Anatomies of environmental knowledge & resistance: Diverse climate justice movements and waning eco-neoliberalism

Abstract

Climate Justice' is the name of the new movement that best fuses a variety of progressive political-economic and political-ecological currents to combat the most serious threat humanity and most other species face in the 21 st century. The time is opportune to dissect knowledge production and resistance formation against hegemonic climate policy making. One reason is the ongoing fracturing of elite power – including acquiescence by large environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -in era of extreme global state-failure and market-failure. The inability of global elite actors to solve major environmental, geopolitical, social and economic problems puts added emphasis on the need for a climate justice philosophy and ideology, principles, strategies and tactics. One challenge along that route is to establish the most appropriate climate justice narratives (since a few are contra-indicative to core climate justice traditions), what gaps exist in potential climate justice constituencies, and which alliances are moving climate justice politics forward. This can be done, in part, through case studies that illustrate approaches to climate injustice spanning campaigns and institutional critique. But it is through positive messaging and proactive traditions of climate justice that the movement will gain most momentum for the crucial period ahead.

Full text

ANATOMIES OF ENVIRONMENTAL
KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE: DIVERSE
CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENTS AND
WANING ECO-NEOLIBERALISM
Patrick Bond and Michael K. Dorsey
‘Climate Justice’ is the name of the new movement that best fuses a
variety of progressive political-economic and political-ecological
currents to combat the most serious threat humanity and most other
species face in the 21st century. The time is opportune to dissect
knowledge production and resistance formation against hegemonic
climate policy making. One reason is the ongoing fracturing of elite
power – including acquiescence by large environmental non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) - in era of extreme global state-
failure and market-failure.
The inability of global elite actors to solve major environmental,
geopolitical, social and economic problems puts added emphasis on the
need for a climate justice philosophy and ideology, principles, strategies
and tactics. One challenge along that route is to establish the most
appropriate climate justice narratives (since a few are contra-indicative to
core climate justice traditions), what gaps exist in potential climate
justice constituencies, and which alliances are moving climate justice
politics forward. This can be done, in part, through case studies that
illustrate approaches to climate injustice spanning campaigns and
institutional critique. But it is through positive messaging and proactive
traditions of climate justice that the movement will gain most momentum
for the crucial period ahead.

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 287
Birthing a Climate Justice Movement
Climate justice only arrived on the international scene as a coherent
political approach in the wake of the failure of a more collaborative
strategy between major environmental NGOs and the global capitalist
managerial class. The first efforts to generate a climate advocacy
movement in global civil society became the Climate Action Network
(CAN). From 1997, CAN adopted as a strategy what proved to be a
‘false solution’, namely an emphasis on regular United Nations interstate
negotiations aiming at minor, incremental emissions reductions
augmented by carbon trading and related offsets. Along with
corresponding national and regional legislation and the rise of emissions
submarkets, this was meant to form the inevitable underpinnings of
greenhouse gas regulation. The myth that this approach would solve the
impending climate crisis was broken in practice by fatal flaws in the
European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme and by the refusal of the
United States to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, as well as Canada’s
withdrawal and the difficulty in establishing targets for emerging-market
economies like Brazil, South Africa, India and China (the BASIC group).
For civil society, the cul-de-sac of CAN’s commitment to carbon trading
was confirmed when Friends of the Earth International broke away in
2010, but already by the time of the December 2009 Copenhagen
Conference of Parties (COP) 15, the critical short film ‘Story of Cap and
Trade’ (Leonard 2009) was launched and in nine months subsequently
recorded a million downloads. CAN’s critics in the climate justice
community were able to make the case for an alternative strategy with
sufficient force, that they gained half the space reserved for non-
governmental delegations in Copenhagen’s Bella Centre.
The Copenhagen Summit crashed on 18-19 December 2009 when, at the
last moment, a backroom deal was stitched together by Barack Obama
(USA), Jacob Zuma (SA), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Manmohan Singh
(India) and Wen Jiabao (China), designed to avoid needed binding
emissions cuts (Müller 2010). Instead, the Copenhagen Accord delivered
business-as-usual climate politics, biased towards fossil-fuel capital,
heavy industry, the transport sector and overconsumers. As the leading
US State Department climate negotiator, Todd Stern, explained when
asked about the growing demand for recognition of Northern ‘climate

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debt’ liabilities, ‘The sense of guilt or culpability or reparations – I just
categorically reject that’ (AP, 9 December 2009). In doing so, Stern not
only rejected the ‘polluter pays’ principle (which can apply to past
environmental externalities) but also the principle of common but
differentiated responsibility, a foundational principle of the climate
governance regime.
Climate justice activists had entered this terrain with demands that the
global establishment would simply not meet: a 50 percent GHG
emissions cut by 2020 and 90 percent commitment for 2050; payment of
a rapidly rising ‘climate debt’ (in 2010, damages to Pakistan alone
amounted to $50 billion) (Klein 2009, Bond 2010); the decommissioning
of the carbon markets so favoured by elites; and massive investments in
renewable energy, public transport and other transformative
infrastructure. As a result, the next stage of the climate justice struggle
was necessarily to retreat from the naively overambitious global reform
agenda (politely asking Copenhagen and then Cancun delegates to save
the planet) and instead to pick up direct action inspirations from several
sites across the world – Nigerian and Ecuadorian oilfields, Australia’s
main coal port, Britain’s coal-fired power stations and main airport,
Canada’s tar sands, and US coalfields and corporate headquarters –
where climate justice J was being seeded deep within the society. This
represented the rise of ‘poly-valent counter-hegemonic climate justice
resistance movements’ (Dorsey 2010), under the loose banner of climate
justice politics.
How did this transition from CAN’s insider-lobbying to climate justice
politics occur? The climate justice lineage includes 1990s environmental
anti-racism (Dorsey, 2007); the late 1990s Jubilee movement against
Northern financial domination of the South; the 2000s global justice
movement (which came to the fore with the December 1999 Seattle
World Trade Organisation protest); environmentalists and corporate
critics who in 2004 started the Durban Group for Climate Justice
(Lohmann 2006); the 2007 founding of the Climate Justice Now! (CJN)
network; the 2009 rise of the European left’s Climate Justice Alliance in
advance of the Copenhagen COP; the ongoing role of Malaysia-based
Third World Network in amplifying the critique by both South states and
radical civil society in COP and related negotiations; the renewed direct-
action initiatives that from 30 November 2009 generated the

