'Even if the world celebrates a Paris climate deal on December 11, the process will still have to be regarded as failure. Let me explain why.The basic reason is that the unequal distribution of carbon emissions is not even on its agenda. The historical responsibility of the West is not on the table, nor is a method of national carbon accounting that looks at how the emissions a country consumes rather than produces. Instead, what is on the table are expanded and new mechanisms that will allow the rich, Western countries to outsource their emission cuts so they can paint themselves green.'
The rich continue to explore various ways and means of evading their responsibility, and climate politics continues to try to perform the magic trick of getting the bad people to do good things. It can't be done, the 'bad people' see the good folk and their contrivances coming a mile off - you can't beat them at their own game. As Christian socialist R.H. Tawney told us nearly one hundred years ago, 'you cannot skin a tiger claw by claw; vivisection is their trade, and they do the skinning first.' They've been skinning us at climate talks from the first, and they will do it again. This time, in an attempt to evade a skinning, Paris will be set up to evade a direct confrontation, it will be set up on a voluntary basis, proposing words designed for consensus, but not backed by obligations with respect to action. It's the best that such a politics can achieve.
I'm not happy with the 'doomed to failure' message here. I see this as all part of a bigger process of transformation. But I do think the critique of political economy is essential. The capital system is not a public domain, open to moral or democratic persuasion concerning fundamentals, but a regime of private accumulation driven by systemic imperatives. The endless expansion of value is its central dynamic and this drives the endless growth that is driving ecological degradation. This accumulative dynamic is non-negotiable within these social arrangements. The case for climate justice has to be set in the context of a fundamental transformation of the whole social metabolic order. (A long term project at a time when we have run out of the long term...)
My view is that the Paris Agreement is far too weak to tackle global warming and, to the extent that it allows so many to pretend otherwise, it will actually serve to set back the fight to address climate change. We have to step up this fight markedly, not settle back on some compromise as the best that we can achieve given political realities.
The more seriously you take the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the angrier you should be.
'Conventional wisdom holds that negotiators are hashing out a fair allocation of the deep emissions cuts all countries would need to make to limit warming. That image bears little resemblance to reality.
In fact, emissions reductions are barely on the table at all. Instead, the talks are rigged to ensure an agreement is reached regardless of how little action countries plan to take.'