Send in the Chinese cavalry!

This post was originally written on December 16, 2015

Every year, governments gather at the climate change negotiations to promise to do as little as they possibly can despite rising sea levels, heat waves and floods, chaotic weather, and other portents of a climate spinning out of control. And every year, social movements, poorly represented by any national government, show up to tell the world that more can be done and they are already doing it. Indigenous peoples guard their territories — and their vast stocks of carbon — against commercial exploitation, deforestation, and fossil fuel extraction. Wastepickers recover a phenomenal amount of metal, paper, glass, and plastic from discards and return it to industry, reducing the energy-intensive demand for raw materials. The traditional agricultural methods of campesinos (peasant farmers) maintain long-term soil health, including vast stocks of labile carbon, unlike industrial agriculture.

This year in Paris, one group of grassroots activists drove the entire agenda. Indeed, much of the sea change in the international negotiations can be attributed to the persistent efforts of this massive social movement. But strangely, they were nowhere to be seen in Paris: not in the official halls, not at the side events, and not even in the streets.

Let me back up. After 20 years of deadlock, the climate talks are finally picking up steam. The agreement signed in Paris is still far too weak, but it represents a significant shift in political momentum. That can be traced directly to the US-China agreement of November 2014, in which the two countries — previously adversaries on the climate issue — signed a deal to both cut emissions. That deal set the pattern for the global compact: every country would sign up to do however much it wanted to, and would get bragging rights in return. Some of the promises are weak: the US has pledged to reduce emissions about 2.5% per year, a modest improvement over current reductions, which are mostly due to switching from coal to natural gas.

China’s pledge, on the other hand, is startling. After decades of skyrocketing energy use and emissions growth, it plans to essentially stop on a dime and start reducing emissions by 2030. In fact, its own actions may be even more aggressive: in 2014, China’s coal consumption had already dropped, leading to a global emissions plateau.

No foreign government has forced China to transform its energy infrastructure. That pressure has come from the Chinese people themselves. They are fed up with living in polluted cities, losing their land to industrial projects, and seeing their loved ones sickened by industrial waste. And they are fighting back.

The Chinese government reported 180,000 “mass incidents” (their term for large-scale protests) in 2010, after which they stopped reporting figures. Most of these protests are against industrialization, land grabs, and an increasingly polluted environment. Unlike the polite, sign-carrying, legally permitted protests that often occur in the US, mass incidents in China are strident and disruptive, and their effectiveness probably lies precisely in their ability to disrupt government control. The foreign press may paint China as an autocratic country with no freedom, but the Chinese people themselves are anything but submissive — to protect their homes, families, and health, they clash with local police and officials, and incur serious risks doing so.

By taking to the streets time and again, Chinese grassroots activists — in a country that affords them no legally guaranteed democratic rights — have shut down countless planned industrial projects. This, in turn, has forced their government to tear up and completely re-write its national economic strategy. And that has energized the international negotiations.

The lesson here is that change comes from the bottom up. National and international policy is less a driver of social change than a barometer of it. Grassroots activism, fighting at the local level, has the power to drive local, national, and international decisions. That is good news for all of us: local decisions are far more accessible, easier to organize around, and easier to influence than the legalistic language debated in Paris. And local victories can be felt around the world. Just ask the Chinese.

Photo credit: “moss” by Marilylle Soveran, CC BY-NC 2.0