Global warming not a priority for business, survey confirms

As the talks on a new climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto accord reached a crisis point in Bali last month, the United States representatives were actually booed by the delegates of more than 180 other countries. The Bush administration’s dogged refusal to accept any binding targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the main cause of global warming, had simply exhausted everybody else’s patience.

Now, as Bush convenes his alternative to Kyoto gathering in Hawaii this week, a new survey by global consulting firm Accenture further demolishes Bush's insistence that global warming is best addressed through voluntary measures undertaken by business. Nearly nine in 10 corporations do not rate it as a priority, says the study, which canvassed more than 500 businesses in Britain, the US, Germany, Japan, India and China. Nearly twice as many see climate change as imposing costs on their business as those who believe it presents an opportunity to make money. And the report's publishers believe that big business will concentrate even less on climate change as the world economy deteriorates.

Four out of the five companies surveyed wanting governments to take a central role in tackling climate change. The survey found that only 5% of the companies questioned – and not one in China – regarded global warming as their top priority. And only 11% put it in second or third place. Overall, it ranked eighth in business leaders' concerns, below increasing sales, reducing costs, developing new products and services, competing for talented staff, securing growth in emerging markets, innovation and technology. Although most are taking limited action to reduce their own emissions, almost one in five had done nothing.

And there’s no hint of salvation in the US presidential election later this year. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, the three serious contenders for the Democratic nomination, are all pledged to cut US emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by the year 2050, and all three accept that this can only be achieved by legal caps on emissions. The leading Republican candidate, John McCain, makes the same promises, except that he is only aiming for 65% cuts by 2050.

But just like Bush, all of the candidates are ruled by corporate interests and none has agreed to sign up to any climate change treaty that does not require the rapidly developing countries, above all China and India, to accept specific obligations too – the main excuse for inaction.

With no sign of serious action by business or government, Nathan S. Lewis, Professor of Chemistry at California’s Institute of Technology puts things into perspective in a recent paper Powering the Planet saying: “In the United States, we spend $28 billion on health, but only about $28 million on basic solar research. Currently, we spend more money buying gas at the pump in one hour than we spend funding basic solar research in our country over an entire year. Yet, in that same hour, more energy from the sun is hitting the Earth than all of the energy consumed on our planet in that year. The same cannot be said of any other energy source. On the other hand, we need to explore all credible energy options that we believe could work at scale because we do not know which ones will work yet.”


With the US government pointing at business and business pointing at government, it must be clear that the rest of us urgently have to take matters into our own hands if the destructive impact of profit-motivated production is to be halted.

Gerry Gold, economics editor

'Road map' with no destination

Environment secretary Hilary Benn and other ministers gathered at the Bali climate talks fell over themselves in the rush to declare the conference a resounding success. The reality is somewhat different. All that was agreed at Bali was to hold talks about more talks with the hope that one day there will be a firm agreement to cut carbon emissions. As one campaigner put it, the “road map” sketched out in Bali actually lacks a destination. And, as any walker knows, a map without a destination point is actually worse than useless.

A deal was struck in Bali on the basis that the agreement was left vague. There was an air of desperation of 11 days of fruitless talks. Plans to work towards binding cuts in carbon emissions were abandoned in favour of a statement which talked about the need to make “deep cuts” without saying how these might be achieved. Just in case anyone was under the illusion that the United States had shifted its ground, yesterday American officials were pouring cold water on Bali. Washington said that the US had "serious concerns" about future talks geared at setting emission targets.

Nelson Muffuh, a senior climate change policy analyst with Christian Aid, said: "The US delegation in particular proved a major obstacle to progress. They appeared to operate a wrecking policy, as though determined to derail the whole process. We were expecting a road map, and we've got one. But it lacks signposts and there is no agreed destination."
While Benn hailed the agreement as an "historic breakthrough", Andy Atkins, the advocacy director of Tearfund, the relief charity, said: "The fact that there is no agreement about how far to cut emissions means the Bali road map is missing a vital signpost. An ambitious, science-based target will have to be agreed by 2009 if the new agreement is not to be fatally flawed." Keith Allott, the head of climate change at WWF UK, said: "We are not at all pleased. We were looking for a road map with a destination."

The harsh reality is that climate change is advancing at a swift pace and the world’s major powers are incapable of doing anything about it. The political elites are beholden to corporate interests and the mantras of the market economy to such an extent that paralysis is the order of the day. Cutting carbon emissions at the rate required to halt global warming could only be achieved through a massive disruption to the status quo of production for profit. It would mean abandoning the drive to produce more and more commodities for the market and a total restructuring of economic activity. Whole new approaches to work and transport would be needed to minimise private car use. Local combined heat and power systems would replace centralised power plants. Can you see this happening under New Labour? Of course not! While global temperatures continue to rise, bringing sea level changes and extreme weather conditions, Benn and his fellow ministers will wasting more time on fruitless post-Bali meetings. The future of the planet cannot be left in their hands.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Who killed Sajida Khan?

As the World Bank plans its launch of a new carbon fund at the United Nations climate conference in Bali, activists worldwide will pay tribute to the woman who spent her last breath resisting one of its most controversial projects. Sajida Khan won the struggle against the project when the Bank pulled out of the toxic South African landfill. But sadly, Khan passed away on 15 July 2007 in her Durban home.

