 Great, welcome all to this first seminar in the Climate Perspective Seminar Series. My name is Camilla Moncadal. I'm an undergraduate student here at SOAS, and I've been organizing this seminar series with an amazing group of people from across years, courses, and societies at SOAS. We are all extremely excited to be able to finally open this seminar series, which we've been working on for a while now, and we're very happy to see such a big audience tonight. The seminar will be followed by a reception in SD 37. We're gonna write a small notice just to let you know how to get down there, but it's on the ground floor next to the, as you're overlooking the atrium, it's just to the right. It's the big study area there is. With some vegetarian nibbles and some drinks, and we hope that many of you can stay for that. At this point in time, I personally find it very hard to be optimistic about the prospects for political action on climate change. There are so many ideas, so many movements, and so many political means for drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and yet we are still heading towards a three to four degrees rise in global average temperatures. What's lacking, of course, is the political will from the people in power. Such and such will, of course, only comes from the sense of urgency, that I'm sure that everyone in this room feels when it comes to climate change. Such a sense of urgency needs to spread as fast as possible, among as many people as possible, in order to prevent the devastating consequences that scientists have been warning us about for decades. An important part of this process is to promote the understanding that climate change must be understood and acted upon by all sectors and all agents in society. Based on this belief, the Climate Perspective Seminar series will address climate change from the perspectives of politics, development, law, economics, and individual action, as comprehensively and as objectively as possible. Our speakers are all experts on climate change within their field, and they come from a diverse range of backgrounds. But one view that will prevail throughout the series is that climate change is inherently linked to unequal power relations on a global and local scale and that the inequalities must be addressed in the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Each seminar will bring its own perspective on how this can be achieved, and each seminar will attempt to convey climate issues that are given less attention in the media. And through this approach, we hope that the series will manage to give you, the audience, a new perspective on climate change. If you want to tweet about the seminar, you can use the hashtag Climate Perspectives. We will have a 40-minute talk, and then we're going to open the floor to questions and discussion afterwards. Now it is my honor to introduce tonight's speaker, Larry Lohman. Larry is a climate researcher specializing in the global inequalities connected with climate change. For years, he has worked with movements engaged with social and environmental justice issues in relation to climate change. In relation to climate change, rights of indigenous people and conservation. This includes, but is not limited to, the World Rainforest Movement, which promotes the rights of forest dependent communities, as well as the Durban Group for Climate Justice, a network of grassroots movements, mobilizing communities around the world to take action on climate change. Larry has previously been a visiting fellow in the Yale University program in agrarian studies, and he has also worked with Thailand's project for ecological recovery. Larry currently works for the Cornerhouse, an institute carrying out research and advocacy on climate change and on issues relating to social and environmental justice. Larry has brought with him some free books and papers that you are free to take a look at and take with you after the seminar. Larry fits perfectly into the setting of SOAS as he speaks fluent Thai. He also fits perfectly into the climate perspective seminar series, as his current work at the Cornerhouse has the aim of, quote, linking issues of stimulating informed discussion and strategic thought on critical environmental and social concerns, and of encouraging broad alliances to tackle them. Although we cannot measure ourselves against an organization like the Cornerhouse, the objective of this series is the same, to link issues, to stimulate informed discussion, and to encourage broad alliances to tackle environmental and social concerns. It's therefore an honor for me to present to you tonight our first speaker in the climate perspective seminar series, Larry Lohman. Thanks very much Camilla. Camilla has introduced me, so I suppose I should introduce my pussy hat. You know what this, you all know what this is, don't you? It's a very beautiful pussy hat made by my dear artist friend, Solveig Good, sitting in the back there. Seven different shades of pink on it, if you can believe that. But I suppose your question is, why am I wearing a pussy hat at a talk about climate? And that's the question I'm going to try to talk about. I won't get around to answering it probably, but I do want to address myself to that set of issues. I suppose one reason why it's puzzling why I'm wearing a pussy hat is that we tend to think of climate in terms of greenhouse gases and of, as Camilla said, limiting the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. So we tend to think of it in terms of carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, CO2 equivalents, and also energy. Everybody knows that energy is very important in climate change. So we have this whole cluster of somewhat reified, somewhat fetishized objects, which we always think about when we talk about climate change. And of course, the biggest one of those objects is climate itself, which has been sort of constructed as this discreet and observable object out there, which is somehow something separate from society, which somehow society has to manage or do something with. And of course, it's in the nature of all of these objects that there's a lot of numbers involved. We've all heard the numbers about climate change, two degrees, four degrees, Camilla just mentioned. 350 parts per million. Some years ago, Bill McKibbin, when we were waiting to go on the Amy Goodman show together, he presented me with a 350 necktie. I'd lost it for some reason, I wish I could show it to you, but it had the numbers 350 and blazing down the necktie. And I think that's very significant. With Bill McKibbin's movement, 350.org, we're dealing with a social movement which doesn't have a slogan like, you know, land and bread or bread and roses or anything like that. It's like 350. 350 is a slogan and I think that's very significant and something that we do have to think about. So in a sense, I guess what I'm going to be talking about today is a fashion contrast between my own pussy hat and Bill McKibbin's 350.org tie. I mean, I have great respect for Bill McKibbin, actually. And I think that he, like me, is on a journey toward overcoming some of our own limitations and dealing with issues like climate change, especially as Westerners, especially as white Western men. So I think we're in this together in a sense. In addition to things like carbon dioxide and the climate system and all of these other strange objects, there's also these fetishized processes which we've grown accustomed to hearing about when we talk about climate, like adaptation and mitigation. You know, just this strange dichotomy people present us with. Okay, are you for adaptation or are you for mitigation? Do you think mitigation is more important or should we concentrate on adaptation? And this sort of defines the horizon, the horizon of discussion in many cases. And this horizon is indirectly limited by these fetishized objects I talked about, the carbon dioxide and so forth. Because the adaptation and mitigation are concepts which are organized around these objects, like carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide equivalents and so forth. And we have energy popping up in the movement for renewable energy. Fairly unquestioned, fairly reified fetishized object. Energy is just a given. It's just something that's out there. Energy poverty, energy democracy and so forth. If this is what we mean by climate, then I think the overwhelming problem does become something like Camilla mentioned at the beginning. How do we connect these objects and processes to everyday political concerns or any political concerns, either inside or outside the mainstream, as Camilla said. Well, the problem becomes how do we get the political will to deal with these objects? She didn't put it in those terms exactly, but that was sort of the framework. So I think this is a very significant fact that if we do confine ourselves, meaning this kind of thing by the word climate, then we're faced with this overwhelming and, as Camilla said, very discouraging political problem. How do we connect? How do we connect with guys like Trump, for God's sake? I mean, you just don't seem positive. My position would be a little bit different. I mean, my position would be that if we're really seeking ways of connecting and perhaps a non-random and more strategic way of going about it, is to ask how climate ever became disconnected from these concerns in the first place. In other words, to engage in a little bit of historical political study. In other words, to extend our efforts at political organizing and movement building as well, to encompass ways of reorganizing the ways we talk and think about climate, energy, fire, et cetera, themselves. Here I actually like to refer to a controversy that I understand has been going on at SOAs itself. This is from the Guardian a couple of days ago. The campaign to decolonize our minds. And the Guardian had this very nice article about our SOAs students' right to decolonize their minds from western philosophers. And of course, this campaign to decolonize our minds at SOAs has just driven the right-wing press completely nuts. I mean, the Daily Telegraph and the Times and the Daily Mail are just... What are you talking about? Are you throwing out these great classics of western philosophy and literature and Plato and Hume and Mill and all these? The Daily Mail had a headline something like, You Can't Be Serious, K-A-N-T. That's the kind of the tone. And I think that extends through a lot of the media when they're reporting on the campaign at SOAs. And of course, as I understand it, the campaign has nothing to do with throwing out Plato and ignoring John Stuart Mill and John Locke and all of these people. On the contrary, as I understand it, it represents a determination to study these figures even more deeply by looking at their place in their society and particularly their place in the colonialist society and