Oh, when there’s too much of nothing,
No one has control.
Bob Dylan
It’s getting harder to hide the climate crisis.
February, for example,
saw a landmark conference1 in which leading
scientists, one after the other, stepped forward to draw a clear, unambiguous
line. No more “uncertainty” for these guys. As John Schellnhuber,
director of Cambridge’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, put it: “We
now know that if we go beyond two degrees we will raise hell.”
Note to
Americans: he means 2 degrees Centigrade. Which, since the warming
already clocks in at 0.7C, gives us about 1.3C to go, with an additional
half degree, or more, already “locked in.” And beyond 2C degrees, which is, alas,
exactly where we’re headed, the projections pass from grim to terrifying.
Which means that not only do global carbon emissions have to drop,
soon and substantially, but so does the atmospheric carbon concentration
itself, which has already passed the highest point that can be plausibly
called “safe.” And
it has to do so while the developing world, well … develops.
If, of course,
we want to avoid “hell.” To help you decide, imagine the current
global drought deepening, and settling in to stay; imagine 3 billion people,
packed into Southern mega-cities, under “severe water stress;” imagine
a loss of 1/3 or more of terrestrial species, including, of course, polar bears;
and imagine the die-off of a drying Amazon. Imagine the melting of the Greenland
and West Antarctic ice, and the rising of the oceans. Imagine, too, that “development” itself
goes Up in Smoke.2 Do so because global
warming threatens to make the international targets on halving global poverty
by 2015, the “Millennium Development Goals,” entirely unattainable.
No wonder,
as all this seeps gradually into our resistant minds, we’re getting a wee
bit alarmed. We have, in effect, run out over the edge of the cliff, and just
now, like Wiley Coyote tempting the laws of physics, we’re looking down.
The
G8 (plus 5)
Obviously, this situation requires a global response. What
seems less obvious, at least among the elites, is that this can’t be a business-as-usual
response in which the climate crisis becomes just another excuse for strengthening
the winds of neoliberalism.
The stakes would be clearer if it weren’t for
the Bush regime. Because, frankly, even neoliberalism—especially the European
sort—can look pretty good when compared to the kind of fundamentalism now
being exported from Washington. Case in point: Tony Blair, and his attempt to
focus the recent G8 summit on two areas, climate change and Africa, that rarely
rise to the top of the elite agenda. Was this an attempt to cover over the stench
of his Iraq policies? Absolutely. But the question here is if, whatever his motivation,
he accomplished anything useful.
Did he, in particular, manage to accomplish
anything at the G8 summit?
Plenty of voices say he did, particularly
on the debt relief side, though he clearly failed in his (currently pointless)
effort to bring the United States back into the international climate regime.
Even on the climate front, however, the optimists cite Mr. Bush’s acknowledgement that
climate change is real, and that human activities lay beneath a significant fraction
of the recent warming. In fact, however, it wasn’t Blair who won the point
here; it was the scientists, who with the help of some recently extreme weather
have begun to drive the denialists back toward their holes. And it was the climate
movement itself, which is weaving initiatives at every level—local, regional,
national, and international—into a net that even GOP realists know they
can’t avoid much longer.3
The
real action, though—and this gets us back to neo-liberalism, and geo-politics
as usual—is the one where the rich world and the poor world circle each
other on the global playing field, each working towards a climate regime that,
somehow, satisfies their “national interests.” Here, the big news
at the G8 summit was the attendance of high-level representatives from Brazil,
China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, and the summit’s concluding plans
for a “dialogue” with these same countries that will continue, quietly,
before the next session of the formal climate negotiations this November in Montreal.
This was interesting. Because if we’re going to avoid global climate catastrophe,
we’re going to do it by way of a new future in which the South takes a
low-carbon path. Everyone (serious) knows this, though when it comes to the shape
of this new future, and the best strategy for pursuing it, the consensus immediately
breaks down. The Europeans want real engagement with the South, at meetings that
begin with clear-eyed, cold-coffee presentations from the scientists, while the
Americans still prefer to leverage their old faiths in power politics and technological
salvation. As for the developing world, well let’s just say that the tension
is rising. Soon now, very soon, the formal debate on the future regime is going
to begin, and one thing we know for sure is that neither Beijing, New Delhi,
nor Brasilia has any intention of bargaining away its “right to development.”
Not
that the G8 is a proper venue for global negotiation. But the G8 communiqué (one
of Blair’s small victories) is quite explicit that the proposed dialogue
is not to be seen as an alternative to the official UN talks, which after all
won the Kyoto Protocol against all efforts by the Bush administration and its
allies. And, frankly, the G8+5 dialogue may well make for a reasonable sort of
ad hoc executive session, and even offer a helpful supplement to the official
negotiations.
Or maybe not. Again, the problem is that the Bush people can make
even neo-liberalism-as-usual look good. Paul Wolfowitz, as the new
head of the World Bank, was already on message at the end of the summit, emphasizing
that the G8 has asked the Bank to construct a “new framework for mobilizing
investment in clean energy and development.” 4 Other
commentary makes it clear, as if there was any doubt, that the Bank
sees its role as one that will persist even after 2012 when, if the
Bush people get their way, Kyoto will expire without an heir.5
This
is neoliberalism as usual. For the Bank, as we should all know by
now, is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It has single-handedly
financed over $25 billion in fossil fuel-based projects since 1992,
when the UN Climate Convention was signed at the Earth Summit. And
even when taken together with the Global Environmental Facility,
a nominally autonomous financing arm that was created to, in part, finance
climate change mitigation, it has invested over 17 times more in
fossil fuels and fossil power plants as in renewable forms of energy and energy
efficiency.
You’d think
that this would be enough, but not for the Bush crowd. Only a few
weeks after the G8 summit faded into the echoes of the London bombings,
the United States moved to undercut the G8 process, as it has sought
to undercut the UN negotiations themselves, by pursuing a high-concept,
technology-centered strategy of overlapping bilateral agreements
in which it can maneuver freely, without the troublesome presence
of either grim climatologists or European surrender monkeys.
The Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development
and Climate
The Partnership, as I will call it, surfaced on July
27th, though it’s clear that its building blocks—a series of bilateral technology
agreements between the United States and other countries—have been in the
works for at least three years. Now, as the run-up to the Montreal climate conference
begins, White House managers decided it was time to go public. And going public
requires, as well all know, a good marketing plan and flashy packaging. Thus
the “Partnership,” and thus the very focused messaging about the “post
Kyoto” era that went along with it. The New York Times story,
for example, began by announcing that “The United States plans to join
China and India in an Asian-Pacific climate agreement intended to replace the
Kyoto pact as a method to control greenhouse emissions … ”6
This
isn’t actually what the agreement says—the Partnership “vision
statement”7 goes out of its
way to say that the partnership “will be consistent with and contribute to our
efforts under the UNFCCC and will complement, but not replace, the Kyoto Protocol”—but
it’s the spin. And this is all about spin.
The Partnership consists of
the United States, Australia, China, India, South Korea, and Japan, and
is designed, unsurprisingly, to address the climate crisis without mandatory
emissions targets. Instead, it emphasizes the development of a variety of energy
technologies, many if not most of them focused on coal, and implies some as-yet-unspecified
terms for transferring those technologies to the developing world. It is entirely
voluntary; in fact, under the wrappings, it looks a lot like a trade pact.
And it vividly displays the U.S. political/rhetorical strategy, which far too
few climate analyses have taken seriously enough: it grants the primacy of
development to the South, beginning with “Development and poverty eradication are urgent and overriding
goals internationally,” and going on to remind us that “the international
community agreed in the Delhi Declaration on Climate Change and Sustainable Development
[this was three years ago] on the importance of the development agenda in considering
any climate change approach.”
Be clear here. There’s absolutely no
chance that we can avoid a climate catastrophe without a massive energy technology
revolution, and without financing and tech-transfer regimes that rapidly spread
the best new low-carbon energy technologies around the world. The question is
if the menu here, which (like the Energy Bill) is heavy with “clean coal” technologies
and puts in a good word for nuclear, is the proper infrastructure of the greenhouse
transition. The question, too, is if Wolfowitz’s World Bank is soon going
to announce a link between the Partnership and its “new framework for mobilizing
investment in clean energy and development.” And, ultimately, the question
is if China and India—both countries with huge coal reserves—are
going to throw their lot in with the United States.
It’s possible, especially
in the short term, and especially if the bribes are large enough. The bribes
and the linkages. The Bush administration is in the process of radically upgrading
its “strategic partnership” with India,8 and
the next few years could see even joint U.S. / India military operations.
And as for China, let’s just say that its need for energy has been prominent
in the news lately. It’s not really very hard, all things considered, to
understand why either country sees “The Coal Pact,” as it’s
being called in Australia, as being in its national interest.
In the long run,
and probably soon, the Partnership will pass, for at bottom it’s mostly
packaging. It’s not like it’s going to mobilize the capital and initiative
needed to open a real road to low-carbon development, a road wide enough for
China, and India, and the rest of the developing world, to actually take. Not
like it’s going to set off an efficiency revolution in the North. Not like
it’s going to close the gap between the threat and the still-missing response.
Not like it can actually work.
But it is clever, and it is dangerous, and it
is a warning. It certainly portends another wave of political sleaze,
as the U.S. and Australian governments campaign, once again, to declare Kyoto
irrelevant, and to further muddy the waters of the post-2012 debate. And there’s this:
The South really does not intend to agree to anything that does not guarantee
it a path to developmental equity, and until a regime that meets this rather
daunting criteria is on the table, the Bush people, and indeed the whole fossil-fuel
/ development-as-usual cartel, are going to find it easy to sow discord and division.
The bottom line: there’s nothing much here, but it’s a dangerous
nothing.
End Notes
- www.stabilisation2005.com
- Andrew Simms, John Magrath, and Hannah
Reid, with contributions from the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, Up
in smoke? Threats from, and responses to, the impact of global warming on human
development, New Economics Foundation, October 20, 2004, at
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=196
- Juliet Eilperin, “Senators Struggle
to Act on Global Warming,” Washington Post, July 22, 2005, at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072102235.html
- Statement By Paul Wolfowitz, President
Of The World Bank, At Conclusion Of G8 Summit, Press Release No:2006/011/S,
at
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/
ORGANIZATION/EXTOFFICEPRESIDENT/0,,contentMDK:20576899~
menuPK:51175739~pagePK:51174171~piPK:64258873~theSitePK:1014541,00.html
- Lesley Wroughton, World Bank to take
lead in new climate change plan, Reuters, July 20, 2005, at
http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=
URI:urn:newsml:reuters.com:20050720:MTFH17554_2005-07-20_15-25-03_N19392712:1
- Jane Perlez, “U.S. to Join China
and India in Climate Pact,” New York Times, July 27, 2005, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/27/international/asia/27emissions.html?
- Vision Statement of Australia, China,
India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the U.S. for a New Asia-Pacific
Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, Fact Sheet, Bureau of Oceans
and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Washington, DC, July
28, 2005, at http://www.state.gov/g/oes/rls/fs/50335.htm
- Praful Bidwai, “India Moves Toward
a New Compact with the United States,” Silver City, NM & Washington,
DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, July 14, 2005, at http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/157
Tom Athanasiou is the co-director of EcoEquity (www.ecoequity.org) and, most recently, the co-author, with Paul Baer, of Dead: Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming.
