Climate talks ignore the evidence

As Durban suffered unseasonable heavy rain and flooding that killed six people in the South African city playing host to the current round of UN Climate Talks, European representative Artur Runge-Metzger asked delegates:

“How high needs the water to get in this conference centre before negotiators start deciding on things?"

The answer is, it doesn't matter how high, or how horrific the impacts of extreme weather on populations across the world because there can’t be a new treaty on climate change within the present profit-driven system.

Right across the world there is evidence of more extreme and unseasonal weather, outside the natural variability of the climate. Glaciers crucial for water supplies are melting.

In Afghanistan, Oxfam says serious drought helped send prices of wheat and wheat flour in July 2011 up to 79% higher in affected areas over their levels a year before. In south-east Asia, heavy monsoon rainfall and multiple typhoons have killed more than 1,100 people and helped increase rice prices by about 25% and 30% in Thailand and Vietnam. Floods have devastated Pakistan’s Sindh province for a second year.

The United States has suffered hurricanes, droughts, out-of-the ordinary snowstorms and even freezing rains in California. Food prices are soaring as a result. Canada, which has become of the main opponents of a binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions, saw freak gales roaring through Alberta, ironically the province where they are determined to go ahead with extracting tar sands.

Closer to home, southern England is facing a water shortage in December, whilst floods are spreading across Scotland.

But none of these events has any impact in the conference centre, and there is no limit to the ability of governments to ignore reality and continue down the same disastrous road.

Before the talks opened, it was said that rich nations had already decided to push any substantive talks on a binding agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 2015 - now it seems unlikely they will accept even that timetable. The truth is, there isn’t going to a successor treaty to Kyoto which will end next year and be quietly forgotten.

Another major element of the talks was to be the launch of the “Green Climate Fund”, which requires developed countries to provide $100 billion to poorer countries by 2020 to help them reduce their own carbon emissions and adapt to climate change.

Now the United States has held up the deal, saying they won't sign anything unless developing nations - wealthy ones, like China, India and Brazil - contribute too.

Countries who would have benefited were also deeply unhappy that the proposed framework for the fund would have allowed corporations to apply directly for money, bypassing governments.

They were prepared to let it go through unchanged, however, because no more funding for mitigating the effects of climate change would have been forthcoming. But outside the conference, a group of leading NGOs wrote an open letter strongly objecting "to any resources going from the Green Climate Fund directly to the private sector, particularly through the establishment of a private sector facility."

They warn that projects that help poor people to adapt to climate change, or tackle their energy problems, are not going to generate corporate profit. Letting corporations and “green investment funds” get their hands on the money would mean it poured into the existing discredited and scandal-ridden carbon markets, or into the new “risky financial instruments” that "green economy" speculators are designing. So in effect, the fund would become yet another means of transferring public money and assets into the hands of the private sector and the speculators.

The message is that the climate crisis, which is a direct result of the operation of capitalist forms of commodity production, cannot be solved within the system that caused it. Our answer to this shameful failure on the part of our governments must be to replace them with a truly democratic power that can then make a binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Economic 'growth' a very dirty business

If anyone needed convincing about the direct link between the in-built growth drive of capitalist economy and climate change, they can thank the European Union’s energy chief for clearing up any confusion.

Who can forget the dramatic graph in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, which showed the upward curve in greenhouse gas emissions from about the mid-1980s. What Gore did not bring out was that this curve was matched by another showing the growth in commodity production during what became known as globalisation.

In other words, the reckless expansion of production regardless of fossil fuel burning and other carbon emissions, the ruthless exploitation of resources for profit, was too much for nature to cope with. Climate change kicked in. Yet another of capitalism’s unintended consequences, except this was one is deadly for all of humanity and every species.

As we know, climate change talks aimed at negotiating a new treaty to replace the half-hearted Kyoto agreement have collapsed, first at Copenhagen and then at Cancun. It’s every country and region for itself now.

That’s the context behind the statement by Günther Oettinger, the EU's energy commissioner, that increasing the notional target for cutting emissions from 20% to 30% by 2020 was not on because it would weaken fabled “growth” prospects and force industries to move to Asia.

If we go alone to 30%, you will only have a faster process of de-industrialisation in Europe," adding: "I think we need industry in Europe, we need industry in the UK, and industry means CO2 emissions." Europe could only adopt a tougher target if other major economies were also willing to do so, he said. "We are willing to go to 30% if big global partners will follow us, but if not we won't."

In others, competition with countries like China for markets to sell more goods to people who can barely afford their utility bills as a result of the crisis, is the only way to go. And damn the consequences. Emissions have fallen during the recession, and a cynical
Oettinger’s response was to say: “So do we need longer and deeper crises?" Look at our deficit – we need growth, and we need more industry."

In their increasingly desperate bid to kick-start economies deep in recession and weighed down by household, corporate and government debt, the capitalist class will drive down not only wages and working conditions but also environmental standards.

These are viewed as an additional cost of production and so will be ditched, circumvented, ignored or abandoned in an attempt to increase profit margins. That was clearly the case with the Gulf of Mexico disaster, where BP and others were indicted for cutting costs at the expense of safety considerations.

So even if there is a resumption of “growth”, it will be an extremely dirty business in every sense. That’s another good reason why society has to kick capitalism’s growth habit. As the call-out for our February 26 teach-in says:

Capitalism’s relentless, in-built drive for continuous expansion is destructive in every sense. It inevitably leads to its opposite – contraction – and with it the destruction of jobs, living standards, pensions and public services that we are seeing now.

And it’s destructive because profit-driven growth always comes before the sustainable use of resources. Insatiable growth has a direct connection to climate change and habitat loss. So how can we kick the growth habit? What’s the alternative to profit as an incentive? How can we create a natural relationship with nature?

Register for “Kicking capitalism's growth habit - building a sustainable economy” and help work out the answers.

Paul Feldman
Communications 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

Extreme weather is all about climate change

This week serious floods in Cornwall, and in September, floods in Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire. Last year, unprecedented rains and flooding in Cumbria; in 2008 Wales and the Midlands; in 2007 Humber, Yorkshire and Gloucestershire and in 2006, Norfolk and Suffolk. Extreme rain and flooding are becoming more frequent events in the UK.

The floods come as one of the climate change deniers’ key myths has been exploded by a report by US and British meteorologists. It confirms that not only is the earth’s surface warming, but the troposphere – the area where weather happens – is warming too.

This is entirely in line with climate science predictions of what happens as greenhouse gases build up in the upper atmosphere. And it means more extreme weather – both drought and floods – and not in the future, but now.

This year, terrible floods in Pakistan affected 15 million people, 300,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and two million left homeless. Public infrastructure of health, education, governance, roads and rail were destroyed in some areas.

There have also been heat waves and wildfires in Russia and Ukraine. Ten million people are currently facing starvation in Chad and Niger after years of drought followed by flash floods. More than a thousand people were killed in landslides triggered by torrential rain in China’s Gansu province. Deforestation, reckless development and political neglect all play a part in these tragedies, but the weather is the major cause.

This year’s hurricane season brought 19 major storms to Mexico and Central America. Weeks of heavy rains triggered landslides in Central America, killing hundreds of people and destroying infrastructure. In Mexico, swollen rivers washed away fields and coastal towns were submerged when tropical storms surged ashore. This wet weather followed a year of severe drought, with the lowest rainfall in 68 years. Cattle and crops all died in some of the driest parts of Mexico.

“This is our new life with climate change," said Gabino Cue, governor of Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca. One of Mexico's poorest states, it faces a $163-million bill for repairing roads, bridges and public buildings damaged by the floods. The cost of extreme weather to Latin America and the Caribbean could equal 137 percent of the region's current economic output by 2100, according to a United Nations report.

So when officials gather in Cancun later this month to try to negotiate a follow-on treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, the evidence of the impact of climate change will be all around them. Climate change models show the situation can only get worse as temperatures rise.

In spite of all that, the officials are not planning to sign any agreement, and people across the globe will pay the price. The sole result of the last round of climate talks in Copenhagen was a commitment to funding for climate change mitigation in the form of aid from richer to poorer countries. In advance of the Cancun meeting, the European Union published claims to have fulfilled a pledge of 2.2 billion euros ($3 billion) to be delivered on a ‘fast track’. But Oxfam challenges this, suggesting that money from existing pledges is simply being rebranded.

The whole UN process, which started with high hopes of success in 1992, has become a process specifically aimed at avoiding action and channelling people’s anger and fears into a bureaucratic dead end. To escape this impasse we need an urgent action plan for climate change, thinking globally and acting locally. For example, People’s Assemblies in flood-affected areas would plan to mitigate the effects. In Britain, they would reverse the government cuts in spending on flood defences which has been reduced from £335m a year to £261m a year for the next four years.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Forests under threat in carbon offsets scandal

Campaigners fear a new surge of forest destruction as a result of both the reactionary Copenhagen Accord and a new European Union bio-fuels directive.

It seems that EU member states will be forced to accept palm oil grown in plantations planted on cleared forest – whether they like it or not.

The EU is committed to a target of 10% of all road transport fuel being based on renewable energy by 2020, and a new directive claims that palm oil plantations can be classified as forest, and meet so-called “sustainable standards”.

According to Rainforest Rescue, razing rainforest to plant oil palm would not count as a change in land use under the new directive, which also says that “member states may not set additional criteria of their own. They may not exclude biofuels/bioliquids on sustainability grounds where these meet the sustainability criteria laid down in the Directive”.

