Uncivil society will have to take up the slack and apply direct pressure, starting with the slogan ‘leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole and the tarsand in the land!’

By Patrick Bond

In Copenhagen, the world’s richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out.

Instead of halting the hedonism, Barack Obama and the Euro elites cracked open the mansion door to add a few nouveau riche guests: South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, China’s Jiabao Wen (reportedly the most obnoxious of the lot), Brazil’s Lula Inacio da Silva and India’s Manmohan Singh. By Saturday morning, still punch-drunk with power over the planet, these wild and crazy party animals had stumbled back onto their jets and headed home.

The rest of us now have a killer hangover, because on behalf mainly of white capitalists (who are having the most fun of all), the world’s rulers stuck the poor and future generations with vast clean-up charges – and worse: certain death for millions.

The 770 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere envisaged in the Copenhagen Accord signatories’ promised 15% emissions cuts from 1990 levels to 2020 – which in reality could be a 10% increase once carbon trading and offset loopholes are factored in – will cook the planet, say scientists, with nine out of ten African peasants losing their livelihood.

The most reckless man at the party, of course, was the normally urbane, Ivy League-educated lawyer who, a year ago, we hoped might behave with the dignity and compassion behooving the son of a leading Kenyan intellectual. But in Obama’s refusal to lead the North to make 45% emissions cuts and offer payment of the $400 billion annual climate debt owed to Third World victims by 2020, Obama trashed not only Africa but also the host institution, according to 350.org leader Bill McKibben: ‘he blew up the United Nations.’

Economist Jeffrey Sachs charged Obama with abandoning ‘the UN framework, because it was proving nettlesome to US power and domestic politics. Obama’s decision to declare a phony negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signaling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the “pesky” concerns of many smaller and poorer countries.’

The Accord is ‘insincere, inconsistent, and unconvincing’, Sachs continued, ‘unlikely to accomplish anything real. It is non-binding and will probably strengthen the forces of opposition to emissions reductions.’ Moreover, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s ‘announcements about money a decade from now are mostly empty words. They do not bind the rich countries at all.’

As Naomi Klein summed up, the Accord is ‘nothing more than a grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters: I’ll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.’

A handful of technocrats must also shoulder blame, including two key South African officials. A week earlier, before the politicians arrived, Pretoria bureaucrats Joanne Yawitch and Alf Wills were already criticized by leading Third World negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping for dividing the South’s main negotiating group, the G77. Yawitch then forced a humiliating apology from Di-Aping for his frank talk (to an African civil society caucus) about her treachery. On Friday night, Zuma did exactly what she had denied was underway: destroyed the unity of Africa and the G77.

The Pretoria team went to Copenhagen empowered by endorsements from the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace – alongside gullible climate journalists – who took at face value a vaguely-promised 34% emissions cut below anticipated 2020 levels, even though absolute decline would only begin after 2030. Tristen Taylor of Earthlife Africa begged Pretoria for details and after two weeks of delays, learned Yawitch’s estimates were from a ‘Growth Without Constraint’ (GWC) scenario.

According to Taylor, ‘GWC is fantasy, essentially an academic exercise to see how much carbon South Africa would produce given unlimited resources and cheap energy prices.’ Officials had already conceded GWC was ‘neither robust nor plausible’ eighteen months ago, leading Taylor to conclude, ‘The SA government has pulled a public relations stunt.’ WWF and Greenpeace owe an explanation for their incompetence.

Then came Friday, which George Monbiot compared to the 1884-85 Berlin negotiations known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’, which divided-and-conquered the continent. The African Union was twisted and U-turned to support Zuma’s capitulation by the man appointed its climate leader, Meles Zenawi. In September, the Ethiopian dictator claimed, ‘If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threatens to be another rape of our continent.’

But he didn’t walk out, he walked off his plane in Paris on the way to Copenhagen, into the arms of Nicolas Sarkozy. The fateful side deal, according to Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), is ‘undermining the bold positions of our negotiators and ministers represented here, and threatening the very future of Africa.’

Not only did Zuma and Zenawi surrender on emissions cuts, but also on demanding full payment of the North’s climate debt to the South. ‘Meles wants to sell out the lives and hopes of Africans for a pittance,’ said Mwenda. ‘Every other African country has committed to policy based on the science.’

Clinton and the US team refused to acknowledge the North’s vast climate debt, owed not only for climate damage but for excessive use of environmental space. Huffed Washington’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, ‘the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations – I just categorically reject that.’

Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations Pablo Solon replied, ‘Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. We are not assigning guilt, merely responsibility. As they say in the US, if you break it, you buy it.’

Stern’s aversion to ‘culpability’ translates into rejection of his own government’s straightforward ‘polluter pays’ principle as well as the foundational concepts of the Superfund, responsible for cleaning toxic waste dumps across the US.

Worse, if the Copenhagen Accord is widely endorsed by February 1, much of the promised funding would flow via notoriously corrupt Clean Development Mechanism projects which often do great damage in local settings. According to the Accord, ‘We decide to pursue opportunities to use markets to enhance the cost-effectiveness of and to promote mitigations actions.’

But carbon markets continue failing, as long predicted by the Durban Group for Climate Justice and more recently by http://www.storyofcapandtrade.org. Last Thursday, the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme anticipated the feeble Copenhagen outcome – including a defunct forest offsets deal – by dropping 5%. The benchmark price is just 13.66 euros, less than half the peak of mid-2008, far lower than required to attract renewable energy investments.

According to European Climate Exchange director Patrick Birley, ‘We were hoping that a deal in Copenhagen would open up new opportunities for emissions trading. That expectation has now faded’.

This leaves South Africa and the others as accomplices to an historic climate crime that cannot be covered up. The claim that post-apartheid Pretoria only looks after itself has often been made elsewhere on the continent. For example, former president Thabo Mbeki’s nickname at the World Economic Forum’s mid-2003 meeting in Mozambique was ‘the George Bush of Africa’, as the Sunday Times reported.

Climate damage to Africa will include much more rapid desertification, more floods and droughts, worse water shortages, increased starvation, floods of climate refugees jamming shanty-packed megalopolises, and the spread of malarial and other diseases. Ironically, Obama’s and Zuma’s own rural relatives in Kenya and KwaZulu-Natal will be amongst the first victims of the Accord.

Did Zuma know what he was doing, acting in Copenhagen on behalf of major mining/metals corporations, which keep SA’s ruling party lubricated with cash, ‘black economic empowerment’ deals and jobs for cronies, and which need higher SA carbon emissions so as to continue receiving the world’s cheapest electricity, and which then export their profits to London and Melbourne?

Perhaps, but on the other hand, two other explanations – ignorance and cowardice – were, eight years ago, Zuma’s plausible defenses for promoting AIDS denialism in 2000. He helped Mbeki during the period in which 330,000 South Africans died due to Pretoria’s refusal to supply anti-retroviral medicines (as a Harvard Public Health School study showed). To his credit, Zuma reversed course by 2003, as public pressure arose from the Treatment Action Campaign and its international allies. That’s exactly what the main local activist network, Climate Justice Now! South Africa, must repeat, or otherwise permit Zuma to remain a signatory to a far worse genocide.

