Bhopal Exhibition: Friends of the Earth – System Change Not Climate Change

“Extractivism describes a political and economic model and an ideology based on the extraction of large quantities of natural ‘resources’ – such as the mining of coal, minerals, or gas. Extractivism can also refer to the systematic extraction of fertile lands through industrial agriculture, deforestation, and commercial fishing.”

The Bhopal disaster illustrates the impact of neo-colonial extractivism. In 1984, the Bhopal Union Carbide factory was operating to lower safety standards than an equivalent factory in Union Carbide’s home country theUnited States of America. Indian labour, and therefore Indian lives, had less value to the corporation than American lives. In the Green Revolution in the mid-20th Century, new, patented varieties of crops, accompanied by chemical inputs such as pesticides, produced massively increased yields.

This was immensely profitable for the corporations who produced the highyield varieties and the chemicals required to grow them, such as Union Carbide.

The same business model of extractivism is deployed by the corporations extracting the fossil fuels that are causing climate change, and by the same corporations that claim to be transitioning away from climate change. According to Friends of the Earth, these corporations, many of which are based in, or operate extensively in Scotland, are actively extracting fossil fuels from Latin America to Africa

A recent report by Friends of the Earth Scotland has exposed the level of lobbying by fossil fuel corporations of Scottish politicians, peaking during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2022.

And as War on Want point out, these corporations are using the same exploitative business model to achieve ‘net zero’ “as corporations are pushed to confront their devastating addiction to fossil fuels and transition to ‘green’ energy, they are driving a new wave of community displacement and dispossession across the Global South. Ecosystems across Africa and Latin America are being plundered for the so-called ‘critical’ minerals needed for the transition to renewable energy — from electric batteries to wind turbines.”

Campaigns such as War on Want and Friends of the Earth are part of the wider climate justice movement that is calling for an end to extractivism: ‘system change, not climate change’.

For information, see:

​https://stillburning.net/extractivism-and-neo-colonialism-the-pillars-of-fossil-capitalism/

https://www.foei.org/how-climate-change-dirty-energy-and-extractivism-are-affecting-people/

https://www.foei.org/publication/dirty-energy-in-africa/

https://foe.scot/polluted-politics-the-fossil-fuel-lobby-at-holyrood/

https://waronwant.org/news-analysis/why-we-must-move-beyond-extraction