Performance of Persistence: A March for Gender Justice in Climate Justice

by Nina Somera

Despite the midday showers, more than three hundred people led by indigenous women joined the women’s march on 1 October 2009, heading to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) building in Bangkok, Thailand.

Chanting “No Climate Justice without Gender Justice”, the participants, mostly coming from Armenia, Bangladesh, Bur ma, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Thailand stressed that women are among the hardest hit by climate change despite their minute carbon footprint. Moreover, they demanded the meaningful engagement of women in the climate talks.

One of these women was Aleta Kornika Baun, one of the scores of Indonesian indigenous women affected by the lucrative mining industries. “Mining cleared the forests of trees and now causes periodic erosions. Today, we walk for at least two kilometers just to fetch water. If we allow mining, the number of women victims will keep on rising,” she lamented.

Another was Elvie Baladad of the Pambansang Koalisyon ng Kababaihan sa Kanayunan (PKKK) or the Philippine National Rural Women Coalition. She owns an orchard of some 300 mango trees that are expected to yield about 6,000 kilos. But in her last harvest, she only managed to collect 300 kilos.

“I’m still paying my debt, with the devastation brought about by insect infestation, which in turn is brought about by climate change. We have a crazy weather, as crazy as those inside who would not want to reduce their carbon emissions and who are responsible for messing up our climate. I blame the countries especially the United States (US). In pursuit of development, it has trampled those who have less in life,” she expressed.

Northern women likewise joined the women’s march. US-based Felicia Marie Davis, who came at her own expense, hoped to learn from the politics and energy of Asian women who have strongly articulated the links between gender and climate change.

As she explained, “I came on my own resources to see and hear first hand how Asian women represent gender in climate change discussions, showing that gender and climate are connected and connected globally. I can connect what happened in the Philippines to hurricane Katrina where more women died. Women from the developing worlds are truly taking the leadership in this issue especially in terms of equity.”

During the march, some women participants periodically danced to the drumbeats, with their red umbrellas, batik banners and placards shaped like the Venus sign. Such fusion of energies, at once serious yet creative, drew the attention of passersby. Just before the march, the participants were thrilled to see four motor boats of SEAFish for Justice plying the Chao Phraya river and heading towards the park beside the Phra Sumen Park.

At the end, the women reiterated their call for accountability particularly among developed nations as well as women’s meaningful participation in both formal and informal processes.

As Baladad asserted, “We call for reparations that are free of conditionalities. They owe it to us, our children and the next generation.” Farjana Akter of Voice of Bangladesh added, “Women must be present in decision-making on adaptation programmes.” Finally Baun remarked, “Women and men must work together. We need to learn from our traditions. We have to think of ourselves as friends of the environment.”

The Population Bomb is Back – with a Global Warming Twist

by Betsy Hartmann and Elizabeth Barajas-Román

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation and violent conflict are just some ills that the elites have blamed on the poor since the days of 18th century social scientist Thomas Malthus. Now the list includes climate change.

Population pundits and advocacy groups claim that overpopulation is the main cause of global warming, that only massive investments in family planning will save the planet. This argument threatens to derail climate negotiations and turn back the clock on reproductive rights and health. It is time for women’s movements to defuse the population bomb – again.

When Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in the late 1960s, he argued that a population “explosion” would wreak havoc on the environment and cause hundreds of millions to star ve to death by the 1980s. His predictions did not come true. Instead world food production outpaced population growth. Birth rates started to fall for a variety of reasons, including declines in infant mortality, increases in women’s education and employment, and the shift from rural to urban livelihoods. Yet his kind of dire forecast ser ved as justification for the implementation of coercive population control programmes that brutally sacrificed women’s health and human rights.

When feminists won reforms of population policy at the 1994 United Nations (UN) population conference in Cairo, Egypt, many thought family planning had finally been freed from the shackles of population control. The more immediate threat seemed to be fundamentalist forces opposing reproductive and sexual rights. But population control never went away. Mounting concern about climate change has provided a new opportunity for the population control lobby to blame the poor and target women’s fertility.