how that works. And then distancing them by introducing other thinkers from other traditions, especially non-western traditions, to put a little perspective on these great classics. I don't know if I've got it right or not, but that's the way I interpret the campaign. Of course, that's completely different in the way the Daily Mail looks at the issue, which is all these people are calling John Locke a racist and they're throwing him out and burning his books. Oh my God, what are we going to do? What I'm trying to do today actually is something a little bit similar to that. I'm trying to recount some stories from my own journey, which has been a very difficult journey, to try to decolonize my own climate mind, which I think is actually very important. In fact, if I could single out one bit of climate politics or one aspect of climate politics that I think is the most important thing to be doing in climate politics over the next few years, it's this, is to decolonize our very concepts and our very practices surrounding things like climate, energy, carbon dioxide molecules, mitigation, adaptation, all the rest of it. Of course, if the Daily Mail heard me saying that, they would go crazy again what are you saying? Are you saying that there are no carbon dioxide molecules? Are there no such thing as energy? Are you saying that the concept of energy is racist? Are you going to throw all of this climate science out? Are you nuts? That's what the Daily Mail would think of me. And I'm thinking, as in the SOAS discussion, I think the response has to be very nuanced and complex. In a sense, yes. I'll be doing what the Daily Mail would accuse me of doing. I do think the concept of energy is anti-labor. The practices of thermodynamic energy are anti-labor. I think the practices of defining climate, the way we've defined it in a spedishized way, is racist. I think it's also patriarchalist. So I'm guilty of all of those things which the Daily Mail would be only too happy to accuse me of. But as with the SOAS debate, I think you have to go further and you have to say, is he throwing out climate science? Is he saying climate science is not true? Is he saying we shouldn't study climate science? Is he saying we shouldn't talk about these things, mitigation, adaptation, energy, and so forth? Well, of course not. My suggestion, I think as in the SOAS debate, is we have to study it more deeply by taking a broader perspective, getting a little bit of distance on how these concepts and their political entailments developed over the last three or four centuries, say. But especially over the last 50 years or so, I would say. So that's the context I'm going to be trying to speak to. In my own case, I've been very, very lucky in getting a lot of help from a lot of friends and other people around the world. On most continents, I think, in helping me understand a little bit of this broader perspective so that I can begin to decolonize my climate mind. And just to give you a taste of this, I'm just going to show a few pictures. These are people from the Korean Hakka-yaw ethnic group in Thailand. A few years ago, they were carrying around banners like this in protest at the United Nations. The United Nations and the United Nations climate apparatus approached the climate. They were quite incensed, as were a lot of other Thai people from different ethnic groups, about the whole concept of climate as it was being pursued in terms of carbon molecules and so forth at the climate negotiations which were at Bangkok that year. There's a satire on the clean development mechanism, which is one part of the Kyoto Protocol, carbon destroy movement. So it's a carbon trading protest, and at the same protest, a protest against coal-fired electricity plants. That plant was defeated by the people, by the way. This is another group of Thai people from southern Thailand. And they were faced with their old nemesis, the state, trying to throw them off of state-owned forest reserve land, which they didn't have full formal title. But the state had taken advantage of the whole climate discussion, and especially this, what I would call a colonialist climate discussion, and enlisted that as a new weapon in trying to evict these villagers from the state forest land. The idea was that these villagers, oh, they've come in and they've cleared this beautiful forest, and they're practicing agriculture on it, and therefore they are causing global warming. And of course there was no shortage of scientific experts that the government could call on to invent an entire pseudo-scientific rationale for how the villagers were actually causing global warming, and how much global warming they were causing. But I won't go into that. I just want to quote the words of this lady here, Gam Chai Chai Phong, from Pataloong Province. She said, I had to pay $50,000. This is illegal fines for causing global warming. Because I cut rubber trees on my own farmland that has come down to me from my ancestors over 200 years ago. I well understand the value of forest, but this is not forested land. Where am I going to get that kind of money? I've never even got my hands around as much as $300. Every day we keep coming back to the idea of killing ourselves. It's only out of concern for our children and grandchildren that we don't. Well, this was an officer of the Santi Bond, the Thai secret police, who was taking a picture of demonstrators like those. He didn't like very much my taking his