In the US, given that Obama’s counterproductive cap-and-trade legislation is grid-locked in the Senate, the logical response – if he cares a whit about the climate – is to compel the Environmental Protection Agency to start shrinking greenhouse gas emissions by the worst polluters through its recent ‘endangerment’ finding, to locate serious resources (e.g. through Third World debt cancellation) to pay carbon debt damages that can finance adaptation for climate victims, and to formally decommission the nascent US carbon markets, which delay the needed structural change towards a post-carbon economy. None of these strategies need congressional authorization.

In South Africa, Zuma should do exactly the same. Neither will, of course.

So uncivil society will have to take up the slack and apply direct pressure, starting with the slogan ‘leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole and the tarsand in the land!’ Indeed the most effective antidote to the post-Copenhagen hangover came from environmentalists – most visibly, Greenpeace – stretching from Australia to Africa to Appalachia to Alberta.

On December 20, on a bridge leading to the world’s largest coal port, in Newcastle, Australia’s Rising Tide activists blocked a train for 7.5 hours, with 23 arrests.

In South Africa, groundWork, Earthlife and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance are amongst the country’s serious environmentalists trying to keep coal in the hole, by protesting the recently-announced $3.75 billion World Bank loan to Eskom (which helps fund the vast Medupi coal-fired plant), increased coal exports from Richards Bay, ultra-cheap electricity for aluminium smelters and mines, filthy operations of Sasol oil-to-coal, a new dirty oil refinery near Port Elizabeth, and a proposed Durban-Johannesburg pipeline which will double fuel flow to Africa’s least sustainable city.

Up the Atlantic Coast, the climate’s and the people’s main ally is the militancy which keeps Niger Delta oil in the soil. The Port Harcourt-based NGO Environmental Rights Action, led by visionary Nnimmo Bassey, links local destruction to global climate chaos. Sabotage of oil extraction is the consistent tactic of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which ended a two month ceasefire by attacking a Shell and Chevron pipeline six hours after the Copenhagen Accord was signed.

In Appalachia, West Virginia’s Climate Ground Zero activists have, according to a December 19 report by Vicki Smith, ‘chained themselves to giant dump trucks, scaled 80-foot trees to stop blasting and paddled boots online into a 9 million-gallon sludge pond. They’ve blocked roads, hung banners and staged sit-ins. Virginia-based Massey Energy claims a single 3 1/2-hour occupation cost the company $300,000.’

And in Canada on December 20, anti-tarsands environmentalist Ingmar Lee climbed a flagpole at the British Columbia parliament to protest carbon crimes by prime minister Stephen Harper, provincial premier Gordon Campbell and their ally Tzeporah Berman from the corrupted NGO ForestEthics. At the Canadian High Commission on London’s Pall Mall last week, Camp for Climate Action activists offered solidarity to Alberta’s indigenous Canadian tarsands victims by cutting down the maple-leaf flag, drowning it in crude oil, and then locking down on an upstairs balcony.

So if only two things were accomplished in Copenhagen, they were the unveiling of Pretoria, Delhi, Beijing and Brasilia as willing criminal accomplices to the Washington/Brussel/Tokyo/Melbourne/Ottawa axis, and the rise of Climate Justice Action, Climate Justice Now!, 350.org and parallel movements whose hundreds of thousands of protesters swarmed streets of the world’s cities.

The next question is whether in 2010, before the next fiasco in Mexico City, the latter can cancel the former. We all depend upon an affirmative answer.

These were not angry anarchists. These were young people who had spent the last few years of their lives working hard to make this process work. They came from groups like Greenpeace and Avaaz and Energy Action and 350.org. They all had credentials to the conference, but almost none had been inside for days, ever since the U.N. decided to stop letting more than a token few NGOs into the hall. They had written position papers, advised small nations, organized email blasts, and now—at least for the moment—it had all come to an end, an end far worse than most had imagined.

Inside, the less important nations of the world were still “negotiating,” trying to decide whether to sign on to the text that the powers that be had left behind. It was an empty and impotent debate, resembling in its power the “model UNs” that high schoolers conduct in civics classes across the U.S. It was also brave—an effort to say that the process of trying to solve the world’s problems will continue.

It’s unclear what that process will look like, or what role global civil society will play in a world where the power balance is now more nakedly obvious than it was before yesterday. China and the U.S. have taken it upon themselves to solve the biggest problem we face, but both have set out profoundly unambitious plans for doing so.

The best guess from the modelers at Climate Interactive was that the proposals various countries were making might yield a world 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and with a carbon concentration of 770 ppm. That’s hot, and it’s why it felt cold down under that Metro station.

With climate agreement, Obama guts progressive values

The President of the United States did several things with his agreement today with China, India, and South Africa:

• He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight. The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want on questions like human rights or the role of women or fighting polio or handling refugees. But when you get too close to the center of things that count—the fossil fuel that’s at the center of our economy—you can forget about it. We’re not interested. You’re a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves, we don’t want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for 50 years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America’s economy. We already did this with war and peace, and now we’ve done it with global warming. What exactly is the point of the U.N. now?

• He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters. China, the U.S., and India don’t want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse. It is no accident that the targets are weak to nonexistent. We don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves with targets, he said. Indeed. And now imagine what this agreement will look like with the next Republican president.

• He demonstrated the kind of firmness and resolve that Americans like to see. It will play well politically at home and that will be the worst part of the deal. Having spurned Europe and the poor countries of the world, he will reap domestic political benefit. George Bush couldn’t have done this—the reaction would have been too great. Obama has taken the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear. The ice caps won’t be the only things we lose with this deal.

When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out “in Mexico one year from now.”(1) Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch: the place where failed negotiations go to die?

De Boer might pretend that this is just a temporary hitch, but he knows what happens when talks lose momentum. A year ago I asked him what he feared most. This is what he said. “The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second WTO. … Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet, and I am afraid that if we don’t, then the process will begin to slip, and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic.”(2)

We can live without a new trade agreement; we can’t live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.

Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We currently enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.

A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places than can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was four degrees centigrade. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.

Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production “is very likely to decrease above about 3C”(3). The panel uses the phrase “very likely” to mean a probability of above 90%(4). Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of three or more degrees by the end of the century.

Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century – probably less than a metre – is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was around 1.3 degrees higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun. A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today’s(5). Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won’t have a country any more.

As people are displaced from their homes by drought and sea level rise, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts: sudden droughts and storm surges.

This is why the least developed countries, which will be hit hardest, made the strongest demands in Copenhagen. One hundred and two poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited not to two degrees but to 1.5. The chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked “to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”(6).

The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama. The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal which outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation; either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.

The British and American governments have blamed the Chinese government for the failure of the talks. It’s true that the Chinese worked hard to mess them up, but Obama also put Beijing in an impossible position. He demanded concessions while offering nothing. He must have known the importance of not losing face in Chinese politics: his unilateral diplomacy amounted to a demand for self-abasement. My guess is that this was a calculated manoeuvre guaranteed to produce instransigence, whereupon China could be blamed for the outcome he wanted.

Why would Obama do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.

So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian every day – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions onto the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero.

Is this music not to your taste sir, or madam? Perhaps you would like our little orchestra to play something louder, to drown out that horrible grinding noise.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Yvo de Boer, 19th December 2009. http://unfccc.int/2860.php

2. From transcript of video interview for the Guardian’s “Monbiot Meets” series. You can watch the edited discussion here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/08/monbiot-yvo-de-boer-climate

3. IPCC, 2007. Assessing key vulnerabilities and the risk from climate change. Table 19.1. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter19.pdf

4. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/supporting-material/uncertainty-guidance-note.pdf

5. Robert E. Kopp et al, 17th December 2009. Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage. Nature Vol 462, pp863-868. doi:10.1038/nature08686

6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/20/copenhagen-obama-brown-climate

NASA climate scientist James Hansen never expected the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen to amount to much. He told the British

Hansen is arguably the world’s best known and most respected climate scientist. Sometimes called the “grandfather of climate change,” he began modeling the effects of warming three decades ago and first testified about climate change before Congress in 1988. He was one of the key figures to blow the whistle on the Bush Administration for censoring science and trying to muzzle warnings about the urgency of the climate crisis.

In the past few years, Hansen has expanded his activities outside the laboratory and into the political fray. In June, he was arrested after marching at a rally against mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia.

More recently, he has become a leading opponent of cap-and-trade, a market approach to greenhouse gas regulation that puts a limit on how much carbon can be emitted and then allows polluters to trade permits to emit. Hansen claims the approach ultimately will not produce the kinds of emissions cuts the world needs to avoid catastrophic climate change. It will simply allow “polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars,” he says. He is especially critical of the large number of offsets available under the current policy proposals, which allow polluters to pay for emissions reductions elsewhere in the world. He points to some offset schemes that have led to fraud, giving credit for pollution reductions that never actually happened.

Hansen is championing an alternative solution called fee-and-dividend, which would impose a fee on any pollution source (mines, ports of entry) and distribute the revenue back to the public. Both fee-and-dividend and cap-and-trade attempt to reduce carbon emissions by raising the price of fossil fuels, but Hansen insists the former is simpler and less vulnerable to speculation and gaming.

Advocates of cap-and-trade have been dismissive of Hansen’s arguments. David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council says Hansen is simply wrong about cap-and-trade, insists the approach has been effective in the European Union, and maintains that the leading bills now before Congress have enough safeguards to avoid market manipulation. Economist Paul Krugman accuses Hansen of naïve thinking: “hard-science guys tend to assume that [economists are] witch doctors with nothing to tell them.”

Hansen has faced off critics before. He is not alone in his critique. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, says that “carbon-trading represents an unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and … offsets … threaten to become a resource grab of colonial proportions.” The Indigenous Environmental Network calls cap-and-trade a false solution “that will allow the fossil fuel industry to continue to do what they do—drill, baby, drill.” In November, two longtime U.S. EPA attorneys published a video online calling cap-and-trade “a huge mistake.”

I caught up with Hansen by phone on Monday morning to ask his reaction to Copenhagen and discuss his new book, Storms of My Grandchildren (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Madeline Ostrander: Is the outcome of the talks in Copenhagen better or worse than you imagined?

James Hansen: I think it’s a good situation. Now we can step back and look at what is really needed.

The proposals discussed in Copenhagen were like the indulgences of the Middle Ages. The sinners are the developed countries, which are responsible for most of the excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They want to continue business as usual, by buying off the developing countries.

If developing countries can get a hundred billion dollars a year, that’s enormously attractive. But both parties are thumbing their noses at young people and future generations.

The hundred billion dollars a year—the money that Secretary of State Clinton claimed the United States would raise to give to developing countries—is vapor money. There’s no mechanism for such financing to actually occur, and no expectation that it will.

The leaders can’t just make up these greenwash statements and claim that they’re dealing with the problem. They’re doing the same thing they did with Kyoto. Before the Kyoto Protocol, global emissions had been increasing one and a half percent per year. After Kyoto, the rate accelerated to three percent per year.

Some countries did set goals to reduce their emissions under Kyoto, but when you look at the details, you see that those goals weren’t realized. For example, Japan had a very strong target under Kyoto, but its emissions actually increased substantially, and it bought off the difference using offsets—investing in China and in rainforests. A few countries in Europe reduced their emissions. But that didn’t reduce global emissions, because the industry and the emissions just moved overseas. Products were then sent back to European countries on airplanes, which do not have any tax on their fuel.

Madeline: What kinds of solutions should political leaders be discussing?

Jim: You have to recognize that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they’re going to be used. To change that situation, you have to place a gradually rising price on carbon emissions.

We have to have a very simple system—put a fee on fossil fuels at their origin at the mine or the port of entry. No exceptions.

If the carbon price rises to $115 per ton of carbon dioxide, considering the amount of oil, gas, and coal used last year in the United States, that would generate $670 billion dollars. That’s between $7,500 and $9,000 dollars per family.

That money needs to be given 100 percent to the public so that they have the resources to adjust their lifestyles—such as to buy more efficient vehicles or insulate their homes. As the carbon price rises, it’s going to become less and less sensible, for instance, to import food from halfway around the world. The economics would favor a nearby farm, as opposed to agriculture at a great distance.

You cannot have these boondoggles in which we invest billions and billions of dollars in so-called clean coal and give money to polluters.

Madeline: Did you see any signs of progress in Copenhagen?

Jim: There was one. We did have a clear statement from Al Gore. I’ve been urging him to say that a carbon price is the best way to get emissions to decrease, better than cap-and-trade with offsets. Gore calls it a carbon tax. I don’t call it that. Even John Kerry, the cosponsor of the lead bill in the Senate, made a statement admitting that a carbon fee needs to be considered. So I think there’s a chance we can have an honest discussion of fee-and-dividend this coming spring in the United States.

The direction that the United States goes determines the direction that the world goes. If we have a sensible approach approved by Congress, then there’s still a very good chance we could solve this climate problem.

Madeline: What do you think the public should do to move the United States toward a solution?

Jim: Public involvement is very important. Otherwise politics as usual tends to continue. When I was on the David Letterman show, he asked me that same question. I said people need to understand the difference between cap-and-trade with offsets and fee-and-dividend. Of course. he cut me off at that point [laughs], because that’s not a subject for a comedy show. But the concept is not difficult.

For instance, fee-and-dividend will be beneficial for the economy. When you put that amount of money into the public’s hands, it’s going to stimulate the economy. It’s not a net tax but a redistribution of income from the people who are burning a lot of carbon to those who are not. It will tend to discourage the processes that are the most wasteful of fossil fuels. That story has got to be communicated and understood by the public, and we have to put pressure on our politicians to act on behalf of the public, rather than on behalf of their campaign donors.

There are more than 2,000 fossil fuel lobbyists in Washington, and they have written most of the words for the leading climate bills—the Waxman-Markey House bill and the Boxer-Kerry Senate bill.

But we are beginning to see discussion of alternatives. During the campaign last year, Obama advocated for a 100 percent dividend. There was the Larson bill in the House, which had a small, but steadily increasing price on carbon. Now there’s the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, which gets rid of the offsets. It is still not exactly fee-and-dividend, but it gets very close. If there is an open discussion in the Senate and House about alternatives, I think it’s possible we could get on a sensible path.

Madeline: You’ve said that climate change isn’t just a scientific and political issue, but also a personal and moral issue.

