UNFCCC process, the Reclaim Power demonstration was a qualified success. It
had politicised events an unprecedented fashion, something that would have been
unimaginable at The Hague, Bali or Poznan. This was heightened by the subsequent
failure of the talks to agree to binding emissions reductions. As Mller argued,
These are precisely the situations where radical social movements have the
greatest capacity to act and make history, when the usual problem-solving
approaches (these days: create a market around it, or repress it) dont seem to
provide any believable way of dealing with something that is perceived as a
problem (Mller 2008).
29

The usual problem-solving had shown to be anything but legitimateyet the radical
social movements did not make process history. And therein lies the nub of the
problem. We can see from the case of The Wave demonstration that situations in
which a movement is co-opted by the dominant class, it is unable to make any
significant headway in politicising the issue which it is seeking to influence. In
Copenhagen, where an alliance of the radical left with the more radical NGOs was
able to hegemonise the protests, they were successful in politicising the process. But
they were still limited by their inability to exercise real class power.
In order to delegitimise the UNFCCC process, the balance of class forces within the
nation-states of the Global North (those who refuse to commit to deeper emission
cuts and assert their hegemony within the process) would have to radically change.
Symbolic actions like those at Copenhagen cannot hope to break down the hegemony
of a system which has been driving market-based solutions for nearly 15 years and
continues to be legitimised by the large well-funded NGOs and even the poorer
states. The process has continuously absorbed the voices of the subaltern classes into
civil society. The UN has taken it so far as to officially recognizing the radical NGO
network CJN. This meant that CJN had more than 50% of the accredited NGO
delegates.
For action that is more than merely symbolic, it must target the levers of power and,
by extension, of production. Within the capitalist system, it is the ability of
collectively organised workers to withdraw their labour and turn off the taps of profit
that give them their collective power. That is why the coming together of teamsters
and turtles at Seattle was of such significance. That protest did not come out of the
blue but involved serious coalition building for several years. It would be unfair to
30

reproach CJA for being unwilling to build coalitions, as even at their planning
meetings a few trade unionists had come along.
But there are a number of key problems that limit the ability of the climate
movement to involve wider layers of workers and trade unionists in their movement.
Many of these are related to the organising tacticstime consuming consensus
decision-making and an abstract commitment to non-hierarchical forms, for
example (these ideas are prevalent in the autonomist movement and are not
exclusive to climate activism and need not concern us here, but see Callinicos, 2003,
for a critique).
The two specific problems specific to the climate movement are the those of
individual solutions to climate change and the related prevalence of degrowth as
an economic strategy among many radical climate activists. Degrowth activists
advocate the downscaling of production and consumption, since they argue that
economic development has not only reached its ecological limits but rather has
passed them already. In that sense, climate justice means that the rich countries
should ratchet back our growth and clear some space for those who need it
(Ellwood, 2010: 5,6).
Some proponents of de-growth like New Internationalist writer Zoe Cormier argue
Workers of the world, relax. Cormier asks what seems like a perfectly reasonable
question: since productivity has risen, so why not share those productivity gains in
the form of less work? (Cormier, 2010). However, calling for less work at a time
when the advanced capitalist states are pursuing a strategy of generalised austerity
cuts to jobs in services in order to pay for the costs of the economic crisis. As Neale
argues,
31

in the current economic crisis there is a strong argument coming from the top
of society that everywhere people will have to sacrifice living standards, jobs
and public services because we are in debt. Many people are already making
sacrifices, and some in the poorest countries are making the ultimate sacrifice.
If environmentalists and climate activists join our voices to these calls, we will
be rejected
the loudest voices we hear proclaim the ruling class consensus that serious
sacrifice by ordinary people is the only way to rescue the world economy. These
voices are all louder than the Marxists and autonomists. They condition what
people hear when you talk about growth. (Neale, 2010: 56-58).
This was summed up succinctly by a Belgian trade unionist who had come to the
climate justice demonstration in Bonn with 40 of his comrades in June 2010 when he
said: we need an anti-capitalist answer to the climate crisis but not one built off the
sweat of workers like some in our movement demand (Bergfeld, 2010b).
The climate justice movement cannot contribute to an emancipatory political project
in the Global North if it aligns itself with the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel
and David Cameron who are calling for workers to sacrifice. We must therefore
consider concretely what climate justice is, and what kind of demand can
contribute to building the kind of movement that can build a broad and effective
movement against climate change.



32

Chapter two: Contesting Climate Justice
In the previous chapter I analysed the deficiencies inherent in the last round of
climate protests. In this chapter, I will look at the various concepts of climate justice
to determine which offers the best possibility of uniting broad sections of society in a
movement against climate change.
Climate justice as (re)distribution and development
Whether Oxfam
20
or Kofi Annan, climate justice was a key term during the
COP15`at Klimaforum one could not a find brochure, pamphlet or postcard
without it. But like every other movement the climate justice movement is a place of
argument and an arena of struggle and contestation. Thus, it comes as no surprise
that climate justice had already been co-opted by businesses,
21
marketing
campaigns like Tck tck tcktime for climate justice and politicians: while we see
lots of young people holding posters that say Climate Justicein fact, many groups
that are driving the youth climate movement support policies that run counter to the
established principles of climate justice (Dayaneni 2009: 83). Of course, I wish to
explore the idea that there are no established principles when it comes to the
climate justice. But these attempts to co-opt climate justice constitute a direct
intervention by organisations and governments who have no interest in building a
mass movement which challenges the roots of the climate crisis, alter the existing

20
Ian Sullivan one of Oxfams full-timers writes on the Oxfam website: At Oxfam, were involved with climate
change because we know that its already impacting on the poorest peoples lives. The irony is that theyve done
the least to cause it and often dont get a say in the decisions that have life and death implications for them. For
me, this is about justice.
21
The European Business Council for Sustainable Energy holds workshops titled Climate Justice as a business
case.
33

social relations or emancipate people from exploitation and oppression. These forces
could be considered the right wing of the climate movement.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annans Tck tck tck marketing campaign which,
like its UK counterpart SCC, demanded the worlds leaders to seal the deal, had
collected nearly 15 million digital pledges for a fair, robust and binding deal. Their
call for no more than a two degree Celsius rise in average global temperature had
little to do with justice, given this would have a catastrophic environmental impact
for tens of millions of people in the developing world. The call exposes glaring
discrepancies in the use of the notion (Seidentsicker, 2010).
Climate justice emerged as the unifying discourse of various organisations in order
that, as the organisers of The Wave had intended
discontent is absorbed and kept within the framework of action, providing the
hegemonic social group with a mechanism to manage the demands of dissent
and to transform potential resistance Once integrated and transformed, civil
society can become an engine of hegemony. At the same time this process
isolates the more radical antagonizing elements of potential counter-hegemony,
by framing their existence outside of common sense (De Lucia, 2009:237).
The Tck tck tck campaign involves organisations such as World Wide Fund for
Nature (WWF),
22
Environmental Defence Fund, Natural Resource Defence Council,
and even the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. The campaigns website does not mention
anywhere what the campaign regards to be just or what climate justice entails. It
does mention that Bob Geldorf, Lilly Allen, and Jet Li are some of their 15 million

22
On WWFs website they state: WWF partners with companies to help them achieve their environmental
objectives. During the COP15 talks, WWF emblazoned its logo on a 1 kilometre long billboard saying climate
responsibility is simple, its just good business sense Let the clean economy begin. This is an example of what
Pusey and Russell call capitalist strategies for dealing with the bio-crisis (Pusey and Russell, 2010).
34

climate allies. Annans political weapon in the fight against climate change are
financial transfers and transfers of sustainable technologies, which is to say, (re-)
distribution and (right to) development (De Lucia, 2009: 231). These are the very
same solutions that business leaders of big corporations propose as these increase
the opportunities for profits and the enclosure of new markets (Brunnengrber,
2008). Climate justice has here been co-opted to serve the interests of powerful
elites. This is should not be confused with the co-opting of the movement itself.
Long before COP15, climate justice had been framed in terms of (re-) distribution
and the right to development. Gordon Brown and former World Bank President
James Wolfensohn showed their support for climate justice (Roberts, J. Timmons
2009, 397), the European Parliament which urged its member states to integrate
climate justice into their long-term perspectives until 2050 (Seidensticker, 2010).
Climate Action Network (CAN) describe their vision on their website as to protect
the atmosphere while allowing for sustainable and equitable development
worldwide [emphasis in original].
CAN is an example of how the concept of climate justice is deployed to serve the
interests of ruling classes. It was founded in 1989 and brings together the largest
environmental organisations. More than 500 NGOs are currently are affiliated to the
network whose main goal is to promote government and individual action to limit
human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels. The central
operation limits itself to information exchange, lobbying and expertise.

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the NGOs took the global stage with a massive
presence. The event was aptly described as the NGOization of world politics
35

(Altvater and Brunngrber, 2002). From then on NGOs have been part of the policy
process concerning the environment and climate change enabling them to make
textual amendments to ministers proposals. NGOs have sought to make minor
changes from within system using the language of peoples participation rather than
building a new political process from the bottom-up. However, greenhouse emissions
have risen sharply since then. These highly wealthy organisations, which largely draw
their donations from states, large donations and subscription rates, continue to argue
that without their involvement the climate would be in a far worse situation thus
legitimizing their participation in a highly ecologically ineffectual process.
(Kaufmann, Stephan and Mller, Tadzio (2009a))

The NGOs organised in CAN have consistently supported market-based mechanisms
to tackle the climate crisis in a scientific, managerial efficiency-based wayPatrick
Bond calls CAN inadequate, compromised and ideologically confused (Bond, 2010:
23).

In solving the problems of the ecological crisis NGOs orient themselves along the
lines of the political restrictions of participation and content imposed by the ruling
elites of the international system (Walk/Brunngraeber 2000:276, own translation)

Arguably, CANs participation in the UNFCCC process has legitimized the use of
market-based solutions as peoples solutions despite the very fact that these cause
more harm today than climate change itself.

36

Emissions trading has not been accompanied by a reduction in greenhouse gas
pollution but by an increase. These NGOs are part of the institutional apparatus that
do not challenge the hegemony of the ruling class ideology but rather enshrine it and
contribute to the marginalisation of dissenting voices.
The action proposed by Annan and the Tck tck tck campaign is money and aid in
form of loans and development. These do not differ from policies such as prescribed
by the IMF and World Bank. The Kyoto Protocol has enshrined carbon sinks and
cap-and-trade mechanisms and thus Tck tck tcks campaign for climate justice is
working within the free market paradigm and see no alternative to Kyoto
(Seidensticker, 2010; Bedall and Austen, 2010; Bond, 2010: 24). This model of
climate justice involves commodifying the atmosphere and subjecting peoples to the
further marketisation of their livelihoods and their resources.
The emphasis on (distributional) justice and the right to development as key
elements in any post-Kyoto agreement has then this effect of transforming
dissenting sections of public opinion and developing countries into supporters
of the global capitalist vision of ideology of the dominant social group. Justice
turns then into a fundamental space of ideological negotiation, where hegemony
is nurtured, articulated and universal/ized (De Lucia, 2009: 237).
De Lucias points clarify what SCC, CAN, Tck tck tck and world leaders mean by
climate justice and how it could emerge as a unifying rallying call. While SCC or Tck
tck tck do emphasize the historical role of the Global North and the common sense
fact that climate change will disproportionately affect the worlds poorest, their
policies of mitigation and adaptation solely to create business opportunities for
corporations. The campaigns completely ignore political and economic interests and
37

conflicts, reducing the climate crisis to a diplomatic act of will (Muller and
Pasadakis, 2010) and putting forward an efficiency-based strategy aimed at the
middle classes of the Global North (Brand, Bullard, et al, 2009:12).
The perspectives and policies advanced by these NGOs and political leaders are
congruent with the dominant political and economic interests of the ruling classes
[mainstream environmental organisations] act as safety valves to make sure that
demands for social change, that our collective rage remain within the boundaries set
by the needs of capital and governments. (Mller and Passadakis, 2008).
This would not be the first time that an ecological concept has been co-opted. The
term sustainability, which arose in 1990s, can now be found on many products,
company logos and supermarkets. Climate justice finds itself in the same danger as it
does not contain an inherent antagonism which has brought the movement about
and the very fact that there is no magic bullet or policy which can make climate
justice a reality.
Thus, the movement for meaningful climate justice must also succeed in collectively
focusing its attention on transforming the political parameters of the debate around
he phenomenon of climate change in opposition to the forces which have been
outlined above.