picture, but I was a white westerner. What could he do about it? Uganda. Okay, well, this explains that the villagers stand the mid-corn planted on what the government says is National Park, which they claim has belonged to them for generations. To plant the corn, the villagers chopped down trees, and they were monoculture eucalyptus trees planted by the Dutch foundation as part of a carbon-treating project to compensate for Dutch electricity plant carbon dioxide emissions. There's some campaigners against another forest carbon compensation program called RED, which many of you probably know about. This is a village I just visited last November, where again the villagers are being called upon to solve global warming, or to help solve global warming by participating in some kind of forest conservation project on their land. They didn't really understand where this was coming from exactly, but they were very clear about one thing, which was that the people who were promoting the project, which in the background there was a World Bank, and in the foreground there were National Park officials who hoped eventually to get some sort of financial compensation for participating in this kind of carbon-treating program. And they were unanimous in just saying, well, you know, these people don't understand our village. They don't understand what's going on here. They come into this idea of carbon, which we don't know what it is, and they kept quoting this legal document that says, okay, you know, pre-friar informed consent, you know, legal safeguards, safeguards, safeguards, they kept repeating it. What is, could you tell us what these safeguards mean? Because they kept hearing this word, but no one had ever actually explained it to them. This is from the, I want to back, Isthmuth in Mexico, where there's a wind farm, supposedly renewable energy, taking over a people's land. And again, the concept of climate, which these people, like everybody else, I mean, they're very well aware of climate issues out there. The concept of climate is something which is contested in their discourse and in their minds. Shift the scene to Ecuador. This is a wonderful group of young people called the Yasunitos, who collected something like three quarters of a million signatures in Ecuador alone, which is a very small country, to try to stop the oil exploitation in the Yasuni National Park, which maybe some of you, some of you have heard of. Anybody heard of that? That's quite a few people. And they called themselves the Yasunitos. And their campaign was against, not only against oil exploitation, but for post petroleum civilization, which they're working very hard with indigenous peoples and peasants and so forth to try to develop in Ecuador, or to try to elaborate in Ecuador. And on the occasion of the COP 20 in Lima, Peru, they all got into a bus to sort of do a protest expedition across the border to Peru, to Lima. And their slogan appears on the top of the bus, is we are the, yeah, we're not the adaptables. We don't adapt to climate change. And I think not many academics would actually listen carefully to what these young people were saying. But if you listen to them long enough, you realize that there's quite a detailed critique of this whole dichotomy of mitigation adaptation in their discourse, and even in their slogan. These young people, after all, are young people who are protesting against mitigation as well. They not only say, don't make us be adaptable, but don't mitigate us either. They're actually contesting the whole framework of climate discourse that all of us, most of us here, take for granted. And predictably, their bus was stopped by police at the border, and they were refused entry to Peru. So let no one think that these questions which people like the Yasuniros are raising about the mainstream climate concepts are some kind of post-modern word game. The police who stopped the bus and their bosses know very well it's not a word game. This is at the very heart of climate issues. Moving along to people who are looking at the subject from a historical perspective. My friend, Andreas Maum, who was here a couple of weeks ago, I think, is that everybody go to his lecture. I've learned a lot from Andreas also about decolonizing my idea of what energy is and also what climate and climate change are. As the people who were at that lecture probably know, or who have read Andreas' work, he goes back to what he calls the origin years of climate change when fossil fuels became, started to become so entrenched in society. And his point is that this turn to fossil fuels did not come from some abstract need for energy which people had been feeling since ancient days and suddenly they found a way of providing this lack, this energy that you didn't know. Steam energy and coal-fired energy were developed as a way of both disciplining labor and it's a way of increasing the productivity of labor. And that's what it was about at the beginning and that's what it continues to be about today. Oil and oil are about increasing the productivity of paid labor so that surplus can be extracted from them so that capital can be accumulated. So anybody who talks about fossil fuel and de-fossilizing everything, they don't take account of what Andreas is saying and aren't really dealing with the climate issue. So again, a decolonizing kind of perspective on climate change. If you want a short course on some of this stuff, all you have to do actually