Jim: Yeah, that’s exactly the point. We’re dealing with a planetary crisis. The climate system is in danger of passing tipping points. If we don’t address it, we leave our children with economic and social chaos within this century. Once that situation is understood, it becomes a question of intergenerational justice. It’s analogous to the situation that Abraham Lincoln faced with slavery or Winston Churchill faced with Nazism. It is a moral issue, and you can’t take a compromise position. You can’t say, “Oh, we’ll do a little bit, but we won’t solve the problem.”

Madeline: You spend so much of time looking at the data and the scale of the problem. What keeps you hopeful?

Jim: Well, if the problem could be understood, there’s no question that the public would support action. Look at the sacrifices the public made in World War II. Climate change is harder, because it’s less visible. But many of us had hoped that President Obama would help press the world to make the right decisions. Now in the next several months, climate change needs to come to the fore, and people need to understand the actions that are really required.

Madeline: In your book, you describe how your grandchildren have inspired you to push harder to get action on climate change. How has your family influenced your work?

Jim: My grandchildren were the reason that I couldn’t just continue to do the science without saying what the implications were. In 2004, I decided I would give one public talk, which I would prepare very carefully with scientific papers to back it up. But then I found that one talk doesn’t really have that much effect. So one thing led to another. Finally, I wrote this book. I bring my grandchildren into the story to explain how difficult it is to preserve a climate that will allow humans to continue to exist. The climate of the last 10,000 years has been very stable, and if we don’t get on a different path in the next several years, we’re going to guarantee that we not only change the climate but destroy a large fraction of the species on the planet.

The row over climate change isn’t just a battle between rich and poor, it illustrates the futility of obsession with economic growth

I’ve had the great Hollywood epic Terminator 2: Judgment Day [5] on my mind ever since I watched it in a hotel room in New Orleans a few weeks ago with the Superdome visible out the window. In 1991, at the time of its release, T2 was supposedly about a terrible future; now, it seems situated in an oddly comfortable past.

What apocalypses are you nostalgic for? The premise of the movie was that the machines we needed to worry about had not yet been invented, no less put to use: intelligent machines that would rebel against their human masters in 1997, setting off an all-out nuclear war that would get rid of the first three billion of us and lead to a campaign of extermination against the remnant of the human race scrabbling in the rubble of what had once been civilization.

By the time the film was released, the news of climate change was already filtering out. Reports like Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature had told us that the machines that could destroy us and our world had, in fact, been invented—a long, long time ago. Almost all of us had been using them almost all the time, from the era of the steam engine and the rise of the British coal economy through the age of railroads and the dawn of petroleum extraction to the birth of the internal-combustion engine and the spread of industrial civilization across the planet. They weren’t “intelligent” and they weren’t in revolt, nor were they led by any one super-machine. It was the cumulative effect of all those devices pumping back into the atmosphere the carbon that plants had so kindly buried in the Earth over the last few hundred million years.

The Superdome is, of course, where thousands of New Orleanians were stranded when Katrina, the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, broke the city’s levees and flooded the place. A maelstrom of institutional failures left people trapped in the scalding cauldron of a drowned city for five days while the world looked on aghast. It was a disaster that had been long foretold, and no one had done much to forestall it. No one had repaired those crummy levees or bothered to create a real evacuation plan for the city—and, unlike the revolt of the machines in T2, the future actually arrived. Like climate change.

For many, it was a foretaste of our new era. It may not be clear what role, if any, climate change played in the generation of that particular hurricane, but it is clear that, in this era, there will be, and indeed already have been, many more such calamities: the deadly freak rainstorms in Sicily, Britain, and the Philippines this fall, the increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic in recent years, as well as in the intensity of droughts [6], floods, heat waves, crop failures, and the displacement of populations, as well as the massive melting of glaciers and sea ice in the cold places, rising waters in the coastal ones, and oceans going acidic with devastating effects on marine life.

This is the actual nightmarish “movie” of our times. This is what our less-than-intelligent machines have actually wrought. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is already responsible [7] for 150,000 deaths annually. Unchecked it will kill far more, and no one’s measuring the despair in the island nations that may disappear and among those who live in, and off of, the melting arctic. Looking at the Superdome during the commercial breaks in T2, I wondered about the apocalypses already under our belts and the bumpy road ahead.

The Governor of the State with the Uncertain Shoreline

The plot of the movie, as most of you undoubtedly recall, is that the Terminator, also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the low-budget 1984 original [8], shows up again, sent back from the future 10 years after in the first epic. This time around, he’s not action-heroine Sarah Connor’s nemesis; he’s on the side of humanity, specifically of her son John Connor, the boy with the unambiguous initials who will grow up to lead the resistance to our extermination by machines.

Another more advanced Terminator is, in the meantime, also sent back from the future to destroy the messianic boy and his foulmouthed commando mom. The rest of the movie is a feast of shootouts, chases, explosions, and brilliantly plotted action. It was all surpassingly strange and compelling when I watched it, while wiped out with what was probably swine flu, a fever dream of the past’s nightmares that somehow didn’t manage to anticipate our waking hells.

Now, of course, the movie’s cyborg star is a major force in the real world. He’s my governor, more powerful but less charismatic than in his Terminator incarnation. Recently, he traveled to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to release the state’s 2009 Climate Adaptation Strategy [9], a 200-page document about the array of devastations the state faces and what countermeasures we can take. Early on, that document states:

“Climate change is already affecting California. Sea levels have risen by as much as seven inches along the California coast over the last century, increasing erosion and pressure on the state’s infrastructure, water supplies, and natural resources. The state has also seen increased average temperatures, more extreme hot days, fewer cold nights, a lengthening of the growing season, shifts in the water cycle with less winter precipitation falling as snow, and both snowmelt and rainwater running off sooner in the year.”

Looking to the future, the report predicted that there would be more fires, less water, loss of coastal lands, and up to $2.5 trillion of real estate put at risk by global warming. The Terminator, or governor, was on the island because, with even modest further rises in sea-level, it will disappear entirely. Hasta la vista, baby.

During the years the Bush Administration refused to do anything at all about climate change, Schwarzenegger arrived at the helm of a state that had already developed major innovations in energy efficiency and in creative price-structuring that took away power-company motives to push higher energy consumption. California had also sought to set new standards for carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles. The bill to do the last of these was crafted in 2002 by Fran Pavley, a newly elected state assemblywoman from Ventura County. When Obama came into office, the roadblocks were finally removed and the bill became the basis for national regulations that will make vehicles 40% more fuel-efficient by 2016. Pavley and Schwarzenegger were there at the Rose Garden signing of the regulations last May.

As Ronald Brownstein reported [10] in the Atlantic this October:

“Ambitious new initiatives have cascaded out of Schwarzenegger’s office—including the two measures raising the renewable-power requirement on utilities, a state subsidy program to encourage the installation of electricity-generating solar panels on 1 million California roofs, and in January 2007, an executive order establishing the nation’s first ‘low-carbon fuel standard,’ which requires a reduction of at least 10 percent in the carbon emissions from transportation fuels by 2020. Schwarzenegger signed a Pavley-sponsored bill imposing the nation’s first mandatory statewide reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill required the state by 2020 to roll back its emissions to the 1990 level—a reduction of about 15 percent from the current level. (By separate executive order, Schwarzenegger also committed the state to an 80 percent reduction by 2050.)”