Within the United States (US) population lobby, the influential Population Action International organisation has taken the lead in linking population growth and climate change.1 Paul Ehrlich is back on the circuit and popular media is spreading fear and alarm.2 For example, a June 2009 ABC prime time television documentary on climate change, Earth 2100 scared viewers with scenes of a future apocalypse in which half the world population dies of a new plague. And in the end, humans can get back into balance with nature again.

Unfortunately, even some feminists have jumped on board this fear-factor bandwagon. Although their message tends to be softer – they believe investments in voluntary family planning will meet women’s unmet need for contraception and reduce global warming at the same time.3 They assume we live in a win-win world where there is no fundamental power imbalance between the rich and the poor or contradiction between placing disproportionate blame for the world’s problems on poor women’s fertility and advocating for reproductive rights and health.

The reasoning behind these views is fundamentally flawed. Industrialised countries, with only 20 per cent of the world’s population, are responsible for 80 per cent of the accumulated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The US is the worst offender. Overconsumption by the rich has far more to do with global warming than the population growth of the poor. The few countries in the world where population growth rates remain high, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have among the lowest carbon emissions per capita on the planet.4

Moreover, the recent resurgence in overpopulation rhetoric flies in the face of demographic realities. In the last few decades population growth rates have come down all over the world so that the average number of children per woman in the Global South is now 2.75 and predicted to drop to 2.05 by 2050. The so-called population “explosion” is over, though the momentum built into our present numbers means that world population will grow to about nine billion in 2050, after which point it will start to stabilise.

The real challenge is to plan for the additional three billion people in ways that minimise negative environmental impact. For example, investments in public transport rather than private cars, cluster housing rather than suburbia, green energy rather than fossil fuels and nuclear, would do a lot to help a more populated planet.

Serious environmental scholars have taken the population and climate change connection to task, 5 but unfortunately a misogynist pseudo-science has been developed to bolster overpopulation claims. Widely cited in the press, a study by two researchers at Oregon State University blames women’s childbearing for creating a long-term “carbon legacy.”6

Not only is the individual woman responsible for her own children’s emissions, but for her genetic offspring’s emissions far into the future! Missing from the equation is any notion that people are capable of effecting positive social and environmental change, and that the next generation could make the transition out of fossil fuels. It also places the onus on the individual, obscuring the role of capitalist systems of production, distribution and consumption in causing global warming.

A second study to hit the press is by a population control outfit in the United Kingdom (UK), Optimum Population Trust (OPT), whose agenda includes immigration restriction. OPT sponsored a graduate student at the London School of Economics (LSE) to undertake a simplistic cost/benefit analysis that purports to show that it is cheaper to reduce carbon emissions by investing in family planning than in alternative technologies.7 Although the student’s summer project was not supervised by an official faculty member, the press has billed it as a study by the prestigious LSE, lending it false legitimacy. Writing on the popular blog RHRealityCheck, Karen Hardee and Kathleen Mogelgaard of Population Action International endorse the report’s findings without even a blink of a critical eye.8

Clearly, it is time for feminists to keep their critical eyes wide open to these developments. We also need to develop alternative frames and politics to address reproductive rights and climate change. We not only have to criticise the wrong links, but make the right ones.

Right Links: Reproductive Justice/Environmental Justice/ Climate Justice

Developed and advanced by women of color activists in the US, the concept of reproductive justice strongly condemns population control, noting its long history of targeting the fertility of oppressed communities. At the same time it includes support for full access to safe, voluntary birth control, abortion and reproductive health services. But reproductive justice goes far beyond the need for adequate services. According to Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ), reproductive justice “will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.”9 Reproductive justice refers not only to biological reproduction but to social reproduction.