is open your wallet and look at the bills inside. I mean the British Treasury has been very obliging in this respect. Not only do we have Adam Smith here in the 20-pound note telling us about the division of labor and the great increase in the quality of work that results. But if we're lucky enough to have a 50-pound note in our wallets, we can look at the back and we see our friend James Watt, the inventor of one of the improved steam engines along with one of his business partners. And as usual with British currency, the quotations are very revealing. I sell here soon with all the world's desires to have power. I can think of nothing else but this machine. Right. Okay. Well, what machine are they talking about? They're talking about the steam engine, of course. And this is a sort of simplified idea last diagram on the steam engine. Does anybody know what W is? That's no accident. The steam engine was for work. The concept as it developed in physics became a little bit distinct, but at the beginning it was all about labor, exploiting labor, getting the surplus out of labor. And in fact, the energy that we think of today, which is a rather recent concept, the energy of the thermodynamicists was above all the theory of steam engines. Steam engines were for increase in the productivity of labor. Thermodynamics was the theory of steam engines. Thermodynamics has the same origin as the desire of capital to beat laborers at a certain period of history. In fact, before 1800, no one talked about energy. Energy was not a part of nature. But by 1870, that had changed. Before 1800, this is a historian, a U.S. historian, the equivalence of heat and mechanical energy was not suspected. This is one of the big concepts of thermodynamics. Heat and mechanical energy can be inter-converted, so you can, you know, make electricity out of heat and you can, you know, change mechanics and so forth. That was not suspected by the late 18th century. The notion that a horse pulling a treadmill and a coal fire heating a lime kiln were in some sense doing the same thing would have appeared absurd to them. But of course, today we have this omnibus abstract concept of energy. This is from one of WWF's publications, where you have, you know, terawatt hours being supplyable by different continents. You know, extremely aggregated kind of energy concept. And again, we have to ask ourselves, is energy really the innocent concept that we all assume that it is? Or does it have a certain background that we need to understand, a historical background, a historical development that we need to understand? Just as the thoughts of John Locke or Emanuel Kant have a certain background which we need to understand before going to decolonize our treatment of them. Other historian, Theodore Porter, an economic point of view formed the root of thermodynamics, the atomic and physical energy as a common context which prevents this if in a multiple city of energetic forms it inspires tremendous optimism in capital search for new workforces. So what does this tell us about energy campaigning today and climate campaigning today? Well, we see a lot of, you know, we see a lot of, believe me, I'm not criticizing the Suez project about renewable energy, but we see a lot of slogans that, okay, this will solve our climate problem. Energy or all forever. I think from a decolonizing point of view it's not going to be so simple if we look at the historical development and the political context of this concept of energy. Energy is a problematic concept for popular democratic movements to use innocently. It's also problematic for post petroleum movements to use because it assumes the normality of using something similar to fossil fuels and energy converters boosting the exploitation of labor. Daily mail will get really upset with me. Oh, are you saying we should throw out energy? We can't use energy. We can't talk about energy. Of course not. That's not at all what I'm saying. Quite the contrary. I'm saying that we need to subject energy to a closer scrutiny and the practices surrounding energy to a closer scrutiny. I'm going to talk about the history of fire a little bit but I think I'll skip this bit. Just to mention about how deeply these physical concepts and these sort of standard concepts of fire and so forth have permeated into our consciousness. It's a sort of remarkable fact once you talk to people who are trying to help decolonize your ideas of climate, heat, energy and fire that today a fire in the open is criminalized usually. It's always big campaigns against, you know, don't burn the forest. You shouldn't be burning your agricultural fields in order to, you know, fix the ashes in the soil because this is not improving. This is not improving your agriculture. You students at SOAS will know the whole discourse in agriculture in the 19th century and so forth. The imperialists were always saying this is not an improving agriculture. This is not an agriculture which continues to produce more and more stuff. It's sort of a steady state agriculture where you burn the fields every year and you get your fertilizer from there. How is that going to progress anything? I mean, there's that whole sort of history in agriculture especially in colonial agriculture in Asia which probably a lot of you know about. Anyway, this kind of fire tends to be very criminalized these days whereas the fire inside cars is never criminalized. In fact, we don't even notice it. We don't even think of it as fire. We don't look at a city street and see hundreds of fires, individual fires inside each car and each truck. It's never, it's the opposite of being criminalized. It's raised up as an idea of progress and enlightenment. No one calls this a city in flames. This is not a city in flames like Los Angeles. And similarly, this is a normal picture where you call a firefighters to put out your fire, your grass fire, your brush fire in the open. You never call the firefighters to put out the fire in the cars inside the combustion chambers. Or, of course, you don't call the firefighters to put out the fires in the industry. Okay, how much time do I have? Not too bad. Well, in the final part of my talk today I just wanted to, I wanted to build on what I've said so far to mention two responses to post-1970s capitalist crisis and why they are not alternatives to each other. And I think these two responses are actually very topical in 2017 because in a sense they're defining the horizon of a lot of the way we in Europe and North America and Japan and China think about climate change. And I think this is another case where in order to understand today's environmental debate you do have to try to decolonize your mind a little bit, go back in history even if it's only for the 1970s, study Marx a little bit to try to link these things with energy, labor and so forth, and soil and environment. And I think this is just an example of what I've been trying to urge I know of is understanding this very topical divide between two responses to capitalist crisis which we're seeing today in the climate debate and look at that from a sort of a different perspective. The two responses are over simplified here but the two responses are very roughly ecosystem services, exchanges, ecosystem service markets, ecosystem service transactions on the one side and examples here that he had a protocol with its carbon trading Paris agreement with its new improved carbon trading, the EU emissions trading system and so forth but also many other things which are outside the realm of climate, biodiversity credits and species credit and all the rest of it. So these are some of the units that have been invented since the 1970s which are now being traded as a response to climate change and the capitalist crisis. On the other side I have what the convenience is saying I'll simply refer to it as Trumpism. That's a nice short way of indicating a slightly different approach although it's not a new approach there's nothing new about it it didn't come into being with Trump. Trump is just an expression of something which has been around for quite a long time it goes back well before the 1970s but I think these are very significant significant sort of positions which derive from the same history. I'm not saying that Trump is the same thing as the Kyoto Protocol because Trump says he's against it he's against the Paris agreement yet what I'm trying to say is if we look at the climate debate from a more decolonizing perspective we can see that both Trumpism and the Paris agreement are expressions of the same history responses by different parts of capital to the same unfolding crisis and of course there's a big debate between those different factions of capital the different factions of environmentalism if you want to call Trump an environmentalist but I think this is something we need to understand if we're going to be supporting a decolonized climate movement the fact that both of these colonizing climate movements come from the same history and to some degree the same perspective and to understand what I'm trying to say here I think we have to go back a little bit a little bit into our marks capital accumulation classically conceived as the accumulation of abstract social labor it was a growth you're able to do economic growth you can find a lot of laborers put them to work and then you can steal a little bit of their time to your bank balance they don't have any choice they don't have any land anymore and they don't have any other way of supporting themselves than by selling their labor so you can exploit that but of course that relation between labor and capital that actually presupposes something else that Marx talked about which is primitive accumulation or enclosure where you actually have to have a process and this is a process which continues every day today in 2017 of roughly speaking dividing people from their land how do you get laborers kind of divide them from their land otherwise they're not going to work for you how do you get resources kind of divide the land from the people otherwise the people are going to be stopping you from using it as resources for your growth so this is like a prerequisite prerequisite of that relationship between capital and labor and I would just add that another way of looking at these things the non-human aspects of this landscape is as activities or even work which is being carried out not only by human beings but by non-human beings so the thing is to take this work which is unpaid these activities which are unpaid which are conducted both by humans and non-humans and convert them into something else separate them and make them into something which can be used to get rich accumulate capital and one aspect of this of course is as the 1970s feminists were forever indebted to for pointing out is that a lot of this unpaid labor was not only unpaid labor of water and microorganisms and so