It’d be easy to go with the Atlantic and frame the governor as a hero, but he landed in office by promising to cut vehicle taxes and has been in bed ever since with the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and the world’s fifth biggest corporation, Chevron. Even the organization that sent him to Copenhagen, Climate Action Reserve, is backed by Chevron and Shell—and the oil and coal industries have been the biggest domestic roadblocks to real climate-change measures. Nonetheless, at the Copenhagen climate conference he talked about R20, the alliance of states and provinces he’s co-founded to implement climate change measures at sub-national levels. And he has suggested [11] that climate-change deniers like Palin are “still living in the Stone Age.”

A Magnitude Shy of What Physics Demands

Think of Schwarzenegger as the hinge between the fantasy of Terminator 2 and the reality of our predicament. Think of Obama…

[12]Well, in T2, there’s Miles Dyson, a slender, well-spoken African-American family man who will engineer the computer technology that will create the intelligent machines that will annihilate practically everything. Sarah—Connor, not Palin—sets out to kill him, but her son shows up with his Terminator-Schwarzenegger sidekick, and they instead convince the not-so-mad scientist he’s about to do something terribly, terribly wrong. He then leads them to his workplace to destroy everything he’s ever done. When their violent erasure program sets off alarms that bring in squadrons of cops, Dyson ends up gravely wounded and holding the trigger to set off the explosion that will wipe out the technologies endangering future humanity—and himself.

Seeing this movie with its acts of self-sacrifice, now offers an occasion to ask: when’s the last time you’ve even seen a major politician who’ll put his finger to that trigger with humanity in mind, no less simply do anything that’s bad for reelection?

What if Obama would say what he has to know, what they all have to know, that saving the planet from our slo-mo, unevenly distributed version of Judgment Day requires destroying the status quo and maybe changing everything? What if he’d just learn from Schwarzenegger that you can do quite a lot and still survive politically?

As a disgusted Bill McKibben recently put it [13], “Obama will propose 4% reductions in [U.S. greenhouse gas] emissions by 2020, compared with 20% for the Europeans (a number the EU said they’d raise to 30% if the U.S. would go along). Scientists, meanwhile, have made it clear that a serious offer would mean about 40% cuts by 2020. So—we’re exactly an order of magnitude shy of what the physics demands.”

Bill, a normally mild-mannered guy who was overjoyed at Obama’s election, called the president’s position [14] “a lie inside a fib coated with spin.”

Thanks to a sudden decision [15] earlier this month by the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the executive branch to address the issue of climate-change gases under the Clean Air Act, Obama has apparently been given superpowers to act without being completely hamstrung by a reluctant Congress. Or as the Center for Biological Diversity put it [16], “President Obama can lead, rather than follow, by using his power under the Clean Air Act and other laws to achieve deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions from major polluters.”

Will he? Probably not. After all, he’s the man who stood up in Prague last April and said: “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” For a moment, it almost sounded [17] as if he was going to be the action hero of our antinuclear dreams, wiping out one apocalypse that has hung over us for sixty years. And then he added that he didn’t actually expect to see the abolition of such weaponry in his lifetime, though he didn’t say why.

Now, we’re in an action movie in which the fate of the Earth is truly at stake, and the most powerful man on the planet has allowed himself to be hedged in by timidities, compromises, refusals, denials, and the murderous pressure of corporations. Those too-big-to-die corporations are the reason why the Senate is unlikely to ratify any climate-change treaty that threatens to do much of anything. Really, corporations—half-fictitious, semi-immortal behemoths endowed with human rights in the U.S. and possessed of corrosive global power—already are the ruthless cyborgs of our time. They are, after all, actively seeking a world in which they imagine that, somehow, they will survive, even if many of us and much that we love does not. Sorry poor people, young people, Africa, sorry Arctic summer ice, you’re not too big to fail.

100,000 in the Streets Vs. Three Degrees of Heat

I wish life on this planet really were like an action movie. I wish that a handful of heroic individuals could do battle with the mightiest of forces and decisively alter the fate of the world—and then we could all go home to a planet that’s safe. As we know, however, it’s going to be a lot more intricate and complicated than that. There are millions, maybe billions, of players in this one, and its running time is a lot longer than the two weeks of Copenhagen or the two hours of a movie. For our heroines, we get not the commando-siren Sarah Connor, but the sturdy, ex-middle-school American government teacher and now California state senator Fran Pavley, 61.

Really, though, if there’s going to be a superhero in our world, a friendly Terminator to go up against the villains in suits and ties, it will be civil society. Even for the betterment of humankind, civil society won’t get to shoot anyone or drive a truck through a wall. Instead, it’ll organize, educate, build, and pressure, while working to create models and alternatives. It’ll reelect Pavley and shut down Chevron.

There have already been some moments of great drama with this superhero leading the way—the civil disobedience [18] of the Climate Ground Zero mountaintop coal campaign in Appalachia, the Climate Camps in Britain, the Kingsnorth Six climbers who blocked a coal-power-plant’s smokestack in England last October (and were exonerated [19] by a British jury), the underwater cabinet meeting [20] held in the Maldives this October to protest that low-lying island nation’s possible fate. All this was done in part to get people to take an interest in the fate of their planet, which is not so readily reducible to a blockbuster’s plot as we might like.

The pivotal moment just came—and went. This week in Copenhagen, the Bella Center conference, in which a new climate treaty was supposed to be negotiated, stagnated while repression around it grew furiously. It stagnated because the rich countries were unwilling to either reduce their own emissions significantly or pledge meaningful funding to help poor nations transition to greener economies. Or it stagnated because the poor countries didn’t consent to be crucified for crumbs. The United States, which just spent nearly a trillion dollars bailing out its floundering financial corporations and spends about $700 billion annually on the military, offered [21] an obscenely inadequate $1.2 billion in aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion [22] way down the road, but only if an unlikely quantity of factors and conditions were to align beforehand.

Outside the center, the Danish police became increasingly brutal as activists from everywhere, representing the poor, developing, and most affected nations, the Arctic, small farmers, indigenous nations, and the environment demonstrated. Inside nongovernmental groups were increasingly excluded from the discussions and then from the actual space itself. None of this prevented the conference from stalling.

On Monday, negotiators from the African nations shut down the climate talks in fury at attempts to undermine the Kyoto accords—a move designed to make the global situation worse at a meeting that was supposed to make it better. On Wednesday, hundreds of delegates inside the Bella Center protested, walking out to join the thousands already in the streets. By all reports the atmosphere was increasingly tense and repressive.

Everyone whose opinion I respect deplores what just went down in Copenhagen. There’s an agreement of sorts, but it was achieved by Obama and a few powerful nations over the objections of the rest in violation of the way the process should have unfolded. Worse, it contains no binding agreements to limit climate change. The so-called agreement acknowledges that we should limit warming to two degrees Celsius, but the actual commitments, if honored, would bring the world to 3.9 degrees Celsius [23] (seven degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Even two degrees, African negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping had said, “would condemn Africa to death.” Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed pointed out that three degrees would “spell death for the Maldives and a billion people in low-lying areas.” Three degrees, said Joss Garman of the British branch of Greenpeace, “would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, droughts across South America and Australia, and the depletion of ocean habitats.”

All that was achieved was consensus that there’s a problem and clarity about what that problem is: the refusal of the wealthy corporations and nations to do what benefits humanity and all other species. Money won. Life lost. Copenhagen is over, a battle lost despite valiant efforts, but the war continues.

The crazy thing about this moment in history is that it isn’t at all like Terminator 2, except that the Earth and our species are in terrible danger, and ruthless superhuman forces push us toward our doom. In the movie, Sarah Connor is the only human being who knows what’s coming, and she’s in an Abu Ghraib-like mental hospital for saying and doing something about it. In our reality, anyone who cares to know what the dangers are should have no problem finding out. Most of us have known, or should have known, for quite a long time. Because we’ve done so little, what a decade ago was imagined as the terrible future has actually, like the Terminator, made it here ahead of time.

The learning curve for so many of us, for so many people and even nations, has been speeding up impressively. If we had 40 years to figure it all out, we might be headed toward just the sort of victory that civil society has, in fact, achieved on so many other environmental and human-rights ideas. But there aren’t decades to spare. It needs to happen now. It should have happened even before the last century ended.

Even in my fever dream, with the Superdome just out the window, I couldn’t help noting the key axiom repeated in Terminator 2: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

So here’s the lesson: there are no superheroes but us.

And here’s the question: what are you going to do about it?

Links:
[1] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175183/
[2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
[3] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175153/tomgram:_max_blumenthal,_how_palin_became_a_rogue/
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html
[5] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/
[6] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175177/tomgram:_martin_chulov,_is_iraq’s_next_crisis_ecological/#more
[7] http://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/
[8] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
[9] http://www.climatechange.ca.gov/adaptation/
[10] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/california-energy
[11] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2009/1216/GOP-s-global-warming-rumble-Sarah-Palin-v.-Arnold-Schwarzenegger
[12] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021075/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[13] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/show-must-go
[14] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/obamas-climate-position-lie-inside-fib-coated-spin
[15] http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/12/07-7
[16] http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/yes-he-can-12-08-2009.html
[17] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090504/schell
[18] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175105/mark_engler_climate_ground_zero
[19] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/may/31/kingsnorth-defence-lawyer
[20] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8311838.stm
[21] http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20091214/factbox-how-much-mights-pledge-climate-aid.htm
[22] http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/12/17-0
[23] http://climateinteractive.org/scoreboard/copenhagen-cop15-analysis-and-press-releases/COP-15 Final Analysis v11 091219.pdf/view

“The conference of the parties takes note of the Copenhagen Accord,” said a final decision announced by Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen. But Tuvalu declared the COP15 process completely undemocratic, conducted in closed door sessions, and slamed the target of 2 degrees for failing to be sufficient to ensure their survival. “We are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our children. Our future is not for sale.” Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and Costa Rica also raised their voices that the proposal cannot be considered as the work of COP according to Copenhagen End Game of the It’s Getting Hot in Here Blog of the Youth Climate Movement.

Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese leader of G77, compared the proposed Copenhagen Accord to entering a suicide pact in a discussion with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now “In all four regions of Africa, and in all seasons, the median temperature [increase] lies between 3 degrees C and 4 degrees C, roughly 1.5 times the global mean response. One hundred and fifty times, so a two degrees is not three; it’s actually 3.5 and above. So, for me, it means simply I will accept the total destruction of my continent, her people, in Copenhagen. That, I would not do. That should not be asked of Africa, because it is effectively saying Africa is not the part of the human family.”

Similarly The Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Apisai Ielemia, says he will not sign a climate change agreement that does not meet his demands on limiting global temperature rises. Tuvalu has had a proposal on the table for 6 months for global temperature rises to be kept below 1.5 degrees to ensure the survival of island nations. Despite bullying from Australia on Pacific Island nations, Tuvalu is standing its ground: “We have nowhere to run to because our islands are tiny, we just have to prepare ourselves individually, family wise so that they know what to do when a cyclone comes in or a hurricane blows because there is nothing else we can do. There is no mountain we can climb up, there is no other inland where we can run to like in your big countries.” according to Radio New Zealand.

The negotiator for the Marshall Islands told the final plenary “Today the issue is not just about sovereignty, it is our fundamental right – that our nation is but a collection of tiny specks of corals in a vast ocean. This tiny collection of islands may be seen as navigational hazards for most people, but it is for me the land of my ancestors. Allow these islands to sink under the waves, and you will have destroyed an entire race. I leave your country, with a profound sense of loss. My country, only 2 m above sea level, is one of the biggest losers. I will have nothing to show my grandchildren for my absence the past two weeks, and I have failed to secure the future for my grandchildren and their future.”

Papua New Guinea played a key role in breaking the deadlock at the Bali negotiations in 2007, when it told the USA to either commit or to stand aside. Their negotiator said in the final Copenhagen plenary “In the final analysis, we left our leaders without anything of substance to carry forward. For this reason, we support this document despite its flaws. We must identify that many of the flaws are due to us as G77; many annex 1 nations were willing to make strong commitments and yet several G77 nations were the ones who struck their flaws. Many G77 countries sent only public servants who struck much of the substance out of this document. We must move forward. The world must move forward.”

To be accepted as an official UN agreement all 193 nations at the talks need to endorse the deal.

Civil Society Response

Bill McKibben, American environmentalist and founder of 350.org, said that President Obama had wrecked the UN and the planet: “This is a declaration that small and poor countries don’t matter, that international civil society doesn’t matter, and that serious limits on carbon don’t matter. The president has wrecked the UN and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it’s at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon henhouse without any oversight.”

A couple of hundred people flash rallied at 1am outside the Bella Centre with banners saying “Climate Shame” and chanting “climate Justice Now”, “World wants Climate Justice, U.S. Climate Shame”. Watch a Youtube video including an interview with Bill McKibben where he accuses Barack Obama and China and India selling out the planet’s climate and the United Nations.

Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam International described the deal as a triumph of spin over substance : “This agreement barely papers over the huge differences between countries which have plagued these talks for two years. It recognizes the need to keep warming below 2 degrees but does not commit to do so. It kicks back the big decisions on emissions cuts and fudges the issue of climate cash.”

“Millions of people around the world do not want to see their hopes for a fair, binding and ambitious deal die in Copenhagen. Leaders need to get back round the table in early 2010 and take the hard decisions they copped out of in Copenhagen.” he said.

Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, Pablo Solon angrily denounced the released text of the agreement, “This is completely unacceptable. How can it be that 25 to 30 nations cook up an agreement that excludes the majority of more than 190 nations. We have been negotiating for months on one of the gravest crises of our age, and yet our voice counts for nothing? If this is how world agreements will now be agreed, then it makes a nonsense of the UN and multilateralism.”

At about 2:15am, while discussions continued inside the Bella Centre in Copenhagen, Pablo Solon, went out to address the demonstrators holding a vigil at the main entrance. “From the substantive part, we know, we don’t have the final text, but they have approved that it will be two degrees (Celsius) – the goal. And we don’t accept that. Why we don’t accept because that means that several islands are going to disappear. Our glaciers in the mountains are going to disappear. Africa is going to be cooked. We are approaching a situation where we cannot guarantee that we are going to be able to save whole humanity. Maybe some millions are going to die because of the decision that tonight is being taken and this is not discussed.” he said.

