Boosting carbon markets top priority at Cancún

As the Cancún climate talks stumble along, it should be no surprise to anyone to learn from Wikileaks that the United States and the European Union used pressure and bribery to bully smaller nations into signing up to the Copenhagen Accords.

As long ago as 2007, A World to Win denounced the UN climate change process as a forum for the prevention of action on climate change. And nothing has happened since to alter that view.

Even the agreement that were expected to be signed in Cancún – the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) agreement, the proposal for free sharing of green technologies between advanced industrial and poorer nations, and the mitigation fund – are now foundering.

Of course, it would be good news if REDD collapsed. It proposes to draw forest protection into the corrupt and ineffective carbon market, with rich countries paying poor countries to protect forest, then claiming carbon offsets to carry on polluting.

It is simply another route towards “business as usual” and it would not, by the way, protect forests, as illegal logging would doubtless continue. It is not surprising that major corporations sent delegates to a meeting in Cancún in support of REDD, including Walmart CEO Robson Walton.

The draft text still includes plantations – for example palm oil plantations – in the definition of forests. So Indonesia could turn a blind eye to illegal clearing of a forest, and then claim funding for the protection of the resulting palm oil plantation. This is turning logic on its head – or rather it is basing the whole process on the logic of the market.

As the ETC Group says in its report “The New Biomassters – Synthetic Biology and the Next assault on biodiversity and livelihoods”:

New carbon markets are turning plant-life into carbon stocks for trading (in lieu of reducing emissions). But the companies that say ‘trust us’ are the same energy, chemical companies, agribusinesses and forestry giants that created the climate and food crises in the first place.

And at the same time, Silvia Ribeiro of the ETC Group warns:

The Gene Giants are stockpiling patents that threaten to put a choke-hold on the world’s biomass and our future food. The breadth of many patent claims on climate ready crop genes is staggering. In many cases, a single patent or patent application claims ownership of engineered gene sequences that could be deployed in virtually all major crops – as well as the processed food and feed products derived from them.

So what is taking place in Cancún is not a negotiation on climate change, but a further development in the globalisation process, where the penetration of the market into new areas is facilitated and subsidised by governments through carbon off-sets.

Bolivia is accused of putting forests at risk by holding out against the inclusion of carbon trades in any treaty. But as ambassador Pablo Solon said, his government is motivated by the desire to prevent the kind of disastrous rise in global temperatures that would condemn humanity to death.

“We have come to seek an accord for humanity and nature in its totality. The most current research indicates that 300,000 people die each year due to natural disasters. You’re playing with human lives,” Solon said.

But that is precisely what capitalism does – it commodifies everything on the planet, including the labour of human beings, and puts it all to work for the creation of profit. At Saturday’s meeting, “Liberation Beyond Resistance – Towards a Peoples Assemblies Movement” – it will be important to include emergency actions on climate change in discussions about what the priorities for the future must be.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Cancún farce puts the world at risk

Government officials meeting in Cancún, Mexico, have begun what the annual round of delay and betrayal that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) has become.

There is absolutely no sign of any compromise between delegates representing nearly 200 countries on the key issues that led to Copenhagen’s failure last December.

"We will not be able to negotiate a new treaty in Cancún, that much is clear," host nation Mexico's chief delegate Fernando Tudela admits. The best he hopes for is to “dispel mistrust”, “end the standoff”, “achieve confidence, unity and effectiveness”.

In other words – good public relations and image-building but absolutely no commitment to reductions in carbon emissions. The only area where progress may be made is in throwing money at the governments of poorer nations, supposedly to offset and mitigate the impacts of climate change. So politicians and officials will be bribed, whilst ordinary people will pay the price.

All hope of achieving an agreement on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at these, or any other talks, has now been abandoned. This was confirmed when Japan stated its outright opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international emissions cuts treaty signed in 1992.

Bolivia’s UN Ambassador Pablo Solon, condemned proposals known as REDD+ that would set up a market-based system to pay poorer nations to protect tropical forests. "Now they want to put a value on nature ... this is what got us here in the first place," he said adding that rich nations were claiming to take part in negotiating a successor to Kyoto without ever having even lived up to their legal commitments under the existing treaty.

At the summit in Copenhagen last year, the rich nations hi-jacked the meeting and transformed the FCCC process from planning a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, to be instead a forum for implementing a market-driven increase in global temperatures by 2ºC. Such an increase will lead to:
 complete destruction of the world’s coral reefs
 26 million people displaced by rising sea levels, hurricanes and cyclones
 300 million people at risk of hunger due to failing crops
 2.8 billion people without access to clean water.
 Spread of diseases such as malaria and Dengue Fever to new areas
 Mass extinctions in the Arctic with only 42% of the Arctic tundra stable.
 Greenland ice cap melted
 Loss of the majority of the remaining major forests of China, Europe and America.

And as meteorologists have recently explained, temperatures are rising even faster than previously predicted, and a 4ºC increase is entirely on the cards in the case of capitalism being permitted to continue business as usual. That would mean:
 Sea levels rise swamping some island nations entirely and 70% of Bangladesh, Florida, Netherlands and the south of England
 40 million people round Shanghai and 60 million around Calcutta displaced
 Melting of the Siberian permafrost, releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases and speeding up the warming process even further.

Bolivian President Evo Morales will attend the final week of the meeting, to promote the Cochabamba Accord on Mother Earth Rights, which stated that capitalism is the structural cause of climate change, and is inherently unsustainable.

He is quite right to do so, but perhaps he’s is doing it in the wrong place. NGOs and campaigners have launched a campaign calling for “ten thousand Cancúns”. That’s the last thing we need! Instead we want 10,000 people’s assemblies, in every country, challenging the right of undemocratic governments and global corporations to continue driving the eco-system to the tipping point where life on earth becomes unsustainable.

Penny Cole
Environment editor