it's women also unpaid reproductive labor from women she says this was this was the challenge facing capital five centuries ago in initiating the process of capitalistic unification is still the problem today for the continuation of this mode of production and its combined strategies of development and under development so the picture is sort of like this you have all this sort of unpaid activity devalued activity because you know we're not paying for it because it's not worth anything of course I mean that's the capitalist mythology and that's also to some extent invisibilized I mean it took the 1970s feminists to point out to make this stuff visible in terms of reproductive work of women and so forth so you have all of this stuff including thermodynamic energy feeding into making possible the labor which capitalists used to accumulate so we've got the factors that's reported not only by the workers and the mining and the resources but also by the incessant activities of non-human beings as well as the unpaid activities of human beings not only women in the households and on the farm but just everyday peasants a lot of unpaid care for the earth a good example of this process in action is China between 2000 and 2010 roughly where you had this huge move for foreign investment in the coastal China, southern China to take advantage of the cheap labor which was being taken out of the countryside moving to the cities I mean this is a historically unprecedented pulse of sort of raw cheap labor which could be paid initially at a very low rate in order to manufacture stuff for exports but supporting that and indispensable to that was also another kind of activity the activity of ancient micro-organisms that made coal and the activity of taking that coal out of the earth and using that to increase the productivity of all of this cheap labor we had the cheap labor the cheap nature supporting it that's a very concrete example of it notably since 2010 or so this model has been faltering a bit because the sort of energies and the flexibility of that very cheap labor is running out they're demanding more pay they're committing suicide the capitalists are thinking about moving to Vietnam and all the rest of this stuff this is one way of sort of summarizing the same picture is you're imperative as a capitalist to sort of increase the productivity of wage labor to get more bang for your buck out of the workers that you but for every small increase in the productivity of wage labor you need a whole lot of unpaid labor to support that to make it possible that includes not only your mining operations your oil operations but includes a lot of different kinds of unpaid labor and eventually through this process you get a sort of progressive exhaustion or maxing out of these frontiers of unpaid activity whether it's coal or whether it's labor itself or whatever and this is not quite the same as what people talk about in the mainstream is resource depletion or peak oil just as with the labor situation what capital is worried about when it thinks about labor is going to run they're not worried about the workers having heart attacks on the assembly line and suddenly keeling over and they're not there no, they're worried about something which is much more complex involving processes of resistance involving processes of laziness and foot dragging and people just demanding more wages all of this sort of stuff it's not as simple as resource depletion and that's true of labor but it's also true of everything else one nice emblematic example of sort of what's been happening in the neoliberal age under this kind of dynamic is the big blow out with the deep water horizon in the Gulf of Mexico some years ago where of course they're looking for cheap oil but the cheap oil does receive to these further frontiers and in this sense the sort of idea that resources are running out there's an element of truth in that they have to go farther and look harder for the oil but also there's these imperatives for them to cut costs in doing so because the costs of that naturally rise and rise and rise but BP certainly tried to cut as many costs as it could in searching for that horizon of unpaid work in the form of oil with the result that we all know but something that not as many people know is that to clean up what happened afterwards and this is also part of the capitalist process the capitalist dynamic to clean up the inevitable mess that happened BP together with the state government of Louisiana and other actors had to look for cheap labor the cheaper the possible and in doing so they overlooked all of the unemployed fishermen and so forth on the coast of Louisiana and they went straight to the prison system which supplied them with not only low cost but in some cases no cost labor for cleaning up the enormous mess on the beaches of Louisiana which was caused by the BP blow up and when people started asking questions about this you know the state authorities answered well gosh this is part of their sentence you know these guys are criminals part of their sentence is they work for you for free so did anybody say racism did anybody say I mean almost all black did anybody say slavery people don't usually use the word slavery but this is actually you know this is an example of the dynamic you exhaust a frontier maxed out it's not flexible anymore it's sclerotic you've got to find a new frontier and the frontier is going to be a frontier where you