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Tracing the Line, or, the Promissory Politics of Climate Change – Architecture – E-Flux

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Delivery Lines: Amazon’s Supply Chain

In 2019 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made a critical articulation about contemporary capitalism, akin to Vanderbilt’s “The public be damned” or Thatcher’s “There no such thing as society”—quotations of the elite that serve to define their epoch. The quote in question didn’t get quite as much media attention at the time as Bezos’s post-space-travel reminder to Amazon employees and customers that “you paid for this,” though that statement was similarly telling and deservedly ridiculed. Rather, it went relatively overlooked within a speech Bezos gave at a special press conference held for the announcement of Amazon’s Climate Pledge, a set of energy and purchasing goals ostensibly intended to address climate change. In attempting to explain the connectedness of capitalist firms and recruit more signatories to the pledge, Bezos also characterized the neoliberal, data-driven, always-on gig economy that has become relevant to enough of life to define our present era. “We are all a part of each other’s supply chains.”

Production Lines: Labor Surveillance

Amazon has become known for subjecting the people that make up its own vast supply chain—employees as well as “independent” contractors—to demanding performance standards. And judging performance against stated goals requires self-monitoring. Amazon worker performance is tracked via infrastructure that produces data, which then contributes to the dataset that is used to make increasingly robust performance benchmarks. This self-perpetuating cycle of data-driven surveillance has profound implications for safety and general working conditions, both inside and outside of fulfillment centers. This follows the larger “Uberization” of the economy, where digital platforms serve as intermediaries between customers and networked service providers. Workers do not own the surveillance-cum-employment platforms or the data they collect, nor do they have a say in what data is collected and how. With more work happening offsite, remote, or by contractors, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between inside and outside the workplace, on the clock and off, or to tell where the production line is—and how it might be stopped. And as more data on location, health, and consumption is collected and connected to work, performance metrics extend outside of the workplace to the extent that what is being produced is data.

Ledger Lines: Accounting for Scope

Worker surveillance has its analog in a company’s internal processes of accounting for environmental impacts. Measuring a different kind of efficiency, firms carefully track their own operational processes according to categories like energy use, material throughput, and waste. Land-intensive programs to mitigate the environmental impacts of these operations similarly depend on measurements like the carbon sequestration abilities of various non-human organisms or entire ecosystems. Land itself is made to perform labor, and its performance is tracked, measured, and evaluated, quantified, and financialized in the form of carbon offsets, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and other climate mitigation policies. The ability of both forms of labor to become all-encompassing—i.e. you’re always at work, and everything has an environmental impact—leaves much room for the setting of arbitrary boundaries that suit specific purposes.

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Like the lines drawn between employee and subcontractor, which allow the company to avoid responsibility for safety, health, and other issues of worker wellbeing, sustainability reporting uses the notion of “scope” to delineate what the company is and isn’t accountable for, or their “lines of responsibility.” In carbon accounting, a widely used three-tier system purports to designate what is and isn’t under a company’s control. But the math gets fuzzy, and the idea of “control” becomes a free pass to absolve responsibility by only claiming territory when it’s convenient or easy. A producer might take responsibility for their own operations: direct emissions, such as the emissions of their own buildings (Scope 1), as well as energy they purchase and consume, such as electricity that powers their factories (Scope 2). But oftentimes indirect emissions, like the emissions of their contractors and subcontractors, or other impacts along the value chain from suppliers or producers, are written out because they are “outside of their control.” Just as no one is checking back on the mechanics of meeting prior, outdated carbon neutrality pledges, no one is really policing the boundaries that determine scope, and where responsibility lies. A company may not directly “control” the work of its subcontractors, but it still exerts influence over them through performance metrics. The scale of Amazon’s aggregate demand influences those in its supply chain who may be technically “out of scope” for the self-monitoring of its climate impacts. In this way, as in much shady accounting, firms can have it both ways. Its measurements of worker safety or climate impact can be both on the books and off the books in the larger system of social, financial, and reputational accounting.

Signature Lines: Promissory Politics

Amazon’s Climate Pledge is just one of many public announcements of environmentally-motivated goals that came to dominate political discussion from the late twentieth century onwards. As innovations in data science made long term climate modeling increasingly robust, and everyday experience made this science increasingly undeniable, it became common practice for businesses, governments, and consortiums of both of these to make public promises, pledges, and agreements that set future target dates for action or major milestones. Anticipated by the military and corporate tradition of scenario building and forecasting, and further enabled by the increasing power and ubiquity of networked computers and accompanying datafication, this promissory politics is encouraged and made sensible by cultures of tracking and measurement in business management and personal self-improvement. Promise-making has become a regular part of the brand management of corporate firms and governmental entities sensitive to investors, employees, customers, and other stakeholders’ concerns about so-called “non-financial” factors, known in industry lingo as “ESG” (environment, social, and governance). But the practice of promising cannot be dismissed as mere greenwashing, as it is so earnestly blind to its own contradictions to appear pathological, and so widespread as to become nearly obligatory.

