#8to10

Coal didn’t create structural inequality—the boats that enabled the transatlantic slave trade and first colonial land grabs were powered by wind, and the early factories powered by water wheels. But the relentless and predictable power of coal certainly supercharged the process, allowing both human labor and natural resources to be extracted at rates previously unimaginable, laying down the bones of the modern global economy. And now it turns out that the theft did not end when slavery was abolished, or when the colonial project faltered. In fact, it is still in progress, because the emissions from those early steamships and roaring factories were the beginning of the buildup of excess atmospheric carbon. So another way of thinking about this history is that, starting two centuries ago, coal helped Western nations to deliberately appropriate other people’s lives and lands; and as the emissions from that coal (and later oil and gas) continually built up in the atmosphere, it gave these same nations the means to inadvertently appropriate their descendants’ sky as well, gobbling up most of our shared atmosphere’s capacity to safely absorb carbon. As a direct result of these centuries of serial thefts—of land, labor, and atmospheric space—developing countries today are squeezed between the impacts of global warming, made worse by persistent poverty, and by their need to alleviate that poverty, which, in the current economic system, can be done most cheaply and easily by burning a great deal more carbon, dramatically worsening the climate crisis. They cannot break this deadlock without help, and that help can only come from those countries and corporations that grew wealthy, in large part, as a result of those illegitimate appropriations.

"University College London released a database collecting information on the identities and finances of British slave-owners in the mid-nineteenth century. The research project delved into the fact that when the British Parliament ruled to abolish slavery in its colonies in 1833, it pledged to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their human property—a backward form of reparations for the perpetrators of slavery, not its victims. This led to payouts adding up to £ 20 million—a figure that, according to The Independent, “represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual spending budget and, in today’s terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £ 16.5bn.” Much of that money went directly into the coal-powered infrastructure of the now roaring Industrial Revolution—from factories to railways to steamships. These, in turn, were the tools that took colonialism to a markedly more rapacious stage, with the scars still felt to this day.

It is time to recognise that we are all Indigenous peoples. We all come from somewhere; we all have a connection to eat we call Mother Earth, and it is time to reclaim these roots. It is time that we stand up and say, 'We will not allow our air and water to be coveted. These basic human rights cannot come from disaster. We will no longer be players in this game of environmental roulette. No more will we be pacified with money that has been making us hostages of this economy.'

I return to the necessity of the labour and climate justice movements, and other related social movements, to support the migrant justice movement, because low-income migrant workers are the human face of environmental degradation, colonial displacements, and labour exploitation at a global scale.