After two weeks of fractious negotiations in Bali, the United Nations sponsored climate conference decided to… keep talking. Such a “roadmap”, argues Joy Macready, is a recipe for climate catastrophe.
The roadmap claims to lay out a timetable for achieving a global climate deal by the end of 2009. The agreement is to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and is supposed to take the world beyond 2012 (when Kyoto expires) – but not a single reduction goal for after 2010 is included in the final text agreed at Bali. So, effectively, after a fortnight of talking, the 12,000 participants at the Bali Summit agreed simply to keep talking. Under the arrangement delegates approved a timetable for a series of international summits over the next two years which is planned to culminate in a full agreement being reached at another UN conference in Copenhagen in late 2009. As one delegate Angus Friday, Grenada’s UN ambassador and chair of the Alliance of Small Islands, said: “We are ending up with something so watered-down there was no need for 12,000 people to gather here in Bali. We could have done that by email.”
Before the summit began the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the official sponsor of the conference, had submitted a document calling on the industrialised nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels) in order to start to address climate change. This was rejected by the US, with Canada, Australia and Japan tailing along in its wake. A compromise draft agreement stating that global emissions should peak within the next 10 to 15 years and then be cut by half by 2050 was also rejected, leaving only the vague commitment devoid of specific carbon emission reduction targets. Instead of concrete targets, the statement talks of the need for “deep cuts in global emissions” and called for a “long-term goal for emissions reductions” – both just empty phrases.
This is a far cry from the “historic breakthrough” that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn and most of the EU governmental participants have hailed as the outcome. Due to the effective stonewalling by the US delegation, delegates from the other 186 countries were so helpless against the world’s single superpower they had to resort to booing of the US delegation’s purposeful obstruction. Everyone knew, whatever the public hypocrisy, that any agreement was not worth the paper it was printed on if the biggest polluter in the world did not sign up to it.
The Europeans tried to snatch the charade from the jaws of defeat by declaring a moral victory. They claimed that consensus was only reached following “a last minute u-turn” from the US after some behind the scenes haggling. It seems that once again Britain was key to this facesaving exercise for their transatlantic masters. Yet the White House (ever ungrateful!) was quick to release a statement that Bush’s position had not budged one iota.
Let’s not forget that the US had actually signed up to the Kyoto Protocol under Clinton, but the Bush administration refused to ratify the agreement. So even though the US has agreed to continue “negotiating” to avoid being internationally isolated, it has not agreed to any action. Nothing has changed on that front. Instead the US has created its own parallel process with the countries accounting for 85 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Some European officials threatened a boycott of the January meeting in Hawaii called by the White House, if the US did not agree to a common statement in Bali.
What became apparent at the summit was that most participants believe that when the Bush regime ends, the US will finally play ball. As though what was at stake was the stubbornness of one not very bright president rather than the interests of a world plundering ruling class. Certainly presidential hopefuls have jumped on the global warming bandwagon, with Democratic frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama joining Republican frontrunners Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney in insisting it was an issue to be faced. Yet, like the Bush administration, not one has promised to impose specific targets to reduce carbon emissions if this would hurt the US economy.
And the economy question is in the back of the Europeans minds as well. Even though they, together with China, India and other emerging industrial countries, were pushing for specific targets, most of the EU nations will not even achieve the completely inadequate targets set out by the Kyoto Protocol. Their position is not driven by genuine concern for the environment, but securing the long-term future of the $30 billion Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and maintaining Europe’s domination of the world carbon commodity trade. The ETS has done nothing to significantly reduce emissions in Europe, but it has spawned an enormous international market in carbon investment and speculation, which is what the presidential hopefuls are also looking to getting a slice of.
“More than $60 billion changed hands in the global carbon market this year, double the trade of last year and up from just $400 million three years ago,” reported an article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Bali’s Business Bonanza”. “Analysts estimate the market could be worth $1 trillion within the next 10 years. By 2030, according to some carbon bulls, it may even be the biggest commodity market in the world, overtaking crude oil.” This is the central concern of the Bali discussions – how to make money out of climate catastrophe.
So was their any political will there to make the shift from a carbon-intensive world economy? The short answer is no. Under capitalism, the drive for profits trumps environmental protection every time. No country will do anything that undermines their ability to compete on the global market. These enormous gatherings contribute little beyond a gigantic carbon footprint; they just add their own green wash gasses to the problem.
Five years ago the big corporations and imperialist governments were still denying or minimising the already massive evidence of climate change. In the last year or so all of them (even Bush) have dropped this approach because they were aware of the effect it was having in discrediting of neoliberal capitalism and radicalising effect it would have worldwide. That was why corporations and most politicians turned to a huge campaign of greenwash, trying to fool their customers or electorates that each of them was “greener than thou.”
In fact capitalism with its reckless using up of all sorts of raw materials and foodstuffs, its systematic pollution of the atmosphere and the seas, its exhaustion of the soil and destruction of the ecosystem, can not take the actions sufficient to avoid catastrophic and mounting extreme climate events. To do so requires setting aside the mad chase for profit, the blind consumerism of a tiny proportion of the worlds population combined with shortages of the basic necessities for the rest. To avoid this danger, to actively reverse the spoliation of humanity’s living space, means a conscious effort towards that goal, not fiddling with markets forces whilst the planet burns
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Only a socialist solution – one that is based on a democratically planned world economy – can tackle the causes of climate change. What does that mean? It means we need an international solution, one that is based on the needs of the majority of society, not a privileged minority. We must democratically decide how we want to develop infrastructure and industry to meet these needs – not leave it to the “elected” leaders that make decisions that only benefit the ruling class. We must make a global shift away from the burning of fossil fuels and towards cleaner technology. All of these objectives will only be met if we radically transform our society. For this we need an international revolutionary movement that can challenge the capitalists and overthrow the system that keeps the majority of humanity in abject poverty and misery. For this we need a party of world revolution – a Fifth International – to fight for power.