Corporate promises are voluntary, piecemeal. They may be touted as backed by science, but they are not backed by any kind of governance. They are, instead, presented as better alternatives to government regulation. Amazon’s Climate Pledge itself, and the PR messaging around it, was crafted to achieve a one-upmanship of not only the US government, but of the coordinated efforts of the nations of the world, its target date prominently advertised as “ten years sooner” than the dates set in the Kyoto Protocol. Efforts to gain signatories to the pledge thus represent a different form of coordination: an organizing effort on the part of the capitalist class to stave off regulation and convince the public that an unfettered market can be trusted to solve climate change. Bezos’s purchasing of naming rights to Seattle’s Key Arena, formerly owned by Key Bank’s parent company KeyCorp, and choosing to name it not Amazon Arena but “Climate Pledge Arena,” underscores just how much of a stunt this is; a staged competition between the false binary of market and government in the arena of public policy.

Corporate environmental commitments usually take the form of some future date at which the company expects to reach net-zero carbon emissions for some percentage, or some part, of its operations. Since the practice is still relatively new in the business world, and old press releases have a way of disappearing from public view, progress toward past goals can be difficult to measure. And measurements of current promises are subject to the same creative accounting involved in their drafting, with so much room for interpretation in variables like the cost of carbon, the type of offset and how it is measured, how the scope of “operations” is defined, which emissions count, how “renewable” is defined, what baseline the percentage is judged against, and so on.

Governments who have been in the promise-making business longer tend to leave behind paper trails of announcements, agreements, and agendas that reveal promise-making as an ongoing game of missing targets and setting new ones, a game whose rules require constant moving of goalposts. US President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 target for 20% of the nation’s energy to come from renewable sources by the year 2000 was moved forward by President Barack Obama in 2013, thirteen years after the initial deadline had passed, to a new goal of 2020. The nation’s promises, at least, are renewable. Perhaps in recognition of this embarrassing precedent, President Joe Biden offered a target percentage range of 50–52% for reduction in US greenhouse gas pollution. The precision of this range, appearing to be backed by some kind of math, is belied by the fact that it is measured against pollution levels from the seemingly arbitrary date of 2005.

The archive of United Nations policy documents reads like an obituary of past commitments: the unmet goals of Agenda 21 (1992–2000) were replaced by the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015), which were replaced by the current Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030), praised by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a “universal, transformative, and integrated agenda” and a “historic turning point for our world.” In September 2020, the news passed with little fanfare that of the twenty targets negotiated by the world’s environment ministers as part of the 2010 Aichi Biodiversity goals, not a single one had been met. Even the much-lauded Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, the round of promises that still informs most status-quo policy, were at the time of their negotiation already recognized by some involved as insufficient: dependent on increased ambition of each nation’s voluntary commitments, undergirded by blind faith in technological innovation, and unfundable through existing government and philanthropic means. One gets the feeling that each agreement is the kind a person makes simply to end the discussion, and get back to whatever it was they were doing until the deadline passes and we all agree to sit down together again, pretending to make progress.

Signature lines—which somehow make these promises feel official—have conveniently replaced another line of struggle: the picket line. Resulting from existing public and private pressure, like employees and lobbyists working through board consortia, the main function of these signature lines is to allow business to continue as usual. They make verbal commitments that help employees feel better about their jobs and the companies they work for. But these promises usually just involve more feel-good strategies like offsets that don’t address problems with underlying business models, let alone whole economies. They function as a form of creative accounting instead of creating accountability, and allow for deferral of the kind of “rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented” action that the IPCC now says is needed to avoid a two-degree temperature rise.

The fundamental logic of these promises is familiar to anyone who has ever been in debt and set up a payment plan; a promise to pay in smaller increments towards a future date of completion. Indeed, climate change may be framed as a situation of intergenerational debt, but one with a kind of compound interest in the warming that has already or is or due to occur, such that the overall debt only grows despite any incremental payoffs. All these pledges and targets seek to buy time but nobody gets paid, and the feeling of imminent existential foreclosure remains.

That these kinds of targets always fall conveniently on years that mark decades or half-centuries like 2030 and 2050 reveals their basis more in public relations than a science whose predictive modeling might suggest more specific dates. Projects like Biden’s “30 by 30,” which has the goal of conserving 30% of land for biodiversity by the year 2030, sound more like a business magazine’s annual roundup of young entrepreneurs than a concrete, science-informed plan. To be fair, the farther off a target, the more justifiable its imprecise positioning. And round numbers certainly are more memorable. But given the margins between 1.5 and 4 degrees of warming, such arbitrary selection or nearest-decade rounding could mean the difference between life or death, survival or extinction.

Following Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means, such public promises, goals, statements, resolutions, protocols, and agreements can be understood as a continuation or transubstantiation not of politics but the absence of politics. Or the avoidance of politics. Promises are not merely policies that can’t be policed, they are fundamentally non-policies to begin with. Their main effect, if not their actual intent, is neither to initiate, nor even to guide action, but instead to forestall it.

In some sense, politics has always been about making promises. But what we see today is a phenomenon wherein promises replace politics. The willingness to make promises set in the future is directly proportional to the unwillingness to make the political changes needed in the present. Hence the increasing proliferation, and desperation, of promises.

Border Lines: Conservation as Enclosure

In order for all these promises to be kept and conservation goals to be met, huge swathes of land would need to be used, affecting its existing designation, zoning, legal rights, and claims. Much of the world—up to fifty percent of it, according to E.O. Wilson’s influential “Half Earth” proposal—would essentially become a kind of “promise land.” This comes after the wave of land acquisitions in developing countries by foreign wealth funds, private equity funds, agricultural producers, and other major firms in the food and agribusiness industry following the sharp increase in international food prices during 2007–2008. These land grabs were also about water (since land rights are often rights to the water below) and energy, since biofuels are a way for rich countries to meet their renewable energy targets. The widespread practice of trading REDD credits (“Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation”) for carbon offset programs has further fueled this global land rush on a scale some compare to that of the colonial era, giving the name “green grabbing” to this massive appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends.

The world’s proposed climate plans—which would require both massive conservation offsetting to meet net-zero demands and rare earth metal mining to increase battery and panel manufacturing—will rapidly expand this global land grab. The entire enterprise amounts to a new enclosure movement, akin to what historians describe taking place in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in late medieval England, except now, as some critics of platform capitalism have already argued, may be from capitalism to some kind of neo-feudalism. It’s as if the inequitable ownership structure of the digital platform economy is being inscribed upon the physical landscape; the boundary lines of the terrestrial platform called Earth being redrawn in its image.

Excursus: Draft Land Acknowledgement for Online Meetings

The powerful tools that allow us to meet together today, across vast distances of space, depend on equally powerful tools of exploitation that affect resources and people in more remote locations. To extract the resources that go into cables, towers, satellites, and devices; to manufacture and distribute products; to host the platforms and run the servers; to power and to cool the equipment; and to store the resulting waste. All of that happens on land. Sometimes underwater, or land that is submerged. But always in place. And all of these places once belonged, or still belong, to many different peoples whose names are too numerous to list here. The ease with which we now click a few buttons and experience each other’s presence obscures the violence required to create and maintain the infrastructure that makes it possible.

While we gather today from different places with their own histories, our gathering depends on even more places with which we all have a direct material connection. We acknowledge those with deeper connections to the lands that are affected by the infrastructure used to gather today, and the ways in which such lands have been and continue to be appropriated via coercive means, ranging from outright theft to treaties or contracts signed under duress within legacies of unjust relations. Our acknowledgement of these relations is a first step toward repairing them. This acknowledgement is in no way intended to replace or diminish the practice of traditional land acknowledgements or the specific acknowledgements of host institutions and participants, but rather it is an attempt to seriously engage them and extend them into an online networked environment where their relevance may not be so obvious.

Battle Lines

If part of the means of production is the land upon which it takes place—the grounds of production—then its ownership matters. If production will increasingly mean not production of commodities in the traditional sense, but production of (commoditized) climate mitigation, then workers must own this means of mitigation. If production increasingly takes place within platforms of data collection and management, then workers must own the means of knowledge production. Furthermore, if workers can also “own,” in the sense of taking responsibility for something, or claiming it as their work, and climate change produces new means of performing, monitoring, and defining labor, then Marx himself—a habitual practitioner of the classical chiasmus and other literary inversions—might have endorsed a contemporary call for ownership of the production of means.

Bezos’s motto—“We are all a part of each other’s supply chains”—is more than just a technical description of the networked organization of firms like Amazon. It neatly encapsulates the dis-organized state of labor among its own suppliers and the broader global precariat, as well as the culture of personal branding and internalized, mediatized person-as-corporation, the ideology of individual consumer responsibility for climate change, and a sense of obligatory participation in the given economic system in order to merely survive.

This global networked “supply chain” may have largely replaced the traditional single-plant assembly or picket line as a locus of labor struggle, but it too contains choke points and places along the chain that can be blocked. A chain, after all, is still a kind of line; one that is only as strong as its weakest link. Only its networked aspect makes it more resilient, as exemplified in Amazon’s own third-party platform model. The supply chain metaphor contains within it the seeds of its own undoing, if only we recognize it not as a statement of corporate social responsibility, but of worker solidarity. The workers of this world have nothing to lose but their supply chains.

Seeing a network means connecting dots. And what we do when we connect dots is draw lines. Capitalism is global, and so are its effects. This much can be plainly seen. These dots have been connected, these lines have been drawn. But the lines themselves are not yet fully seen for what they are: battle lines.

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Opinion: Canada's foreign policy and its domestic politics on Israel's war against Hamas are shifting – The Globe and Mail

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The vote in the House of Commons last week on Israel’s war against Hamas represents a shift in both Canada’s foreign policy and its domestic politics.

The Liberal government is now markedly more supportive of the rights of Palestinians and less supportive of the state of Israel than in the past. That shift mirrors changing demographics, and the increasing importance of Muslim voters within the Liberal coalition.

Both the Liberal and Conservative parties once voiced unqualified support for Israel’s right to defend itself from hostile neighbours. But the Muslim community is growing in Canada. Today it represents 5 per cent of the population, compared with 1 per cent who identify as Jewish.

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Although data is sparse prior to 2015, it is believed that Muslim Canadians tended to prefer the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party. They were also less likely to vote than the general population.

But the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper deeply angered the community with talk about “barbaric cultural practices” and musing during the 2015 election campaign about banning public servants from wearing the niqab. Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was promising to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada if elected.

These factors galvanized community groups to encourage Muslims to vote. And they did. According to an Environics poll, 79 per cent of eligible Muslims cast a ballot in the 2015 election, compared with an overall turnout of 68 per cent. Sixty-five per cent of Muslim voters cast ballots for the Liberal Party, compared with 10 per cent who voted for the NDP and just 2 per cent for the Conservatives. (Telephone interviews of 600 adults across Canada who self-identified as Muslim, were conducted between Nov. 19, 2015 and Jan. 23, 2016, with an expected margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points 19 times out of 20.)

Muslim Canadians also strongly supported the Liberals in the elections of 2019 and 2021. The party is understandably anxious not to lose that support. I’m told that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly often mentions the large Muslim community in her Montreal riding. (According to the 2021 census, 18 per cent of the people in Ahuntsic-Cartierville identify as Muslim.)

This is one reason why the Liberal leadership laboured so mightily to find a way to support last week’s NDP motion that would, among other measures, have recognized the state of Palestine. The Liberal caucus was deeply divided on the issue. My colleague Marieke Walsh reports that dozens of Liberal MPs were prepared to vote for the NDP motion.

In the end, almost all Liberal MPs ended up voting for a watered-down version of the motion – statehood recognition was taken off the table – while three Liberal MPs voted against it. One of them, Anthony Housefather, is considering whether to remain inside the Liberal caucus.

This is not simply a question of political calculation. Many Canadians are deeply concerned over the sufferings of the people in Gaza as the Israel Defence Forces seek to root out Hamas fighters.

The Conservatives enjoy the moral clarity of their unreserved support for the state of Israel in this conflict. The NDP place greater emphasis on supporting the rights of Palestinians.

The Liberals have tried to keep both Jewish and Muslim constituencies onside. But as last week’s vote suggests, they increasingly accord a high priority to the rights of Palestinians and to the Muslim community in Canada.

As with other religious communities, Muslims are hardly monolithic. Someone who comes to Canada from Senegal may have different values and priorities than a Canadian who comes from Syria or Pakistan or Indonesia.

And the plight of Palestinians in Gaza may not be the only issue influencing Muslims, who struggle with inflation, interest rates and housing affordability as much as other voters.

Many new Canadians come from societies that are socially conservative. Some Muslim voters may be uncomfortable with the Liberal Party’s strong support for the rights of LGBTQ Canadians.

Finally, Muslim voters for whom supporting the rights of Palestinians is the ballot question may be drawn more to the NDP than the Liberals.

Regardless, the days of Liberal/Conservative bipartisan consensus in support of Israel are over. This is the new lay of the land.

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Recall Gondek group planned to launch its own petition before political novice did – CBC.ca

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The third-party group helping promote the recall campaign against Mayor Jyoti Gondek had devised plans to launch its own petition drive, as part of a broader mission to make Calgary council more conservative.

Project YYC had planned with other conservative political organizations to gather signatures demanding Calgary’s mayor be removed, says group leader Roy Beyer. But their drive would have begun later in the year, when nicer weather made for easier canvassing for supporters, he said.

Those efforts were stymied when Landon Johnston, an HVAC contractor largely unknown in local politics, applied at city hall to launch his own recall drive in early February. Since provincial recall laws allow only one recall attempt per politician per term, Project YYC chose to lend support to Johnston’s bid.

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“Now we have to try to do door-knocking in the winter, and there’s a lot of preparation that you have to contemplate prior to starting. And Landon didn’t do that,” Beyer told CBC News in an interview.

Project YYC has helped gather signatures, created a website and erected large, anti-Gondek signs around town. It has supplied organizational heft that Johnston admits to lacking.

Their task is daunting.

According to provincial law, in order to force a recall plebiscite to oust the mayor before the term is up, they have two months to gather more than 514,000 signatures, an amount equal to 40 per cent of Calgary’s population in 2019.

They have until April 4 to collect that many signatures, and by March 21 had only 42,000.

Beyer criticizes the victory threshold for recall petition as so high that it’s “a joke,” and the province may as well not have politician recall laws.

So if he thinks it’s an impossible pursuit, why is he involved with this?

“You can send a message to the mayor that she should be sitting down and resigning … without achieving those numbers,” Beyer said.

Project YYC founder Roy Beyer, from a Take Back Alberta video in 2022. He is no longer with that provincial activist group. (royjbeyer screenshot/Rumble)

He likened it to former premier Jason Kenney getting 52 per cent support in a UCP leadership review — enough to technically continue as leader, but a lousy enough show of confidence that he announced immediately he would step down.

Gondek has given no indication she’ll voluntarily leave before her term is up next year. But she did emerge from a meeting last week with Johnston to admit the petition has resonated with many Calgarians and is a signal she must work harder to listen to public concerns and explain council’s decisions.

The mayor also told the Calgary Sun this week that she’s undecided about running for re-election in 2025. 

“There used to be this thing where if you’re the mayor, of course you’re going to run for another term because there’s unfinished business,” Gondek told the newspaper.

“And yes, there will be unfinished business, but the times are not what they were. You need to make sure you’re the right leader for the times you’re in.”

The last several Calgary mayors have enjoyed multiple terms in office, going back to Ralph Klein in the 1980s. The last one-term mayor was Ross Alger, the man Klein defeated in 1980.

Beyer and fellow conservative organizers launched Project YYC before the recall campaign. The goal was to elect a conservative mayor and councillors — “a common-sense city council, instead of what we currently have,” he said.

Beyer is one of a few former activists with the provincial pressure group Take Back Alberta to have latched themselves to the recall bid and Project YYC, along with some United Conservative Party riding officials in Calgary. 

Beyer’s acknowledgment of his group’s broader mission comes as Premier Danielle Smith and her cabinet ministers have said they want to introduce political party politics in large municipalities — even though most civic politicians have said they don’t want to bring clear partisanship into city halls.

Although Beyer admits Project YYC’s own recall campaign would have been a coalition effort with other conservative groups, he wouldn’t specify which ones. He did insist that Take Back Alberta wasn’t one of them.

A man in a grey baseball cap speaks to reporters.
Calgary business owner Landon Johnston speaks to reporters at City Hall on March 22 following his 15-minute conversation with Mayor Jyoti Gondek. (Laurence Taschereau/CBC)

Johnston says he was approached by Beyer’s group shortly after applying to recall Gondek, and gave them $3,000 from donations he’d raised.

He initially denied any knowledge of Project YYC when documents first emerged about that group’s role in the recall, but later said he didn’t initially realize that was the organizational name of his campaign allies.

“They said they could get me signatures, so I said, ‘OK, if you can do it by the book, here’s some money.’ And it’s worked,” he said.

Johnston has said he’s new to politics but simply wants to remove Gondek because of policies he’s disagreed with, like the soon-to-be-ended ban on single-use plastics and bags at restaurant takeouts and drive-thrus.

He’s no steadfast conservative, either. He told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener that he voted for Rachel Notley’s NDP because one of its green-renovation incentives helped his HVAC business.

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


03:21

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