can get new kinds of cheap activity which hasn't yet been utilized anybody who thinks that this inmate labor is unrelated to petroleum extraction anybody who thinks that that dynamic is different between these two things or they were talking about two different subjects I think just doesn't understand capitalism so I want to expand a little bit on what I mean by this maxing out of this exhaustion of frontiers and I think one manifestation of frontiers being exhausted is when people just can't take it anymore when their environment is being destroyed and then the U.S. this happened in the 60's and 70's and resulted in this strange wave of environmental regulation which started up in the 1970's but almost as soon as this regulation was promulgated you started hearing voices that this is a growth ban we can't accumulate capital and this regulation is really holding and this became quite a strong current certainly as early as the Jimmy Carter administration the idea that this would disrupt this whole dynamic and this remains the concern behind both the Paris Agreement and Trump's anti-Paris sentiment the problem is that the frontiers are becoming exhausted and sclerotic in order to do something about that we institute environmental regulation but it costs too much the Paris Agreement deals with that in a way I'll try to explain a little bit more through ecosystem services trading Trump deals with that by saying well let's just forget it let's forget about this regulation in nonsense let's just modify it just a few more details about the ecosystem service trading response which includes the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol and so forth the idea here is to repair this pipeline of unpaid work so that the unpaid work can continue to flow so you admit that this is becoming sclerotic or inflexible or exhausted but you repair the pipeline how do you do that you try to make the regulation legislation more flexible and you try to import units of environmental services from somewhere else in the world in order to repair your frontier so the frontier can continue to provide this unpaid work to the capitalist system which will ensure the productivity of labor this is very frank sorry this is very frankly admitted by the ecosystem services traders themselves the objective is to transform environmental regulation into tradable instruments to transform the law into commodities so we have some of these commodities and of course they're traded worldwide in the form of legal rights to be more or less exempt from certain kinds of regulation which have been modified to allow for that institutional responses to the threat to accumulation but of course the same dynamic erupts here you're taking these ecosystem services from different parts of the globe but in order to do that you have to modify these ecosystem services you have to modify what's going on in the unpaid work of nature and of non-humans and that begins to take a toll for example if you have a carbon trading program which tries to extract carbon emission rights from an agroforestry system or from a forest naturally you're going to be concentrating on the aspect of that nature that forest or that agricultural field which can provide low-cost tokens of environmental regulatory relief and that's going to have a certain toll on that particular kind of nature just briefly a second form of magical thinking that was a form of magical thinking is Trump's fantasy holds that rather than being a symptom of the decline in the usability of old frontiers regulation is actually the cause and if you get rid of regulation you'll just solve all your problems we can go back to using the old frontiers just like before so you'll press immigrants through threats of expulsion or exclusion and they will quietly go right back to providing previous levels of low-cost and no-cost labor get rid of environmental and all of the previously costless activity of organisms and the old waste dumps like the sea and elsewhere will instantly return to effective service in the cause of capital no repairs of the frontier are actually necessary abolish welfare programs and other old reservoirs or free work can once again be tapped without capital it's having to pay increasing costs for their maintenance criminalized blacks and Mexican-Americans and non-white environmental protesters that's very important in places like the Andes and Latin America and you can use their labor for free and they will immediately go back to providing unpaid reproductive work in support of a white male labor aristocracy well it ain't going to happen but this is the message that Trump is trying to get across and a lot of capitalists would love to believe it too see what happens next anyway this is where I'll stop and for me one of the political conclusions from all of this is just as Obamaism should never be seen as the alternative to Trumpism they come from the same history and the EU should not be seen as the alternative to Nigel Farage or in this I'm making reference to Ecuadorian politics Lenin Moreno should not be the alternative to Lasso and the rule of the bankers so to the Paris agreement should never be presented as the alternative to Trumpism that way lies divide and rule and strategic defeat and I think value of trying to decolonize our climate minds as the rest of our minds is in strategy and in political wisdom and in way of movement building in the future around climate as well as other issues