This is entirely in line with the Copenhagen Accord, the wrecking agreement forced through by powerful nations at last year’s climate conference.

Without a successor to Kyoto the controls on carbon off-setting (weak as they were) will become non-existent. It will lead to large-scale destruction of eco-systems and unprecedented land grabs, as spurious projects are classified as carbon offsets. There will even be carbon credits for tree and crop monocultures and GM soya, planted on cleared rainforest.

Stella Semino from Grupo de Reflexion Rural (Argentina) states: “If these new proposals are agreed upon we will see a massive boost for crop and tree plantations alike which, in the name of ‘climate change mitigation’, will speed up the destruction of forests and other vital ecosystems, the spread of industrial agriculture, and land grabbing against small-farmers, indigenous peoples and forest communities. Industrial monocultures are already a major cause of climate change and their expansion will make it worse.”

The problem is even bigger than palm oil – the whole concept of bio-fuels replacing oil is flawed because of the nature of the capitalist system and the system of private land ownership. An example is the development of new oil plants that will grow on so-called “marginal land”.

The Jatropha plant is being grown by Kijani Energy of Canada in Mozambique on land classified as marginal. This very experimental process, with an incredibly toxic plant which can harm farmers as they harvest and crush it, is already being claimed as a biol-fuel breakthrough.

It is reported that Kijani has now purchased 200,000 acres of land in the Thar province of Pakistan for Jatropha cultivation. Local people say that far from being unused land, this area belongs to them, and their centuries old livestock grazing rights are being violated.

In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions we reject the idea of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, within the existing capitalist economic structures. It is damaging the poorest and most powerless in society, not protecting them from the effects of climate change – and it is doing it without making any significant reductions in emissions. An alternative system of energy production and land ownership is urgently needed.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

US and EU scupper climate summit

International talks preparing for the Copenhagen climate summit are in disarray and on the point of collapse, as the science is pushed to one side and the discussion descends into self-seeking wrangling. The United States says it will not sign up to an agreement that includes the Kyoto Protocol. Since other countries thought they were negotiating a successor treaty to Kyoto, this is a major blow.

The US wants historic responsibility for climate change on the part of the earliest industrialised countries removed from the picture and countries to set their own emissions reductions targets. But India and China say they will not sign up to any agreement that does not include Kyoto principles.

The existing protocol sets specific emissions target for each industrialised nation while allowing them to use carbon trading schemes to buy or sell “credits”. The protocol was never ratified by the US and the Obama administration has also declined to endorse it.

The European Union signed up to Kyoto but spokesperson Karl Falkenbert now agrees with the US. His smokescreen? "We look at the Kyoto protocol, but since it came into force we have seen emissions increase. It has not decreased emissions.”

All that is true, but the question is, why was it not made clear four years ago that Copenhagen was about negotiating an entirely new framework treaty? Starting on negotiations for a new treaty now means that talks will rumble on into 2015/2016 with no action taken.

At present, the only US offer on the table is a 17% cut from 2005 emission levels by 2020, and even that has not made its into law, though between the recession and carbon off-setting, the US could meet that target without making any real reductions at all.

Even the modest cap-and-trade scheme proposed by the Obama administration is foundering, as frightened Democrats give in to the Republican Right. The only legislation that looks likely to pass is an Energy Bill with a small commitment to renewables, and a rider allowing extensive drilling for new oil and gas off the Florida coast.

Organisations like the Association of Small Island States are in despair. The Maldives, Kiribati, and some of the Bahamas, would be inundated by sea levels more than one metre above current levels – which could happen by 2100, if warming is not kept to a minimum of 1.5%. Samoa, Fiji and other south sea islands have already lost hundreds of acres of coast to rising sea levels.

AOSIS representative Dessima Williams, from Grenada, said: "We face an emergency. We want commitments. We did not create the problem. Any mechanism currently in use is one we want to maintain. National actions are important but they are no substitutes for an international framework.”

But the survival of small island nations is not a priority at Copenhagen, nor drought, hunger, disease or wars over resources. The only priority is the need for capitalist business-as-usual.

There is a kind of liberal piety that says that China historically did not create the emissions, so should not hold back development by making substantial cuts now. But industrial development is not taking place for the benefit of ordinary Chinese. Poverty in the countryside, low wages in the factories and political repression everywhere are the Chinese realities. We should be demanding that all global industries start now to prioritise emissions reductions over profits – wherever they are located on the planet.

Profit-driven forms of production are unsustainable – in terms of climate and the eco-system, raw materials and human health – but capitalism will not vote itself out of prime position at the heart of all international debates. In the end, it will have to be physically removed by the mass action of millions – and we need to do it soon, for our own survival.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

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