38

Rights-based climate justice
Earlier I quoted Dayaneni stressing that a lot of young people waving placards calling
for climate justice actually do not represent the principles of climate justice. The
principles referred to here were mainly laid down in the Bali Principles of Climate
Justice in 2002 and the Climate Justice Assembly Declaration in Belem 2009. The
two documents are fundamentally different in purpose yet both explicitly refer to
rights-based/justice-based approach to climate policy (Dayaneni 2009:82).
Rights and justice-based approaches in social movements are not a novelty. Whether
the civil rights movement or the environmental justice movement, both shared a
common understanding that the existing laws discriminated against one people and
benefited another people directly. The repertoire of contention and tactics used
within the movement were many: sit-down, road blockades, mass meetings or
litigation. Yet, they all strived to empower the community and win the rights that
others were privileged with. In the face of Jim Crow laws when African-Americans
could not even visit state parks to enjoy nature claiming rights was radical yet broad
enough as people indeed were enjoying these rights. The political opportunity here
could be exploited and full civil rights for African-Americans were grantedon paper
(from more on the parallels between the civil rights and environmental movements,
see Roberts, 1999: 230-267).
There is pitfall inherent in the language of rights. An African-American might have
the right to enter a state park but may not have the financial means to get to the state
park: if, say, is 150 miles away and public transport only runs every two days. There
are stark limitations with a rights-based approach to climate justice if rights are
isolated from structural, economic inequality. Yet these approaches manage to
39

establish a discourse and subsequently demands which are opposed to those of the
market and corporate-led globalisation. The rights-based approach can serve radical
NGOs, helping create their own political practice, to point to certain struggles and
environmental problems and create new networks between activists, social
movements and NGOs and hopefully broaden their social base. This is crucial as in
many cases activists belong to a multitude of organisations, networks and
movements, a so-called multi-organisational field (Klandermans 1992;
Klandermans 1997).
The Bali Principles of Climate Justice assert, Climate Justice insists that
communities have the right to be free from climate change, its related impacts and
other forms of ecological destruction (CJN, 2002). Unlike an efficiency-based
strategy aimed at the middle classes, a rights-based approach asserts rights to be
universal: rather than following a NIMBY (not in my backyard) approach, rights-
based activists argue not here, not anywhere (Agyeman and Evans, 2004: 160) or
NIABY (not in anyones backyard). This involves a movement of solidarity, not
simply pressuring governments to tinker with market mechanisms.
In order to uphold the rights-based approach to climate policy one thus needs to go
to the roots of climate change and the climate crisis itself. The Bali Principles read
that the aim [is] to eliminate the production of greenhouse gases and associated
local pollutants (CJN, 2002). Thus, climate justice ultimately becomes removing the
cause of climate change once and for all.
Removing the causes of climate change means tackling the fossil-fuel (dependent)
economy or what is commonly is referred to among activists as fossilistic
capitalism. However, we have seen that mainstream NGOs and businesses
40

emphasize the right to developa pretence for creating business opportunities in the
Global South and in underdeveloped areas. These market-based mechanisms and
technological fixes currently being promoted by transnational corporations are false
solutions and are exacerbating the problem (CJN, 2002). These solutions have aptly
been named false solutions and include nuclear energy, carbon offsets, techno-fixes
like geo-engineering, clean coal, agro-fuels, and large scale hydro-dams. Indeed
CJN emphasizes a radical re-thinking of the dominant development model (CJN,
2008).
Rejecting the false solutions of big corporations must entail the formulation of real
solutions. These solutions come from people in the affected communities and
impacted disproportionately by climate change. Energy sovereignty as opposed to
energy security, food sovereignty as opposed to food security are key in the fight for
climate justice. There are more specific demands however which highlight the rights-
based approach in its entirety.
The demand for climate debt reparations or ecological debt reparations entails
financial redistribution from North to South. On the one hand, it involves
diminishing the dependency of the Global South. Reparations must be made in the
form of deep and drastic GHG [greenhouse gas] cuts in the North domestically and
transfer of financing and technology to the South. There should be strong penalties
for countries that do not follow targets. Reparations also means funds for mitigation
and adaptation cannot be based on creating loans and grants (CJN, 2008). Climate
debt reparations thus reconsider who owes what to whoyet there is a serious
question as to whether this right can be fulfilled on the basis of the capitalist
market given the fundamental challenge they would represent to the balance fo
41

forces both between and within nation states (Kaufmann, Stephan and Mller,
Tadzio (2009a): 190). The civil rights question in the US could be fulfilled under the
same configurations and without radically altering the property relationsit is
difficult to imagine a way that a struggle for equal climate rights could succeed
without fundamentally challenging such relations. Thus, the rights-based approach
to climate policy in the form of climate justice also means radically re-thinking our
rights in terms of ecology and environment.
The rights-based approach to climate policy means that new coalitions and networks
can be established in the field of climate politics as it frames climate change not as
simply an issue of ecology and conservation but a question of societys (natural)
conditions (Gerstetter, Christiane and Krause, Ilana (2010). Thus, social, economic
and environmental justice groups, anti-racists and almost every other progressive
group can gather under the banner of climate justice and frame policies and
demands which have the underlying principle of justice for those most affected by
climate change. This is particularly helpful for and plays a large role why climate
justice has been the unifying call for Copenhagen and beyond.
In terms of political practice, however, there are shortcomings related to the rights-
based approach in the Global North. Its demand for climate debt reparations and
analysis that puts the Global South into the limelight of the struggle runs risk of
misconstruing the fundamental conflict over climate change as one between rich and
poor countries. There are however real class conflicts over climate change within the
Global North and Global South (Neale, 2010; Bond, 2010). International movements
often risk omitting the internal class nature of societies in favour of an idealised
north versus south or east versus west dichotomy. Most anti-imperialist
42

movements in the North throughout the 20
th
century fell prey to this and
subsequently aligned themselves with forces which did not emancipate the working
class majority in those countries fighting against imperialism or did not reach out to
the working class majority in the countries where the movements took the stage. This
political tendency, most closely related to Maoism, continues to influence those in
the movement who emphasise dependency theory and unequal exchange between
advanced and developing economies as the cause of global injustice.
23

In its rights-based critique, CJN writes whereas the multilateral development banks,
transnational corporations and Northern governments, particularly the United
States, have compromised the democratic nature of the United Nations as it attempts
to address the problem; whereas the perpetration of climate change violates the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on
Genocide (CJN, 2002). This portrays another serious flaw in the right-based
critiqueit explicitly refers to institutions such as the UN abstractly as neutral,
democratic institutions being undermined, rather than as sites of international
conflict and negotiation that, under the dominance of the US, perpetuate the
hegemony of the status quo. After the collapse of the COP15 talks the rights-based
approach and its orientation on bodies such as the UN might simply continue to offer
legitimacy to institutions and processes that are fundamentally incapable of
addressing the problem.
Only if the idea of justice is linked to people, their place, culture and time can climate
justice contribute to building a lasting mass movement. We have seen how a rights-
based approach to climate policy can mobilise people and create new networks but it

23
Gunder Frank and Fuentes, 1987, is typical. See Callinicos, 2003 for a critique. For a critical analysis of the
history and legacy of Maoist influenced solidarity movements in the developed world, see Harman, 1998
43

is crucial to have examples on the ground which are fighting under the banner of
climate justice so that the fear of having the term co-opted by businesses and
mainstream NGOs does not become a political reality.














44

Struggle-based climate justice
This struggle-based approach to climate justice targets both fossilistic capitalism and
green capitalism, mainly through non-violent direct action, which is often illegal but
seen by activists as legitimate.
Climate Camp UK was one of the first organisations to unfurl the banner of climate
justice in the UK and Europe. Its main form of contention is the camp which was
born out of the anti-capitalist movements summit mobilisations and became one of
the movements main institutions. There have now been climate camps in Germany,
New Zealand, the USA, Catalonia, Sweden, France and Australia.
Climate Camp is a place for anyone who wants to take action on climate
changeand anyone whos worried about our future and wants to do something
about it and holds four principles on paper: education, direct action, sustainable
living, and building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.
24

In 2009 Climate Camp not only organised its annual gathering but increased its
activities by organising a street occupation/party of the European Carbon Exchange
in the City of London during the G20 summit. It organised one of its largest camps
ever at Blackheath in that summer; it had its own Reclaim Power action targeting
Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in October and in December it mobilised hundreds
to Copenhagen. Turner writes: The new social vehicle is the Climate Camp...
Evoking the teach-ins and love-ins of the 1960s launching direct actionsfreeing
political prisoners and challeng[ing] climate criminals (Turner 2010:12).

24
Climate Camp UK website: http://climatecamp.org.uk/about/ Accessed 23/12/10
45

Having become a major weapon of radical climate activists in the Global North,
Climate Camp illustrates how climate justice does not only offer activists a strategic
orientation around the particular mobilizations in Copenhagen. Instead it can be
used far beyond a mobilisation in the Global North and assist activists in broadening
their social base and creating new networks that highlight that a struggle-based
approach is necessary to tackle the climate crisis.
Climate Camp is a constituent part of Climate Justice Action (CJA) which co-
ordinated the Reclaim Power action. CJA conceives itself to be a primarily Northern
international networking platform for climate activistsa Climate Camp
International. For CJA:
To struggle for climate justice, then, is to recognise that all these crises
[economic, political, food, energy et al] are linked; that the climate crisis is as
much as social and economic crisis as it is and environmental disaster. To
struggle for climate justice is at the same time struggling against the madness of
capitalism, against austerity enforced from above, against their insistence on
the need for continued growth (green or otherwise) It is about empowering
communities to take back power over their own lives. (CJA, 2010)
In their strategy paper What Does Climate Justice Mean in Europe? CJA links the
EU, food and agriculture, military, migration, energy, production and consumption
to the struggle for climate justice. The discussion paper presents a thorough anti-
capitalist critique of the system. The starting point here is not climate justice but an
anti-capitalist critique of the current system. Its goal is the overthrow of capitalism.
For CJA any struggle-based approach to climate justice is necessarily a struggle
46

against capitalism. However, this is problematic in as far as the majority of people
within the climate movement have not drawn revolutionary conclusions.
A struggle-based approach such as the one advanced by CJA and Climate Camp run
the risk of cutting themselves off from the vast majority of activists in the climate
movement but also the working class. In the first chapter, I argued that the working
class is the decisive agent in the struggle for climate justice. By extension, they are a
the key agent in the struggle for social transformation on a broader basis, including
that sought by CJA and their ilk. And recent months have shown the international
working classes ability to mobilise huge resistance in the form of general strikes
across Europe and across the world. But this is is long way from overthrowing
capitalism.
Workers responses to alienation and oppression are always heterogeneous and
contradictory since, as Marx argues,
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class
which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its
disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so
that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of
mental production are subject to it. (Marx, 1845 German ideology).
So workers do not simply reject the system because they are exploited within it.
However, the experience of exploitation, and the need for collective action to resist it,
means that everyday experience offers an antidote to the phenomenon described by
Marx. As Antonio Gramsci argued,
47

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical
consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involves
understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical
consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might
almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory
consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites
him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world;
and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past
and uncritically absorbed (Cited in Harman, 2007: 109, 110 (ISJ 114)).
If activists in Climate Justice Action and Climate Camp want to succeed in advancing
a struggle-based concept of climate justice it must be working to engage the
working-class majority, and to engage the working-class majority with them
(Barker, 2006: 22). This will only be possible if it advances a repertoire of contention
and tactics which do not simply confront workers (such as blockading a harbour or
factory), but rather encourages these forces to join with the climate movement. This
must be approached from the perspective how do we relate to contradictory
consciousness. Workers are not somehow instinctively revolutionary. Bridging the
gap between where we are and where we want to be becomes a key strategic question
in any approach to climate justice based on struggle.
Whilst Climate Camp UK and CJA have pushed for climate justice and their struggle-
based conception of how to tackle the climate crisis, workers on the Isle of Wight at
the Vestas wind turbine factory have provided an exemplary case of what a struggle-
based fight for climate justice in the Global North could look like. As a direct
response to factory closure the Vestas wind turbine workers on the Isle of Wight
48

occupied their factory and raised the slogan Save jobsSave the Planet. They did
not employ the language of climate justice or indeed did not struggle against
capitalismthey demanded nationalization by the Labour government of the time
(see Neale, 2009 for an appraisal of the struggle at Vestas). But this struggle pointed
at a possible way of integrating the best elements of the rights-based and struggle-
based approaches to climate justice with a working class perspective for building the
struggle.
When struggling against the system people under attack use their own language.
Climate justice can draw the links between different struggles and thus act as the
glue to bring disparate campaigns under one banner. However, it cannot define what
means and tactics people use in fighting back and what demands people place upon
the system. When thousands African-Americans blocked trucks from dumping toxic
waste into a landfill in their Warren Council, North Carolina in 1982, and more than
500 people were arrested over the course of two weeks, including the reverend, the
movements leaders, housewives and children as young as four years old, people did
not fight under the banner of environmental justice but to protect their community.
Yet, this came to be known as the birth of the environmental justice movement
(Roberts, 1999: 254-258). Any struggle-based approach to climate justice thus must
be based on the self-activation and self-empowerment of the people themselves.




49

Time and politicstowards a working concept of climate
justice
Frederic Jameson observed that Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the
end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism (Jameson, 2003).
And indeed that is true in respect to the vast majority of climate groups. The
Campaign Against Climate Change uses photographs of floods, deserts, landslides
and bush fires in the developing world to back up its arguments, Christian Aid uses
starving children on placards; and pictures of melting polar caps, or a drowning polar
bear are the first pictures to see when climate change is debated.
The catastrophic framing of climate change fits in very neatly with the interests of the
dominant political and economic elites and an efficiency-based strategy aimed at the
middle-classes to tackle climate change. Indeed, the catastrophic framing of the
problem of climate change re-enforces the notion that climate change is solely an
ecological issue. By framing climate change as apocalyptic and catastrophic does not
serve to build a broad political movement nor a radical one. Instead it suggests that
there is no time to discuss alternatives to capitalism, which gives rise to climate
change in the first place (Brand, Bullard, et al, 2009: 12).
Even worse, the media attempts to separate natural disasters and environmental
catastrophes from any causal relationship with climate change, and climate change
from the destructive logic of competitive capital accumulation. Large climate change
demonstrations like The Wave confirm that climate change can still conceived as
apolitical: it does not need rallying speeches at its demonstrations nor clearly
formulated policies, it simply suffices to be against climate change.
50

But this sense of urgency can also lead to dangerous conclusions in the more radical
wings of the climate movement. So in a document entitled How Civil Society Can
Rescue the Copenhagen Climate Conference to Save the Future of Humanity and
Life on Earth, CJN argued It is now time for civil society to intervene in
Copenhagen to reduce todays catastrophically dangerous atmospheric CO2
concentrations to a safe level. This is urgent. We must proceed in the most
expeditious manner if we are to avoid global catastrophe. THERE IS NO TIME
LEFT (CJN, 2010).
The problem with this approach is summed up in George Monbiots statement:
stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim
(Monbiot, 2008). This brings up a whole host of contradictions: Is climate change
not linked to other processes? Can some of these processes be addressed in some
form and take us closer to our goal of tackling climate change? There needs to be a
bridge from where we are to where we wish to be. It is no good to simply assert that
the urgency of the situation means that all other considerations must be dropped.
How does this relate to the growing movement against austerity in Britain and
around the world?
This sense of urgency has served to incorporate sections of the climate movement
into propping up the existing state of affairs. NGOs, having had a seat at the
negotiation table for more than 15 years, have become experts in issues of climate
change and policy. Such partnership has enabled NGOs to belong to the epistemic
community that has built up around a consensus that anthropogenic climate change
is a significant risk that has to be managed (Gough and Shackley 2001: 331).
51