Aged 55 her fragile but vibrant, uncompromising life endured several bouts of debilitating cancer. The dump that the government promised to close in 1987 is still open and thriving. Indeed, plans for new carbon financing were sealed by the South African government even before the Bali conference. The Bali conference is likely to generate a lot of hot air as it searches for climate solutions, but as government delegations debate yet more market-based policies for the post-Kyoto era we should pause and reflect upon who really killed Khan?

Meet the suspects and consider their motives:
1) Bisasar Road’s original design team of apartheid bureaucrats who in 1980 dumped what became Africa’s largest formal garbage heap in the middle of a nature reserve in the mixed-race residential neighbourhood of Clare Estate.

2) Operators of the illegal medical waste incinerator parked at Bisasar during the 1990s, sprinkling toxins onto Khan and her neighbours until its belated closure.

3) Durban Solid Waste for not terminating the dump as repeatedly promised. It runs a methane incineration system that spews yet more cancerous ingredients - dioxins, lead, cadmium — into the toxic soup around Bisasar.

4) The World Bank team who met Durban officials in 2002, persuading them that the dumpsite should remain open for seven to twenty more years. The reason? To capture carbon credits by selling investments in Bisasar methane-to-electricity operations to global polluters, who in turn will face less pressure to cut their own emissions.

5) The Kyoto Protocol – meant to turn the corner on climate change – is thus also a suspect. It established a ‘free market’ in carbon credits that would permit polluters in the North to purchase shares in ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ projects like Bisasar, instead of reducing their own greenhouse gases.

6) Major international polluters ranging from Big Oil to the Dutch government, who are the buyers of this “privatised air”.

7) Other landfill sites in Durban’s Marianhill and La Mercy suburbs, which are also supported by the World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund.

8) Who can forget the role of the [South Africa’s] national Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism? According to the National Climate Change Response Strategy, citizens must understand “up-front” how the “Clean Development Mechanism primarily presents a range of commercial opportunities, both big and small. This could be a very important source of foreign direct investment’. Khan and her Durban Group comrades considered this position a form of eco-prostitution equivalent to accepting toxic waste for a pittance.

9) Then there’s the South African economy itself, addicted to fossil fuels and the world’s cheapest energy. The US is the world’s largest CO2 emitter in absolute terms, but in relative terms SA emits 20 times more of that gas than the US, measured by each unit of output per person. That in turn has made Pretoria aware of the need for even rotten offset projects like Bisasar, so as to market SA’s feeble attempts to cut back on greenhouse emissions.

This blog is drawn from an article published in Alter-Eco, which is being produced by groups who have come together to make a unified call in support of real solutions to climate change and against the false market-based solutions that are being implemented under the Kyoto Protocol.

Planetary emergency appeal

In the run up to the December crisis meeting on global warming, a call has gone out to world governments meeting in Bali to make a global energy and economic transition without delay in order to save the planet and its inhabitants from disaster. Signatories to the call say a “systemic shift” is needed just to stabilise the planet’s climate.

Drawn up by leading development and climate organisations, include the International Forum on Globalisation, Focus on the Global South and the Polaris Institute, the appeal calls on governments to "begin a pathway toward new global agreements that recognise and operate within our planet’s limits and equitably share its ecological space". It rightly points out that the proposals governments are likely to discuss in Bali will "dangerously underestimate the challenges confronting us".

Instead, the signatories make the case for having "deeper binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at the very least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050... with solutions that place the greatest burden of adjustment on the richer nations, and the richer segments within all nations". The appeal demands that developed countries "drastically reduce consumption of energy and others resources, materials, and commodities" and proposes that "...conservation and re-localising cycles of ownership, production and consumption are the fastest, cheapest most efficient means toward powering down”.

Interestingly, the appeal recognises the need to "shift power away from global and national governance, and toward local economies, especially energy and food systems..". This appears to be the beginnings of a realisation that the structures of the existing society cannot deliver a sustainable future. There is a call for new development models that "satisfying basic human rights and basic human needs for all (such as survival, sufficiency, freedom, identity)", to replace existing measurements based on economic performance.

The signatories urge the creation of global financial mechanisms to help poor nations keep their resources and see the need to "drive ecological solutions that transform today’s patterns of production and consumption, replacing long-distance trade and absentee-ownership with decentralised economic activity under community control".

There is nothing in the appeal you could disagree with, even if there is no reference to the economic system known as capitalism anywhere in the document. The real issue revolves around how these absolutely necessary changes are to be achieved. In this respect, the signatories mistakenly place their faith in existing governments and institutions to carry through the transition. For example, the appeal claims: “Just as one of the oldest global bodies, the International Labour Organisation, includes representatives from governments, labour, and business, these new negotiations must involve all of the sectors of society to be effective.”

Just how naïve this approach is was demonstrated by the New Labour government last week when it effectively gave the green light for a new runway at Heathrow Airport, despite massive opposition from local communities and environmental groups. Transport secretary Ruth Kelly said expansion was needed to keep the British economy “competitive”. Her “solution” for the extra CO2 emissions that would occur was to ensure “that every tonne of carbon that is emitted from a plane is matched by a reduction somewhere else in Europe” through carbon trading.

Kelly’s decision is just one of countless examples of how corporate power and compliant governments are locked into a mutual dance of death at the planet’s expense. They are deaf to appeals, whatever their merits and logic, and incapable of tackling the planetary emergency in the way outlined by the signatories above. Political and economic life will have to be restructured from top to bottom by the mass of the people themselves independently of their rulers’ wishes. If there was an easier option, it would have been discovered by now.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor