Why are we letting the big emitters control our future?
2011
Economists who wish to impress the world with their cleverness and prescience can be found telling us that Africa will be the next big thing. China and India have yet to become the big economic powerhouses they are promised to be, yet many are keen to identify the ‘next big thing’. And that’s Africa. There is a huge potential for economic growth in Africa.
That may well be true. But something these economists have missed is that as climate change really starts to impact, Africa isn’t going to be allowed to develop. It’s ecological viability is directly and immediately threatened. We are no longer in the world of predictions. From all over the continent, observers are already pointing to the impacts of climate change. More floods, droughts, storms and changing seasons are being experienced: the heatwaves are getting hotter, are lasting longer and are becoming more frequent; the storms are becoming more intense; the night-time temperatures are increasing; new diseases and pests are emerging, undermining farming; the growing seasons are increasingly disrupted, desertification is spreading; the cities are becoming unbearably hot. The peer-reviewed science on all of this is consistent with the latest models done by the much abused Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Well, here are a series of events which have been anticipated by the IPCC and which are now occurring.
In Copenhagen in 2009, more than 100 hundred heads of state were present to sign the deal on climate change. A couple of years on, climate change has not just faded from the global agenda, it seems to have disappeared. What is most remarkable about this political white flag is that the science behind global heating is stronger than it has ever been; many of the environmentally disastrous events long anticipated are now underway. It is as if, recognising their own impotence, governments don’t want to acknowledge the horrible truth – they are out of time and they know it. All that they can do is maintain some pretence at normality until reality slowly dawns on the public and the penny drops. This looks like a nervous breakdown on the part of the governments of the world. They are in denial of unpalatable truths.
In the run up to Copenhagen, the world’s governments declared their commitment to an equitable, fair agreement in order to secure the future of humanity. We are still waiting. The conclusion of such a deal keeps being projected further and further into the distance. Ministers are now suggesting that the deal may require further talks over a period of four years before a plan could be finalised to come into effect in 2020. By then, we will have entered the period of the ‘future of humanity’. If the future of humanity was imperilled in 2009, the decision to act should have been taken then. By 2020, there will be less scope for salvation. Instead, action will start to look more and more like a reaction to events that are increasingly beyond our control – and governments know it. The evidence is that governments have given up. Governments have abandoned hopes of securing the future of all humankind. They are preparing to rescue elements of it. In more civilised times, it’s the weakest who are protected first. In future, it will be the rich and the powerful who will be saved first and the rest, if at all, by a rescue squad.
How else is one to interpret the inertia of governments in light of an ever worsening climate condition? Whilst leaders of the poorer nations and nations directly threatened by climate change demand action, the leaders of the rich, high-emitting countries display a lack of interest and political enervation, seeking to consign climate talks to an ongoing low-grade, low-profile discussion that never ends because it never achieves anything other than an endless postponement of action. Judging by deeds rather than words is revelatory. Of course, governments will express concern in public – although they are doing even this less often - but in terms of what they do there is precious little evidence of a willingness to act.
Increasingly, the 175 or so developing countries are increasingly speaking in one voice. They want to know the reason for political inertia in the developed world. Forget the fairy-tales that climate change deniers feed the public through various media, the science behind human made climate change is firmer than ever, strengthened by more research and more evidence. Yet where developed nations promised action, now there is inertia. That position is tantamount to a policy of genocide. A 2C-4C temperature increase still means what it has always meant - that Africa burns and people starve, that the ice caps melt and the polar bears die out, that Bangladesh and small island states will be submerged, that droughts in Latin America and West and East Africa worsen. The world’s poor and powerless will be hit the first and hit the hardest. And the governments of the developed world know it and could care less. They care as little as the voters do in the same countries. They should care. There are already more refugees as a result of environmental disaster than there are as a result of war. That movement of peoples will worsen. We live on one world. If the rich and powerful think that they can insulate themselves from the woes and travails that befall the poor and powerless, they are deluded. And they will pay a big price for that delusion. They have been living inside their own egos for so long that they can no longer identify a reality greater than themselves.
We are in the middle of a 10-year drought, food and famine crisis in Africa; there is unprecedented flooding in southeast Asia and Central America, and North America, Australia and Europe have been suffering their most extreme climatic years ever. Global temperatures are higher than ever and, in the middle of economic depression, so too are carbon emissions. The undeniable hard facts give cause for alarm. And yet the highest emitters on the planet fail to act. It begs the question: why? The evidence is irrefutable. Forget climate change deniers. In terms of serious fact and evidence, the deniers have nothing to offer. So the question of why governments in the developed world are not acting on the evidence in front of them needs addressing. That inaction effectively makes these governments climate change deniers.
The endless postponement of a climate deal is not merely political inertia, it is criminal negligence, sentencing the poor and the powerless to death.
Back in 2010, Bjorn Lomberg, once lauded by climate change deniers, saw that the scientific evidence pointed to a threat to life on earth so great as to require a $100bn fund to fight global heating. ‘The sceptical environmentalist’ examined the evidence and demanded action on climate change. Yet from governments, who accept the climate science and who agree that the crisis in the climate system is real and serious, there is nothing. Trillions can be found to bail out failed and corrupt banks, hundreds of millions can be found to pay bonuses to financiers, $1.7 trillion can be spent globally on arms, yet the rich countries who bear the greatest responsibility for the highest emissions can generate little by way of material resources and political energy to make and finance a climate deal so as to avert a planetary crisis that is most certainly on its way. So we need to ask the question why political leaders are gambling with the lives of so many people and with the health of the planet?
I think these governments have given up. I think that they realise how powerless they are within the capital system. Subject to both corporate capture and to the systemic imperatives of capital accumulation, the state lacks significant power of manoeuvre. Back in 1990, S McBurney wrote a book entitled Ecology into Economics Won't Go. That’s too simple. The words ecology and economics share the same stem ‘eco-‘, deriving from the Greek oikos, meaning household. It is the capital system and ecology that can’t go together and, looking at the stagnant, crisis torn, global economy, it seems that the capital system can’t go with the economy either. Wedded to the capital system, subject to capital’s economic determinism and the need to assert the primacy of politics with respect to the climate, the world’s political leaders are paralysed. The climate crisis has stripped them bare, exposing their pretensions of power to be as illusory as the democracies they claim to lead. Political democracy is merely a floor show. Real power lies elsewhere and so too does real decision making. What we see in the gatherings of political leaders is mere illusion. And the illusion is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. The pronouncements of political leaders at climate talks are increasingly disconnected from reality. Leaders express concern but they have been parroting these lines for so long that they can no longer believe that the public still believe them. They are doing no more than defending vested economic interests and preserving existing power relations. Their faces register disbelief that the voters still don’t know this. Surely the electorates must have realised that real power is private and economic and that they, the electors, only have the appearance of political choice?
This charade will carry on until the members of the public finally catch themselves on or until it’s too late and the planet is on fire.
In the meantime, nothing changes. At every climate conference there is the same intense negotiations behind-the-scenes, the same chimera of a deal commanding the assent of both rich and poor countries, the same commitment of financial resources – followed by the same old last minute dramatics as certain rich countries - the US and Saudi Arabia can always be relied upon - pull out. Then we get the further meetings as attempts are made to rescue the deal, the same compromises, the same weakening of commitments, the same sell-outs that resolve nothing. And now we have governments putting the Kyoto treaty – in which all countries except the US committed to reduce carbon emissions - in the balance again. Japan and Russia don’t want to continue with it, and Europe is increasingly divided. Instead of binding commitments, these countries want a system of voluntary pledges on the part of developed countries, with developing countries taking more commitments. That’s not an agreement, that is a licence for irresponsibility, blame and recrimination. Remarkably, given the quantity and quality of the scientific evidence, the issue of reductions in emissions is kept off the agenda by the big polluters. Without a discussion of emission cuts, there is little left to discuss – other than buying silence and complicity and compensating the climate losers with a pittance.
The developing countries are being consigned to oblivion and they are understandably angry. They are insisting on the Kyoto protocol. Indeed, we can see the stirrings of a climate revolt, with senior diplomats from all the continents considering a call by the former Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figueres to "occupy Durban". There seems little that the developing countries can do in these talks, but in the least they can expose the fraudulent words and activities of the political leaders from the developed world. It’s for the voters in these countries to decide whether they are content to remain subjects of fraudulent political regimes.
Hands 1980 Michael Wells
One world? Four hundred and forty seven billionaires own more wealth than over three billion people on the planet. One world and one species divided by politics and class.
In June (2011), Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, demanded that the world’s governments should agree to limit global warming to just 1.5C instead of the current target of 2C. Scientists argue that a temperature increase of 2C is the limit of safety, beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible. At the UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, (December 2010), the world’s governments set a target limit of 2C on global warming. This consensus was difficult to achieve, and there are doubts as to whether governments will meet the 2C target. However, according to Figueres, the more ambitious global warming target of 1.5C is required: "Two degrees is not enough - we should be thinking of 1.5C. If we are not headed to 1.5C we are in big, big trouble."
Speaking at Carbon Expo, the annual conference of the International Emissions Trading Association, Figueres made it clear that limiting ourselves to the 2C target renders many parts of the world vulnerable to devastating climate change. Even if governments do meet the 2C target, many parts of the world will still be threatened with ruin. Coastal nations and low-lying islands such as the Maldives could be overwhelmed by sea-level rises whilst agriculture in places like sub-Saharan Africa could be subject to severe damage.
Figueres’ call for a more ambitious target on global warming has created a certain uneasiness in international circles. It certainly threatens to expose the flabbiness of the supposed consensus around and commitment to the 2C target. The 2009 summit in Copenhagen achieved only a partial agreement, talks ending amid acrimony and scenes of chaos. A principal reason for the rancour was the campaign for a 1.5C target by some developing countries. Negotiations since have been fragile, with officials treading warily in order to make progress ever since.
In other words, regardless of what scientists identify as the critical threshold of global warming, it’s all about politics, trade-offs and compromises. And the wealthier nations are pushing for greater licence for themselves, at the expense of those nations more directly threatened by climate change. Developed nations and rapidly expanding economies, such as China, argue that it would be impossible to adopt the tougher target. One participant in the talks at Carbon Expo said: "This is a big surprise." So it seems we are stuck with the 2C target, which has little more than a partial consensus and weak commitment behind it.
Figueres is under no illusions. "I'm not saying this is going to be easy. The argument I am making is not about feasibility but an argument of social justice. We can't have as our goal something that we already know does not guarantee the survival of low-lying states and sub-Saharan Africa."
In other words, the world of scientific and moral truth is at adds with the world of politics. That’s the conflict which the citizens of the world need to address. Human civilisation is at a crossroads. Civilisations collapse when empathy is lost within. If people can sit by and watch others suffer the moral circle narrows so that, sooner or later, the circle of suffering widens so as to embrace all. The loss of empathy towards people without is a sickness of the soul that eats a person and a society away from within. To so callously ignore the survival of other members of the species, for no other reason than the vagaries of geography and politics, is evidence of a species dying from within. The new politics is organised around a division between those committed to endless economic expansion, those who assert the primacy of economic imperatives and growth, and those committed to rational and moral restraint, those who assert the primacy of social and environmental justice. This entails a division between those who pursue a self-interested short-term gain that pays no attention to greater environmental and social impacts, and those who pursue a long-range strategy which harnesses resources and intelligence towards the common good. And the new politics is a battle for science too. Unlike the murky world of politics, where compromise around the terms of surrender to the rich and the powerful is the norm, scientific truth is non-negotiable. The world is round, whichever way you measure it; it doesn’t become oblong because of need of agreement in light of political controversy. There is such a thing as scientific and moral truth, and the capital system has neither on its side. It is for people to decide which side they are on. Because not only is the 2C target of global warming inadequate, scientific estimates show that current emissions pledges from developed and developing countries represent barely 60% of what is required to remain within the 2C threshold. Somehow, the poorer nations of the world are expected to make up the shortfall. The ones who emit the least are expected to cut as much as the high emitters. It isn’t going to happen. In which case, catastrophic, runaway climate change becomes unavoidable. Hilariously, the developed and rapidly developing economies think that this will affect the poorer nations only. No. The poorer nations will be affected first. The day will come when it will be the turn of the other nations.
The world is crying out for a universal planetary ethic that binds all the people of the world together within a political regime that respects our universal dependence on nature’s life support systems. Instead, we seem to be at the fag end of an outdated political anarchy based on national sovereignty – and behind that economic self-interest. The rich, high-emitting countries are playing a zero-sum game in which a victory for one is a loss for another – and they are playing to win. It is myopic and it is mad – we live in one world. In such a world, the rich and the powerful can never be insulated from the consequences of actions that inflict losses on the poor and the powerless. The ironies of this situation abound. Science has been a powerful factor in giving the developed countries an economic edge over other parts of the world. Yet it is the developed countries who are most in denial of climate science, of the work of their own scientists, whereas the poor and the powerless hold all the intellectual – and moral - cards. We shouldn’t be surprised. The inequality that the developed countries are imposing upon the world is an expression of the social inequality they practise within their own countries. Climate change is now exposing this internal shabbiness to public global view. Asymmetrical relations of class power, domination and exploitation, involving unequal distributions of resources, are best preserved when they are least publicised. Climate change is not just turning up the heat, it is shedding light on these relations of domination and power, and it can only be a matter of time before they are subject to political controversy, intervention and alteration. Let’s hope the people within the developed countries reclaim their citizen identity and start to do this in time to save those who live in the developing countries. After all, the citizens of the developed world have a power as citizens which is denied to the poor and powerless in the developing world – it’s about time they started to use it.
Devastating climate change begins with the poorer nations, it doesn’t end there. If charity begins at home, it shouldn’t end there.