Delegates to the United Nations Conference on climate change last December
faced a painful choice while drafting the so-called Bali Roadmap. They could
specifically mention the necessity of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
by 25-40% by 2020 and face the possibility of a US walkout from the
negotiations. Or they could drop all mention of targets to keep Washington in
the negotiations - and risk the United States obstructing the process of coming
up with a tough regime of mandatory emissions cuts that would have to be in
place by the UN's climate meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The delegates went with the latter and appeased Washington by not mentioning
any targets. After the declaration on climate issued by the Group of Eight
(G-8) summit in Hokkaido, Japan, this month it is clear that the delegates in
Bali made a strategic
mistake. The G-8's endorsement of a 50% reduction in emissions by 2050, which
they have presented as a major step forward, is actually, as the South African
government put it, a "regression from what is required to make a meaningful
contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change".
In fact, "regression" is too polite. The G-8 position is a giant step backward.
It may have effectively undermined the prospects for an effective global
climate strategy for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol that is
expected to be finalized at the crucial UN meeting in Copenhagen in December
2009.
Given the confusion that the G-8 climate communique has created globally, it is
worthwhile deconstructing the position in detail.
The 25-40% reduction from 1990 emission levels by 2020 that could have been
adopted in Bali grew out of a developing consensus. Based on the latest report
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this consensus holds
that preventing global mean temperature from rising above the critical
threshold of 2 degrees centigrade in the 21st century will require radical cuts
in greenhouse gas emissions of 80-90% by 2050. The 25-40% reductions were an
intermediate target on the path to achieving this goal. The G-8 "commitment" of
about half this final target is grossly inadequate.
Several other considerations highlight the dangers of the Washington-driven
formula. First, the G-8 proposes a global cut, not one that would be undertaken
only by the industrialized or "Annex One" countries. As such, big polluters
like the United States can actually free-ride on the rest of the world.
Second, the cut has no clear baseline. When making the announcement, Japanese
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda initially said the cut was from 1990 levels. Then
he had to take back that statement and subsequently mentioned the higher levels
of 2000 as the baseline.
Third, this declaration of intent is not binding, and the G-8 have given no
indication that they want to bring their "pledge" fully under the UN climate
negotiations framework that would bind its signatories. Indeed, the G-8
announcement reinforces the G-8 as a site for climate action that rivals the UN
process and effectively subverts it. Not surprisingly, the G-8 declaration
emerged as part of a parallel process known as the "Major Economies Meeting".
The Major Economies Meeting is a US initiative to wrest decision-making on
climate from the UN framework and process.
The G-8 climate communique demonstrates that not only Washington but the other
powerful economies of the world are opposed to effective climate action. And
without the rich country governments committing themselves to obligatory
radical cuts in carbon dioxide levels, it will be impossible to convince China,
India, and other rapidly industrializing economies to agree to subject
themselves to a mandatory regime in the near future.
With Washington's posture so retrograde, the policies of other developed
country governments appear in a more positive light. But this is an illusion.
While Washington has been the most visible obstacle to achieving effective
action on climate, the obstructionist role of the other advanced industrial
countries has not been insignificant. Japan and Canada, for instance, have
retreated from their previous support for a regime of mandatory reductions and
saved Washington from total isolation in the negotiations.
The European Union, while it continues to support a mandatory regime, does not
appear to be willing to support the cuts of up to 80-90% by 2050 that are
necessary to prevent irreversible large-scale climate change. In terms of its
approach to reducing carbon emissions, the EU, like the United States, has
increasingly given a central role to the corporate-friendly market approach of
carbon trading.
On the critical issue of providing the South with assistance for technology and
adaptation, the EU, again like United States, prefers to channel the relatively
little money it has so far been willing to commit not through institutional
mechanisms set up under UN auspices but through those established by the World
Bank, such as the Bank's Climate Investment Funds. The reason is simple: the
North controls the World Bank.
Most importantly, like the United States and Japan, the European governments
continue to hang on to the position that economic growth can be "decoupled"
from energy use. In other words, they think they can maintain current European
consumption levels and only have to achieve the more efficient use of energy
and replace oil with other energy sources.
Thus, the EU has preferred to lull Europeans with panaceas. Brussels has
championed biofuels, though its enthusiasm has been dampened somewhat by the
increasingly evident negative impact of biofuels on global agricultural
production. It has also increasingly come out in support of hard energy
alternatives, such as mega-dams and carbon sequestration and storage
technology, and has also reopened the discussion on nuclear energy.
The focus on techno-fixes is not limited to the political and economic elites
of the North but is shared by key members of its intellectual elite. I'm not
talking about people like the Danish climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg but
influential opinion-makers like Jeffrey Sachs, who has attempted to transform
himself from the author of economic shock therapy in Eastern Europe to a
progressive partisan of the struggles to end poverty and to fight global
warming.
In his latest book Common Wealth, Sachs' message is that technology can
make the transition to a clean green world a relatively painless one, with no
major lifestyle change in the North and no change in the high-growth
development paradigm in the South. "Rather than focusing, as some
environmentalists do, on reducing the income and consumption of the rich
world," he asserts, "we should focus much more on raising the ...
sustainability of the world's technologies."
For Sachs, the key technology is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) "which
will allow the world to continue to use low-cost fossil fuels such as coal in a
manner that does not wreck the climate." With what can only be described as
childlike techno-enthusiasm, Sachs says, "air capture would allow humanity to
reverse a previous rise of CO2 by capturing and sequestering more carbon
dioxide than is being emitted in any period! Put differently, the best that can
be achieved at a power plant is to stop new emissions. With air capture, we
could put into reverse what we've done up to this point." That this technology
is at least 20 years away from being a practical technology and comes with
unknown risks does not enter Sachs' sci-fi scenario.
Capitalism and the climate crisis
Herman Daly, the renowned environmentalist, calls this attitude - that
environmental action stops when it begins to impinge on the economy -
"growthmania". Growthmania, however, goes beyond being a psychological fix. It
is a cultivated ideological predisposition that serves as a protective shield
for global capitalism. Capitalism is an expansive mode of production, and it
can only reproduce itself by continually transforming living nature into dead
commodities. This is essentially what growth is all about. This is why
ever-increasing consumption is so central to the engine of profitability that
drives capitalism.
The G-8, the directorate of global capitalism, is trying hard to avoid just
such radical controls on growth, consumption, profits, and the market that a
viable strategy to stave off the looming climate catastrophe will necessitate.
Voluntary cuts, technofixes, and carbon trading are desperate efforts to
prevent the inevitable. Just like the US economy during World War II, it will
take planned economies with severely regulated markets and profits, strictly
controlled consumption, and equitably shared sacrifice to win the war against
climate change.
Walden Bello, a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, is also senior
analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the
Global South and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.
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