Mobilising against two existential threats

First published at Walden Bello’s Facebook page.

I am sharing these thoughts a few days after Lula da Silva’s impressive electoral victory in Brazil. Democracy was under threat from fascism and the people came out in force to save it. What made the difference, according to many accounts, was the combination of street mobilisation and coordinated online protest to get people to vote.

Inspiration from Brazil

What is notable is how many people worldwide have drawn inspiration from Lula’s victory. In the days leading up to and after the elections, people the world over felt invested in Lula’s fate — whether they were in Africa, Asia, Europe or North America, they felt their future would be affected.

Hence the great sigh of relief and elation that was heard from Rio to Johannesburg to Jakarta. This feeling of global solidarity has revealed to many the vision of what we could accomplish if we translate that solidarity into a coordinated global movement to save democracy, save the climate, and save humanity from AI.

Ever since the world became aware of the climate crisis, pressure from civil society has been focused on getting governments to come up with an agreement to prevent the rise of global mean temperature by 1.5oC. That strategy has had some success, notably the Paris Agreement of 2015.

But the limits of that strategy have become evident a decade later: the voluntary climate reduction efforts nations have pledged will not prevent a rise of 2.7oC of global mean temperature by the end of the century, and meeting the target of $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries has had little success.

What we need is a global mass mobilisation that can move governments to take more decisive action to save the climate.

Lessons of the anti-globalisation struggle

If you think that is impossible, remember it was global mass action that stopped globalisation in its tracks and exposed the fact that it was not leading to prosperity but to great inequality, more poverty, and global economic crisis. If no one talks anymore about the so-called benefits of globalisation — the mantra we kept hearing in the late 1990s and the 2010s — it is because of global mass mobilisation.

Of course, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 played a role, but global mass resistance was decisive. A landmark study led by Isabel Ortiz and her colleagues found that of the 2809 protests between 2006–20 they analysed, 1484 were related to neoliberal reform or structural adjustment; that is, issues

related to jobs, wages and/or labor conditions; the reform of public services; corporate influence, deregulation, and privatization; inequality; tax and fiscal justice; low living standards; agrarian/land reform; high fuel and energy prices; pension reform; housing; and high food prices.

In addition,

897 protests were for environmental and climate justice; against the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, and the European Union/European Central Bank; against imperialism (United States, China); against free trade; in defense of the global commons; and against the G20.

These protests included transborder mobilisations against key instruments of globalisation: the World Bank, IMF, and the World Trade Organization. Protests against these multilateral institutions were among the most prominent of some 209 transborder protests in the period 2006–20.

The most decisive were the mass mobilisations that led to the collapse of the Third Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Seattle, in late November 1999, and the Fourth Ministerial Conference in Cancun, in 2003. The WTO was intended to be the key instrument in liberalising global trade and investment. With the collapse of the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun, the US and EU lost interest in the WTO as the main agency for globalisation. It also led to the widespread discrediting of the globalist project.

The point is mass protests made the difference in stopping the project of corporate-driven globalisation.

Data centres are great, juicy targets

We can do the same with the fight against climate change. Having demonstrations at COP climate summits is important, but it is better to have concrete targets that large numbers of people can unite and mobilise against at the local level.

AI data centres are great targets. Data centres consume huge amounts of water and energy that would otherwise be used for community needs. They also contribute tremendous amounts of carbon emissions that worsen the climate crisis.

US President Donald Trump is going all out for AI, partly because it needs huge amounts of energy that can only be provided by the fossil-fuel industry, one of his main backers. By targeting data centres, we would be hitting two existential threats to the planet and humanity: climate change and AI.

There are 12,250 to 12,660 data centres globally, of which 1136 to 1189 are hyperscale — indeed, city-size — facilities, serving the huge cloud and AI computing needs of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other Silicon Valley giants. More are on the way.

They are being constructed in the Global North and South. In the US, the Yakama and other indigenous nations are resisting the construction of 240 data centres in the Columbia River area. But while much of the news coverage focuses on the resistance of communities in the Global North, opposition to data centres is also occurring in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in India; Queretaro in Mexico, where Silicon Valley giants have built 32 water-intensive data centres on arid land; and Batam, Indonesia, where the community has protested against their water supply being consumed by data centres.

There have been cases of successful resistance. In Oton, Iloilo, in the Philippines, residents subjected the representative of a Norwegian firm seeking to build a data centre to such hostile questioning in a community meeting that the proposed project was cancelled.

Pax Silica: A value chain whose links are great targets

The opportunities for protest will be expanded by the implementation of Pax Silica. This US initiative, which includes 26 countries, is meant to create a value chain from the mining of minerals such as lithium through to the running of data centres. All sectors of the value chain are carbon and water intensive. Therefore, all major points along the value chain could potentially be sites of protest. 

In the Asia Pacific, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Singapore have already signed on to Pax Silica. In the Philippines, the Marcos Jr government is devoting more than 1600 hectares — the size of a small city — to hosting an AI complex, even though foreign corporations have yet to make investment commitments. Even before Pax Silica has taken off, it has already united so many oppositional forces in a way no issue has been able to in the past few decades.

AI value chain links, from mining to data centres, provide the potential of uniting people beyond political differences in other countries. Data centres are so unpopular that they have become one of the hottest issues in the US midterms, with pro-tech politicians busy backtracking from their previous positions.

Targeting data centres need not be the only strategy in building a mass movement against climate change that forces corporations and governments to take decisive action. There can be various complementary strategies based on one conviction: unless people come out in force, as they did in Brazil, the factors pushing two existential risks to humanity — climate change and AI — will not be stopped.

This is a revised version of Bello’s presentation at the Conference on Planetary Well Being from the Ground Up, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, October 31, 2026.