"This scales cannot carry such weight". Ziya Paşa's famous motto summarizes the climate crisis. "This scale", is this planet. "Such weight" is the burden put on this planet. No serious reduction of that weight, of that poison instilled into the earth on a daily basis means that eventually the scale crumbles, and the life on it perishes. The perpetrators of the fatal poison, the burden which causes the turn on the scale are small in number, yet their crimes are global. Responsible for the destruction of the planet is a "corporate feudalism", consisting of 80 people and 90 companies. We talked to Ömer Madra, founder and manager of Açık Radyo, one of the primary venues of the environmental movement in Turkey, about the cause and perpetrators behind the destruction of the earth, and what can be and has been done against it.
What is climate change, why is it important for Turkey, and what is its impact on the country?
Ömer Madra: Let’s start with a general assessment if you wish. Climate change is as important for Turkey as it is for the rest of the world. We are on the brink; the end of the world as we know it is very near. Today is the first day of September. Autumn has yet to arrive, but August 2015 has already gone down in history as the hottest month of August in history. It is also almost certain that the year 2015 is the hottest year ever in history. In other words, it is like in that old gloomy song: “Oh what misfortune, another year the summer has passed without a hint of spring…”
This is the hottest year ever in history, yet a tiny elite group has changed the rules to such an extent that the game called growth—or development in the Turkish context—has turned into winner takes all. You know the game of roulette—one places bets on various numbers and spins the wheel, and may win double, triple, etc., of the initial bet. Then there is the chance that the winner takes all. Just like in that game, a small number of companies are playing winner takes all, but they are doing it in real life. However, they are the only people winning, and everyone else is losing.
The figures are striking. The aid organization Oxfam announced earlier this year that only 80 people’s wealth is equal to that of the half of the world population, which is 3.5 billion people. The same report also states that next year the richest one percent will come to possess more than the entire wealth of the rest of humanity!
The Guardian published a well-studied news article. It looks into how much single companies are responsible for climate change since the Industrial Revolution, that is, since the beginning of climate change. The most significant portion of climate change since the 1750’s has taken place in the last 40 years, in fact the last 25 years, and only 90 companies account for two-thirds of the all greenhouse gas emissions! Just 90 out of the tens of thousands of companies across the world! They are the largest oil companies. However, there is an interesting omission in the report—that of the agricultural industry and livestock farming.
They are not on the list?
No, they are not. If I am not mistaken, the list includes only oil, coal and cement companies. Industrial agriculture and livestock farming companies pollute the air and cut down forests to grow animal feed. According to World Bank data, the livestock sector is responsible for 51% of the entire greenhouse gas emissions across the world. There are “cattle cities” with hundreds of thousands of cattle. Their transportation to the slaughterhouse, cutting down of trees to grow food for them… Their slaughter, packaging, delivery to market, and of course the gas they emit... It is horrible: 51% and yet no one talks about it. Less then one hundred companies are responsible for 90% of greenhouse gases; namely, 80 people and 90 companies play the lead role here!
Another article published in The Guardian last month pointed to coal-related activities in Turkey. They are building the world’s largest coal-fired power plant in Afşin-Elbistan. Furthermore, there is a similar scale investment in Karapınar, Konya. A report on the Konya Plain written by a commission headed by Prof. Ismail Duman and published by the TEMA Foundation points to the gravity of the situation.1
As indicated in the said report, even the construction of the coal-fired power plant in Karapınar will be enough to completely destroy the Konya Plain, Turkey’s breadbasket. There already is a horrible drought, which leads to the creation of sink-holes, or large craters. However, there are still mega projects in the pipeline in Turkey, such as Kanal Istanbul, the third bridge over the Bosphorus, and the third airport in Istanbul. This is the obsession with grandeur! Growing and developing, whatever the cost. This is the nuisance called neoliberalism. We cannot deal with it. As May Boeve, the director of 350.org, has said recently “There is no development on a dead planet!”