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 289
Mobilization for Climate Justice in the US and in 2010 drew in more
mainstream groups like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and
350.org; and, maybe most portentously, the Bolivian government-
sponsored (but civil society-dominated) April 2010 ‘First Peoples’ World
Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth’ in
Cochabamba. Shortly afterwards, the Detroit Social Forum began to
consolidate a US movement led by people of colour. On October 12,
2010 (to counteract what in the US is known as ‘Columbus Day’ but
represents European invasion of the hemisphere), the European-based
Climate Justice Action network coordinated direct-action protests against
climate-related targets in two dozen locales. In Cancun from 28
November-11 December 2010, an International Forum on Climate
Justice was established to unite international forces.
Fused as climate justice, these inter-related and often overlapping
(although sometimes conflicting) traditions are mainly aimed at building
(or serving) a mass-based popular movement bringing together ‘green’
and ‘red’ (or in the US, ‘blue’) politics. This entails articulating not only
the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also the need to
transform our systems of materials extraction, transport and distribution,
energy-generation, production of goods and services, consumption,
disposal and financing. While lacking 350.org’s mass activism (albeit in
events that mainly refrain from challenging power) and consciousness-
raising capacity, the climate justice organizations and networks offer
great potential to fuse issue-specific progressive environmental and
social activists, many of which have strong roots in oppressed
communities. To illustrate, in late 2010, a network based at Movement
Generation in Oakland provided an impressive list of direct action events
and resulting community organizing victories in the US over several
prior months and years:
• Stopping King Coal with Community Organizing: The Navajo
Nation, led by a Dine’ (Navajo) and Hopi grassroots youth
movement, forced the cancellation of a Life of Mine permit on
Black Mesa, AZ, for the world’s largest coal company –
Peabody Energy. Elsewhere in the U.S. community-based
groups in Appalachia galvanized the youth climate movement in
their campaigns to stop mountain-top removal coal mining, and
similar groups in the Powder River Basin have united farmers

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and ranchers against the expansion of some of the world’s
largest coal deposits.
• Derailing the Build-out of Coal Power: Nearly two thirds of the
151 new coal power plant proposals from the Bush Energy Plan
have been cancelled, abandoned or stalled since 2007 - largely
due to community-led opposition. A recent example of this
success is the grassroots campaign of Dine’ grassroots and local
citizen groups in the Burnham area of eastern Navajo Nation,
NM that have prevented the creation of the Desert Rock coal
plant, which would have been the third such polluting monolith
in this small, rural community. Community-based networks
such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Energy
Justice Network and the Western Mining Action Network have
played a major role in supporting these efforts to keep the
world’s most climate polluting industry at bay.
• Preventing the Proliferation of Incinerators: In the last 12 years,
no new waste incinerators (which are more carbon-intensive
than coal and one of the leading sources of cancer-causing
dioxins) have been built in the US, and hundreds of proposals
have been defeated by community organizing. In 2009 alone,
members of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
prevented dozens of municipal waste incinerators, toxic waste
incinerators, tire incinerators and biomass incinerators from
being built, and forced Massachusetts to adopt a moratorium on
incineration.
• Defeating Big Oil In Our Own Backyards: A community-led
coalition in Richmond, CA, has, stopped the permitting of
Chevron’s refinery expansion in local courts. This expansion of
the largest oil refinery on the west coast is part of a massive oil
and gas sector expansion focused on importing heavy, high-
carbon intensive crude oil from places like the Canada’s Tar
Sands. This victory demonstrates that with limited resources,
community-led campaigns can prevail over multi-million dollar
PR and lobby campaigns deployed by oil companies like
Chevron, when these strategies are rooted in organizing
resistance in our own backyards. REDOIL, (Resisting
Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands) an Alaska

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 291
Native grassroots network, has been effective at ensuring the
Native community-based voice is in the forefront of protecting
the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Together with allies, REDOIL
has also prevented Shell from leasing the Alaska outer
continental shelf for offshore oil exploration and drilling.
Advancing recognition of culture, subsistence and food
sovereignty rights of Alaska Natives within a diverse and
threatened aquatic ecosystem has been at the heart of their
strategy.
• Stopping False Solutions like Mega Hydro: Indigenous
communities along the Klamath River forced Pacificorp Power
company to agree to ‘Undam the Klamath’ by the year 2020, in
order to restore the river’s natural ecosystems, salmon runs and
traditional land-use capacity. For decades, Indigenous
communities have been calling out false solutions - pointing to
the fact that energy technologies that compromise traditional
land-use, public health and local economies cannot be
considered climate solutions.
• Building Resilient Communities through Local Action: In
communities all over the US, frontline communities are
successfully winning campaigns linking climate justice to basic
survival:
o In San Antonio, Texas, the Southwest Workers Union
led the fight to divert $20billion dollars from nuclear
energy into renewable energy and energy efficiency. In
addition, they launched a free weatherization program
for low-income families and a community run organic
farm.
o In Oakland, California, the Oakland Climate Action
Coalition is leading the fight for an aggressive Climate
Energy and Action Plan that both addresses climate
disruption and local equity issues (Movement
Generation et al, 2010:2).
Some activists and visionaries (e.g. those associated with the journals
Capitalism Nature Socialism and Monthly Review) anticipate that the
linkage of red and green struggles under the climate justice banner will

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require society moving from a fossil-fuel-dependent capitalism to eco-
socialism, which will entail:
a transformation of needs, and a profound shift toward the
qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative… a
withering away of the dependency upon fossil fuels integral to
industrial capitalism. And this in turn can provide the material
point of release of the lands subjugated by oil imperialism, while
enabling the containment of global warming, along with other
afflictions of the ecological crisis… The generalization of
ecological production under socialist conditions can provide the
ground for the overcoming of the present crises. A society of
freely associated producers does not stop at its own
democratization. It must, rather, insist on the freeing of all beings
as its ground and goal (Kovel and Lowy, 2001: 3-5).
Before such a vision can be properly articulated, several critical missing
elements must be accounted for, including, amongst others:
• a stronger labour input, particularly given the potential for
‘Green Jobs’ to make up for existing shortfalls (British eco-
socialists have taken the lead with demands for a million green
jobs) (Campaign Against Climate Change, 2009);
• a connection between climate justice and anti-war movements,
given that military activity is not only disproportionately
concerned with supplies of oil and gas (Iraq and Afghanistan)
but also uses vast amounts of CO2 in the prosecution of war
(Smolker, 2010); and
• a stronger presence of both environmentalists and socialists in
many high emissions sites not yet suffused with grassroots
climate justice movements, from the Arab oil world to petro-
socialist Venezuela.
However, against eco-socialist orientations of the sort proposed by Kovel
and Lowy, not only are anarchists in the climate justice movement
suspicious of central planning, but a bottom-up socialism would
preferably generate such manifesto statements from actual practice and
from generalized movement sensibility and demands, as opposed to top-
down pronouncements. The forging of unity in movements that address
climate and social justice from below is especially important during
times (such as at present) of apparently intractable conflict and division,

