Kathy
Kuang
Brown
ENG
306
3
November 2017
Historical Context
Floods, rising temperatures, melting
polar caps, and many other occurrences are evidence that the climate on Earth
is changing. These changes are a result of human activity – mainly fossil fuel burning.
The burning of fossil fuels release a gas known as carbon dioxide and the
excess release of this chemical can cause a phenomenon known as the green house
effect, which is characterized by the insulation of heat on Earth. Although
this theory is a widely accepted notion today in the scientific community, it
was merely just a theory in the past amongst other climate theories. Some of
these climate models suggested that the change in temperature is due to natural
variability – for example, changes in solar radiation and the discharges from
volcanoes could increase temperature– however, it has been determined that
those forces are not enough to explain this increase (Burch 13). Human activity
is to blame; in 1938 Guy Callendar calcified the notion that the rise in global
temperatures is indeed attributed to the rising carbon dioxide levels produced
by the burning of fossil fuels (Flemming 581).
Unquestionably, global warming was occurring,
however, it was not a concern to many. In fact, the first public remark on the
issue of climate change by a world leader was made in 1988, decades after
Callendar’s findings; Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom at the time, “set a precedent for [the] issue” (Nulman 9). She informed the Royal
Society of the “growing evidence of the rise in greenhouse gases ‘creating a
global heat trap which would lead to climatic instability” in the form of a
speech (Nulman 9). The first major international attention to the issue was
given at the Earth Summit of 1992, a conference on the environment initiated by
the United Nations. There they created the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty regarding climate change policy; it “manage[s]
emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting climate change, [and] help[s]
hold periodic meetings…called Conferences of the Parties …every twelve months”
(Burch 17). Although the UNFCCC was a
substantial step towards the global agreement to address climate change, it was
not a crystallized promise by any country. Binding emissions targets were later
discussed in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which aimed to “stabilize greenhouse
emissions at a level that would prevent dangerous levels of climate change”
(17). The UNFCCC is supported by the
efforts of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which consists
of prominent scientists that “produce reports based on the latest scientific
research”, “reviews progress on climate change …and synthesizes material for
use during policy negotiations (19). The Kyoto Protocol was brought up again - 12 years after its
initial adoption in COP3 – in 2009 at COP15, where it was determined that it
could not be implemented due to the failure of agreement (Rhodes). Later,
a second commitment period for the Kyoto arose from COP17 thanks to a major political leader of this movement, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
(“UN Secretary General and Climate Change”). Under
his leadership, which initiated in 2007, the Conference of Parties held in 2007 became a major
pivotal point that lead to his success in COP16 and COP17, conferences that
resulted in greater collective effort as well as the development of the Green
Climate Fund (which helps developing countries with climate change efforts) and
the second period for the Kyoto, respectively (“UN
Secretary General and Climate Change”).
In recent efforts, Ban Ki-Moon, who is aware of general delay of climate change policy action,
highlights the urgency to act; during his speech at the press conference at the
United Nations Headquarters, he states, “action on climate change is urgent.
The more we delay, the more we will pay in lives and in money” ("Press Conference by
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at United Nations Headquarters"). Thus, as a result, he convened a conference, The 2014 Climate Summit held in New York “to mobilize
political will for a universal and meaningful climate agreement next year in
Paris; and… to generate ambitious steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and
strengthen resilience” ("Press
Conference by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at United Nations
Headquarters.").
The
protest movements developed, prior to Ban Ki-Moon’s election,
presumably in 1992 when the Earth Summit was held; “the climate change movement worked
to influence… international negotiations” (Nulman 9). After more than a decade
since the Earth Summit, this international effort resulted in dissatisfaction
(especially to climate change activists), as proven by the history of the Kyoto
Protocol alone, which was the first major binding commitment for global
cooperation. To elaborate, this protocol adopted in Kyoto, has been rejected by
Canada and was not ratified by the United States. Clearly, these international
negotiations simply were not producing results. The climate change policy is
still relatively stagnant and yet, the climate is changing at an alarming rate;
as Birch reiterates the IPCC’s words in their Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), “warming of the climate system is
unequivocal…. [C]oncentrations of greenhouse gases are increasing…will continue
under all…scenarios until 2100…and will require substantial and sustained
reductions of greenhouse gas emissions [because] global sea level will continue
to rise through the 21st century” (184). As aforementioned, this increase
in global temperatures and the resulting devastating effects are due to human
activity; “human activities are the main culprits, directly or indirectly,
through their use of fossil fuel and changing land uses” (184). Clearly, to
substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global agreement
and the cooperation and participation of all countries must be achieved; human
activity transcends political boundaries.
Current protest movements, including
People’s Climate March, aim to catalyze this extremely slow action. In fact,
People’s Climate March, which occurred in 2014 at New York, two days prior to
the Climate Summit was the largest climate change march (Giacomini and Turner
27). It included six contingents that involved participants that identify as
indigenous peoples, migrant workers, labor, women, families, elders, students,
scientists, LGBTQ, and a myriad of other organizations and identities (27). Due
to the fact that the march unified very dissimilar groups (some that even have
ideologies that fundamentally contradict another group’s beliefs) to work
together to protest against the inaction of climate change policies, this
protest is an instance of rhetorical crisis; it disturbs the established rhetorical
context.
Works
cited:
Burch, Sarah, and
Harris, Sara. “Climate Change in the Public Sphere.” Understanding Climate Change : Science, Policy, and Practice,
University of Toronto Press, 2014, pp. 3-23.
Flemming, James. “Climate, Change,
History.” Environment and History,
vol. 20, no.4, 2014, pp. 577-586, doi: 10.3197/096734014X14091313617442.
Accessed 23 October 2016.
“UN Secretary General and Climate Change.” UN, www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ban-ki-moon-climate-change/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2016.
Nulman, Eugene. Climate Change and Social Movements.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, www.myilibrary.com.ezproxy4.library.arizona.edu?ID=835112. Accessed 19 October 2016.
"Press Conference by
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at United Nations Headquarters." Premium Official News. Infotrac
Newsstand, 17 Sept. 2014, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=STND&sw=w&u=uarizona_main&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA382667820&it=r&asid=a0cfafa84278b6c2f942430591f57eed.
Accessed 23 Oct. 2016.
Rhodes, Christopher. “The
2015 Paris Climate Change Conference: COP21.” Science Progress, vol. 99, no. 1, 2016, pp. 97-104,
doi:10.3184/003685016X14528569315192.
Giacomini, Terran, and Terisa Turner.
“The 2014 People’s Climate March and Flood Wall Street Civil Disobedience:
Making the Transition to a Post-Fossil Capitalist, Commoning Civilization.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 26,
no. 2 , 2015, pp. 27–45, doi: 10.1080/10455752.2014.1002804. Accessed 18 Oct.
2016.
Rhetorical
context
There are generally two ways to react in limiting
climate change, mitigation or adaptation. Mitigation is actually enacting
measures to prevent climate change or, if it has already started, reducing its
harmful effects; adaptation is the opposite: allowing climate change to
continue without intervention and simply accommodating to its reality.
According to Burch and Sara, the former “has been the most common policy
response to climate change since evidence of human interference with the
planet’s delicate climatic balance began to emerge” (15). Thus, in addressing
climate change issues, the government has biasedly favored a certain goal:
mitigation. Even more importantly is the bias regarding mitigation. The goal is
to reduce carbon emissions, but only if the policy is economically advantageous.
Economics has been a guiding factor in many political
decisions in the United States since the 1920s; not surprisingly, climate
change policy is not an exception; however, the introduction of the analysis
with regards to the costliness of resolving climate change did not start until
the 1970s (Randalls 226). In the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, economic research
had been aimed at directing climate change policies by analyzing the economic
consequences of potential actions made to ameliorate climate change (225). In fact,
the Department of Energy in 1980, declared “determining the optimal resiliency
(meeting the goals of climate “stability” and economic growth) is an important research
issue, because the costs of achieving a complete reduction in CO2 for maximum
climate resiliency (least harm) would be too high” (223). In other words, political decisions were not
aimed at maximally reducing carbon dioxide emissions in order to effectively solve
the dilemma. It became a question of how to reduce these emissions whilst maintaining
economic prosperity or rather, a “cost benefit analysis” (230).
This goal is still very much the leading
decision factor in policymaking for climate change, not just in the United
States, but internationally. For instance, Maria Neira, a member of the
Department of Health and the World Health Organization in advocating for a
reduction in green house emissions to improve global health acknowledges that
“policies for the mitigation of climate change” are developed to be “more
socially beneficial, cost–effective and widely supported” internationally (546).
That is, even though sufficiently
reducing climate change (and therefore its damaging effects) will prevent an
estimated 2.5 million deaths annually, the policies are still made in
capitalistic interests (546).
This ambition is also reflected in the
methodologies for mitigation, “decisions
about which scientific research projects deserve funding are often shaped…by
political context. Some governments funnel spectacular quantities of cash into the
development of clean energy technologies or infrastructure design projects,
while perceiving little use for studies of behavioral change, politics, and
policy design” (Burch 9). The technologies and the projects that are created to
reduce climate change are mechanisms to make money. In accordance to the
cost-benefit analysis, by placing preference in scientific research projects
that produce these aforementioned technologies and projects, not only are the
governments reducing carbon dioxide emissions, they are also simultaneously
capitalizing on them. Moreover, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in their Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) the most recent report (and the
one that is relevant to the rhetorical context of the protest of interest) for
the first time mentions the importance of urbanization and spatial planning for
mitigation (Birch 184). Again, the international focus is on solutions that
generate money – urbanization and city planning tends to be economically
beneficial in the long term – but also impact the increasing green house gas
quandary.
Due to this growing fixation, different
perspectives on climate change have developed, namely, those of the solar
commoners and those of the green capitalists. Business profits depend on oil
and this is “largely responsible for climate destruction” (28). This notion is
the basis for understanding the solar commoners’ perspective on solving climate
change. Solar commoners desire to undermine capitalism as a whole, because that
is the source of the problem (Turner 102). They like the idea of a small scale
or grass roots economy instead (Carlassare 92), especially since corporate
businesses frequently exploit resources that are free and vital to life, such
as the “soil, plants, animals, [and] people” to produce profits (Turner 104). Thus the underlying basis for the solar
commoners’ proposed idea of eliminating capitalism – and thereby fossil fuel
usage – as the solution is their dissatisfaction of the myriad harmful effects
of capitalism; not only do businesses harm the economy with respect to global
warming, but they are also unjustly taking advantage of resources (including
human labor). Green capitalists, on the contrary, are individuals that believe
that the solution to the climate change issue lies in altering capitalist
habits of utilizing fossil fuels, specifically, making processes in the
capitalist chain of production to be more ecologically friendly (Giacomini and
Turner 29). They believe that capitalism can be sustainable if companies take
collective effort to reduce their ecological footprint by reducing the usage of
fossil fuels. Overall, solar commoners
are asking for a massive change, a change that undermines the globalized
economy today, whereas green capitalists seek a solution that functions within
this long-established method of making capital.
Not surprisingly, because of the
radicalness of solar commoners’ ideas, the current methods of addressing climate
change reside closer to the green capitalists’ ideals. In fact, “Ban
…endors[es] ‘green’ market…solutions to climate change” (Giacomini and Turner
31). Additionally, as established in earlier parts of this essay, since money
is the leading factor in international climate change policy, it is clear that this
is indeed the actual strategy to reduce climate change. The problem then
becomes not how to solve the problem (solar commoners versus green
capitalists), but rather, how to accelerate the international cooperation of
resolving the climate issue, especially since the climate change reduction is
at the stages of attempt, but no guaranteed action.
Thus, the current (and more accurate) identity
associated with climate change activists is global citizens. Global citizens are entities whose concerns “transcend
…national citizenship and boundaries of the nation state” (Stokes 19). Thus,
they usually advocate for ubiquitous problems; furthermore, because these
issues are widespread, they believe that everyone is technically considered responsible
(19). With regards to climate change, climate change is arguably an issue that
stems from the fossil fuel emissions that (practically) everyone contributes to
and it is a change that affects everyone inhabiting this planet, making it an
apt concern for global citizens. Because global citizens reside across the
world, protest movements regarding this problem are also global in nature; as
Stokes states, “the global citizen typically acts cooperatively with others in
transnational movements of protest and social transformation” (21).
With those characteristics of a global
citizen in mind, the participants in the People’s Climate March, not surprisingly,
are global citizens. Superficially, the march is characterized with a myriad of
sub-identities that either associate with the green capitalist activists or the
solar commoner activists. However, despite their difference in ideology, these
groups decided to collectively act (and cooperatively act) against climate
change inaction. In other words, they discarded their bias in the methodology
to solve climate change and embraced their identity of a global citizen
instead. This action is characteristic of a global citizen, an entity that is
interested in the omnipresent problem and will therefore act in the interest of
the world, instead of his or her own. This identity is also demonstrated in the
fact that the march was not only located in the United States; many other
marches physically occurred in international territory as well, making it an
transnational event, which global citizens typically partake in. Some
international participants even flew to New York to participate in the cause,
again supporting the fact that “global citizen[s] typically act cooperatively
with others” (in this case, mostly Americans) in solving global issues and the
issue of global warming definitely has no political boundaries (Stokes 21).
Works
Cited
Birch,
Eugenie. “A Review of ‘Climate Change 2014: Impacts,
Adaptation, and Vulnerability’ and ‘Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate
Change’.” Journal of American Planning
Association, vol. 80, no. 2, 2014, doi: 10.1080/01944363.2014.954464. Accessed 25 Oct. 2016.
Burch,
Sarah, and Harris, Sara. “Climate Change in the Public Sphere.” Understanding Climate Change : Science,
Policy, and Practice, University of Toronto Press, 2014, pp. 3-23.
Carlassare,
Elizabeth. "Socialist and Cultural Ecofeminism: Allies in
Resistance." Ethics and the Environment, vol. 5, no. 1, 2000, pp. 89-106, www.jstor.org/stable/27766057. Accessed 24 Oct. 2016
Giacomini, Terran, and Terisa Turner.
“The 2014 People’s Climate March and Flood Wall Street Civil Disobedience:
Making the Transition to a Post-Fossil Capitalist, Commoning Civilization.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 26,
no. 2 , 2015, pp. 27–45, doi: 10.1080/10455752.2014.1002804. Accessed 18 Oct.
2016.
Neira, Maria. "The 2014 WHO Conference on Health and
Climate." Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 92, no.
8, 2014, pp. 546,
doi: 10.2471/BLT.14.143891. Accessed 25 Oct. 2016.
Randalls,
Samuel. "Optimal Climate Change: Economics and Climate Science Policy
Histories (from Heuristic to Normative)." Osiris, vol. 26, no. 1, 2011, pp. 224-242,
doi:
10.1086/661273. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.
Stokes, Geoffrey. “Global citizenship.” Ethos, vol. 12, no. 1, March 2004, pp.
19-23,
ezproxy.library.arizona.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=12795590&site=ehost-live.
Accessed 30 Oct. 2016.
Turner, E, and Leigh Brownhill.
“Ecofeminism and the Global Movement of Social Movements.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 21, no. 2 ,2010, pp. 102–106,
doi: 10.1080/10455752.2010.489681. Accessed 23 Oct. 2016.
Questions:
1. Are my ideas logically
organized?
2. Are the historical and
rhetorical contexts relevant to the protest?
3.
Are the historical and rhetorical context comprehensive? 
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