Jo Hamilton, Rising Tide
When faced with the inter-related issues of oil dependency, climate change and war, many people feel a genuine, profound concern but simultaneously feel immobilised by the apparent complexities of analysis and remedy. Such individual and collective silence is worrying – when daily papers are full of stories documenting the tip of the climate change iceberg, when we know that international laws have been flagrantly breached to satisfy our addiction to fossil fuels, and when we know that imaginative action is an imperative. And such silence and inactivity is especially remarkable when the very governments and companies perpetuating this state of affairs appear to agree with us: Blair has committed to a 60% reduction in Greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and pledged to take action on climate change when the G8 meet in Scotland next year; even Shell and BP acknowledge that climate change is a threat about which something must be done. It seems as if the solutions to climate change have been captured by the prime suspects – and everyone else is either content to let that be, or too overwhelmed by what’s at stake to get involved.
The writing on the wall
The writing on the wall is simple: “We need to start dismantling
the oil economy now”. Although this sounds radical, unachievable
and unrealistic, it’s something which we could and should
have started years ago. It’s not too late, but we need to
begin now. I think we have about ten years in which to reverse the
excesses of climate change, and to ensure that the current trend
of the ravenous oil machine does not continue.
In taking on some of the most powerful corporations and governments,
our own power is sometimes occluded – we forget that real,
lasting change is possible, and that we are the ones who can make
it happen. It is sometimes too convenient, and tempting, to lay
all the blame – and responsibility for action – at the
doors of those we perceive as the power-holders: governments and
corporations. In doing so we deny the power we hold as collectives,
as citizens, as free-thinking people. Tackling the oil economy requires
that we wholeheartedly embrace and enact this power.
As a contribution to awakening and encouraging our sense of power,
I’d like to draw some comparisons between our modern-day campaign
and the campaign that ended the slave trade in Britain in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. i
Words into action
In the 1785 Cambridge University student Thomas Clarkson entered
an essay competition on the morality of slavery. His essay won the
competition, but, far more importantly, in the course of researching
and writing it he became deeply engrossed in the subject and decided
that “if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time
some person should see these calamities to their end”. So
he met up with some friends in London to publish the essay and to
begin putting words into action.
Their anti-slave-trade campaign was the first sustained, mass, international
campaign on behalf of the rights of others. The boldness of the
campaigners’ vision in the 1780s led some to claim that their
demands were naïve and unrealistic – something which
could equally be levelled at demands to dismantle todays oil economy.
The beginning of the end
Whilst Clarkson and his friends wanted an end to the slave trade
internationally, they chose first to target the British slave trade.
In many ways their campaign bears the hallmarks of tried and tested
of modern-day campaigning: inspiring groups of people to get active
in their local communities; putting pressure on the policy-makers
and people involved in the industry.
Clarkson went up and down the country, talking to whomever he could
within the trade – crew, ships’ doctors (early-day whistleblowers)
and so on – to get an accurate picture of what went on. He
purchased some of the tools of the trade: shackles, handcuffs and
implements to force feed slaves (in case they should try and starve
themselves to death and thereby deprive the traders of valuable
income). When shown to the public, these private tools acted as
oxygen to the growing public fire against the trade. As a consequence
of such public meetings, citizens started using their consumer power
and began a sugar boycott, sugar being one of the most obvious products
of slavery. Campaigners began distributing the first ever ‘fair
trade’ sugars.
Counter-attack
Of course, with such successful campaigning against an industry,
there was inevitably going to be a counter-attack by the slave traders.
They produced and distributed pro-slavery booklets and pamphlets
at places such as Oxford and Cambridge, arguing that the products
of slavery were necessities, and without slavery the economy would
collapse. Forerunners to the art of “greenwash”, they
attempted to subvert language, but underestimated the average person’s
intelligence when suggesting changing the name of slaves to “assistant
planters”. Slave Traders even sponsored a London musical –
“The Benevolent Planters” – in an attempt to win
over influential public opinion.
Compare all this to B(“Beyond Petroleum”)P’s sponsorship
of National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera, Tate Britain etc, and
Shell’s “Better Britain Campaign”. Such sponsorship
is vital to their social license to operate, and helps to diffuse
accusations about the negative impact of their operations at home
and abroad. (Sometimes there’s a perverse link between sponsorship
and guilt: the Natural History Museum lists BP, British Airways
and Rio Tinto Zinc amongst its corporate patrons.)
