WHEN? Sunday, April 21, 1pm
WHERE? George-Étienne Cartier monument at Mont-Royal Park
Once again this year, the fight "for the environment" has been dominated by business and government. As they have for many years, they offered us eco-friendly cars, "eco-responsible" investments, blue, green and brown bins, more efficient thermostats and apps to check the energy footprint of our tomato cans. While we take one step forward in reducing greenhouse gases, we take three steps backwards in protecting biodiversity, which is just as essential to our survival on earth, and another step backwards in increasing electricity consumption. The environmental emergency is being used as a pretext to reinforce capitalist growth, which in turn feeds the climate crisis and enables us to continue making ever greater profits while the planet continues to warm. There are people who profit directly from these situations, and so on. These companies live on the illusion of inconsequential consumption: it's just as easy to think that our phones could work without server rooms on the other side of the world, and very often operating on coal, as it is to imagine that electric cars could work without them.
There are people who benefit directly from these situations: Northvolt, Volkswagen, General Motors, Glencore, Osisko, Google, Amazon1 and so on. These companies live off the illusion of inconsequential consumption: it's as easy to think that our phones could work without server rooms on the other side of the world, and very often operating on coal, as it is to imagine that electric cars don't use minerals that come from the other side of the world. We could do without electric cars in the city if we invested in the metro, which is already electric. Similarly, improvements in communications technology have been used primarily to maximize our exposure to advertising. These "improvements" in our quality of life only serve to increase the profits of corporations, which enrich themselves by pretending to be part of the solution, building infrastructure everywhere for a "green" future.
So we need more and more space: in Montreal, the equivalent of 8 times the surface area of Mount Royal Park is occupied by parking lots. At the same time, flood zones are getting bigger, while farmers are increasingly resisting the invasion of wind turbines on their land. The pressure to colonize new territories is therefore increasingly intense, for a way of life that enriches us in no way. Indeed, we eat mainly what comes out of the agri-food industry, which only sells us what it is profitable to produce. We no longer have any green space in the city, as we have to make way for more roads and parking lots.
Governments will do nothing to save us: they are the first to support these industries, using greenwashing to justify their subsidies. They don't even hide it: it's public knowledge that, on leaving office as premier, Jean Charest went to work for TransCanada, the developer of the Energy East pipeline.
Fortunately, anger is growing. Collectives are springing up everywhere to resist capitalist invasion and environmental destruction. The Nehirowisiw struggle against logging has brought the importance of solidarity between peoples to the fore. The struggle against Northvolt served to strengthen ties between groups in struggle, and to demonstrate the relevance of direct action in the struggle. The struggle against the extension of Route l'Assomption is a reminder of the importance of a diversity of tactics. People are increasingly minding their own business, while it's clear that the wishful thinking of COP15 has since been forgotten and buried.
[1] Northvolt is a Swedish company planning to build a mega-battery factory on the border of Saint-Basile-le-Grand and McMasterville, on the south shore of Montreal. Volkswagen, a car manufacturer, would be the main customer for Northvolt's future plant, using the batteries to make electric tanks. General Motors is the world's largest automaker, closely followed by Toyota. General Motors owns several car brands (Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buic, GMC) and is now embarking on the manufacture of electric tanks.
Glencore is a multinational company, exploiting "natural resources" in over 35 countries, including Australia, Africa and South America. Its main activities are mining (copper, cobalt, zinc, etc.), the extraction of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.) and the transport of these resources to industry. Osisko is a mining company that mainly exploits gold deposits in so-called Canada.
More than just a search engine, Google is a multinational corporation offering a wide range of technological products, such as applications, software, websites like YouTube, the Android phone operating system, artificial intelligence products and more. Like Amazon, it is one of the GAFAMs (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), the 5 mega-companies that dominate the digital market. Google and Amazon have sales of around $250 billion and $500 billion respectively.