Actually, there is a way to deal with it and I will touch upon it later. In an article2 published in 2014, Chris Hedges indicates that neoliberalism is being unraveled thread by thread across the world, starting from the USA, which is his focus. There are cases in point in Turkey, too. We can define neoliberalism simply as free market fundamentalism. This is an ideology which took off in the 1980’s and has been in action since 35 years. During the era of neoliberalism, we saw arguments such as “the market solves everything,” “wealth trickles down to everyone,” and “all players are equal” turn out to be mere lies.
They claimed that global wealth as well as rights would be shared across the board equally. However, richness are concentrated in the hands of the oligarchic elite I mentioned before. Most rights were not granted and no one became equal; in fact, there are huge gaps of inequality which increase day after day! Greece is a case in point. The rights and unions of the working poor have been trampled on. Wages are frozen or even falling, people are condemned to chronic poverty and their lives reduced to continual stress. They are living in a stress-ridden emergency, as suggested by Chris Hedges in his 2015 article.3 The middle class is disappearing. Cities are built in places where the manufacturing industry and factories used to be. As such, cities are turning into empty lots closed with wooden fences. Prisons are overcrowded. Companies are hoarding money in tax havens as a result of secret agreements with banks. All of this is true for Turkey to a certain extent; the number of inmates in Turkey has doubled in the last 12 to 13 years. Despite the promises of democratization, democratic regimes are crumbling. This has turned into corporate monstrosity.
Can you elaborate on the effects of neoliberalism on ecosystems?
Neoliberal powers are destroying ecosystems as well. Eons ago, 90% of all species living on the face of the Earth were wiped off. Books on such mass extinctions on the world suggest that 90% of all species had disappeared in the fifth of such events. Now, we are approaching a similar catastrophe. An article I read today suggests that the ice meltdown in the poles has broken all historical records. The ice sheet is melting especially in the North Pole, while on the other hand, immense conflagrations are wreaking havoc in other regions of the world. In both poles, the ice and glaciers are disappearing rapidly.
Prominent climatologist James Hansen and 16 of his colleagues have published an online study4 which sparked heated debate; however, climate change deniers tried to disregard its arguments on the pretext that the journal was not refereed. But the results of their study, which was initiated in early 1980’s, is unfortunately very accurate. The study suggests that the world’s largest port cities such as Paris, New York, Istanbul and London could be under water in 30 to 35 years.
On the other hand, we observe mega droughts in the Middle East and unstoppable forest fires across America. Their increase is directly related to global warming, and then they further aggravate global warming. Like a snake eating up its tail... If you just take the example of Washington state, 100 hectares of forests are said to have burnt down. “This is an unprecedented event in world history,” they say. A study in 2014 focused on the disappearance of historical forest lands. Unfortunately in Turkey, during the construction of the third airport for instance, historical woodland has been cut down and new saplings were planted instead. This is an irrecoverable mistake. The said study from 2014 has proven that new saplings cannot replace historical forests.
Where there is no fire or drought, we have flooding. We witnessed the latest example in Hopa, Artvin. After the event, the Minister of Forestry and Water Management spoke of a “deluge,” and said that such an event could happen only once in five hundred years. Well, there is a web site called Floodlist,5 which keeps track of flood areas day by day. In the period between August 3-28, 32 floods have occurred on six continents. That makes more than one deluge per day. Well, isn’t this a bit too frequent for such a catastrophic event? As for the seventh continent, Antarctica, it is not beset with fire or drought, but is melting down at an unprecedented tempo.
What do you think of the argument that the war in Syria is triggered by large-scale drought due to climate change?
Famine, drought, scarcity, violence and war force people to abandon their homes. People are fleeing Syria en masse at the moment. The civil war there started with drought. Discontented young women and men had fled to the cities but were discriminated against. They started a rebellion in the town of Daraa, and when Assad repressed the rebellion, civil war broke out. In total, over four million people have had to flee and emigrate.
Migration is not limited to Syria. Over 4.5 million people emigrated from Iraq. People are fleeing from Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and other African nations towards Europe. The flow has increased by 40% over the prior year. As is known to all, many of these migrants lose their lives while trying to cross the Mediterranean. This is the largest migration to occur in the world since World War II.
What’s worse, migration is set to increase further. More drought, flooding, conflagration and disease will trigger further migration. It is predicted that due to the chaos caused by failed states, 50 to 250 million people will flee to Europe in the future. The study by Hansen and colleagues indicates that there are numerous Asian cities at most one meter above sea level and that 30% of Bangladesh’s population falls into this category. They have nowhere to run. If they flee to India, they will run into a huge border fence built by that country.
The same study indicates that 33 countries will suffer from severe water shortage in 25 years, including Turkey. However, the Turkish media still describes these people who have nowhere to run to as fugitives or illegal migrants. Since this is generally described as the migration crisis, European countries get together to find solutions. However, this development is related to the climate change, and thus not temporary but bound to continue. This is a historical migration, and it is naïve, indeed stupid, to think that this historical migration or the climate change will end one day.
It is said that migrants will not be able to return to their countries of origin since their livelihood is destroyed. In your opinion, what kind of a transitional period is this and what will the new order including migrants be like?
That argument is right. Even Syrians do not think that they will return home one day. In fact, return has always been a very rare incident in refugee crises in history. We always talk about climate, but there is also another issue: In fact, we are witnessing an environmental, social and political unraveling. We cannot escape from this by watching screens all day long, like a society of spectacle. This unraveling mentioned by Hedges is heading towards total collapse. This chaotic and anarchical atmosphere is made up of nihilism mixed with anger.
The late Chalmers Johnson, a prominent political scientist, has described this phenomenon as a blowback. For instance, the wars waged by the USA across the world have resulted in the 9/11 blowback. Today, we see people go berserk and start a shooting spree in shopping malls. There is a similar situation in Turkey, where cases of individual violence are also on the rise. In Europe, schools, cinemas, offices, and public transport come under attack. Today I read that Boko Haram has raided a school delivering Western-type education and killed 70 people. ISIS, on the other hand, is in a killing fever: They kill people from all groups—Christians, homosexuals, Muslims—for being different from themselves. The same happens everywhere: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Mauritania, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, Nigeria, Russia, the UK, India and Pakistan… We have already mentioned the USA.
Fanaticism is in fact a result of despair and lack of hope. As suggested by Antonio Gramsci, the old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms. Unless we change our relationship with the ecosystem, this morbidity will continue. Hedges describes this new modus as “corporate feudalism”, where a small elite is at the helm and claims that security is their main concern. Indoor and outdoor security mechanisms and surveillance cameras are everywhere, from shopping malls to neighborhoods.
Security is also associated with the energy issue. “Energy security” is almost always brought up in discussions about energy. The energy agenda is pretty much focused on security, so much so that it is impossible to bring climate policy into the debate for instance. Why do you think everyone talks about security?
Language gives us hints about social reality. In fact the entire country is slowly turning into a security state. Laws are being put in place as a part of this trend. All this military and police armament brings to mind the prospect of civil war. In fact, this is the case all over the world. Hedges says that unless we topple the neoliberal order right away, a Hobbesian nightmare will be unleashed. Violence begets more violence. The masses are condemned to such severe poverty that violence is inevitable. In reaction, Hedges suggests that the elite will retreat to the palaces, just like in Turkey, much like Versailles or the Forbidden City in China. As long as certain groups keep control over assets not accessible to everyone, hate will become a widespread ideology. Societies are already heavily armed. For instance, we are watching as ISIS grows rapidly. They have occupied a territory the size of Texas, declared Raqqa as their capital and numerous people continue to join them every day. They subject women, homosexuals, believers from other religions to incredible violence. While condemning ISIS, we should also try to understand it.
What is the reason behind this anger?
The neoliberal order. The fact that a handful of people control the world’s wealth. We are talking about 80 individuals. As Ziya Paşa once said, “the scales cannot carry such a weight,” and they will eventually break. If we take a look at Donald Trump, who seems to lead the race for the Republican presidential nomination, we can see that his supporters are people who experience similar despair. People work at two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. In the USA, 60 million people are on the brink of famine. The neoliberal order has made people disposable. Those who cannot become a worker within the system are viewed as redundant laborers. We could go even further and say that those who do not produce are seen as redundant human beings.
According to Hedges, our only hope is the reintegration of the “wretched of the earth” to the society. In the current situation, they have no future. We had touched upon this while discussing the killings at Charlie Hebdo. We saw that people without future resort to violence.
Hedges’ view is based on the argument that unless we overthrow the neoliberal order, and recover the humanistic tradition that rejects the view that humans and the Earth are commodities to exploit, our industrialized and economic barbarity will clash with the barbarity of our opponents. Friedrich Engels used to say that we will either choose socialism or fall back on barbarism; Hedges says that it is now time to make that decision.
What kind of an opposition do climate activists organize against all of this?
Now we are coming to the positive part. There are people who oppose what is going on. It is the tenth anniversary of the hurricane Katrina. Katrina has turned into a pilot case for neoliberalism. One hundred thousand black people could not return to their homes. The schools there were rapidly turned into private schools. However, something else rose from within that group which could not return. Their slogan is “The seas are rising and so are we.” A Shell platform that was on its way to wreaking havoc in the North Pole was blocked by “kayaktivists” in their small canoes, and had to stop working for two days. Germany, which is closing down nuclear plants on the one hand and selling coal technology on the other, sent a gigantic coal mining machine to Afşin-Elbistan just like the one in their company RWE. However 1500 activists blocked its passage and prevented the extraction of tons of coal from the ground. They were able to stop the machine for just one day, yet they prevented a huge amount of pollution.
We can topple the monster only if we push all together. The call came on August 27. A historical declaration was issued, entitled “Freeze Fossil Fuel Extraction to Stop Climate Crimes.” Those who expressed their demands in this text will follow up during and after the Paris Summit (COP 21). Over one hundred scientists, philosophers and activists have signed the declaration. The states, which are controlled by large corporations, do not take any action. Neoliberalism has destroyed their capacity to intervene in the climate crisis.
What should we expect from the COP 21 talks?
As mentioned in the text, we know that global companies and governments will never give up. As such, this declaration is a call to revolution. They say, we are confident in our capacity, just like slavery was destroyed in the past, today climate change will be eradicated through rebellion. We want to rebel and to change absolutely everything. Across the world, indigenous peoples are fighting against large corporations. Small-scale economies secure food autonomy. Our call is clear: Do not extract the 80% of fossil fuel reserves buried deep underground! This is the main decision which must be taken in Paris. The text suggests, if you want to leave a habitable world to the next generations, you have to stop extracting coal. And we will not wait for states to heed this call—basta!
Slavery was abolished not because states granted freedom, but because masses of people mobilized and left states no other option. They enjoyed their big party, but we will not be cleaning the rubbish they left behind.
Companies’ hegemony over politics must be eradicated. We have to change our modes of consumption and production radically. We will change the system, not just the climate. The declaration ends with the words “We will not waste this opportunity, in Paris or elsewhere, today or tomorrow.”
What is the situation in Turkey? Could you talk about the movement Iklim Için (For the Climate)?
The movement Iklim Için set out this February with a manifesto, which basially says that Paris is not our last chance. Even if the necessary decisions are not taken in Paris, we will continue on our way. The climate movement in Turkey gained in strength with Iklim Için. Prior to the G20 summit, the campaign will hold the Climate Forum at Boğaziçi University on November 12-13, and organize a Climate March on November 14 to say to the G20 countries, “you cannot go on like this.” In fact, our objective is to irritate the G20 leaders. In a way it is the second version of “Tek Yol Devrim (Revolution is the only way!) And everyone is invited to join in.
Are we, the ordinary people, the last generation which can save the planet?
Yes, absolutely.
The campaign Iklim Için strives to involve everyone. Not only those already interested in the issue, but ordinary souls like ourselves. What do you think?
Naturally. Heroic achievements were reached in local struggles in Turkey. For instance, people waged a three-year struggle in Gerze and won twice. This achievement belongs to Gerze’s locals, especially women. The same is true across the world. In Yırca, the local women joined our press conference for Iklim Için with tears in their eyes. There is a rising grassroots struggle against the horrible neoliberal onslaught. Gezi was another such struggle. It started in a park at the heart of Istanbul and expanded to 79 cities. What really moved me was to see the people of Gerze bring their freshly collected tea and share it with those occupying Gezi Park…
To sum up, the matter is too critical to be left to environmentalists! To change everything, we need everyone. So we invite everybody—to the Climate Forum, Paris, and beyond.
So are you saying, “we are saving the world and you should join us”?
Yes, this is an invitation to all ordinary Supermen and Superwomen…
2. http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/saving_the_planet_one_meal_at_a_ti…
3. http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_great_unraveling_20150830
4. http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/acpd-15-20059-2015…
CALL FOR TO STOP CLIMATE CRIMES
Freeze fossil fuel extraction to stop climate crimes
We are at a crossroads. We do not want to be compelled to survive in a world that has been made barely livable for us. From South Pacific Islands to the shores of Louisiana, from the Maldives to the Sahel, from Greenland to the Alps, the daily lives of millions of us are already being disrupted by the consequences of climate change. Through ocean acidification, the submersion of South Pacific Islands, forced migration in the Indian Subcontinent and Africa, frequent storms and hurricanes, the current ecocide affects all species and ecosystems, threatening the rights of future generations. And we are not equally impacted by climate change: Indigenous and peasant communities, poor communities in the global South and in the global North are at the frontlines and most affected by these and other impacts of climate disruption.
We are not under any illusions. For more than 20 years, governments have been meeting, yet greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased and the climate keeps changing. The forces of inertia and obstruction prevail, even as scientific warnings become ever more dire.
This comes as no surprise. Decades of liberalization of trade and investments have undermined the capacity of states to confront the climate crisis. At every stage powerful forces – fossil fuel corporations, agro-business companies, financial institutions, dogmatic economists, skeptics and deniers, and governments in the thrall of these interests – stand in the way or promote false solutions. Ninety companies are responsible for two-thirds of recorded greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Genuine responses to climate change threatens their power and wealth, threatens free market ideology, and threatens the structures and subsidies that support and underwrite them.
We know that global corporations and governments will not give up the profits they reap through the extraction of coal, gas and oil reserves; and through global fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture. Our continuing ability to act, think, love, care, work, create, produce, contemplate, struggle, however, demands that we force them to. To be able to continue to thrive as communities, individuals and citizens, we all must strive for change. Our common humanity and the Earth demand it.
We are confident in our capacity to stop climate crimes. In the past, determined women and men have resisted and overcome the crimes of slavery, totalitarianism, colonialism or apartheid. They decided to fight for justice and solidarity and knew no one would do it for them. Climate change is a similar challenge, and we are nurturing a similar uprising.
We are working to change everything. We can open the way to a more livable future, and our actions are much more powerful than we think. Around the world, our communities are fighting against the real drivers of the climate crisis, protecting territories, working to reduce their emissions, building their resilience, achieving food autonomy through small scale ecological farming, etc.
On the eve of the UN Climate Conference to be held in Paris-Le Bourget, we declare our determination to keep fossil fuels in the ground. This is the only way forward.
Concretely, governments have to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and to freeze fossil fuel extraction by leaving untouched 80% of all existing fossil fuel reserves.
We know that this implies a great historical shift. We will not wait for states to make it happen. Slavery and apartheid did not end because states decided to abolish them. Mass mobilisations left political leaders no other choice.
The situation today is precarious. We have, however, a unique opportunity to reinvigorate democracy, to dismantle the dominance of corporate political power, to transform radically our modes of production and consumption. Ending the era of fossil fuels is one important step towards the fair and sustainable society we need.
We will not waste this opportunity, in Paris or elsewhere, today or tomorrow.