Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Eco-Terrorism is Real and Driven By Corporate Capitalism

President Joe Biden’s approval of what the essayist Rebecca Solnit called “an act of terrorism against the climate” is another indication that efforts to avert climate catastrophe will always place second to the concerns of the corporate economy.

The “act of terrorism” — ConocoPhillips Alaska’s plan to drill in Alaska’s North Slope — is supported by big business and much of Alaska’s power structure, even though climate groups argue that the move will maintain an unsustainable carbon status quo.

As Grist reported, approval of the Willow project by the federal Bureau of Land Management was tied to a Department of the Interior promise to “restrict future drilling in other parts of Alaska as well as ban offshore oil drilling in a swath of Arctic Ocean waters.”

The Biden administration argues that it had little room to maneuver, given previous decisions, and says the accompanying impositions on drilling elsewhere in Alaska was a tradeoff that made sense.

It doesn’t. The Biden compromise not only turns its back on the president’s campaign promises, but gives in to the power of Big Oil to suck profits from the planet and not make the needed changes in the way it operates. Big Oil stands to make a mint off of this.

The industry’s biggest firms, as Lisa Friedman writes in the New York Times’ “Climate Forward” newsletter, have raked in record profits and now seem “to be backtracking on promises they had made to reduce their contributions to global warming.” They view these alternatives as unnecessarily expensive, she writes, and say their “primary job is pumping oil.”

Translation: Oil companies want to pump oil because pumping oil generates the most income and profit. And oil companies, because of their vast wealth, have undue influence on our political system. The industry contributed $129 million to US House campaigns during the 2022 Congressional cycle, according to an analysis done by Open Secrets (opensecrets.org). That represents 6.6% of all contributions, and is probably an undercount given that about $820 million comes from party, candidate, or ideological committees who also are funded by the main industries — like oil and gas.

Money drives all of these discussions, which means that the public interest will be sacrificed to the prerogatives of capital. In our privatized, corporate economy, the common good only matters if it generates revenue. Our outsourcing of climate policy to the oil and gas industry, means that the industry can hold the public hostage.

This brings me back to Solnit’s description of the Willow project as an “act of terrorism.” This might seem hyperbole to some, but I think she’s hit upon an important way of looking at corporate capital’s refusal to move away from carbon-generating fuel. The FBI defines terrorism as “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.” Remove the word “criminal” and it the definition fits — an act by an organized group that fathers ideological goals (i.e, capital accumulation).

Solnit uses the word “terrorism,” she says, “because this drilling project in Alaska produces petroleum, which will be burned, which will send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will contribute to climate chaos that will affect people in the South Pacific, the tropics, the circumpolar Arctic, will affect the melting of the Greenland ice shield (this month reaching a shocking 50F warmer than normal).”

In the wake of 9/11, we created an elaborate structure to battle what we wrongly saw as an existential threat to the nation. We gutted constitutional protections. We spent billions on the military, fought two wars, and spread our tentacles far and wide. The effort was massive and concerted, but misplaced.

We do face an existential threat, but it is not from foreign terrorists, or vague overseas bogeymen. It is a corporate, profit-driven threat, a kind of corporate terrorism that is ideologically committed to protection of its profit and its ability to generate profit.

Biden promised to push back against this, but has buckled. He is a creature of a system we need to change, a system with misplace priorities that will continue to endanger the planet and its inhabitants until it is upended.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2023

Populist.com