Feminist scholar Giovanna Di Chiro argues that the concept of social reproduction is crucial to understanding the possibilities for linking struggles for women’s rights with environmental justice. Social reproduction includes the conditions necessary for reproducing everyday life (access to food, water, shelter, and health care) as well as the ability to sustain human cultures and communities.10 Whether or not individuals and communities can fulfill their basic needs and sustain themselves depends critically on the extent of race, class and gender inequalities in access to resources and power.

Unlike the population framework with its focus on numbers, social reproduction focuses on social, economic and political systems. It helps us to look more deeply at the underlying power dynamics that determine who lives and who dies, who is healthy and who is sick, whose environment is polluted and whose is clean, who is responsible for global warming and who suffers most from its consequences.

Looking through this lens leads to a much more liberatory understanding of the convergences of reproductive and climate politics. It encourages us to consider:

Connections between the Local and the Global. Some of the same powerful forces that drive environmental injustice at the local level contribute to climate change on the global level. While marginalised communities all over the world experience environmental injustices at the hands of powerful corporate and political actors, their experiences and concerns are diverse. Local battles against environmental injustice include coal mining towns in rural Appalachia, indigenous communities of the Arctic and Subarctic, the oil fields of Nigeria and the oil refineries of the Gulf Coast. The task of confronting global climate change challenges us to build alliances, coalitions, and

Que[e]r[y]ing the Climate Debates

by Nina Somera

As interest on the climate talks is picking up, more orginising are done on the ground and mobilisations staged. Theories are being revisited and expanded. More and more links are also made as the climate crisis is increasingly realised as a systemic problem – the same one that has constantly spawned inequality, deprivation and violence which have left their marks on the identities, bodies and lived experience of people One of these links is that between climate change and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities.

Peter Tatchell asserted: “There is not much point campaigning for LGBT human rights unless we have a habitable planet on which to enjoy these rights. If global warming results in climate destruction and economic downturn, our quality of queer life will be seriously diminished.” Tatchell helped launch the so called 10:10 campaign that calls for the United Kingdom to cut their emissions by 10 per cent in 2010. “Queers make up one in ten of the population. By reducing our energ y consumption by a tenth, ‘pink power’ can help save the planet,” he added.

Meanwhile in her essay “Subsistence as a Lesbian Revolution,” Jeanne Neath shared her retreat to a farm, along with her partner, in an attempt to have a self-sufficient and healthier lifestyle. “In many ways, we have been able to create a small lesbian feminist chunk of reality. Yet we still are entrenched in the larger patriarchal society.”

But there is more in the link between climate change and various LGBT individuals and communities. Both issues stem from the fundamentalist desires to dominate and control other people’s environment, resources, contexts and desires. Neoliberalism has been working hand in hand with neoconservatism that stretches beyond the United States’ right-wing politics. This was clearly reflected by the Bush administration’s attacks especially in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of “war on terror,” its ag gressive promotion of consumerism and global gag rule, that prohibited funding for reproductive health. As Reihana Mohideen wrote, “All religions have buttressed patriarchal systems and ideologies. Conversely, all patriarchal systems and ideologies have used religious reinforcements.”

It is interesting to note that though they had their respective starting points, the two main agenda of 2009 Commonwealth Summit’s main agenda were climate change and gay rights. While the former is a symptom of advanced capitalist society, the latter was a result of stone age policy that punishes homosexuality.

The discourse around climate change has to be more open to otherwise unusual suspects like LGBTs, people living with HIV/AIDS, labour migrants, communicators and many others who are poised to initially ask, “what is our entry point?”

The connecting dots between climate change and LGBT are also instructive in reevaluating the more dominant theoretical handles on gender and climate change particularly ecofeminism and reemphasing intersectionality. Forwarded by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, ecofeminism sees women’s special relationship with nature given their shared experience of oppression because of patriarchy and capitalism. As one who has embraced it said, “If I had to do it all over again, I would become a Lesbian herbalist growing herbs and spices on Womensland and making them available to other women and Lesbians. That would be my protest.”

However, ecofeminism has been criticised for its essentialising tendencies, including its perspective of women as a class. The quote above, for instance suggests a disengagement from societies, despite an attempt to carve a conducive space for a marginalised group. In addition, ecofeminism tend to affirm particular gender roles that have been disempowering for women in particular contexts. As Sowmya Dechamma pointed out, “For many ecofeminists, liberation does not require women to sever themselves from their sexual and reproductive biology or from nature. In an already gendered society where gender roles are specific and prominently used to justify [the] subjugation of women to a domestic, ‘natural’ sphere, such essentialising connections are no way liberating.”

Moreover, given the diversity of women’s contexts and capacities as well as the shifting terrains in both patriarchy and capitalism especially in an increasingly globalising process, there has been a call to speak not just of nature but of a political ecology. The same political ecology necessitates multiple resistance communities such as people living with HIV/ AIDs and LGBTs.

It is for this reason that engagement in the climate talks need not be based on the close proximity of climate change to particular issues or the way it is in relation to indigenous peoples rights, agriculture, fisheries and renewable energy. The discourse around climate change has to be more open to otherwise unusual suspects like LGBTs, people living with HIV/ AIDS, labour migrants, communicators and many others who are poised to initially ask, “what is our entry point?” This may also enable a more empowering participation as people enter with the identities that they value most rather than say, LGBT entering the climate talks through another issue like HIV/ AIDS.

Intersectionality
The concept of intersectionality calls for the simultaneous
appreciation of the axes of class, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality and other bases of identities and differences. In
her essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Kimberle
Crenshaw wrote: “My objective there was to illustrate that
many of the experiences Black women face are not
subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender
discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood,
and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into
Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly
by looking at the women race or gender dimensions of
those experiences separately.”
In this essay, Crenshaw introduced structural intersectionality
and political intersectionality. In structural intersectionality,
she explained how women of colour are not prioritised in
shelter systems. Unlike white women who seek refuge in
such shetters, women of colour are burdened by their
poverty, child care responsibilities and lack of skills which are
needed for them to find a job and be independent. Structural
intersectionality is likewise observed among women migrant
workers, who are physically abused by their partners. In most
cases, they respond to threats against their continued stay in
their host countries, rather than the threats to their bodies.
These abuses are also suffered in silence when the legal
status of one’s whole family may be put at risk.
Meanwhile political intersectionality highlights a person’s
imbrication within two or more subordinated groups that
pursue conflicting agenda. Black women for instance
struggle for women’s rights quite differently from white
women while their community struggle for citizenship and
welfare rights, which are enjoyed by the majority population.
However, the collective struggle has then and now placed
women’s rights at a marginal tier in a scheme of priorities.
Source: Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (No. 43, 1991). “Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” in
Stanford Law Review.

In one paper that advocates for inclusion of HIV/AIDS in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, the links between the two issues have been made by citing the vulnerability of migrants in contacting HIV/AIDS and the aggravating impact of water stress. But it is silent on the difficulty of people living with HIV/AIDS and their caregivers’ access to water because of discrimination.

The intersectionality in identity politics also remains quite important for it surfaces the for ms of discrimination and degree of responsiveness of policies, programmes and projects. Although a comprehensive set of financial mechanisms for climate change mitigation and adaption has yet to be in place in many countries, it is not surprising if there would be fears that these mechanisms may favour certain individuals and communities over others based on gender, ethnicity, caste, religion and citizenship. These are lessons learned from many existing mechanisms on health care and microcredit, among others.

In the case of LGBTs, these mechanisms might be heteronormative in both framework and implementation. As Diane Foster asserted in her essay in Sinister Wisdom, “When Lesbians become sick from drinking bad water or inhaling deadly fumes, the establishment is less likely to address our health concerns. We have to beg, cry and fight for medical support simply because we are Lesbian[s].”

Identity politics is likewise crucial in surfacing the strengths and the gaps even of a social movement. The short story by Honorio Bartolome de Dios, “Giyera” [War] from the Philippine gay writing anthology, Ladlad 3 reflects on a community’s selectivity of issues, one that has become transfor med into discrimination. In “Giyera,” the protagonist gay beautician Bernie and her friends join a mobilisation against the logging operations and the construction of an industrial plant in the agricultural village of San Martin. Despite being known as a trusted aide by San Martin’s elite, Bernie’s inclusion in the movement is questioned based on her sexual identity:

“The people were laughing when they saw the three, along with the farmers and fisherfolks who were marching towards the municipal office...Bernie and his friends ignored those people. But they did not join the succeeding rallies anymore. Bernie was right in his suspicion...However close he has become to an important person like Dona Estela Salvador, people still know him and his friends as gays from the parlour [Translation mine].” Later Bernie transforms her parlour as an inconspicuous post for rebels, whom she transforms into women to protect them from the military and hired goons. Pageantry and performance thus become a form of resistance that would be belatedly acknowledged in the end.

Finally, acknowledging multiple identities strengthens the claims for historical responsibilities and social reproduction especially in the present global context that is increasingly attacked by fundamentalist forces that results in multiple violence. Although climate change is not necessarily a new phenomena, its impact is not limited to the changes in temperature one can sense on her skin. Instead it aggravates long- standing inequalities and peculiar situations that strike one’s layers of identities – as a tenant farmer, industrial worker, lesbian mother, landless widow, indigenous woman and so on.

Admittedly, this task is difficult even in shaping an advocacy. As one feminist mentioned, it is already hard to attribute a result to a particular social issue. One was also reminded of the campaigns for economic justice where civil society organisations (CSOs) have allied themselves with the Catholic church in repudiating the odious debts of the South. But the same Catholic church has repudiated reproductive justice that women have been demanding. Gita Sen asserted that even most feminist movements have yet to reconcile this “third site” where women are oppressed as members of particular economic class, caste and citizenship with the previous sites that criticised the power relations between women and men.

Yet it is an inescapable challenge that stakeholders need to address rather than evade especially in deconstructing and transforming the personal relationships and social relations within a dominant system that is attempting to annex and destroy the only planet we all share.

Nina Somera is a staff of Isis International and a post-graduate student at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. She has five dogs. Among them, she loves Marx the most.

Sources:

Abeysekera, Sunila. (No. 2, 2007). “Shifting Feminisms: From Intersectionality to Political Ecology” in Women in Action.

Agarwal, Bina (2001). “Environmental Management, Equity and Ecofeminism.” In Feminism and Race. Edited by Kumkum Bhavnani. Oxford: Oford University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (No. 43, 1991). “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” in Stanford Law Review.

Dechamma, Sowmya. (No. 3-4, 2009). “Eco-feminism and Its Discontents” in Women, Gender and Research.

De Dios, Honorio Bartolome. (2007). “Giyera” in Ladlad 3: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. Edited by J. Neil Garcia and Danton Remoto. Pasig: Anvil.

Foster, Diane.(Fall 2009). “Environmental Issues/ Lesbian Concerns” in Sinister Wisdom.

Global Unions. (2007). “Fact Sheet for UNFCCC COP13: Climate Change & HIV/AIDS.”

Homovision. (22 September 2009). “Tatchell: ‘Climate Change is Gay Issue.’”

Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva (2001). “People or Population: Towards a New Ecology of Reproduction.” In Feminism and Race. Edited by Kumkum Bhavnani. Oxford: Oford University Press.

Mohideen, Reihana. (No. 1, 2008). “The ‘War on Women’ Belies the ‘War on Terror’” in Women in Action.

Neath, Jeane. (Fall 2009). “Subsistence as a Lesbian Revolution” in Sinister Wisdom.

Sen, Gita.(2005). “Occasional Paper 9: Neolibs, Neocons and Gender Justice: Lessons from Global Negotiations.”

The Canadian Press. (26 November 2009). “Harper heads to Commonwealth Summit: Climate Change and Gay Rights Could Dominate Agenda.”

Geoengineering: A Gender Issue?

By Diana Bronson

The idea of re-engineering the planet used to be th stuff of science fiction, but a band of increasingly vocal scientists and other advocates – almost all male – is rapidly moving these controversial ideas from the margins to the mainstream of policy response to climate change. Some want geoengineering included in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Others are waiting for Copenhagen negotiations to fail in order to create a political opening for a high-risk Plan B: a climate techno-fix.

Geoengineering is the intentional, large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate systems by artificially changing oceans, soils and the atmosphere most often as a response to climate change. It is a technological fix on a planetary scale – one that may have devastating environmental, economic and social impacts, particularly in the global South that is already suffering most from the impacts of rapid environmental change and will have least say in how such technologies are deployed.

Engineering is defined in Webster’s English Dictionary as “the application of science to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the uses of mankind.” Since “geo” means the earth, this “optimum conversion” carries great planetary risks. And since all people on the planet do not have a common view of how the resources of nature should be used, “mankind” is a loose and intellectually lazy notion, laden with the false universalism of the patriarchal mind. Geoengineering does not benefit “mankind.” At best, it offers an Geoengineering appearance of a short-term remedy for those who caused the climate crisis and who do not want to pay for it. The majority of humankind have nothing to gain at all and potentially, a great deal to lose.

A Dangerous Distraction

Geoengineering is a dangerous and expensive distraction from the urgent work that needs to be done on mitigation and adaptation. These technologies, by virtue of being large-scale, highly centralised with significant commercial and military connections and applications, are bound to deliver inequitable outcomes. The illusion of a climate techno-fix just around the corner serves as an all too convenient excuse for industrialised countries to drag their heels and continue avoiding the urgent changes required to reverse the climate’s trajectory.

It is hard not to notice that an overwhelming majority of people discussing geoengineering are men. Whether it is the meetings that are organised, the reports that are written, the traffic on the listserves, the academic papers that are published or the media coverage, women are practically absent from the discussion. If engineering is a male-dominated field – and it is – then engineering on a planetary scale is even more so.

While statistics have not yet been compiled on gender and geoengineering, it is enlightening to look at the two most recent influential reports this year by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center.1 Women only account for 16 per cent in these reports’ panels.

Other influential reports offer no means to break down the gender of the authors as they are published on an institutional basis. And some score far worse than the two studies above: One that merits specific mention is published by Novim, a new California-based think tank that claims to do science “without advocacy or agenda.” It looked at all the “technical” issues involved in the research, development and deployment of shooting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere.2 It had a working group and a board composed uniquely of men. The study failed to acknowledge that the social position of the ten men who authored the report in some way, coloured their perceptions, methodologies or recommendations – despite the fact that the working group convenor, Steven Koonin, is current United States Under-Secretary of State for Energy.

There are three broad categories of geoengineering technologies currently in research and development in Northern academic, public and private settings. They are solar radiation management or reflecting sunlight back to space, carbon dioxide removal and sequestration, and intentional weather modification.

Managing the Sun

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) covers a series of technologies that aim to increase the albedo or reflectivity of the earth by reflecting more sunlight back to outer space and thereby cooling the planet without changing in any way the composition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, SRM technologies address the symptom of global warming without addressing the cause, which is the increased concentration of greenhouse gases.

SRM comes in the forms of spraying aerosol sulphates in the atmosphere, cloud whitening, space sun shades and albedo enhancement.

• Aerosol sulphates in the stratosphere Pumping aerosol sulphates into the stratosphere to block sunlight, thereby lowering the earth’s thermostat.
• Cloud whitening Spraying seawater through unmanned ships to make clouds “whiter” by increasing the condensation nuclei in clouds, thereby reflecting more of the sun’s rays back to space.
• Space sunshades Trillions of small freeflying spacecrafts launched a million miles above the earth or space mirrors, made from a reflective mesh of aluminum threads and placed between the earth and sun
• Albedo enhancement Increasing the reflectiveness of the Earth’s surface by planting whiter or shinier crops, painting roofs and roads, or covering desert regions with white material.

SRM has the potential to cause significant environmental damage, including releasing additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, changing weather patterns and reducing rainfall, damaging the ozone layer, altering the colour of our skies, diminishing biodiversity, making solar power less effective, allowing ocean acidification to proceed unhindered, and provoking sudden climatic jumps if stopped. Among the most critical questions in deploying SRM: Who will control the earth’s thermostat? Who will make the decision to deploy when such drastic measures are considered technically feasible?

Burying the Carbon

Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration technologies remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and attempt to store it somewhere other than the atmosphere where it provokes warming. While the removal part of the equation is no longer so scientifically challenging, the question of the safe storage of carbon dioxide remains high risk, hugely expensive and uncertain in terms of duration. Carbon dioxide removal can be done through ocean fertilisation, ocean upwelling or downwelling enhancement, genetic engineering of algae, carbon-sucking machines or synthetic trees and biochar.

When used at a large scale, these technologies can cause destruction or intentional modification of complex ecosystems and are therefore likely to cause unpredictable side effects.

• Ocean fertilisation Stimulating the growth of phytoplankton with iron or nitrogen in order to promote carbon sequestration deep at sea. There have already been more than a dozen experiments and 191 states at the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a de facto moratorium on the practice in May 2008. The London Convention is about to adopt rules on what constitutes “legitimate” scientific research.
• Ocean upwelling or downwelling enhancement Using giant pipes to bring up nitrogen or phosphorous enriched waters (relative to carbon) to the surface to cool surface waters and enhance ocean sequestration of carbon dioxide, promoted notably by the company Atmocean.
• Genetic engineering of algae Genetically engineered algae, covering urban buildings, open ponds, or the surface of the ocean would be used to capture carbon dioxide. This solution is advanced by UK engineers.3
• Carbon-sucking machines or synthetic trees Extracting carbon dioxide from the air by using liquid sodium hydroxide (or another “proprietary sorbent material”4), which is converted to sodium carbonate, then extracting the solid carbon dioxide to be buried.
• Biochar Burning huge quantities of biomass through pyrolysis (low oxygen) and burying the concentrated carbon in soil, a proposal backed by the corporatedriven International Biochar Initiative.

When used at a large scale, these technologies can cause destruction or intentional modification of complex ecosystems and are therefore likely to cause unpredictable side effects. The duration and the safety of sequestration in land or sea, whether through biological or mechanical means, are mostly unknown. Many of these techniques require unsustainable inputs and land and ocean use.

Controlling the weather

Technologies that alter weather patterns have been used by the military for some time. The most common of these is cloud seeding in order to induce rain and disable enemy troop movement. Cloud seeding has also been used for agriculture. However, this technology has delivered unpredictable results and has never been systematically successful.

Another technology is used in suppressing or redirecting the path of a hurricane. It entails control over multiple factors that cause hurricanes, typhoons and extreme weather events. Several patent claims are pending.

Cloud seeding for rain is increasingly widespread and has been practised in many countries in a desperate attempt to avoid devastating results. But weather modification technologies have unpredictable and potentially devastating global and regional impacts, particularly on soil alkalinity and ocean ecosystems. Weather modification has also been advanced as an adaptation technology for climate change particularly in protecting waterflow for hydropower schemes.5

The Language of Geoengineering

Perhaps the best illustration of the gender bias of geoengineering is the language that is used to talk about it. There are “hard” and “soft” technologies. The notion of controlling or dominating the earth’s climate systems is prominent, whereas notions like integrity and respect for existing ecosystems receive scant mention. Sometimes the vocabulary used is more explicitly gendered and filled with sexual imagery.

Take for example the much-discussed chapter on geoengineering in the recently published Superfreakonomics: “What distinguishes a big ass volcano is not just how much ejaculate it has, but where the ejaculate goes” explain the authors as they articulate not only how shooting sulphates in the stratosphere resembles volcanoes but also how volcanoes are seen to resemble a certain male sexual experience.

This notion of controlling the earth, that is traditionally perceived as female, is deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition as many feminist authors have pointed out over the past thirty years. It is filled with the arrogance and hubris. Sometimes, listening to geoengineers get excited about the potential climate leveraging geoengineering offers, one is reminded of small boys playing with new toys. Yet this does not change the fact that the potential consequences of these much bigger toys are much more devastating.

Fatal Flaws and Frameworks

Despite its already questionable proposals, geoengineering is seriously being considered in the current climate talks, giving communities especially in the South much more reasons to be alarmed. Today there is no multilateral body specifically mandated to take on the governance and regulation of emerging technologies like geoengineering. Thus it is not clear who will determine the kind and conditions of technique that will be deployed.

Should geoengineering become a part of climate change adaption and mitigation programmes, geoengineers who have the technical and economic means to fiddle with the global thermostat take the lead. In the absence of a multilateral debate, these people will even define what constitutes a “climate emergency.”6

Recent governance proposals, including a “voluntary code of practice,”7 rather than a binding and globally agreed upon set of rules, make a mockery of any notion of accountability. In the absence of a global consensus, support for geoengineering technologies would be irresponsible, reinforcing the lack of accountability of industrialised countries for climate change and worsening negative consequences on the global South.

Geoengineering thus constitutes a perfect excuse for industrialised countries. It offers governments an option to evade historical responsibility rather than reducing emissions. Geoengineering research is often seen as a way to “buy time.”8 The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) governments and powerful corporations who have denied or ignored climate change for decades and are responsible for 90 per cent of historic emissions– are the ones with the budgets and the technology to execute this gamble with the earth. There is no reason to trust they will have the interests of more vulnerable states or peoples in mind.

Moreover, geoengineering puts the earth at great peril, with impacts that are unknown and even irreversible. Even without the climate talks, its deployment is likely to violate national sovereignties, regional security and international treaties.

Since a geoengineering project is done at a massive scale, it obliterates any possibility of effective local, national or regional climate policies. It is likely to provoke unpredictable disruptions to the climate system such as precipitation disturbances and even drought in Asia and Africa that could be caused by some SRM techniques.

Many geoengineering techniques also have latent military purposes and their deployment would violate the UN Environmental Modification Treaty, that prohibits the hostile use of environmental modification.

Similarly, it commercialises climate. As competition is already stiff in the patent offices between those who think they have a planetary fix for the climate crisis. But should “Plan B” ever actually be designed, the prospect of it being privately held is terrifying.

The Way Forward

Given the very flawed framework of geoengineering particularly in the context of climate change, demanding equal access to this male-dominated field will hardly deliver the kind of results feminists would like to see in th future of our only planet. However, it is essential to expose how the patriarchal nature of geoengineering and its inclusion in the mainstream policy discussions.

As geoengineering enters the discussions in national legislative processes and the UNFCCC and as more public and private money flows into this field, it is vital that women’s voices be heard and that women work to elaborate a feminist critique and response to this development.

Diana Bronson is a programme manager of ETC Group and lives in Montreal, Canada. She has a background in journalism and human rights.

Endnotes

1 Found respectively at URL: http://royalsociety.org/news.asp?id=8734 and URL: http://fixtheclimate.com/

2 See Novim (2007), “Climate Engineering Responses to Climate Emergencies”

3 See Institute of Mechanical Engineers (UK) (August 2009), “Geo-Engineering: Giving us the Time to Act”

4 Ibid.

5 See for example plans by Pacific Gas and Electric Company (California) to use cloud seeding in the Pit and McCloud Watersheds to offset snow pack loss from climate change – Christina Aanestad (nd), “Seeding Clouds for Hydropower” Climate Watch” over KQED Radio

6 Opcit. See Novim.

7 UK Royal Society (2009), “Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty.”

8 Opcit. See Institute of Mechanical Engineers (UK)