Tag: Kyoto Protocol

I think today must go down in history as the moment when humanity collectively failed to secure its own future. It also has to be seen as one of the greatest crimes of the rich and powerful of the world against the vast majority of humanity that has ever been committed.

Although I won’t hear the full skinny on final negotiations inside the COP17 conference until later in the day, it’s already clear that the news is not going to be good.

Here’s what former Bolivian ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon had to say in a hasty email sent out while negotiators sprinted towards the finish line last night:

A few moments ago we found out the decisions that they have been cooking behind the scenes. In Durban they won’t approve a second period of commitments of the Kyoto Protocol. This will happen at the end of next year: in COP18. In Durban they will only take note of the draft amendments and the “intention” of rich countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol will lose its heart. The promises of reductions by rich countries will be incredibly low until 2020 and will lead to a temperature increase of more than 4 degrees C. The Kyoto Protocol will turn into a Zombie without a global figure for reduction of emissions by industrialised countries, and will carry on walking until 2020 just so that carbon markets don’t disappear. In 2020 it will enter into effect in “a new legal framework appliable to everyone”. By everyone, they mean diluting the difference between developed and developing countries, between countries responsible for climate change and those who victims. The US managed to eliminate any mention of a “binding” agreement. That means the “new legal framework” will be an empty gesture without any effect. This will become known as the lost decade of the fight against climate change. Genocide and ecocide will reach proportions that we have not yet seen. The Great Escape by the Rich has turned into the Great Swindle.

Solon does not toss around terms like genocide and ecocide carelessly. The failure to agree to a just and binding replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, the only climate agreement that humanity has ever reached that had any real teeth, signals the inability of humanity in general, and the rich nations in particular, to agree on a course of action that goes beyond competitive, short term interests. We’re essentially looking at a world in which inter-imperial tensions are being ratcheted up, leaving the rulers of powerful nations thinking only about their defensive interests. The killing irony is that this behavior will only ensure greater hostility and competition.

If one looks at the geologic record, it’s clear that human beings have enjoyed a period of extraordinary environmental stability over the last 10,000 years. It is likely that this stability would have ended one way or another at some point, but, with the failure of negotiations at COP17 to achieve any of the goals that the climate justice movement has been pushing for, we have ourselves ensured that this window of stability will close quickly and ferociously.

It’s hard not to think that we’re not all that different from other primates. Despite our vaunted claims to self-consciousness, historical awareness, and collective rationality, at the end of the day we seem to be ruled by the basest of our passions.

Today we have ensured that we will be unable to take our fate into our own hands. And it is the poor and weak, people like the rural farm women I’ve met over the last two weeks during my stay in South Africa, who will be the first to be devoured by the holocaust we are unleashing.

COP17 – the 17th annual Conference of Parties, aka the Conference of Polluters – began on Monday in Durban, South Africa.  The Kyoto Protocol, to which most attendee nations (but not the U.S.) are signatories, is widely acknowledged to be in its death throes.

As in previous U.N. climate conferences, civil society organizations are mounting a counter-summit, a step that is particularly important given the significant reduction in the number of NGOs allowed to register for the conference.  But will global civil society be able to exert any influence on the powerful nations of the world? How much traction can a radical anti-capitalist critique of over-development gain under current conditions of global economic crisis? Will rising inter-imperial competition between nations such as the U.S., China, and Brazil spell the end of the Kyoto Protocol and a complete abandonment of all attempts to regulate the world’s increasingly chaotic environment?

Sitting waiting to sort out housing after arriving on a red-eye flight to Durban, I met Dr. Landry Mayigane, a young veterinarian from Rwanda who is one of the organizers of the youth delegation to COP17.  He said that the young people from around the globe whom he helps to organize are feeling very pessimistic about the current meeting.

According to Landry, there is little hope that any substantial forward progress is going to come out of a meeting held under the current global economic downturn.  The point here is pretty obvious: global elites are taking the current economic crisis a pretext to impose austerity rather than – as they should – an opportunity to facilitate a just transition to a truly sustainable society.  One way that such a transition might be effected is through a Million Climate Jobs initiative – a campaign being spearheaded, at least in organizational site, by a guy I ran into last night: Jonathan Neale.

He also talked about how disillusioned many civil society organizations became after the Copenhagen climate summit.  The huge mobilization resistance groups engaged in there failed to produce any meaningful movement, and, it could be argued, the situation has deteriorated significantly in terms of international negotiations since then.  For example, Landry noted that just two days ago, the Canadian government announced that it is going to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol.

The evening ended with me sitting bleary-eyed through a meeting of the Climate Justice Network as they debated whether to back a press conference to be organized by five prominent groups (e.g. Friends of the Earth – Africa). There was quite a lot of debate about whether to move forward with this initiative given the fact that many in the People’s Space cannot get into the conference; significant numbers of people expressed concern about the impact on the People’s Space of holding meetings “inside.”  Where, some wondered, would “outside” be if “inside” was so sanctioned?  This debate I think underlines how marginal social movements (and the 99% in general) are to the entire UN process as presently constituted.