Dave Stockton
Dave Stockton looks at the outcome of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change
After two years of preparation and two weeks of face-to-face negotiation, the conference that was supposed to establish legally binding limits on emissions and to agree sources of funding to help protect poorer countries has failed, and failed utterly. The 15th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP15) drew world leaders, environment ministers, NGOs, and journalists to Copenhagen. In all, some 50,000 came to this first ever global conference to try to avert catastrophic climate change. By any standard, this was a conference of historic significance. All the more significant, then, that it failed, and failed utterly.
The only legally binding climate agreement in existence, Kyoto, will end in 2012 and nothing similar will replace it. Copenhagen has taken no measures to limit or reverse the processes with which unbridled capitalist despoliation of the natural environment threatens the world – nothing short of climate catastrophe. It contains no legally binding targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and no dates for their achievement.
As we shall see, this means that the movement against climate change needs to reorient its tactics and strategy radically away from NGO-style lobbying of governments. It needs to consider how the working masses can remove from power the politicians, the capitalist classes they represent, and the entire economic system which will make this catastrophe inevitable.
What Copenhagen did show, and with devastating clarity, was that a conference on the climate is actually a conference on who controls what. The stalemate over the proposed agreement reflected the balance of forces in the world, and how they are shifting. In particular, it revealed two political facts of tremendous significance.
The first of these is the yawning chasm between, on the one hand, the interests of the imperialist developed states, plus the new would-be imperialist superpower China and, on the other, the economically and politically weak countries of Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America.
The second category – in fact the great majority of states, and representing the majority of the world’s people – saw their justified fears for their future brutally thrust aside and ignored. The Sudanese negotiator, Lumumba Dia-ping, said of the final agreement, that it, “asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”. The first group were hell-bent on defending their “right” to monopolise the globe’s resources. They are determined to go on using fossil fuels and degrading the biosphere in a way that will cost the lives, or undermine the wellbeing, of billons; and all to swell the profits of a few thousand mega-corporations and their multi-billionaire owners.
Even the expected pledge by the rich nations, to divert funds to help the poorer ones to bear the costs of climate disasters, turned out to be a total fraud. The promise of $30bn (£18.5bn) over the next three years, rising to $100bn per year by 2020 is, as an African delegate commented, hardly enough to pay for the coffins of those who will perish. In comparison with the trillions of dollars spent by the USA and the EU on bailing out their banks in 2008, it is chickenfeed.
Worse, the handful of great powers refused point blank to commit to this being new money. In other words, any payments that are made will simply be taken out of their existing aid budgets. The countries in the front line of climate change, in Africa, Asia and Oceania, will be forced to choose between fighting its effects or slashing their spending on education, social welfare and economic development for their peoples. These states are already suffering under recent cuts in aid from the rich countries, violating the promises (the Millennium Development Goals) the latter signed up to in 2000 and re-affirmed at Gleneagles in 2005.
The second significant fact on display in Copenhagen was what happened in the behind-the-scenes negotiations to which only a handful of North American, West European and East Asian “big powers” were invited. These meetings witnessed a sharp clash between the old, “satisfied” imperialist powers and those leaner and hungrier states seeking to join the imperialist club. China, in particular, showed it now has such economic power that it cannot be ignored, nor even light-mindedly offended.
China ruthlessly used its newly acquired economic muscle to veto any proposals that would have limited its own capitalist development in the 21st century, despite the destruction of the environment this will mean. Already the British for example are trying to throw the entire blame for the Copenhagen fiasco onto China. We should contemptuously reject this passing of the buck. China can reply, with complete justice, that criticism from Europe and to a lesser extent from the USA, Japan and Australia, is the purest hypocrisy, since those countries are responsible for two centuries of pollution and are still today responsible for 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 emissions per head are four times higher in USA and Australia and twice as high in EU and Japan than they are in China. Moreover, the US itself proposes to do nothing to reduce its emissions beyond the fraud of carbon trading, by which its continued emissions are supposedly offset by bribing underdeveloped countries to stay underdeveloped.
Nevertheless we should not, as Venezuela will be inclined to do, pass over in silence or even excuse China’s actions. China blocked even the inadequate targets and legally binding commitments proposed by the EU leaders because it opposes any restraint on its soaring carbon emissions, which given the size of its population, do indeed present a massive contribution to the problem. And if other “developing nations” follow suit – as they have a every right to do using the Chinese argument –we will reach disaster even sooner tan is presently predicted. In short China’s rulers puts their ambitions to make their country an imperialist power ahead of any concern for the welfare of the world’s people, including their own.
Significantly the Chinese rejected key parts of the weaker proposals that Obama was prepared to sign up to, such as the merely aspirational goal to cut global carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 and for “the developed world” to cut its emissions by 80 per cent by the same date. A European official explained: “China thinks that by 2050 it will be a developed country and it does not want to constrain its growth.”
The Chinese also veto humbled US President Barack Obama, eager to play the role of dealmaker, although it also let him off the hook of trying to force the reactionary US Congress majority (Democrats as well as Republicans) to agree to any targets. However, it clearly infuriated the European imperialists. The London Independent on Sunday (20 December) records one European diplomat as saying, off the record, of course, “this is a shitty, shitty deal.” Nonetheless, they will not publicly attack the deal dictated by the USA and China, beyond saying that it is “only a beginning”.
Last, but not least, the deal cruelly exposed the supposed role of the UN and its huge NGO jamboree conference, which it pretended was a consultation with “civil society”. In fact, the Copenhagen Accord was not even voted on by the representatives of the 193 nations present. Richard Black of the BBC described the dismay as the deal broke: “…scientists and campaigners … watched aghast as Chinese and US leaders and their entourages flew in, took over the agenda and emerged with what was basically their own private deal, with leaders announcing it live on television before others realised it had happened.” Delegates simply “noted” the deal.
The ALBA bloc of Latin American countries – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, denounced the deal. The Venezuelan delegate, Claudia Salerno Caldera, described it as a “coup d’etat against the authority of the United Nations”. More ominously, BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath reports that “there is to be a list of those countries in favour and against on the front of the final document, with some experts suggesting money will only flow to those who say yes.”
Whatever spin is put on the Copenhagen Accord, it will not meet the threat of climate change. Even the 2° Celsius limit to the increase in global temperatures, which it failed to agree on, would not guarantee protection for much of the semi-colonial world. The consensus amongst scientists is that if the imperialist countries and China cut their emissions of warming gases by 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 that would only give a 50-50 chance of staying this side of the tipping point of catastrophic changes. That is why many delegates demanded a 1.5° limit. Scientists at Climate Analytics calculate that what was on offer in Copenhagen from the EU and the US was only a nominal 8-12 per cent cut which, when the loopholes and accounting tricks are deducted, would actually mean a net increase of four per cent.
So how can we save humanity from these disasters? Quite simply by recognising that we have to mobilise its potential victims in a global fight back. The workers and poor peasants of the world, the popular classes of both the imperialist and the exploited semi-colonial countries, have to take up this fight. They have to mobilise to force their governments to take real measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, to stop cutting down forests and burning fossil fuels in power stations and vehicles and to develop “clean” sources of energy. The spearhead of this alliance has to be the politically and trade union organised working class in all countries.
Obviously, too, we will never win the majority of them to action unless we present an alternative form of “development”, a means of overcoming the inequality and misery of the great majority that is maintained in the interests of a tiny minority. This simply cannot be done under capitalism, with its national states viciously competing to divide and redivide the world’s markets and resources, as well as its corporations struggling for profits. Copenhagen shows that the movement to save humanity and its natural environment must become fully and consciously anticapitalist, revolutionary socialist, and internationalist in its goals. Only a globally planned economy directed at social justice and a sustainable environment can meet our needs. Nothing short of this will do.