To cheers he told the crowd that “For us, the most important thing here is that Copenhagen was a success. Not here. Outside (cheers). Because there has been a lot of awareness, a lot of conscience, and now we have to build a very big movement. Things are not going to change in the negotiation if we don’t have a strong social movement, a strong civil society mobilise in the street.” (Andy Bodycombe, Bolivian Statement Outside Bella Centre)

Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, also identified Copenhagen as a turning point with the birth the birth of a diverse global movement for climate justice: “The people of the United States voted for President Obama based on his promise of change and hope. But the only change today’s agreement brings is a greater risk of dangerous climate change. And the only hope that flows from Copenhagen stems not from the president’s hollow pronouncements but from the birth of a diverse global movement demanding real solutions and climate justice — demands made with a collective voice growing loud enough that in short order politicians will no longer be able to ignore it.” she said.

Friends of the Earth were one of the NGOs excluded from observing the conference in its final days, with all their credentials suspended by the UN with no satisfactory reason given.

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth U.S said “The blame for the failure to achieve a real deal lies squarely on the rich countries whose pollution has caused the climate crisis — especially the United States. Rich countries refused to budge from the grossly inadequate emissions reduction proposals they brought to Copenhagen, and they failed to put sufficient money on the table so that poor countries that did not cause this crisis have the capacity to cope with it.”

The failure of Copenhagen is a wake up call for those who care about the future Erich Pica said: “It is a call to action. Corporate polluters and other special interests have such overwhelming influence that rich country governments are willing to agree only to fig leaf solutions. This is unacceptable, and it must change. Fortunately, while the cost of solving the climate crisis rises each day we fail to act, the crisis remains one that can largely be averted. It is up to the citizens of the world — especially citizens of the United States, which has so impeded progress — to mobilize and ensure that true solutions carry the day. I firmly believe that together, we can still achieve a politics in which climate justice prevails.”

Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director called Copenhagen but a first step with much more work needed for a fair, binding, and ambitious climate deal. He identified the US Senate and its obstruction as one reason preventing President Obama from taking the necessary leadership on this issue: “President Obama and the rest of the world paid a steep price here in Copenhagen because of obstructionism in the United States Senate. That a deal was reached at all is testament to President Obama’s leadership–all the more remarkable because of the very weak hand he was dealt because of the Senate’s failure to pass domestic clean energy and climate legislation. Now that the rest of the world–including countries like China and India–has made clear that it is willing to take action, the Senate must pass domestic legislation as soon as possible. America and the world can no longer be held hostage to petty politics and obstructionism.”

The climate deniers were also in Copenhagen, and while their lobbyists still have tremendous financial resources and access to politicians, the science of climate change is now overwhelmingly accepted by most nations and most politicians. Members of the Youth Climate Movement succeeded in crashing a climate denier live webcast.

“What was clear over the past two weeks is that there is no argument over the science of global warming or the urgency with which we must act. A parade of developed and developing counties alike made crystal clear that they would implement their national plans to tackle global warming and build the clean energy economy not because they were required to do so, but because it was simply in their own national interest to do so.” said Carl Pope.

Scientists Respond

Scientists also responded to the failure to set ambitious emission targets that matched with the the science. “Continued failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions commits the World to metres of sea-level rise, with severe consequences for many millions of people and the natural environment.” said Dr John Church, Principle Research Scientist in Australia’s CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and Leader of the Sea Level Rise Program at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre.

“A brave face on total failure. This is a triumph for the fossil fuel lobby.” said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Centre for Marine Studies at the University of Queensland and attended the climate negotiations and gave presentations on climate impact on marine biodiversity.

Professor Tim Flannery, Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council and Macquarie University’s Division of Environmental and Life Sciences was more postive than others saying the agreement is good but not perfect: “We’ve made a huge advance at this meeting on a number of fronts, one being those pledged emissions, another being the funding we’ve now got for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. The third is the REDD negotiations, the world’s efforts to protect the tropical rainforests and that seems to be going very well indeed.”

Dr Jim Salinger, climate scientist and honorary researcher University of Auckland writing from the Cook Islands said: “I welcome the news that the big players: USA, China, India, Brazil and South Africa have committed to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees C. It is essential that all countries sign on to effective emissions reductions targets of greenhouse gases by 40% at 2020 and 80% by 2080 to prevent disruptive climate change and sea level rise later this century that so threaten peoples such as those in the tropical Pacific.”

Dr Andy Reisinger, Senior Research Fellow – New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, called the agreement a crucial breakthrough as it provides verifiable emissions reductions targets by most of the world’s largest emitters. He qualified this support saying “The devil is in the details though. It is worrying that even those countries that brokered the deal have admitted that the specific emissions targets will not be stringent enough to reach their stated long-term goal, which is to limit global average temperature increases to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. We will have to wait until the final numbers are on table to see how far the actual emissions targets fall short of that ultimate goal, and what amount of warming we might expect more realistically once the dust and celebratory rhetoric has settled.”

Professor Suzi Kerr, Visiting Professor, Stanford University, Department of Economics, Senior Fellow, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research said “The agreement on a transparent monitoring mechanism is a relief and a major step forward with respect to some key developing countries.”

Global Movement

The Copenhagen climate negotiations have sparked a global justice movement on climate. Over Thirteen million signatures were collected on a global petition for an ambitious fair and binding treaty. Hundreds of thousands attended vigils, marched in the streets of Copenhagen, Melbourne or took direct action on the Streets of the United States.

The Science of climate change is clear on the impacts we face. The current emission reduction national proposals as of Dec 19, will result in a 3.9 degrees Centigrade of temperature rise above pre-industrial levels according to the Climate Interactive Scoreboard.

The Climate Crisis will deepen as more scientific studies are published. A new study on Sea Level was published in the Dec. 17 issue of Nature. Professor Michael Oppenheimer, from Princeton University said about the study that “According to the analysis, an additional 2 degrees of global warming could commit the planet to 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise. This rise would inundate low-lying coastal areas where hundreds of millions of people now reside. It would permanently submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana, much of southern Florida and other parts of the U.S. East Coast, much of Bangladesh, and most of the Netherlands, unless unprecedented and expensive coastal protection were undertaken.”

While National leaders have not shown the necessary leadership on emssion reduction targets many local and regional Governments are taking their own actions independent of national Governments.

The Climate Justice Movement has achieved much in a short time and needs to continue to pressure national Governments to take decisive action on carbon emissions and for policies that avoid Climate Colonialism

Sources

• Oxfam Media Release, Dec 18, 2009 – Historic Moment, Historic Gathering, Historic Cop out
• Bolivia Media Release, Dec 18, 2009 – Bolivia calls Copenhagen climate accord “unacceptable”
• Statement of Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth U.S., on tonight’s announcement by President Obama. Dec 18, 2009
• Sierra Club Media Release, Dec 18, 2009 – President Obama Leads World to Historic, If Incomplete Climate Deal. Progress Made Sets Stage for Fair, Ambitious, and Binding Deal in 2010
• Media Release, Dec 18, 2009 – Center for Biological Diversity Statement on “Deal” at Copenhagen
• Bill McKibben, 350.org, Media Release, Dec 18, 2009 – Bill McKibben and 350.org Response to President Obama’s Speech
• Democracy Now, Dec 18, 2009 -Chief G-77 Negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping: US-Backed Proposals Mean Death for Millions of Africans
• Radio New Zealand International, Dec 18. 2009 – Tuvalu’s PM says his country will not move from its bottom line
• Youth Climate Movement – Dec 19, 2009 – Copenhagen End Game from the It’s Getting Hot in Here Blog

For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big To Blow

Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone’s fault. It did not happen because human beings are incapable of agreeing, or are inherently self-destructive. Nor was it all was China’s fault, or the fault of the hapless UN.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn’t use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the U.S. took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him.

