Documents of Disaster and Conferences of Calamity: Rhetorical Questions, Questions of Rhetoric and the Transition from Fossil Fuels
By: Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels produced a People's Declaration. There have been many such statements over the years, yet the climate crisis continues unabated.
“Words that do not match deeds are unimportant” - Che Guevara
250 years ago, a collection of disgruntled white men - many of them wealthy landowners, slaveholders, and white supremacists - declared their independence from a king and what they believed to be an iniquitous tyranny that exercised interdiction from the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.” This so-called Declaration of Independence (DOI) may very well be the most hypocritical, contradictory, and incomplete document and proclamation in the HIStory of the world. According to the historical society, American Battlefield Trust, 41 of the 56 DOI signers were slaveholders, with Thomas Jefferson, the lead author of the document, himself owning over 600. This one man, who began a sexual relationship with one of those enslaved people, Sally Hennings when she was just 14 years old, further elucidates the toxic tartuffery of the DOI, while also surfacing a whole new meaning to the idea of “unalienable rights,” as well as who they belong to and who they don’t.
And while the aforementioned white men may have declared independence from a King and the government of Great Britain, when it came to upholding racial capitalism they bent the knee. Their pledge of allegiance to racial capitalism required them to maintain slavery as well as continue brutal land theft from and systemic and sanctioned genocide of Indigenous peoples. The contradiction of declaring themselves free while keeping others in a bondage of forced labor, forced fecundity, and general dehumanization set the stage for a series of subsequent documents that vindicate the sage words of Che Guevara, “words that do not match deeds are unimportant.”
Some 240 years later, another curious document emerged from a cauldron of Pan-European, western mode of thinking in one of Jefferson’s favorite cities in the world, Paris. Much like the white men who patted themselves on the back for bestowing upon the world a historic document that would forever alter its course, in 2015 195 nations signed the Paris Agreement, which, according to the United Nations (UN), is a "legally binding agreement to combat climate change and unleash actions and investment towards a low carbon, resilient and sustainable future.” Additionally, the UN declared, “The Paris agreement for the first time brings all nations into a common cause based on their historic, current and future responsibilities.” And like the DOI, the Paris Agreement was also littered with ubiquitous contradictions and abject hypocrisy that both still adversely impact the planet and the most vulnerable people and species who call it home.
The list of nation states who signed the Paris Agreement include many whose entire economies are reliant on the extraction, trade, and perpetual exploration for fossil fuels including, but not limited to, Azerbaijan, Guyana, the Russian Federation, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Yet the signature of the United States, under the direction of President Barack Obama, contained a duplicity that was arguably more toxic than fossil fuels while also forming a miasma that could rival some of the more potent mercaptans.
The United States did not become the world’s premier petrostate overnight, it became this way over years - years of neoliberal policies ratified from Republican and Democrat party administrations alike and Barack Obama, who was once described by Dr. Cornel West as “a Rockefeller republican in Blackface” was a catalyst. It’s fitting that Dr. West used a family that made its fortune on fossil fuels to describe Obama as the former president's approach to climate change and fossil fuels policy demonstrates why the U.S.’s Paris Agreement signature is the equivalent of someone writing and signing a check they know is going to bounce.
On March 12, 2012 - just three years before allowing the U.S. to be a signatory of the Paris Agreement he gave a speech at a fossil fuel pipeline manufacturing facility in Cushing, Oklahoma. As part of his remarks, Obama proclaimed, “...the fact is that my administration has approved dozens of new oil and gas pipelines over the last three years -– including one from Canada.” He continued, “And as long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people.” One month later, Obama defended his energy record by suggesting, “We've quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipelines to circle the Earth and then some.” But the tip of the iceberg - that, statistically, is now rapidly melting due to a rapidly warming planet - is what Obama did before the ink on the Paris Agreement was even dry. In December 2015, just weeks after the conclusion of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) - the UN’s annual global climate change summit - that produced the Paris Agreement Obama signed a law ending the U.S.’s prohibition on selling crude oil on the international market. By some estimates, this move resulted in the addition of 73 to 165 million metric tons of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The only difference between the singers of the DOI and Obama signing the Paris Agreement is that the former were hypocrites for owning slaves whereas the latter is a hypocrite for cynically calling himself a climate champion while putting policies in place that continue to make the masses slaves of a fossil fuel oligarchy that continues to treat the planet like its own plantation where natural resources, the atmosphere, self determination of nations and communities, and public health are tied to racial capitalism’s whipping post and beaten into submission. Worse yet, similar to the DOI, the Paris Agreement is also a fallacy and has proven to be both anemic and inadequate as it pertains to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, holding the nations most responsible for the climate crisis to account, and delivering even a semblance of climate/environmental justice. James Hansen, a former NASA scientist who some consider “the father of climate awareness” did not mince words when expressing his chagrin for the Paris Agreement, “It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words.”
While interrogating the sham of the U.S. 4th of July holiday, Frederick Douglass declared, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” It's been six months since COP 30 in Brazil, which can only be characterized as yet another failed opportunity to secure global cooperation for confronting the climate crisis at the requisite scale, another example of the inability and unwillingness of the petty bourgeois apparatus that controls the guild of environmental civil society organizations (CSOs) to organize and mobilize for climate and environmental liberation. So the question, to Douglass’ sage words, remains - what have we learned from past failures of the UN, CSO, lawmakers and the nation states they preside over as well as the anodyne and insouciant documents, declarations, and un-enforceable agreements they sign.
As part of their statement on COP 30, Black Alliance for Peace noted, “And while it’s encouraging that we’re leaving Brazil with a Just Transition framework for the first time in the COP’s history, [we] wonder how this framework can commence if there’s no commitment to phasing out fossil fuels - what are we ‘transitioning’ from exactly…it’s kind of like aiming to play a soccer match without any balls.” To this end it was encouraging to learn of the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels hosted by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands in the coastal city of Santa Marta. Per the conference’s website, “The Conference is designed as a space for countries, subnational governments and other stakeholders that recognize the need to implement a transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner, in line with climate goals and the best available science.” Time, rather than subjective opinions of CSOs and certain anointed climate “leaders” will tell if the goals of the conference were actually met and what will come from it. After three days the conference did produce a People’s Declaration for a Rapid, Equitable, and Just Transition for a Fossil Free Future. The document includes 15 principles as well as four concrete actions:
A complete equitable and just phase-out of fossil fuels aligned with meeting the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°c and reach global real zero emissions by 2050;
A rapid, direct, equitable, and just transition to 100% renewable energy; ensure equitable and universal access to renewable energy;
An end to barriers to the transition and pursue solutions; and
A comprehensive just transition
And while the document certainly contains some fine and salient elements, the key questions that remain are:
A “Just Transition” to what exactly; and
What is to be done/Where Do We Go From Here?
Both questions require deep cogitation, principled debate and analysis, and, yes, even some very loud discussions and disagreements that actually forms the foundation of a movement rather than a select collection of CSOs who continue to demonstrate that winning the climate fight to sustain the planet is not as much a priority as maintaining the illusion of a fight. To this end, it’s the second question When Lenin asked the question, “What is to be done,” he prescribed what will be necessary to vanquish the fossil fuel oligarchy and the racial capitalist dictatorship it serves and upholds, "Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!" And Martin King did the same when he asked the questions, “Where do we go from here,” explaining, “The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” Both ideas were not adroitly addressed or considered during the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Until these truths presented Lenin and King are put in kinetic motion - not via reports, documents, panel discussions, social media posts, and press statements - there will be no “Just Transition,” only just - a - transition to the next set of conferences that continue a circular path that is the equivalent of travelling without moving.
Amilcar Cabral was clear, “…we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it.” He’s correct, for we can do all the panels, we can regurgitate the obligatory, "capitalism sucks” rhetoric - ironically while benefiting from it - we can continue to get all the snaps and claps for pithy one liners during speeches to the same people you already speak to all the time - like eight times a week at least on various zoom calls -and do all the interviews and panels that lead to more reports, policy position papers, and documents that will likely be collecting digital dust in a few weeks after the next document, report, and position paper is released. None of these exercises have anything to do with climate/environmental liberation, just the illusion in which we are tricking ourselves even more than the masses, many who do not have the privilege of rubbing elbows with the petit bourgeois while wearing revolutionary costumes.
The questions What is to be done/Where do we go from here - unlike how we approach the climate crisis through a series of questions so that our think tanks and CSOs can, somehow, convince their philanthropic masters to give them more money/resource to ask yet even more questions as part of the next batch of documents, position papers, and reports - cannot be theoretical or many more people will die and otherwise continue being oppressed by the racial capitalist dictatorship. Because the irony is that even while the signers of the DOI were white supremacist charlatans, they were revolutionary in their intention to be so and took up arms in support of their evil deed - whereas the guild of climate/environmental formations and individuals barely put up a real fight to advance the truth of climate catastrophe and ecocide. As such, Douglass may as well have been speaking to the climate CSOs when he denounced the 4th of July holiday, “...your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to [the masses], mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
At the end of the day, organizers, including the CSOs and governments, who put the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels have a gargantuan, yet warranted and principled task to ensure the documents and declarations they produced are not yet another Declaration of Independence, another Paris Agreement, another set of documents, proclamations, and demands that just lead to more discussions about documents, proclamations, and demands for people and organizations that can afford to attend them. Next week we will analyze how the global Afro-descendant delegation at the conference put a foundation together to do just that.
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a son of Sierra Leone, an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cats, “Evil” Ernie and MalaChai the Mischievous. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.