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 293
which may even disrupt and distract the immediate future of climate
justice politics.
Climate Controversies and Wedge Issues
There are at least five ideological positions that have variously sought to
claim climate justice but that are not oriented (first and foremost) to
movement-building:
• a Rawlsian ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ technical
calculation of per capita GHG emissions (by the NGO
Ecoequity, with echoes in ‘Contraction & Convergence’
expansions/reductions and GHG ‘budget-sharing’) which aims
to distribute the ‘right to pollute’ (and then let underpolluters
sell their surplus rights via some form of carbon trading)
(Athanasiou and Baer 2010);
• an emphasis on South-North justice primarily within interstate
diplomatic negotiations over climate, as advanced especially by
the South Centre and Third World Network, as well as the
Bolivian government albeit with an awareness that the April
2010 Cochabamba meeting made demands on world elites far
beyond their willingness to concede (Tandon 2009);
• an orientation to the semi-periphery’s right/need to industrialise,
via the United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs (DESA) (Jomo K.S. 2010);
• the use of climate justice rhetoric by former UN Human Rights
Commission director and Irish president Mary Robinson (2010),
whose agenda for a new Dublin foundation appears solely
situated within the ‘elite’ circuitry of global governance and
international NGOs, in which ‘climate justice links human
rights and development to achieve a human-centered approach,
safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable and sharing the
burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution
equitably and fairly’; and
• attempts to incorporate within climate justice politics a
commitment to carbon markets, especially through the Reducing

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Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)
projects (Spash 2010).
It may be premature to judge, but these latter strands, drawing upon
varying degrees of technicist-redistributionist, Third Worldist,
Keynesian, or global-elitist experiences and aspirations, do not hold out
much opportunity for success. There is a simple reason: the adverse
balance of forces at the world scale. Most of these latter five climate
justice projects’ ambitions play out at elite levels, primarily within UN
negotiations. The problem for elite-level strategies is that the last time a
sense of global-state coherence was achieved in addressing a world-scale
problem was when the 1996 Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) banned emissions outright, in order to prevent growth of the hole
in the ozone layer. Just such an agreement is required today (Jomo K.S.
2010). But since then, there has been no progress on any other
substantive top-down front, in part because of the decline of global social
democrats (of the Willy Brandt type) and rise of neoliberals (1980s-90s)
and then neoconservatives (2000s), and sometimes – as in the case of
World Bank president Robert Zoellick, considered in detail below – their
even more dangerous fusion. Hence we can label the current era as one
of global-state failure, simultaneous with an historic failure of the
financial markets that at one point eco-neoliberal technicists had relied
upon, through carbon trading, to solve the climate crisis.
Nevertheless, for some eco-neoliberal specialists who carry out climate
or development advocacy mainly within multilateral institutions or from
international NGOs, especially in New York, Washington, London and
Geneva, commitments to top-down approaches are held with an almost
religious fervor. To recall an analogy once evoked by George and Sabelli
(1994), supranational, non-democratic, elite institutions have ‘doctrine, a
rigidly structured hierarchy preaching and imposing this doctrine and a
quasi-religious mode of self-justification.’ Unsurprisingly, the
aforementioned five approaches to climate justice are at times advanced
directly at odds with grassroots forces which tired of the futility of
global-scale reform.
In February 2010, for example, a controversy broke out in civil society
regarding one civil society group whose initial desire for a negotiating
stance in Geneva included a petition with several controversial positions:
promotion of the Kyoto Protocol (due to its common but differentiated

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 295
responsibilities position) notwithstanding the treaty’s very weak
emissions cuts; a 2 degree (not 1 degree) centigrade temperature rise
(considered unacceptable within the climate justice movement); and an
implicit endorsement of offsets and other private sector financing
arrangements in spite of the failures of private offset arrangements and
the broader emissions market. The petition was changed after an uproar
within the Climate Justice Now! network.
By April 2010, the demands of climate justice activists had strengthened.
The Cochabamba conference adopted several that were anathema to
mainstream climate politics, and the Bolivian government struggled to
put these into official United Nations texts:
• 50 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2017
• Stabilising temperature rises to 1C and 300 Parts Per Million
• Acknowledging the climate debt owed by developed countries
• Full respect for Human Rights and the inherent rights of
indigenous people
• Universal declaration of rights of Mother Earth to ensure
harmony with nature
• Establishment of an International Court of Climate Justice
• Rejection of carbon markets and commodification of nature and
forests through the REDD programme
• Promotion of measures that change the consumption patterns of
developed countries
• End of intellectual property rights for technologies useful for
mitigating climate change
• Payment of 6 percent of developed countries’ GDP to
addressing climate change (Solon 2010).
REDD proved amongst the most important wedge issues within the
climate justice community, for late in 2010, sharp controversies emerged
over forest preservation, as major US environmental foundations
attempted to resurrect market strategies. The seeds of the controversy
were sown in late 2009 and in the aftermath of Copenhagen. Several US-
based, pro-REDD funders - ClimateWorks, David and Lucile Packard,
Ford and Gordon and Betty Moore - came together under the auspices of

296 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
the US based Meridian Institute, a mediator-oriented think-tank that
periodically assembles ‘government officials, business leaders, scientists,
foundation executives, and representatives of nongovernmental
organizations’ to ‘facilitate internal consensus’. These foundations
committed to begin making grants in support of REDD projects under an
umbrella group called the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) in
early 2010. Other climate justice groups, including the San Francisco-
based International Forum on Globalization, also sought a ‘consensus’
position, but one that excluded the Indigenous Environmental Network,
which maintained a strong critique of carbon markets.
Meridian’s corporatist approach had been tried before. In late 2006 and
early 2007 Meridian was the sole facilitating and mediating institution
behind the creation of the US Climate Action Partnership. The
Partnership assembled well over $200 million to support efforts by pro-
market environmental organizations and major corporations to advocate
for market-based solutions within US climate change legislation (such as
the 2009 bill proposed by Henry Waxman and Bill Markey), which
subsequently failed to find traction in the Senate in 2010. No US national
climate legislation is anticipated until at least 2013, in view of the
election of numerous climate-denialist Members of Congress and
Senators in November 2010.
The CLUA sphere of influence is not confined to the US. By June 2010
CLUA members, heads of state, influential ministers and representatives
from 55 countries convened in Norway for the Oslo Climate and Forest
Conference. The conference aimed to endorse and launch the post-Kyoto
REDD effort, dubbed the ‘Interim REDD+ Partnerships’. By the
meeting’s end, with the largest contribution from the Norwegian
government, some $4 billion was committed to support developing
country involvement in REDD. Yet some argue that CLUA foundations
and key actors that control the Interim REDD+ Partnerships process
utilize a kind of divide-and-rule strategy. According to some sources,
organizations that support and do not question any aspects of proto-
REDD projects are lavished with funds; while those that have question
REDD projects have been marginalized from even participating in many
key of meetings on the matter. In a September 2010 letter, 34 non-
governmental organizations from 20 countries issued a complaint to the
co-chairs of the Interim REDD+ Partnership:

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 297
The modalities proposed so far by the Partnership do not satisfy
the minimum requirements for effective participation and
consultation, and therefore we urge that the workplan include a
process to develop concrete and effective procedures to ensure
proper participation and input to the Partnership initiatives.
Simply using a mailing list that has been put together randomly,
including organisations that are not working on REDD and
excluding key actors, notably indigenous peoples organisations,
is not an acceptable way to pretend that stakeholders are engaged
in an effective and fair manner.
In the US, tensions between the climate justice approach and the group of
NGOs comprising the Climate Action Network and 1 Sky continue, over
whether legislative lobbying, social marketing and top-down
coordination of consciousness-raising activities without further strategic
substance (e.g. TckTckTck in 2009) are more appropriate advocacy
methodologies than bottom-up linkage of organic climate activism. In a
letter to 1 Sky in October 2010, a coalition self-described as ‘grassroots
and allied organizations representing racial justice, indigenous rights,
economic justice, immigrant rights, youth organizing and environmental
justice communities’ criticized the vast expenditures on congressional
lobbying, at the expense of movement building:
A decade of advocacy work, however well intentioned, migrated
towards false solutions that hurt communities and compromised
on key issues such as carbon markets and giveaways to polluters.
These compromises sold out poor communities in exchange for
weak targets and more smokestacks that actually prevent us from
getting anywhere close to what the science – and common sense
– tells us is required (Movement Generation et al, 2010:2).
These struggles are not limited to seemingly rival grassroots social
movements and mainstream organizations. Funders too, are also divided
on which constituencies to support and at what levels; and variously
divide and gather those same constituencies. While most foundations
support the pro-market, corporatist CLUA effort described above, in
September 2010 the Climate Equity Working Group of the Funders
Network on Trade and Globalization committed to supporting ‘fossil-fuel
infrastructure resistance struggles and more broadly building the power
of grassroots movements.’

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Contrast this with the revelation at the 2009 US Environmental
Grantmakers Association meeting in Alaska, that less than 2% of all
recorded funds from US private foundations were spent on addressing
unfolding climate change in Africa — where many researchers concur
that the adverse effects of climate change will be most severe.1
Accordingly the battle for justice-based climate policy is as much a
derivative of movement and organizational dynamics and struggles, as it
is subject to passing whims, fads and frenzies of private foundation
capital.
Such strategic controversies and divergent funding strategies are logical
to expect at a time huge, intractable pressures are mounting. North-South
and environment-development tensions are often extreme. Neoliberal
financial forces continue to dominate the mainstream elite framework.
And climate justice movements across the world have not solidified a
coherent set of tactics, much less strategy, principles, ideology and
foundational philosophy. This is not the space to explore that
shortcoming, but suffice to say that the wedge between most of the
movement-oriented climate justice activities and those from the five
other climate justice approaches noted above, as well as with CAN, could
continue to grow, in part because use of carbon markets is one of the core
differences between climate justice and mainstream strategies.
Failure of the Elite Model
One reason for ongoing tension, as made clear by global climate
negotiations since Bali in 2007, is that NGO investment of enormous
lobbying efforts into elite processes is not effective. This is not merely a
problem in the climate talks, for a scan of global governance reform
efforts reminds us of consistent failure. The World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Annual Meetings were sites of
merely trivial reforms (for example, subimperial countries’ voting power
rising a bit in 2010, with most of Africa’s and other poor countries’
voting shares stagnating or actually falling). The reformers’ inability to
1 A staffer from the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, the ‘premier
professional association of foundation executives and trustees who make
environmental grants’ revealed this in the Association’s meeting.

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 299
budge the Bretton Woods ideological status quo was demonstrated when
even a mild-mannered ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ gambit was
introduced in early 1998, but within twenty months, its champion, Bank
chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, was fired. Similarly, the UN Millennium
Development Goals launched in 2000 proved illusory especially for
Africa, in no small part because the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
and Bretton Woods Institutions were crucial intermediaries for MDG
delivery. The WTO itself went into apparently terminal decline after the
1999 Seattle summit meltdown, the overhyped 2001 ‘Doha Agenda’ and
the failed Cancun summit of 2003 – with no subsequent progress to
report.
On the global currency and credit fronts, in addition to failed World
Bank and IMF reform (Goldman 2005, 2007), none of the five main
processes designed to shore up a cracking international financial
architecture mustered the clout required to control footloose financiers:
the Monterrey Financing for Development summit in 2002; various Basel
Bank for International Settlements risk and capital re-ratings during the
late 2000s; the G20 global financial reregulation talkshops of 2008-09;
Stiglitz’s 2008-09 United Nations commission on reform; and French-
German advocacy of an international financial transactions tax (George
2009, 2010, 2011). Such reregulation can only be built in a sturdy way
based upon state power over finance in national settings, but the two
leading national capitals for world banking – Washington and London –
were run by Democratic Party and New Labour Party deregulators during
the periods of greatest financial industry vulnerability. As a result, there
was only insubstantial regulation, as witnessed by the rapid return to
superprofits and bonuses at Goldman Sachs and the other too-big-to-fail
financial institutions from 2009. Indeed, as Europe’s national elites have
shown – from Iceland to Greece to France to Britain to Ireland to
Portugal in 2009-10 – there is still excessive banking power and a
tendency to impose austerity policies on a citizenry that in each of these
settings, has begun to wake from a slumber to again explore the practice
of class and social movement politics.
With climate change bound to generate more warring of the Darfur type,
i.e., the kind where climate strained and stressed natural resource
problems cyclically exacerbate conflict, it is especially disturbing that
global governance is also failing on the security front, with renewed wars

300 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
in Central Asia and the Middle East starting in October 2001 meant to
last, as former US vice president Dick Cheney confessed, apparently
forever. German, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian and African attempts to
widen the UN Security Council failed decisively in 2005. Meanwhile
North-South ‘global apartheid’ wealth gaps grew even more extreme,
especially when G8 aid promises were broken; African countries hopes
had been raised by the Gleneagles Summit of 2005, but then dashed
when neither aid transfers nor debt relief were carried out with a genuine
sense of shifting economic power.
Finally, the most decisive blow to the idea of global governance was the
failure of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, as demonstrated by the 2009
Copenhagen Accord. The international carbon market was founded
when, then US vice-president Al Gore in 1997 at Kyoto effectively
misled other global climate managers into thinking Washington would
sign the Protocol if US firms were given permission to keep polluting at
planet-threatening rates, through offsetting their emissions with trades
and Clean Development Mechanism investments (Lohmann 2006, Spash
2010). Zoellick’s World Bank still strongly promotes carbon markets,
even though they contain so much corruption, speculation and
incompetence that the carbon price crashed from a high of €33/tonne in
mid-2008 to €13 after the Copenhagen Summit, and on two European
markets all the way down to €1.50 after yet more fraud scandals in
March 2010 (Dorsey and Whitington 2010).
Continued volatility on various international financial fronts is especially
worrisome for those championing carbon market approaches. Indeed, as
shown by the recent financial meltdown’s ongoing contagion into the
European Union, there is not only a global-state regulatory failure in
financial markets but an extraordinary hubris still evident, insofar as
Goldman Sachs and many other institutions harbour ambitions that a
global carbon market can address climate change. In the early part of the
21st century, eco-neoliberals explained that the Emissions Trading
Scheme’s repeated crashes, fraud and irrational features were because it
was an ‘immature’ market. However, as carbon markets mature they are
increasingly characterised by crime, corruption, institutional malfeasance
and incompetence. These problems increasingly appear to be systemic.
Since the conclusion of the first phase of the world’s largest formal
carbon market (the EU-ETS) in 2007, carbon market crime has cost the

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 301
market no less than €5 billion. Since the last quarter of 2009, analysis
from the Climate Justice Research Project at Dartmouth College reveals
that nearly 90% of publicly-known incidences of fraud took place during
the ‘mature market’ stage after the end of phase one. Contrary to
theoretical predictions and official proclamations, as the formal carbon
market matures, without proper oversight, criminal activity, corruption
and ethical malfeasance are on the rise (Dorsey and Whitington, 2010).
These examples add up to a devastating conclusion: that the
contemporary global elite cannot properly diagnose the extreme
economic (trade/finance/migration), geopolitical, environmental and
legitimacy crises that afflict the world, much less mobilize the political
will and capital needed to fix the problems (Bond 2009). Efforts by the
five teams of insider elite strategists, no matter their claim of climate
justice sensibilities or how talented they package the advocacy, will in
this context inevitably bump up against a low ceiling, at least for the
foreseeable future. At its most dangerous, elite jockeying in the realm of
climate policy making runs the risk of marginalizing social movements,
curtailing proverbial direct democracy and undermining social and
political moves toward energy sovereignty. Increasingly the harms of
broken carbon markets, off-set scheme frauds, inter alia, are socialized
across and over tax-payers, while the benefits are privatized to a
shrinking set of would-be climate-catastrophe profiteers.
So it is to the more direct ways in which climate justice activism
confronts its targets that we turn for inspiration. While the international
climate justice movement rose rapidly and has a lifespan only as long as
its activists stay focused, nevertheless it combines a variety of political-
economic and political-ecological theories, scale politics, and single-
issue constituencies (Ziser and Sze 2007, Dawson 2009). The extreme
challenge of mobilizing on an issue that in temporal and spatial terms is
of great distance from the most implicated constituencies – the
corporations, governments and citizens of Northern industrial countries –
suggests the need for common targets, narratives, strategies, tactics and
alliances. To this end, an example of a campaign that gained more from
losing than it would have from winning is the effort in early 2010 to
prevent the World Bank’s largest-ever project loan to the world’s fourth-
largest coal-fired power plant, at Medupi. (Had the campaign against the
World Bank won, the project would still have gone ahead with private

302 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
financing.) The death of a campaign in South Africa in 2010 suggests
potential areas for building climate justice politics in years to come,
especially against the single major financier of fossil fuel across the
globe, the World Bank.
Defeat of a South African Climate Justice Campaign
We learn a great deal about the climate justice terrain by examining a
crucial campaign – unsuccessful in the short term – which entailed
fighting the World Bank’s fast-growing coal portfolio. On April 8 2010,
after nearly two months of strenuous lobbying against more fossil fuel
credits, the Bank Board approved a $3.75 billion loan to the South
African electricity utility Eskom. It’s main purpose (for which $3.1
billion was allocated) is to build a power station that will pump 25-30
megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, more than the output
of 115 countries. Paying for Medupi will require a 127% real price
increase from 2007-12 for South African household electricity
consumers (to nearly $0.15/kiloWatt hour).
The loan was a last-minute request, as the 2008-09 global financial
turmoil dried up Eskom’s potential private sector financing. As a result,
it was only in December 2009 that South African civil society activated
local and global networks against the loan, starting with a
groundWork/Earthlife briefing document in December 2009. Within
three months, more than 200 organisations across the world had endorsed
a critique of the loan (see http://www.earthlife.org.za/?p=858). South
Durban activists launched the local public campaign on February 16
2010 with a spirited protest at Eskom’s main local branch. South Durban
was an epicentre of protest against fossil fuels, given that it hosted the
largest and least responsible petro-chemical firms south of the Niger
Delta. With electricity prices soaring, many more residents in South
Durban were being disconnected. They often reconnect illegally and as
Eskom and the municipality clamped down, the result was more social
strife, in a country with what is probably the world’s highest rate of
community protest (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,27,3,1858).
To establish a campaign against an obscure World Bank loan so quickly,
with the purpose of generating a profound crisis of confidence at the
World Bank and in Pretoria, required clarity of message, an explicit

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 303
demand (‘stop Medupi financing’) and a variety of issue-linkages to pull
various constituencies into a coalition.
As always, the question is who wins and who loses? First, the source
areas of the coal for Medupi are highly contaminated by mercury and
acid-mine drainage, with air, land, vegetables, animals and people’s
health at much greater risk. Forty new coal mines in impoverished areas
of Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces will be opened to provide inputs
to Medupi and its successor, Kusile. This will create a few coal sector
jobs (hence receiving endorsement from the National Union of
Mineworkers), but a great many jobs in agriculture and tourism will be
lost as a result of the invasive mining activity and downstream
degradation. Medupi itself will be built in a water-scarce area where
communities are already confronting extreme mining pollution and, even
though an air-cooled model (Africa’s first) was chosen, the cost of
supplying an additional water-cooling supply amounted to hundreds of
millions of dollars, given the long transport and pumping costs.
Once the coal is burned and electricity generated, the winners and losers
become even more divergent. Medupi’s main beneficiaries will be the
world’s largest metals and mining corporations, especially BHP Billiton
(Melbourne based) and various Anglo American subsidiaries (most
reporting to London), which already receive the world’s cheapest
electricity thanks to multi-decade deals. Anger soon grew about the huge
discounts made when secret, forty-year ‘Special Pricing Agreements’
were offered by Eskom during late apartheid, when the firm had a third
too much excess capacity due to the long South African economic
decline. These agreements were finally leaked in March 2010 and
disclosed that BHP Billition and Anglo were receiving the world’s
cheapest electricity, at less than $0.02/kWh (whereas the overall
corporate price was around $0.05/kWh, still the world’s cheapest, and the
consumer price was around $0.10/kWh). In early April, just before the
Bank decision, Eskom announced that a small modification was made to
BHP Billiton’s contract price but it was reportedly to the firm’s
‘advantage’. Finally, however, the Australian based mining house was
sufficiently intimidated by the glare of publicity that in October 2010
Deutsche Bank mining analysts predicted BHP would dispose of
Richards Bay assets. According to Business Day (2010) ‘The reason for
selling the aluminium smelters would be the scrutiny under which BHP’s

304 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
electricity contracts have come amid demands for resource companies to
use less power.’
An additional problem with BHP and Anglo as beneficiaries is the
outflow of profits to Melbourne and London, at a time South Africa’s
current account deficit made it the world’s most risky middle-income
country, according to The Economist (25 February 2009). Moreover,
South Africa had an existing $75 billion foreign debt, which would
escalated by five percent with the Bank loan. The 1994 foreign debt was
just $25 billion, and First National Bank projected that the ratio of
foreign debt to GDP would by 2011 rise to the same level as was reached
in 1985, when a debt crisis compelled a default (on $13 billion), a signal
that business and banking were finally breaking ranks with the apartheid
regime.
Another controversial aspect of the loan was the Bank’s articulation of
the privatization agenda. The confirmation that Eskom would offer
private generating capacity to Independent Power Producers was
established in loan documentation, in relation to the renewable
component, advancing Eskom’s desire to privatize 30 percent of
generating capacity (including a 49 percent private share in Kusile,
although no private interest had been expressed for Medupi). This
component attracted explicit opposition from trade unions – especially
the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa - and consumers.
Corruption was another feature that generated critiques of the World
Bank by South African opposition political parties (especially the centre-
left Independent Democrats and liberal Democratic Alliance, which
subsequently merged) and the influential liberal Business Day
newspaper. These organizations opposed the loan because contrary to
supposed Bank anti-corruption policies, it will directly fund African
National Congress (ANC) ruling party coffers. Medupi will be built with
Hitachi boilers that in turn kick back between $10 and $100 million (the
amount is still unclear) thanks to an ANC investment in Hitachi. As the
Eskom-Hitachi deal was signed, Eskom chairperson Valli Moosa was
also a member of the ANC’s finance committee. A government
investigation released in March 2010 found his conduct in this conflict of
interest to be ‘improper’. The ANC promised to sell the investment stake,
but this dragged on and in late 2010 was still not complete. Ironically, in
February 2010, the Bank had issued a major statement alongside its

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 305
annual African Development Indicators, entitled ‘Quiet Corruption’, in
which it blamed African teachers and healthcare workers for
moonlighting (a result of Bank structural adjustment policies).
Finally, the matter of historic racial injustice could not be ignored. The
World Bank’s financing of apartheid began just three years after the 1948
election of the Afrikaners’ Nationalist Party, lasting through 1967, and
included $100 million for Eskom. During that period, the Bank financed
the supply of electricity to no black households (who only began
receiving electricity in 1980), and instead empowered only white
businesses and residences (Bond 2003).
Curiously, South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan argued, on
April 1 2010, that ‘South Africa, in 16 years of democracy, never has had
to take any loans from the World Bank… This is an opportunity for the
World Bank to build a relationship with South Africa.’ Yet the Bank’s
1999 and 2008 ‘Country Assistance Strategy’ documents show
conclusively that Medupi is the 15th credit since 1994. As for ‘building a
relationship’, Gordhan also neglected that the Bank coauthored the 1996
Growth, Employment and Redistribution (homegrown structural
adjustment) programme, whose orthodox strategies failed and which led
South Africa to overtake Brazil as the world’s most unequal major
country, as black incomes fell below 1994 levels and white incomes
grew by 24% within fifteen years, according to official statistics.
Indeed the Bank itself regularly bragged about its ‘Knowledge Bank’
role in South Africa, and in 1999, for example, after Bank economist
John Roome suggested to then water minister Kader Asmal that the
government impose ‘a credible threat of cutting service’ to people who
cannot afford water, the Bank’s Country Assistance Strategy reported
that its ‘market-related pricing’ advice was ‘instrumental in facilitating a
radical revision in SA’s approach’. As a result, the cholera epidemic the
following year – catalysed by water disconnections near Richards Bay -
killed hundreds. Predictions are easy to make, given the huge price
increases faced by electricity customers, that parallel misery will follow
the Bank’s Medupi loan.
It is here, in questioning the World Bank’s ability to reform away from
its fossil fuel portfolio and extreme market-based orientation, that the
climate justice movement came to the conclusion in 2010 that the Bank

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should have no role in climate-related financing. There are a great many
socio-environmental rationales why the Bank should be boycotted – as
documented by a coalition, ‘World Bank out of Climate’
(http://www.worldbankoutofclimate.org/) – but one obvious reason was
the institution’s leadership, a model of climate injustice.
Robert Zoellick as Exemplar of Elite Failure and Climate
Injustice
Robert Zoellick, the 58-year old World Bank president, replaced Paul
Wolfowitz, who in 2007 was forced to resign due to nepotism. US
foreign policy analyst Tom Barry (2005) recalled how, ideologically,
Zoellick stood hand in hand with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, John Bolton, John Negroponte and the other
neoconservatives:
Zoellick was perhaps the first Bush associate to introduce the
concept of evil into the construct of Bush’s radical overhaul of
US grand strategy. A year before Bush was inaugurated, Zoellick
wrote: ‘A modern Republican foreign policy recognizes that there
is still evil in the world - people who hate America and the ideas
for which it stands.’
Zoellick is of interest to the climate justice movement not only as a
neocon (given the relationship of militarism to climate change), but
because he represents a global trend of Empire in crisis since the
Millennium, featuring at least three traits which he brings to climate
negotiations. First is the ideological fusion of neoconservatism and
neoliberalism that Zoellick shares with his predecessor Wolfowitz. Both
strains are bankrupt, by any reasonable accounting, given the failure of
the Bush petro-militarist agenda of imposing ‘democracy’, and the 2008-
present financial meltdown catalysed by neoliberal deregulation.
Representing the former, Zoellick was at the outset a member of the
Project for a New American Century, as early as January 1998 going on
record in a letter coauthored with a score of other leading neocons to then
president Bill Clinton that Iraq should be illegally overthrown. The petro-
military complex is a major contributor to climate change via direct
emissions, has a strong interest in the invasion (or imperial policing) of

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 307
territories with fossil fuel resources, and has been the key source for
financing climate denialism (Smolker 2010). It is therefore crucial for the
climate justice movement to reach out to a global anti-imperialist
network that, notwithstanding failures to halt the US and allied invasions
of Iraq and Afghanistan, did manage the world’s largest-ever anti-war
protest, on 15 February 2003, when more than fifteen million
participated.
As for the latter ideology, the ‘Washington Consensus’, Zoellick had
long advocated and practised the core strategy of financial deregulation,
no matter its devastating consequences. The extension of financial
securitization into the climate, via carbon markets, was as prone to
failure as the packaging of real estate loans and associated instruments.
As a result, after the 2007-08 meltdown of securitized home mortgages
in the US undermined neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony, Zoellick
and IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn spent 2009 beating
a hasty retreat from the austerity-oriented economics their institutions
intrinsically favor, so as to maintain global effective demand with crony-
Keynesianism during capitalist crisis. Yet by 2010 it was evident in sites
as formerly wealthy as California, Greece, Ireland and Britain, that the
Washington Consensus was only temporarily in retreat. Moreover, it was
Zoellick’s embrace of eco-neoliberalism that would maintain Bank
promotion of carbon markets, notwithstanding his attempts to disguise
the financial agenda with triumphalist 2010 speeches about
‘Democratizing Development Economics’ and ‘The End of the Third
World?’ (Zoellick 2010a, 2010b). A final feature of neoliberal economic
policy is the desire to lock in financialization and the resulting strategy of
austerity, and it was therefore not out of character for Zoellick (2010c) to
promote ‘gold as an international reference point of market expectations
about inflation, deflation and future currency values.... Although
textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an
alternative monetary asset today.’ This view, according to University of
California economist Brad de Long (2010), a Clinton-era Treasury
official, was Zoellick’s ‘play for the stupidest man alive crown’, because
‘The last thing that the world economy needs right now is another source
of deflation in a financial crisis. And attaching the world economy’s
price level to an anchor that central banks cannot augment at need is

308 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
another source of deflation--we learned that in the fifteen years after
World War I.’
The second trait of interest to climate justice politics is Zoellick’s
inability to arrange the global-scale deals required to either solve climate
crises or gracefully manage the US Empire’s smooth dismantling. This
was witnessed in the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO’s) demise, on
his 2001-05 watch as the US Trade Representative. Zoellick’s inability to
forge consensus for capital’s larger agenda was on display at the Cancun
ministerial summit in 2003, in disputes with the European Union over the
US genetic engineering fetish, and in his insistence upon bilateral and
regional alternatives to multilateralism, which generated durable anti-
Washington economic sentiment across Latin America. Then, as one of
the most senior Bush Administration officials in 2005-06, second-in-
command at the State Department, Zoellick achieved practically no
improvement to Washington’s wrecked image abroad. And as Bank
president, appointed after Wolfowitz’s fall by Bush, Zoellick’s efforts
during the 2008-09 G20 deliberations on the world economy and at the
December 2009 UN Copenhagen climate summit were equally
unsuccessful. If Zoellick continues clinging to the core financialization
agenda of the US empire, the discarding of carbon markets in favour of
genuine solutions to the climate crisis will take much longer.
The third trait, at a more profound level, was Zoellick’s tendency to deal
with economic and ecological crises by ‘shifting’ and ‘stalling’ them,
while ‘stealing’ from those least able to defend. As a theoretical aside,
the shifting-stalling-stealing strategy (Bond 2010) is at the heart of the
problem, and can be summed up in David Harvey’s (2003) phrase:
‘accumulation by dispossession’. This stage arrives when capital
exhausts the options it usually has to address economic crises through
traditional means: work speed-up (absolute surplus value), replacing
workers with machines (relative surplus value), shifting the problems
around geographically (the ‘spatial fix’), and building up vast debt and
blowing speculative bubbles so as to stall crises until later (the ‘temporal
fix’). At this stage, capital needs to also loot the non-capitalist spheres of
society and nature through extra-economic, imperialist techniques, as
described by Rosa Luxemburg (1913) a century ago in The Accumulation
of Capital and more recently by Naomi Klein (2007) in The Shock
Doctrine. Carbon markets are a classic case of shifting-stalling-stealing,

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 309
since they move the challenge of emissions cuts to the South (hence
preventing industrialization), they permit a financialised futures-market
approach – no matter how fanciful - to preventing planet-threatening
climate change, and by ‘privatising the air’ (through carving up the
atmosphere to sell as carbon credits) the maintenance of an exploitative
relationship between capital and non-capitalist spheres is crucial to
Zoellick’s agenda. To shift-stall-steal in his various positions since
achieving international prominence in 2001, Zoellick’s neocon-neolib
worldview provided cover, yet only up to a point, which we now appear
to be reaching. That point comes sooner than later in part because the
institutions needed to keep the game in play are cracking up.
To illustrate this problem of institutional incapacity, consider the fate of
several major US financiers: Fannie Mae, Enron, Alliance Capital and
Goldman Sachs. These were all crucial US imperial financial institutions,
instrumental in generating the fictitious capital in real estate, energy and
other sectors which proved so important to the Clinton-Bush era’s
internal displacement and eventual amplification of crises. First, Fannie
Mae was led by Zoellick - its mid-1990s executive vice president – into
dangerous real estate circuitry after his stint as a senior aide in James
Baker’s Treasury, at one point Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial
Institutions Policy just prior to the 1988-90 Savings&Loan (S&L) crisis,
itself a function of the financial-deregulatory era that gave us mortgage-
backed securities. Fannie Mae was soon so far in the red due to subprime
lending through those securities, that a massive state bailout was needed
in 2008. (And Baker also found Zoellick invaluable when he served as
the Texan’s main assistant during the notorious December 2000
presidential vote recount in Florida, destructive of those last vestiges of
US democracy, thanks to the open racism and right-wing bullying of
Zoellick’s assistants.) Enron, the second of these financial firms, which
cracked in 2002, boasted Zoellick as a senior political and economic
advisor in 1999. Records are not available as to how implicated Zoellick
was in Enron’s gambles, so painful to Californians (subject to extreme
electricity price manipulations) and investors (who suffered Kenneth
Lay’s illegal share price manipulation). However, as Board member of
the third firm, Alliance Capital, Zoellick was party to late 1990s
oversight of its investments in Enron which led to multiple fraud lawsuits

310 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
and vast losses for Alliance’s clients, including the state of Florida, led
by Jeb Bush.
The fourth bank, Goldman Sachs, which Zoellick served as a leading
international official in 2006-07, did well only through morally-
questionable and allegedly-illegal deals, followed by crony-suffused
bailouts linking Bush/Obama adminstration officials Hank Paulson, Ben
Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. For the climate justice
movement this is important, not only because ‘The world’s most
powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the
face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that
smells like money’, as Matt Taibbi (2009) put it:
The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-
market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious
new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will
be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It
will be rigged in advance… The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the
Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded.
Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-
based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great
demand if the bill passes… Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just
waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be
bigger than the energy-futures market? ‘Oh, it’ll dwarf it,’ says a former
staffer on the House energy committee. Well, you might say, who cares?
If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of
global warming? Maybe -- but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman,
is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the
revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon
pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they
make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street
swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-
collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to
seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected… The moral is the same
as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to
2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly
for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt,
and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has
been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 311
guarantees -- while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers,
are the ones paying for it.
Under Zoellick, the World Bank remains the most important multilateral
fixer of broken carbon markets, continuing to invest billions and spin-
doctor the obvious flaws in the system. Simultaneously, internal Bank
sources actively criticize and challenge the legitimacy of the Bank’s role
in the carbon marketplace. A late 2010 report from the Bank’s
Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) poignantly reveals,
The World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit (CFU) has led, through
its extensive activities in Clean Development Mechanism
markets, to expanding the role of, and the infrastructure for,
carbon trading between developed and developing nations.
However, there has been criticism of the environmental quality of
many projects that the WBG [World Bank Group] has supported,
including industrial gases, hydro-power, and fossil (gas and coal)
power plants, which may well have been either profitable in
themselves or were pursued primarily for the purpose of national
energy diversification and security policies. In addition, although
the CFU was promoted as a market maker that could act as a
carbon offset buyer until the private market flourished, the WBG
continued to build up its trading after that private market was
fully established. Finally, as a vehicle for catalytic finance and
technology transfer, the IEG finds the CFU’s record is at best
mixed. The Panel suggests that the WBG has a public
responsibility to ensure that its behavior advances the quality of
international institutions that regulate carbon finance markets,
rather than acting principally as a pure market player profiting
from expanding market scale.
Partly as a result, in November 2010, four global civil society
organizations - Jubilee South, Friends of the Earth International,
ActionAid and LDC Watch – along with dozens of regional and national
organizations reacted to Zoellick’s management of the environment,
including the loan to Medupi, with a full-fledged international campaign
to ban the Bank from climate financing:
Many northern country governments and the World Bank itself
have been actively pushing for the World Bank to be given the
mandate to be ‘THE’ global climate institution, or for it to play a
central role in setting up and eventually managing the governance
and operations of a new global climate fund. At the June

312 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
UNFCCC inter-sessional negotiations in Bonn, Germany, the
United States submitted a proposal naming the World Bank as the
‘Trustee’ for the formation of the Global Climate Fund. On June
25th, on the eve of the G20 meeting in Toronto, the WB
appointed a World Bank Special Envoy for Climate Change. The
World Bank also recently hired Daniel Kamman as their clean
energy czar. These are some of the latest of a series of moves
since 2008 to secure this important mandate for the World Bank.
Also included is the establishment of the WB-managed Climate
Investment Funds, at the behest of the UK, US, and Japan.
Regional development banks are also part of the governance and
management system of these Climate Investment Funds (Jubilee
South et al 2010).
In short, argue Jubilee South et al (2010), there should be no World Bank
role in climate finance, for reasons that bring together several aspects of
climate justice politics:
Financing must be public in nature, obligatory, predictable,
additional, and adequate, must not come with or be used to
impose conditionalities, should not be in the form of loans or
other debt-creating instruments. Instruments for raising finance
should not cause harm to people and the environment. These
should not promote or reinforce false solutions. These
mechanisms and instruments should also have a transformational
effect on the economy and environment. A new Global Climate
Fund is an essential institutional channel for north to south
climate finance flows and ensuring equitable, fair, and
appropriate distribution among countries of the South. Such an
institution should have democratic governance and management
structures with majority representation from South countries,
gender balance, and seats for civil society organizations (Jubilee
South et al 2010).
Conclusion
Had the Kyoto Protocol and its arcane climate financing strategies
succeeded over the past 13 years, and had centrist non-governmental
organizations and environmentalists not themselves failed to offer
visionary advocacy on what is the world’s most serious threat, there
would not have been a need for the climate justice movement to emerge

ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE & RESISTANCE 313
and gel (Vlachou and Konstantinidis 2010). Had global governance
firmly established itself in the 1990s-2000s, based on the Montreal
Protocol’s example of decisive action in which global public goods were
taken seriously, the kinds of subsequent elite gatherings that produced, at
best, the likes of a Copenhagen Accord would instead have had more
legitimacy and efficacy. Had South African elites paid attention to the
variety of extreme contradictions unveiled by the Medupi power plant
and World Bank financing, the campaign that generated a South African
climate justice movement – so crucial ahead of the COP 17 in South
Africa in November-December 2011 – would not have been necessary.
Finally, Robert Zoellick’s background – his relationship to S&Ls,
FannieMae, the Project for a New American Century (now formally
defunct), Florida vote-counting, Enron, Alliance Capital, the WTO,
Bush-era foreign/military policy (not to mention a million Iraqis and
thousands of US soldiers), Goldman Sachs’ reputation, the World Bank,
South African finances, and the climate – reveals his Zelig-like role in
the interrelated failures of global states and markets. Instead of
generating despair, what climate justice observers need to understand is
that Zoellick is little more than a key figure in a demonstrably corrupt
actor-network defined by the consistent geopolitical, economic,
environmental and diplomatic self-destructiveness associated with recent
elite managerialism. Zoellick is merely a personification of the way
global governance, neoliberal-neoconservative ideological fusion,
frenetic financialisation, the failing green-market project and the
responsibility for financing a transition from climate chaos are not
capable of working under present circumstances.
Climate justice marks a double effort to imagine other possible worlds
and deliver them through struggle. Bolivian president Evo Morales
(2009) offered his perspective on the movement’s momentum well
before he convened the historic Cochabamba summit: ‘We can’t look
back; we have to look forward. Looking forward means that we have to
review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot
just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and
humanity. And that’s the problem that planet earth faces today. And this
means ending capitalism.’ Accordingly, only the continuing rise of
climate justice activism from below – notwithstanding an occasional
defeat, and indeed spurned on by the knowledge and anger thereby

314 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 66
generated - will suffice to reverse the course of fossil fuel consumption
and, more broadly, of a mode of production based on the utterly
unsustainable accumulation of capital.
Patrick Bond is senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
School of Development Studies where he directs the Centre for Civil
Society, and is also visiting scholar at the University of California-
Berkeley Department of Geography. Michael K. Dorsey is assistant
professor at the Dartmouth College Environmental Studies Program in
the Faculty of Science.
bondp@ukzn.ac.za
Michael.K.Dorsey@dartmouth.edu
The authors thank Tony Phillips and Vito de Lucia for their useful inputs.
Bond benefited from a presentation of this analysis in Seoul in May 2010
as a result of a grant from the Korean Research Foundation (KRF-2007-
411-J04602).
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