The knowledge-based approach treats climate change as a question of science rather
than politics (Brand, Bullard, et al, 2009: 11) and thus collective solutions which the
climate justice movement advances and argues for are marginalized and silenced
within the UNFCCC, the climate debate and in policy decisions as these solutions do
not come from within the epistemic community. What does this science do? It
constructs so-called scientific research. It tries to convince the people of the world
through scientific jargon and mathematics that if we do this and that, we will have
solved the climate problem. (Kaara 2010: 111) Thus solutions to tackle the climate
crisis will necessarily reflect the dominant modus operandi: the free market.
It is essential that the incontrovertible fact of anthropogenic climate change are
extracted from that discourse which seeks to use the science as a reason to accept
that only tinkering with business as usual has any possibility of solving the climate
crisis. The climate justice movement has to capitalise on the failure of the market to
deal with either climate change or the economic crisis it to take the issue of climate
change out of respectable politics (Gough and Schackley 2001: 339) and into the
realm of class struggle.
In this sense, the struggle at Vestas offered a glimpse of how this could come about.
Bridging the gap between every day struggles and a vision of the future is essential to
bringing wider layers of people into the movement. The recent publication of the
One Million Climate Jobs report by the Campaign against Climate Change Trade
Union Group is a concrete example of how this can work. The problem we face was
posed starkly by Jones in a recent article:
The world faces two huge crises. Theres the economic crisis, which is being
used as an excuse to make massive cuts, destroy jobs and services, and push
52

privatisation. And theres the climate crisis, which threatens to put dozens of
countries under water, devastate large parts of the world and push billions
deeper into poverty and despair. But what if there was a way to start to solve
both problems? What if there was a campaign not only to save the planet, but to
create a huge number of jobs as we do it? (Jones, 2010)
The argument that this can happen is precisely the contention of the climate jobs
report. It is a concrete goal, achievable under capitalism and a positive demand that
can be embedded in the trade union and anti-cuts movement. The fact that the
British Trades Union Congress voted to back the report in 2010 shows there is real
purchase with the demandone delegate said that "The fight for jobs is the same
fight against climate change" (Nousratpour, 2010).
These can be conceived in the sense of transitional demandsdemands which
would meet the immediate needs of the vast majority, but, as Callinicos argues,
implementing them would involve a massive confrontation with the existing
structures of economic and political power. It therefore points towards, not a
reconstruction of capitalism, but a move beyond itWho after Copenhagen doubts
that they could only be won over the fiercest resistance by capital? (Callinicos 2010).
In this way, we can conceive of a movement for climate justice which can be built in
the Global North which does not look to market mechanisms or appeals to
supranational institutions and which moves beyond the elitism and static conception
of revolutionary change envisioned by the various strands of the movement.

53

Conclusion: Whither Climate Justice?
The movement against climate change which developed over the past decades
reached its high point at the protests around the COP15 talks. But they also
represented a turning point. The failure of the talks to reach any agreement on
reducing emissions has left the various strands of the movement at an impasse. Each
had found a niche or accommodation within the movement that had served it until
that point.
The reliance of the right wing of the climate movement on building support for world
leaders allowed for the demobilisation of huge numbers of protesters after the failure
of COP15. The alliance between the NGOs of CJN and the radicals of CJA helped to
create a militant presence on the streets of Copenhagen. But CJN were thrown into
disarray by their marginalisation at COP15, and both have found themselves isolated
as the wider movement has been thrown into disarray.
The failure of the COP15 talks was fuelled in large part by the economic crisis. But
the convergence of the economic and environmental crises also offers a real
opportunity to fuse the fight against climate change with that against the impact of
cuts, job losses and austerity. By rejecting the status quo offered by the distribution
and development stand of the movement, and synthesising the best elements of
rights and struggle-based climate justice, we have been able to approach a
conception of climate justice that has application in the Global north and beyond.
This is not to imply some teleological prophecyagency is crucial, and what happens
in the years ahead is not automatic. By learning from the mistakes and successes of
54

the pastnot simply of the climate movement but the totality of class struggles
against capitalism over centurieswe can continue to develop a strategic orientation
for the way forward that not only offers a realistic vision of a carbon free future but
which is linked to the one agency which can make it a realitythe working class.




















55

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