http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/265.php#continue
When the Climate Change Center
Cannot Hold Patrick Bond
On a day that 350.org
valiantly trying to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe,
we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people depart and the
props are packed up. No matter today’s activism, global climate governance
is grid-locked and it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in
Copenhagen on December 18.
The recent Bangkok negotiations of Kyoto Protocol Conference of Parties
functionaries confirmed that Northern states and their corporations won’t
make an honest effort to get to 350 CO2 parts per million. On the right,
Barack Obama’s negotiators seem to feel that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is
excessively binding to the North, and leaves out several major polluters of
the South, including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
Kyoto’s promised 5% emissions cuts (by 2012, from 1990 levels) are
impossible now. Obama’s people hope the world will accept 2005 as a new
starting date; a 20% reduction by 2020 then only brings the target back to
around 5% below 1990 levels. Such pathetically low ambitions, surely Obama
knows, guarantee a runaway climate catastrophe – he should shoot for 45%,
say the small island nations.
The other reason Kyoto is ridiculed by serious environmentalists is its
provision for carbon trading rackets which allow fake claims of net
emissions cuts. Since the advent of the European Union Emissions Trading
Scheme, the Chicago exchange, Clean Development Mechanism projects and
offsets, vast evidence has accumulated of systemic market failure, scamming
and inability to regulate carbon trading (see a website launched today
www.350reasons.org).
A final reason we need to rapidly transcend Kyoto’s weak, market-oriented
approach is that devastation caused by climate change will hit the world’s
poorest, most vulnerable people far harder than those in the North.
Reparations for the North’s climate debt to the South are in order. The
European Union offered a pittance in September, while African leaders are
stiffening their spines for a fight in Copenhagen reminiscent of Seattle a
decade ago.
Since discussing this threat six weeks ago in a *ZNet* column, subsequent
Bangkok negotiations and web traffic offered me a sobering reminder of
Northern stubbornness, on two fronts – those whose interests are mainly in
short-term capital accumulation, but also the mainstream environmentalists
who are only beginning to grasp the huge strategic error they made in Kyoto.
Negotiating the Environment
In the first camp, Obama’s people are hoping non-binding national-level
plans will be acceptable at Copenhagen. But their case is weaker because at
home, the two main proposed bills – Waxman-Markey which passed in the U.S.
House of Representatives and Kerry-Boxer which is under Senate consideration
– will do far more harm than good.
Don’t take it from me; the best source is Congressman Rich Boucher, from a
coal-dominated Southwestern Virginia district. Boucher supported
Waxman-Markey, he told a
reporter
month, precisely because it would not adversely affect his corporate
constituencies. The two billion tons of offset allowances in the legislation
mean that “an electric utility burning coal will not have to reduce the
emissions at the plant site,” chortled Boucher. “It can just keep burning
coal.”
Boucher was one of the congressional rednecks who wrecked Obama’s promise to
sell – not give away – the carbon credits, and then bragged to his
district’s main newspaper, the *Times News*, that “this helps to keep
electricity prices affordable and strengthens the case for utilities to
continue to use coal.”
Boucher and company are also working hard to disempower the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating CO2. This was accomplished in
Waxman-Markey, and upon introducing his legislation, Senator John Kerry gave
the game away by noting EPA regulatory authority is not gutted in his bill
now, only so that it can be gutted later, so as to provide “some negotiating
room as we proceed forward.”
The Senate bill has all manner of other objectionable components, which
hard-working activists from Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, Friends
of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, Biofuelwatch and
Greenwash Guerrillas have been hammering at.
Hence in the U.S., the balance of forces is fluid. On the far-right, the
fossil fuels industries are intent on making Obama’s climate legislation
farcical – and have so far succeeded. In the centre, the main establishment
‘green’ agencies – such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural
Resources Defence Council – are plowing ahead with carbon trading
strategies, hoping to salvage some legitimacy for Obama, because these bills
are a ‘first step’ to more serious emissions reducation, they claim.
Yet U.S. negotiators will go to Copenhagen (as they did in Bangkok and will
next month in Barcelona) with the aim of smashing any residual benefit of
the Kyoto Protocol – such as potential binding cuts with accountability
mechanisms – and then allow these U.S. dynamics to play out in a manner that
locks in climate disaster.
So just as in 1997, when Al Gore introduced carbon trading into the initial
deal – and subsequently broke an implicit promise by failing to get the U.S.
(under both Clinton and Bush) to ratify the Protocol – there is every
likelihood that if an agreement in Copenhagen were reached, it would be as
worthless as Kyoto.
Which brings us to quandaries faced by two other forces: the ordinary
environmentalist in the U.S. – perhaps a typical fan of useful
www.grist.orgblogs – and activists based in the so-called Third World
who have to deal
with the most adverse impacts of climate chaos in coming decades.
*Grist*’s Jonathan Hiskes recently reacted to the first dilemma by
characterizing Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen –
the most celebrated U.S. climate scientist – as “especially troublesome.”
Hansen not only put his body on the line this year in a high-profile arrest
at a West Virginia coal generator, and testified repeatedly against carbon
trading, but also endorsed Climate SOS, to Hiskes’ dismay.
Why rail against Hansen? Hiskes claims that when describing Obama’s bills as
“worse than nothing,” Hanson and other ‘no-compromise types’ ignore “the
historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving
into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not
address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The
original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural
workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers.”
The obvious difference is that those two laws empowered environmentalists
and workers against enemies. They had universalizing potential and could be
incrementally expanded. In contrast, Obama’s climate legislation is so far
off on the wrong track – by commodifying the air as the core climate
strategy and empowering the fossil fuel industries – that the train cannot
be steered away from its over-the-cliff route. Just let it crash.
(Oh bummer, the same seems to be true of 2009 legislation and fiscal
programs for the economy and healthcare, which empower banksters, derivative
financiers, energy firms, insurers and others who caused the problems in the
first place.)
The second force caught in the quandary of climate politics is Penang-based
Third World Network (TWN) and its many admirers, who insisted at Bangkok
that the Kyoto Protocol be retained because, first, at least it offers the
possibility of a binding framework, and second, countries not presently
liable under Kyoto should still have the right to increase emissions so as
to ‘develop.’
I’ll grant the first point, for if U.S. negotiators block Kyoto’s extension,
then national-level agreements could indeed be much weaker. On the other
hand, if the EPA actually used its powers to reduce the top 7500 or so
largest point-sources of U.S. carbon pollution, that would be far stronger
than carbon trading legislation which lets polluters off the hook.
The main problem with TWN’s ‘development’ argument is that a great deal of
CO2-emitting economic activity and resource extraction in the Third World
are better considered ‘maldevelopment’ – and for environmental,
socio-economic and moral reasons should halt.
Here in South Africa, a long-term (apartheid-era) state relationship to the
so-called ‘minerals-energy complex’ generated a political bloc so powerful
that it is now in the process of building $100-billion in new coal-fired and
nuclear plants. Their strategy is to keep offering the cheapest electricity
in the world to UK/Australian (formerly SA) mining/metals firms, including
Anglo, BHP Billiton, Lonplats and Arcellor-Mittal.
By way of background, state supplier Eskom lost $1.3-billion last year
gambling on aluminum futures. Forty percent of SA’s CO2 emissions can be
traced to a handful of the largest firms, including the dangerous
oil-from-coal/gas operator Sasol. And cheap electricity for the
mining/metals firms contrasts with wickedly-high price hikes (a 250%
projection from 2008-11) for ordinary people, which in turn contributes to
the intense demonstrations now destabilizing dozens of municipalities (the
Centre for Civil Society documents these daily in our Social Protest
Observatory, at www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs).
Moreover, as corporations export profits and dividends to London/Melbourne
headquarters, our vast balance of payments deficit gives *The
Economist*magazine cause to rate South Africa the world’s riskiest
emerging market. In
sum, it is impossible to argue that SA’s world-leading per capita CO2
emissions represents ‘development.’
One way to address this maldevelopment – especially from exports of
CO2-intensive minerals and cash crops, as well as manufactured goods
transported by air and ship – is import/export taxation.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a small import tariff (the
equivalent of 4 cents per litre of petrol) last month: “Most importantly, a
carbon tax at the borders is vital for our industries and our jobs.” In the
U.S., the energy secretary and organized labour are also making noises along
these lines.
Sarkozy’s small incremental tax will not change consumption patterns.
Explains Soumya Dutta from the People’s Science Movement, “In India, a far
less affluent society, whenever gasoline or diesel prices are raised by even
6-10%, there is an initial hue and cry. Within a month, things settle down
and the consumption keeps growing – invariably.”
The South Centre’s Martin Khor condemns Sarkozy’s move as ‘climate
protectionism,’ remarking, “It would be sad if the progressive movement were
to support and join in the attempts by those who want to block off products
from developing countries in the name of climate change.” He is correct to
label such taxes “self-interested and selfish bullying acts.”
More generally, says Khor, “We shouldn’t give the powerful countries an
excuse and legitimacy to use climate or labour or social issues to block our
exports and get away with it through a nice sounding excuse.”
Of course, the details of the French strategy, and indeed its protectionist
orientation, must be criticized. But the most crucial factor when imposing
any kind of sanctions – whether a carbon tax or trade sanctions against
Burmese regime or Zimbabwe’s main ruling party – is the consent of those
affected who are themselves struggling for change, a point Sarkozy hasn’t
factored in.
An Alternate Strategy for Copenhagen
How might one? Turning a carbon tax into a positive funding flow for the
Third World is a suggestion by Daphne Wysham of the Institute for Policy
Studies. Proceeds should go directly to the countries whose products are
being taxed, for the purposes of explicit greenhouse gas reduction.
These nuances in national-level strategic debates should be tackled by
Northern activists bearing in mind the Global South’s genuine development
aspirations.
Regardless, core principles of the progressive movement are non-negotiable.
In advance of Copenhagen Bella Center protests, here are demands articulated
by Climate Justice Action:
– leaving fossil fuels in the ground;
– reasserting peoples’ and community control over production;
– relocalising food production;
– massively reducing overconsumption, particularly in the North;
– respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights; and
– recognising the ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of the
South and making reparations.
If the center is not holding, that’s fine: the wave of courageous
direct-action protests against climate criminals in recent weeks – and the
prospect of ‘Seattling’ Copenhagen on December 16 – is an inspiring
reflection of left pressure that will soon counteract that from the right.
It’s our only hope, isn’t it. •
Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil
Society