(The “deal” that was ultimately rammed through was nothing more than a grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters: I’ll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.)

I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can’t deliver, about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No President since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the U.S. into something that doesn’t threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let’s look at the big three.

Blown Opportunity Number 1: The Stimulus Package

When Obama came to office he had a free hand and a blank check to design a spending package to stimulate the economy. He could have used that power to fashion what many were calling a “Green New Deal”—to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. Instead, he experimented disastrously with reaching across the aisle to Republicans, low-balling the size of the stimulus and blowing much of it on tax cuts. Sure, he spent some money on weatherization, but public transit was inexplicably short changed while highways that perpetuate car culture won big.

Blown Opportunity Number 2: The Auto Bailouts

Speaking of the car culture, when Obama took office he also found himself in charge of two of the big three automakers, and all of the emissions for which they are responsible. A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos would obviously have used that power to dramatically reengineer the failing industry so that its factories could build the infrastructure of the green economy the world desperately needs. Instead Obama saw his role as uninspiring down-sizer in chief, leaving the fundamentals of the industry unchanged.

Blown Opportunity Number 3: The Bank Bailouts

Obama, it’s worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees — it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn’t tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it’s harder than ever to get a loan.

Imagine if these three huge economic engines—the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill—had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.

Whether the bill had passed or not, by the time Copenhagen had rolled around, the U.S. would already have been well on its way to dramatically cutting emissions, poised to inspire, rather than disappoint, the rest of the world.

There are very few U.S. Presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Barack Obama. More than anyone else, the Copenhagen failure belongs to him.

Climate Structural Adjustment: We’ll Save Your Life On Our Terms

It’s the second to last day of the climate conference and I have the worst case of laryngitis of my life. I open my mouth and nothing comes out.

It’s frustrating because I was just at Hillary Clinton’s press conference and desperately wanted to ask her a question – or six. She said that the U.S. would contribute its “share” to a $100-billion financing package for developing countries by 2020 – but only if all countries agreed to the terms of the climate deal that the U.S. has slammed on the table here, which include killing Kyoto, replacing legally binding measures with the fuzzy concept of “transparency,” and nixing universal emissions targets in favor of vague “national plans” that are mashed together. Oh, and abandoning the whole concept (which the U.S. agreed to by singing the UN climate convention) that the rich countries that created the climate crisis have to take the lead in solving it.

Unless every country here agrees to the U.S. terms, the Secretary explained, “there will not be that kind of a [financial] commitment, at least from the United States.”

It was naked blackmail – forcing developing countries to choose between a strong fair deal that stands a chance of averting climate chaos and the funds they need to cope with the droughts and floods that have already arrived. I wanted to ask Clinton: Is this not climate structural adjustment, on a global scale? We’ll give you cash, but only with our draconian conditions?

And who is the U.S. to call the shots when it carries the heaviest responsibility for emitting the gasses that are already wreaking havoc on the climates of the global south – what happened to the principle that the polluter pays?

But…no point raising my hand, no voice.

I feel a bit like a walking metaphor because this is the day that pretty much all the NGOs have been locked out of the Bella Center, making this a much less interesting place. Almost all the side events have been canceled and people are scrambling to find alternative spaces around the city in which to meet. Some youth groups staged a sit-in last night to protest their expulsion.

As the big shots arrive and civil society is expelled, it may well turn out that months of activism and negotiations don’t matter much in the face of raw power plays like the one Clinton launched this morning: sign on our terms or get nothing.

Bolivia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solon put it best: “It seems negotiators are living in the Matrix, while the real negotiation is taking place in the ‘Green room,’ in small stealth dinners with selective guests.”

The image from the Bella Center that will forever stay with me is seeing security guards refuse entry to Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, who has been fighting Shell and other oil giants in the Niger Delta for decades, losing friends like Ken Saro Wiwa to the struggle and being jailed himself. Meanwhile, the oil execs walk the halls of the Bella Center with impunity.

Even if I could talk I’d be speechless.

from http://www.naomiklein.org

Photo by Bob Strong/Reuters.

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] No, it’s a waste of time. And if the leaders of countries cannot arrive in an agreement, why don’t the peoples then decide together?

View VIDEO on Democracy Now!

source: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/17/bolivian_president_evo_morales_on_climate

Photo by Olivier Morin /UK Guardian.

By John Vidal, Allegra Stratton and Suzanne Goldenberg in Copenhagen

Saturday Dec. 19, 2009

The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

American officials spun the deal as a “meaningful agreement”, but even Obama said: “This progress is not enough.”

“We have come a long way, but we have much further to go,” he added.

Gordon Brown hailed the night as a success on five out of six measures.

In a press conference held after the talks broke up, Brown said the agreement was a “vital first step” and accepted there was a lot more work to do to get assurances it would become a legally binding agreement. He declined to call it a “historic” conference: “This is the first step we are taking towards a green and low carbon future for the world, steps we are taking together. But like all first steps, the steps are difficult and they are hard.”

“I know what we rally need is a legally binding treaty as quickly as possible.”

The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session. The deal aims to provide $30bn a year for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year by 2020.

But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries which had been holding out for deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in past drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO₂ emissions by 80% was also dropped.

The agreement also set up a forestry deal which is hoped would significantly reduce deforestation in return for cash. It lacked the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries that the US and others demanded.

Obama hinted that China was to blame for the lack of a substantial deal. In a press conference he condemned the insistence of some countries to look backwards to previous environmental agreements. He said developing countries should be “getting out of that mindset, and moving towards the position where everybody recognises that we all need to move together”.

This was a not-so-veiled reference to the row over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol and its legal distinction between developed and developing countries. Developing nations saw this as an attempt by the rich world to wriggle out of its responsibility for climate change. Many observers blamed the US for coming to the talks with an offer of just 4% emissions cuts on 1990 levels. The final text made no obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

Negotiators will now work on individual agreements such as forests, technology, and finance – but, without strong leadership, the chances are that it will take years to complete.

Obama cast his trip as a sign of renewed US global leadership: “The time has come for us to get off the sidelines and shape the future that we seek; that is why I came to Copenhagen.”

But the US president also said he would not be staying for the final vote “because of weather constraints in Washington”.

Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, said the deal had “the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It’s nothing short of climate change scepticism in action. It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.”

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. Ed Miliband [UK climate change secretary] is among the very few that come out of this summit with any credit.” It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

Lydia Baker of Save the Children said world leaders had “effectively signed a death warrant for many of the world’s poorest children. Up to 250,000 children from poor communities could die before the next major meeting in Mexico at the end of next year.”

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal