A-Infos (en) wsm.ie: Transport needs and Climate Breakdown as 25, 000 march through Dublin by: Andrew N Flood

As part of the global climate strike about 25 thousand students marched through the center 
of Dublin city. This was one of many demonstrations that took place around Ireland, even 
the small dormitory towns around Dublin like Maynooth had their own demonstrations. So the 
actual numbers protesting in Ireland was probably in the region of 40,000.  In this piece 
Andrew looks at how collective action can halt Climate Breakdown using the example of the 
need for transport to illustrate why individual consumer choices cannot fix things. ---- 
Watching the march one of the things that struck an observer was all the handwritten signs 
that certainly indicated quite an awareness of what the core issues around Climate 
Breakdown actually are. Worth mentioning as we've seen an awful lot of cranky old white 
men in the Irish media over the last couple of weeks trying to suggest that the young 
people taking part in these mass protests don't understand the issues or were being 
tricked by adults. One powerful answer to that is just to watch this video and watch all 
the different signs and different slogans that people have created themselves.

The Irish government's complete lack of seriousness about the climate crisis is shown by 
the fact that the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar chose this of all days to cut the ribbon on a 
runway being reopened. Air travel of course is one of the things people focus in as a 
cause of a climate change / climate breakdown. The reason for that is it's a significant 
enough percentage on its own, around 3.5%, but also it's one of those things where a very 
small number of people are causing a huge amount of damage. An awful lot of the damage of 
air travel is  from people who are travelling multiple times each year.

That air travel figure is one illustration among many of why it's a mistake to talk about 
halting climate breakdown in terms of getting people to make different individual consumer 
choices. In fact most of the damage is done by a very, very, small percentage of the 
world's population, these are the world's wealthy.  In the UK for instance 10% of people 
account for 50% of International flights.

We already know the wealthy don't particularly care about the rest of us because they have 
created and maintain an economic system in which a huge percentage of the world's 
population are extremely poor.  So while on the individual level you or I might decide to 
try and completely avoid air travel that makes very very little difference if the wealthy 
take 6 or more trips a year. We've got a fairly narrow elite that are traveling multiple 
times per year who won't change their behaviour because frankly they don't really care 
that much about how or whether the rest of us live. This also isn't a question of the rich 
simply being immoral - they are but it's more a case that an awful lot of the Climate 
Breakdown causes we face need systematic collective change. Climate Breakdown can't be 
halted at an individual consumer level.

Collective decisions making not individual consumer choice
You can see why this is the case if you look at transport. Ireland has a pretty terrible 
public transport system as it's expensive, it's quite often slow and it also doesn't 
really connect areas up very well. It tends to just connect city centers up with the 
suburbs because it's set up to facilitate working and shopping. The national train network 
is is both slow and expensive.  It also only connects Dublin to each of the regional 
cities. It doesn't even really connect them to each other. So we've created this transport 
system in Ireland where a lot of people are quite dependent on having a car and are often 
unable to choose an alternative way of getting around.

Now we know cars cause a huge amount of climate damage so the government's proposed 
solution to that - which is no solution whatsoever - is to simply try and replace the 
mechanical petrol and diesel cars on the roads with electric cars. On one level you might 
think that an improvement because obviously emissions from electric cars are lower but 
what it also does is ensure that in fact lots and lots and lots of new electric cars need 
to be built. The process of constructing those results in the production of huge amounts 
of a climate change gases and uses up materials some of which are in short supply and/or 
have polluting extractive processes. What we need to do in terms of transport is not an 
individual consumer choice of what sort of car people drive but rather a collective choice 
made by society that we're going to have a very good public transport system.

An effective public transport should be free and able to get people where they are going 
regular & fast enough that there is almost no need for individually owned cars anymore. We 
need a collective transport system where the private car becomes a kind of oddity of the 
late 20th century. A weird symptom of the hyper individualism that capitalism encouraged 
and which almost wrecked the planet.   In the cities this means a system that is not just 
about getting people from a suburb into the city centre but that connects the entire city 
up so that visiting a friend on the opposite edge of the city is as easy as driving there. 
And we need a rural transport system that enables people to rapidly reach every village on 
the island, and runs late enough to help revitalise rural social life.

Although in the US or Ireland this probably sounds hopelessly utopian the reality is that 
such systems have already existed and we tore them up.  Ireland had a fair more extensive 
island wide train system in the 1910's, you could even get to Achill island by train. 
Trams ran out of Dublin to Howth and the foothills of the Dublin mountains so people could 
escape the city at the weekends.  Outside of the global north transport systems that 
connect up everywhere are common as there are no other options.  Trains & buses run 
between cities and towns, shared taxi's run the same routes with greater frequency and 
connect up towns to villages.  These are a necessity of relative poverty, many people 
can't buy and run a car. The pressures of poverty mean they certainly have significant 
flaws not least pushing drivers to cramming too many people in and driving for too many 
hours.  But they prove that  a properly funded system could ‘abolish the car', even more 
so when you consider that the technological developments of the last decade cover the 
final set of uses.  If you need to transport an elderly relative for a hospital 
appointment or move a load of furniture to a new home you could rent a vehicle suitable 
for that for the time it takes, such schemes often using electric vehicles already exist. 
Which in any case is a lot better than trying to use the ‘family car' for all those 
purposes when it's too small for some and too big (and therefore wasteful) for others.

This is a very different idea the government goal of replacing our current fleet of fossil 
fuel cars with a similarly sized fleet which incidentally would require 2.6 million 
electric cars in the south alone.  That sort of consumer choice approach to Climate 
Breakdown might reduce running emissions significantly but it requires a huge use of 
energy and raw materials to make all those cars.  A process that will involve the 
production of lots of greenhouse gases, around 8.8 tonnes of CO2 per car so some 22 
million tonnes in all which is more than current transport emissions for over a year.

Car use is already very inefficient in terms of transporting people in comparison with 
trains or buses, most cars bringing people to work only carry one person which at the same 
times a bus will have 50 on board.  The electricity used to drive an electric car still 
has a high proportion (70% in 2017) coming from fossil fuels so the emissions from 50 
single person electric cars taking 50 people to work will be very much larger than a 50 
seater diesel bus.  And while each of those cars will sit unused for the rest of the day 
the bus will continue to run back and forth meaning the emissions from the manufacturing 
process per person transported will be minuscule in comparison with a car.  So why on 
earth are we talking about replacing single user petrol cars with almost as inefficient 
single user electric cars rather than a really good collective public transport system?

The level of collective decision making we need here extends beyond the type of vehicles 
but also what sort of transport infrastructure we build.  In particular government 
priority for a very long time has been to prioritize private cars on roads over 
pedestrians, cyclists and bus and train passengers.  Tram tracks were torn up, footpaths 
narrowed or never built, bus corridors a recently hotly contested introduction and cycle 
lanes seldom much more than a line of paint.  In the last decades a lot of money went into 
building motorway connections between Dublin and the other cities around Ireland but 
almost nothing into train lines.  As a result the trains are expensive and no faster than 
driving.  They should be making inter-city journey's at a fraction of the cost of a car 
and at 2 to 3 times the speed which incidentally would also relieve some of the housing 
pressure in the big cities by making it possible to reasonably commute from much further 
away. Putting money into fast train lines rather than motorways is an excellent example of 
how meaningless a ‘consumer choice' approach is to Climate Breakdown.  This decision to 
fund one over the other cannot be made by individuals but only through collective decision 
making.    The decision to give space on a city transport route to pedestrians, cyclists 
and buses rather than a car lane for individually owned cars cannot be made by a consumer, 
it has to be a collective decision.  Organising rather than shopping choice is what we need.

Why the consumer focus?
  So why is it that there is such a big focus on individual consumer choices as a way of 
combating climate breakdown? Well one of the reasons is that at first it seems like an 
easy solution to people not used to working together as a group to win change.   On your 
own you can decide to buy one product rather than another and that gives us a sense that 
we're doing something meaningful. Probably most people reading this are already making 
some choices along this lines, cycling rather than driving, avoiding flying where 
possible, eating less beef or even going vegan, avoiding ‘fast fashion' and so on. I've 
made changes myself to the way I live and that's because I want to contribute as little as 
possible to making Climate Breakdown worse.  I don't want to be somebody who's 
accelerating climate change but I recognize that what choices I make will have very very 
little impact, indeed no measurable impact in terms of where the planet is going to find 
itself in 10, 20 or 30 years time.  For the reasons already outlined the really meaningful 
changes have to be changes we make collectively, that we make as a society. But there are 
other reasons why the individual consumer choice gets pushed and the main other reason is 
ideological.

We live in a society, a neoliberal society, where the whole idea that society could make, 
indeed should make decisions is is looked down on.  People coming together to educate each 
other, talks things out and then perhaps vote on a range of options is seen as impossible, 
as something not to be attempted outside of the occasional referendum. Instead we are told 
that left to itself the market will make wise decisions. That if we allow the free hand of 
the market to operate it will somehow magically make decisions that will avoid climate 
breakdown or that will supply housing - to take an example where it's very obviously not 
happening in the current Irish context. You might wonder where does this idea that the 
market can be a solution come from, in particular when in the context of housing and 
climate change it very obviously hasn't been working and time is running out.

Why is it the case that what we are told are intelligent people, media commentators etc 
continuously put forward this idea that the market can do something that it very blatantly 
isn't. The reason is basically down to the fundamental nature of the society we live in. 
Taking a step back and looking at that society we see that a very small percentage of 
people control almost all the wealth in our society and that this control means that while 
we call the society we live in a democracy the reality is that they make all the key 
decisions.  Those people don't want us making decisions.

We have little say but much potential power
In work for instance most of us have no say whatsoever in terms of how things go. We've no 
say over what's produced, why it's produced, how much its sold for etc. That's made by the 
people who own the company. Those people often don't even work for the company we're in. 
They are often just shareholders, meaning they just collect a percentage of the profits 
made every year because they own those shares. That's quite a strange system and under the 
threat of climate breakdown its a disaster as shareholders want to make profits, not 
protect the planet.

OK you might think, there is no democracy in work and we do spend a lot of our lives 
there.  But once we turn 18 we do get to vote for politicians.   But what determines who 
wins an election is very is very often how the media covers them, right? And most of the 
media is owned by the same very small amount of rich people who own the wealth in society. 
When you look at the data in fact you realize that elections are nearly always won by the 
candidate who has the most money. That's the main determining factor in who rules us.  So 
in work it's the case that we live in what is really a dictatorship, we don't really have 
a say about how work runs and then society as a whole turns out to be also run by the same 
people.

Effectively the super wealthy buy politicians, sometimes very literally in terms of 
bribes, sometimes less literally but still as effectively in terms of control of the media 
and who gets donations. So the decision making system we have means the people who are 
producing the vast majority of climate change gases have by far the loudest voices.  These 
are the people who control and profit from the companies and corporations which produce 
the vast majority of climate change gases.  So you've got a very small percentage of the 
world's population, we're maybe talking less than 1% here, maybe 0.1%, and they get most 
of the wealth that's generated by the processes producing climate change.

It gets worse though.  This group, the super wealthy also have the least interest in 
minimising the extent of climate change. If you take the example of rising sea levels the 
rich have the money to move.  Indeed they have the money to buy a house on wherever the 
beach is going to be at its new sea level. Some are experts in making a lot of money from 
property speculation so who knows they might well make a lot of money from property 
speculation around sea level rises. The vast majority of the world's poor on the other 
hand don't have any of those choices. Lots of people cannot escape rising sea levels 
because they live in in places almost entirely comprised of low-lying land as in Pacific 
Islanders or in countries like Bangladesh where there's a lot of rivers and little 
available land. They also can't escape the effects of sea level rises because they don't 
have the money to move somewhere else and in any case border regimes won't allow them escape.

For a lot of the rest of us it's not quite that severe but it is the case that we already 
can't afford housing, that we are already stuck paying way more rent than what we can 
actually afford and that as things get disrupted, as areas go underwater moving for us is 
a much bigger deal than it is for wealthy people.  Of course the sea level rise will be 
slow and over many decades, I'm using it here for illustration.   The much more worrying 
thing that's already happening is rising food insecurity. The changing climate means that 
food crops that were once reliable are sometimes failing or delivering reduced harvest, 
and that's really affecting the poorest people in the world who are very much dependent on 
subsistence farming to eat. The rest of us, we see food prices increasing, perhaps we see 
we have to switch from eating one thing to another thing as a consequence of that but a 
lot of the world's population are dependent on growing their own food and if the crop 
fails they don't necessarily have the means to purchase something else. They become 
dependent, perhaps on UN relief funds, and if that fails to arrive they literally face the 
threat of starvation.

This is already happening,  there are already a lot of people living in food insecurity 
due to failing crops and becoming dependent on UN or whatever other relief agencies 
provide food.  For years the number in food insecurity decreased, with economic crisis and 
climate breakdown this is no longer true and is rising since 2015.  The UN said last year 
that more than 820 million people did not have enough it eat.  This is roughly one person 
for every nine on the planet and one baby in 7 is now born underweight.

That's the planet we've already created and climate breakdown is going to escalate food 
insecurity considerably in the next decades. In terms of human impact it's probably the 
most devastating short term outcome, although it will be obscured by the civil conflict 
and wars that will accompany it.  There is good evidence that the 2011 Arab Spring 
insurrections were in part generated by escalating costs of the main food stables.  In 
other words the first mass movements of climate refugees have probably already happened.

If you look at the denialism commentary from the angry old white men in the media I 
referred to earlier about the movement to halt climate breakdown you'll see that the same 
collective V consumerist ideas I write of here, but from the opposite angle. Because what 
you'll often see is they'll try and rubbish the dedication being shown by the activists 
who are coming out and organizing on the street by suggesting that instead they should be 
not using their mobile phones, or that there parents shouldn't be driving them to school 
in the morning or that they shouldn't be taking a holiday. A whole range of things that 
are precisely intended to try and push people away from the collective solutions we need 
and towards individual consumer choices.   So the message that's been put out in the 
media, and again the media is controlled / owned by the super wealthy, is that instead of 
taking collective action, instead of collectively organizing together instead of talking 
about what solutions we need together, what you should do is retreat back into the home. 
Go back to being an individual, go back to making consumer choices.

Profit, consumerism and divide & rule
The capitalist system is also well capable of making profits out of consumer choices. Lots 
of people may stop eating beef or drastically reduce the amount of it they eat because of 
the proportionally huge amount of greenhouse gases beef results in.  There is a good 
argument for making a collective decision to drastically cut beef production for that 
reason and for all remaining production to be low intensity grazing based that aids in 
soil regeneration.  But that's a collective decision that can be made, capitalism has no 
problem with individuals cutting down on beef because it can sell them other products. And 
then it can probably sell more or less the same quantity of beef to other people, perhaps 
at a slightly reduced cost, perhaps at the same cost with more spent on advertising.  The 
individual consumer route in other words might well have no useful impact on climate 
breakdown at all.

But of course on this particular issue and plant V meat based diets in general we've 
already seen that partly to keep us divided and partially to create market segments the 
capitalist media will be very happy to stir up antagonism between those two groups because 
they know if they can create a fight between vegetarians and meat eaters then both those 
groups become distracted from the common danger of Climate Breakdown we face. A lot of 
vegetarians probably already know multiple reactionary uncles who will make a point out of 
extra meat eating to annoy them.  The media already regularly publish ‘beef to be banned' 
clickbait articles to drive traffic to their sites for ad purposes and  if you look at the 
commentary underneath those clickbait articles you'll see an endless pointless fight 
between vegans and those who think their heads will explode if they 24 hours without 
feasting on flesh.

You'll see the same sort of fight before that between car drivers and cyclists and again 
this often comes from a media click bait, a deliberate attempt to sort of set people who 
aren't really against each other against each other. When the reality is that the change 
we need isn't going to be made simply by more people choosing to become cyclists, that's 
great if they do that, but actually needs to involve a whole reworking of what we 
understand by transportation. That's switch I talked about earlier from individual car 
culture to collective forms of public transportation, trains in particular, buses, cycling 
and collective systems of being able to use shared cars. Instead of having a discussion 
about the need for this transformation and how it might be organised in the media what we 
see endlessly is this attempt to set the needs of one group of people against another 
group of people.

Escaping the trap, effective action
So how do we escape this trap? We escape this trap by coming together, we escape this trap 
by taking it part in collective action and climate strike marches are a start to that 
process of collective action. They are bringing people together, people are talking to 
each other while they march, people are getting a sense of common purpose. And even more 
importantly big march's give you a sense of collective power. You see how many people are 
thinking the same sort of thing and will got act.  You realize you have a part to play 
together and there's even a collective sense of oneness that you get in a football or 
other sports crowds. So they often provide a very good start point but I think the thing 
we've got to be clear that are only a start point.

Back in 2003 ahead of when the USA invaded Iraq there were absolutely enormous 
demonstrations all around the world and in particular in the countries that were heading 
to war. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people came out on the streets and 
said we do not want this war.

Even Dublin saw a demonstration that was probably four times bigger than the Climate 
Strike march. At least a hundred thousand people marched through Dublin that day in 2003 
and they were specifically saying we don't want to have a part in this war. The part that 
we  were and are being pushed into in America's wars is refuelling warplanes at Shannon. 
But the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said he'd have been on the demonstration himself if he 
wasn't busy and ignored the demand to stop refuelling. They are well used to contain mass 
popular protests in the form of marches. We might start with a march but that has has to 
go somewhere else before it loses momentum, we have to escalate. We need to come together 
and think about what else can we do, what other possibilities exist, how do we force them 
to pay attention to us. In 2003 that meant organising mass trespasses at Shannon airport 
as others snuck in at night and damaged planes.  For the while that real momentum existed 
they had to stop refuelling there but that was a brief moment as once war officially 
started most people stopped marching.

In the context of Climate Breakdown the answer is not the one most people first think of. 
The answer is not electoral politics. I've already talked about the way that's controlled 
by the super-wealthy but beyond that in Ireland we see a very good example in the Irish 
Green Party of how toothless and useless electoralism is. The Green Party have been in 
power, they were part of the government back in the  late 2000s.  Importantly they were 
part of the government when there was massive opposition to the opening of a new 
experimental gas refinery at Rossport. There were huge community mobilizations against 
that, people resisted that refinery over the course of a decade and  the Green Party were 
in power at the end of that process, at the time that they saw the deployment of the Irish 
Navy, two gunboats, hundreds of Gardai and even elements of the Irish Army. This saw the 
illegal preventive arrest of activists and their detention in Mountjoy jail to prevent 
them taking kayaks out into the bay. Before the Green Party went into government they'd 
stood alongside the protesters, in power they were part of the government that suppressed 
and even illegally jailed them.  That is the reality of electoral power and what it does 
to the good intentioned.

What we can do is move from these marches to programs of direct action where we actually 
target the industries that are producing most of the greenhouse gases. In the Irish 
context for instance it means if they give a go ahead for the LNG plants on the Shannon, 
which will result in the importation of lots of fracking gas that we physically put 
ourselves in the way and stop the construction of that plant. You can apply the same sort 
of thing to road projects. We must identify areas where we ourselves can come together in 
huge numbers and stop those projects going ahead.  That's called Direct Action because the 
action taken has a direct impact on stopping what we are against.  We are not reduced to 
pleading with politicians to act for us.

We can also do things that are somewhat more indirect but still quite effective like 
bringing cities to a halt, and that's been happening already to an extent, but somewhat on 
the symbolic level.  Through methods of mass power forcing a change of policy we gain an 
understanding of our own power.  We come to to see that if we come together we are 
perfectly capable of running society and that we want to do it on a very different basis 
to that very, very tiny percentage that currently run everything. We can take power 
ourselves, we can collectively come together, we can run our workplaces, we can run our 
communities and we can set a very very different set of priorities than the current system 
which prioritizes profit above all else.

It's great to see the huge numbers that have started to mobilize, what we need to think 
about is what we're going to do with that mobilization and the answer is to radically 
transform society, top to bottom, in a revolutionary sustainable way.

Words: Andrew Flood (follow Andrew on Twitter)

https://wsm.ie/c/transport-needs-climate-breakdown-collective-action
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