Climate Justice, Militarisation and Palestine

We're publishing here a transcript of the speech given by Nandana James, Communications Content Officer, at our recent event with Afri, 'Climate Justice, Militarism, and Palestine: Unlearning Empire, Rooting Resistance' on August 13th. Katie Martin, Afri's Coordinator, faciliated an educational workshop that critically connected local and global struggles for justice, using Ireland and Palestine as interconnected lenses to explore how settler colonialism, militarism, ecological destruction and imperial power structures operate globally. Nandana's speech aimed to give a brief overview of the interlinked crises of climate injustice, militarisation and the genocide in Palestine through an intersectional lens just before the workshop kicked off. 

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 Climate Justice, Militarisation and Palestine

…and the intrinsic interconnectedness of it all 

Hi everyone! Welcome again to a very special evening of collective learning and empowerment! Just before we kickstart the workshop, I’ll be delving into the interlinked crises of climate injustice, militarism and the genocide in Palestine, which are arguably the most pressing crises that we as a society are facing. In particular, I’ll be exploring what I like describing as the intrinsic interconnectedness of these crises. 

I’m going to start by naming some crises, and briefly introducing the concept of intersectionality. Inequalities. Colonialism. Poverty. The genocide in Palestine. Systemic racism. The climate crisis. Militarism. Wars. It may seem like I’m listing wildly disparate issues, but in reality and on closer inspection, they cannot be more closely interlinked.

These issues are not mutually exclusive and they do not occur in isolation—in fact, these issues reinforce and intersect with each other. They need to be understood and addressed within the context of the same exploitative systems they occur in. It’s a different matter that we as a society have been conditioned to understand and approach these issues in siloes - and this has particularly been the case with the climate crisis. Almost as if climate change occurs in some sort of vacuum and has no bearing on people’s everyday lives.

Author and activist Naomi Klein explains this concept of intersectionality really well. Let me read out an edited version of what she said:

We have multiple emergencies and what we’re trying to understand is how are they feeding each other and how are they intersecting with each other? What if we responded to these unveilings with an intersectional response that actually tried to change the system that was producing these overlapping crises? So how about as we decarbonise and create a less polluted world, we also build a much fairer society on multiple fronts?

Now, why is it important to understand, connect the dots and talk about these issues? Acting for change begins with becoming informed, especially when it’s done in critical, in-depth and intersectional ways. Oftentimes, this in itself is a way of standing up and acting for change. Knowledge is power, as they say.

This is especially significant how rife disinformation and propaganda are, and how, on a global political level, there are concerted efforts to erase critical thinking as well as histories of oppression and resistance. One just has to think about the way the mainstream media has been covering what’s happening in Palestine—legitimising and manufacturing consent for a genocide.

Now, let’s specifically explore these issues through an intersectional lens. First, something to think about – what are some of the first images that come to your mind when you think about climate change?

Historically, the mainstream climate movement has mostly focused on emission targets, individual behaviour changes, technological fixes, polar bears, biodiversity etc. This has overshadowed efforts to communicate the glaring role of fossil fuel extractivism, colonialism, capitalism—or about climate justice! 

These concepts are not typically linked together in people's minds. This is by design. Fossil fuel multinationals and the Governments they're in cahoots with wanted and benefited from people thinking about their own individual consumption habits and not these companies' gigantic role in causing and prolonging the climate crisis. For example, do you know who came up with the concept of carbon footprint? British Petroleum, through their advertising campaign! They did this to distract us from the actual villains of the climate crisis—which are fossil fuel multinationals like them – and instead make regular people like us feel responsible and guilty for these companies’ pollution. 

Climate change related issues also do not occur in a vacuum—the climate crisis we are seeing today is owing to hundreds of years of powerful nations and corporations exploiting nature and people, especially the systemically marginalised, for the sake of profits. This ties in with extractivism, which is something I've mentioned a few times already. In a very broad sense, extractivism entails large-scale, intensive extraction of natural resources where the output is directly exported and little to no benefit remains in the place where the extraction took place. It is characterised by a profit accumulation objective above all, even if it’s at the expense of people and ecosystems. 

And where and how did such a model come into place? Lo and behold - British and European colonialism, which set in place a global capitalist model of extraction and exploitation of nature and people—all to fuel their own industrial growth. 

Rather than focussing only on reducing emissions, we should also be tackling the root injustices and exploitative systems that caused and prolong the climate crisis—such as colonialism, militarisation, extractive capitalism etc. Such a way of understanding and tackling the climate crisis is what climate justice and intersectionality is essentially about. It's about centering human rights and justice. 

Climate justice also means recognising that the impacts of the climate crisis differ across class, race, caste and gender lines and that it multiplies existing inequalities and injustices. Another important dimension of climate justice is that the climate crisis is, at its core, an issue of deep injustice, with those least responsible for climate change the most impacted by it. The rich developed countries in the Global North - such as the US, European countries etc. - are responsible for over 90% of historical emissions! And let’s be clear—such emissions from hundreds of years ago continue to contribute to the heating of the planet.

And yet, it is people in the Global South - or countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America - that are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. To give just one example, more than 90% of pollution-related deaths occur in low and middle-income countries. 

Climate justice also means that the Palestinian liberation and the genocide happening there are inextricably linked with the climate movement. Climate issues are not just about extreme weather events or emissions, it’s also wars, it’s also militarisation, it’s also the genocide in Palestine. This is not only because of the emissions associated with wars and militarisation - which are astronomical and rarely talked about - but because the climate movement is about protecting people and our planet. As a movement that exists to protect people and our planet, the climate movement cannot remain silent as Israel continues to deliberately and systematically massacre people and nature. Besides, the genocide in Palestine and the climate crisis also share the same root causes—of colonialism, extractivism and racialised capitalism. 

Israel’s genocide in Palestine points to the need to have intersectionality, justice and human rights embedded across the climate movement. Or else, among other implications, world leaders will continue to get away with making tall claims about tackling climate change while funding and enabling militarisation and genocides in the same breath.

Finally, I want to delve more into militarisation—which really is the elephant in the room when it comes to the climate crisis. In addition to causing unfathomable cruelties, wars and occupation also aggravate the global climate crisis (these are all interlinked issues after all!).

Militaries worldwide generally are estimated to account for almost 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually—more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. If the world’s militaries were a country, this figure would mean they have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world - and all this is likely to be a significant underestimate, because guess what, there is no obligation for states to report military emissions to the UN climate body! 

Isn’t it appalling and ridiculous that there’s such scrutiny on what a person puts in their recycling bins and so on and so forth while powerful nations' militaries don't even have to report their emissions? To put into context just how glaring this is, a recent report revealed that the carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual emissions of a hundred individual countries. 

Let’s call a spade a spade—there is no climate justice in a world where genocides and wars are allowed to happen with impunity. 

On that note, I’d like to conclude by reminding all of you that, together, we do have a lot of power. Collective action and mass movements - or people power at large - is how change has happened, throughout history. But it’s hard to feel we have any power at all, when, for the past two years nearly, we’ve been waking up to the horrors of a live streamed genocide. So I think it’s fitting to end by reading an excerpt from activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest book (No Straight Road Takes You There):

For the directly impacted, giving up means surrendering to devastation…And I doubt that anyone in desperate straits has ever taken comfort from the idea that somewhere far safer, people are bitter and despondent on their behalf...We who have materially safe and comfortable lives and who are part of societies and nations that contributed and still contribute the lion’s share of greenhouse gases do not have the right to surrender on behalf of others. We have the obligation to act in solidarity with them. This begins by recognising that the future has not yet been decided, because we are deciding it now.

 

Thank you!