Pete Cannell from ScotE3 was invited to introduce a discussion on Fossil Fuels and Right-Wing Populism at a recent meeting of Dumfries TUC. This is a slightly edited version of his talk.
This post explores the way in which right wing populist parties use climate denial as a key part of their agenda. In thinking about the topic, I found Andreas Malm’s excellent book ‘White Skin – Black Fuel on the danger of Fossil Fascism’ very helpful. Early on in the book, Malm notes that:
“All European far-right parties of political significance in the early twenty-first century expressed climate denial.”
The book weas written 3 years ago but it’s hard to think of more recent exceptions. So, there’s definitely something to be explained here.
Clearly climate denial didn’t start with the rise of right-wing populism. From the 1970’s onwards the major oil and gas companies, particularly Exxon, were researching the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the environment and at the same time funding organisations like the Global Climate Coalition in the US whose role was to argue that pushing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere was not a problem. Privately they knew from early on that fossil fuel extraction would have a devastating effect on the global climate. In 1995 the GCC in an internal document wrote that
“the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”
but in public they denied it.
As a strategy outright denial had its limitations. The Kyoto protocol signed in 1997 marked the beginning of a new strategy – a shift from denial to greenwashing.
The three core tenets of Kyoto are:
- Postpone the showdown with Fossil Fuels into distant future.
- Place no serious limits on fossil fuel extraction.
- New opportunities for generating profit.
In the UK, the industry’s plans for the North Sea are a good example of postponing any showdown with fossil fuels. The strategy is based on continuing extraction through to and beyond 2050 and the development of a so-called net zero oil and gas basin. Here net zero depends on heroic assumptions about techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage combined with creative accountancy that ascribes all responsibility for the carbon in the oil and gas that’s produced to the users. Globally there are virtually no regulatory limits on the production of fossil fuels. It’s assumed that any run down will be as a result of market forces. At the same time trading carbon permits has been highly profitable in financial terms and has allowed the industry to claim that the trade contributes to reducing carbon emissions. There is next to no evidence that carbon trading and offsetting has reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
So as far as big business goes, we are still in the era of greenwashing. Big oil and gas are at pains to argue that they want to protect the planet. And almost all governments around the world are in lockstep with fossil fuel industry in this strategy. Practically, depending on local circumstances the form that greenwashing takes varies, but everywhere it’s about maintaining or enhancing the profitability of fossil capital and preserving the existing infrastructure. So, in the UK for example hydrogen is touted as the answer to domestic cooking and heating. In the short to medium term this would probably mean higher carbon emissions than the existing use of natural gas and if ultimately the hydrogen was all green, i.e. produced by electrolysis it would be fantastically inefficient. Requiring the use of up to seven times as much electricity than would be required to simply electrify cooking and heating. But it’s attractive to the industry because it enables the continuation of existing economic and technical infrastructure.
The result of all this is that investment is skewed away from forms of energy use and production that are sustainable and rapidly achievable – and rather than supporting a just transition for workers and communities existing inequalities are maintained and ramped up. The ongoing cost of living crisis in which poor consumers of gas and electricity contribute to eye watering profits for energy producers and distributors is a case in point.
And it’s this that has provided fertile ground for right wing populist parties.
Five decades of neo-liberalism has syphoned money and resources from public to private and increased inequality everywhere so that working class people are anxious or scared about climate, cost of living, war, housing, growing old – in a world where the belief that their parents or grandparents had that things would be better for the next generation is dead. Most people don’t trust established politicians – established parties offer variations on the same neo-liberal agenda. Into this vacuum has stepped forms of right-wing populism that purport to offer alternatives to the ‘establishment’.
Right wing populism takes different forms – sometimes taking over long-established parties – Trump and the Republican Party in the US. Or in the UK the continuing rise of right-wing populists as a major, perhaps majority faction within the Tory party. Sometimes emerging from explicitly fascist formations, for example, Le Pen in France or Meloni in Italy. And sometimes completely new organisations, for example the AfD in Germany. None of them are into Greenwashing. They are all about Climate Denial.
In Spain a prominent member of right wing populist party Vox explains climate change as
“any change on the sun, the moon, the rotation of the earth, volcanoes and naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena but absolutely not on CO2 emitted by humans. It would, said Abascal, be ‘very arrogant’ to believe that humans could alter the climate. It would be ‘even more arrogant’ to think that the alteration could be rectified by ‘coercive laws and taxes’.”
The AfD in Germany has increased its influence through organising around climate issues, demonising perhaps the biggest climate movement around the world, foregrounding the cost-of-living crisis and agitating around the farmers protests. Often supported and facilitated in this by the state and the police.
It’s obviously not just climate that is building the new far right. Climate issues intersect with the legacy of neo-liberalism, migration and racism and the failure of the left to provide an alternative that speaks to working people’s insecurity and against individualistic solutions. The far-right populists feed off social media fuelled confusion and conspiracies. Very often angry or frightened people looking for answers find them in apparently anti-establishment and authoritative voices online.
So, what’s to be done. I think we can see the embryo of an alternative in the picket lines and in the huge response to the ongoing horror in Gaza. It’s struck me standing on UCU picket lines last year, and then again in the last few months picketing and leafleting outside the Leonardo arms factory in Edinburgh, how many of the passing drivers beep their horns and wave. Early in the morning many of them are white van drivers, very few of them will be in a union. There’s are real possibility of breaking the rise of the populist right. But if I’m right about why they’ve been able to build on climate I think part of what a revitalised left has to do is set it’s face firmly against partnership with fossil capital and clearly against solutions like CCS for continuing oil and gas production and hydrogen for domestic heating that preserve the power of fossil capital. And that means for example that UNITE, RMT and GMB need to stop supporting the oil and gas industry’s North Sea transition deal.
Employment, Energy and Environment 