Slave traders displayed remarkable disingenuity when arguing that
if they didn’t trade in human beings, someone else would,
and the slaves wouldn’t be treated as well. ii.
Industry responses to the potential phase out of World Bank funding
for fossil fuel projects mirror this, stating: “the danger
exists that future projects in difficult areas will be carried out
under less transparent conditions and being subject to less stringent
social and environmental conditions than had the World Bank Group
been involved”. To date there have been no oil and gas projects
which have lived up to even the World Bank’s socially beneficial
guidelines.
Progress, repression, emancipation
Just five years after the initial anti-slave-trade meeting in a
London bookstore, public feeling against the trade was incredibly
strong: 519 petitions (the one from Edinburgh rolled down the entire
floor of house of commons) forced a House of Commons vote to gradually
abolish the trade. The House of Lords, in their wisdom, voted it
down.
Unfortunately foreign affairs affected the domestic campaigning:
twenty two years of war with France (which culminated in the Battle
of Waterloo) brought about a wave of state repression, with every
progressive movement severely hampered, including the anti-slave-trade
campaigners. Witness the repression especially in the USA following
the September 11th attacks, with progressive movements silenced,
and criticism of the state increasingly deemed socially unacceptable.
By 1807 the abolitionists got both houses of Parliament to ban the
slave trade – but not slavery itself, so in the 1820s the
movement sprung back to life, this time pushing for emancipation.
Clarkson again looked up all his contacts, and did the rounds; over
200 local committees were established committed to a total end to
slavery. When news of the movement crossed the Atlantic, it helped
ignite the largest slave rebellion: 20,000 slaves took part in Jamaica
– plantations houses up in flames like beacons. This helped
convince the British establishment that the cost of continued slavery
was too high, and 800,000 slaves throughout the British empire were
freed on August 1st 1838.
Lessons to be learnt
So what can we learn from this? That change takes time, that it
takes all walks of life, that industries will attempt to copy and
co-opt our language and tactics, that if we get close to seriously
achieving our aims we will be repressed and made to look like we
have no place in civil society. Of course we should expect this.
What is imperative is that we do not lose heart, that we believe
that our wildest dreams are actually possibilities – and that’s
where it starts to get scary.
The UK is a perfect place to start dismantling the oil economy:
the Headquarters of BP and Shell are here; the UK is a major source
of graduate recruitment for the companies; we financially support
these companies through private finance, and through our considerable
influence on public financial bodes such as the World bank group,
and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The institutions
are here, the knowledge is here, and with two million people marching
against war on Iraq, we have recently witnesses an unprecedented
wave of mass social engagement and action. The time is right.
“You know what everyone’s greatest fear is?
It is that all the dreams we have,
all the crazy ideas and aspirations,
all the impossible romantic longings and utopian visions can come
true,
that the world can grant us our wishes.
People spend their lives doing everything in their power to fend
off that possibility:
they beat themselves up with every kind of insecurity, sabotage
their own efforts,
undermine love affairs and
cry sour grapes before the world even has a chance to defeat them.
Because no weight could be heavier to bear than
the possibility that everything we want is possible.
If that is true, then there really are things at stake in this life,
things to be truly won or lost.”iii
i. All information on anti-slave-trade campaigning is taken from a recent article by Adam Hochschild (Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2004): http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_403.html
ii. One of the main battlefields in the nonviolent war against socially- and environmentally-destructive industries is the issue of self-regulation. Governments love it as it does not pit them against industry, and industries love it as they don’t have to change their practices. This is apparent today in the Extractive Industries Review, an independent review which the World Bank commissioned looking into the impact of mining and oil and gas projects. One of its key recommendations is that “the World Bank should phase out investments in oil production by 2008… and devolve its limited scarce resources to investments in renewable energy resource development... and other efforts that delink energy use from greenhouse gas emissions.” (Striking a better balance, Vol 1, p67) The oil industry, along with their supporters, argue that regulation, in the form of de-investment by governments, is unnecessary, citing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) as a sufficient form of voluntary self-regulation instead. The former (EIR) would be enforceable and goes to the heart of the problem. The latter (EITI) is a weak initiative which, even in pilot countries, is an ineffective tool to deal with the power and corruption that encircles the extractive industries. Voluntary regulation will not work when it goes against a company’s prime raison d’etre – the extraction of fossil fuels.
iii. from the back of 'Desire for change, Women on the frontline of global resistance'