Re: [Marxism] The failure of the Paris environmental summit, COP21

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 2015/12/15 09:11 AM, Joseph Green wrote:

The "red lines" demonstration in Paris was the best thing that happened at the 
Paris climate change summit, COP21...


Agreed... but from centrist-NGO civilized society came a stunningly weak 
response, worse than I'd anticipated from the prior episode at the G7, 
sigh. A couple of pieces to express the frustration:



*Climate terror from Paris could endure for generations*

/ZNet, /15 December 2015

Paris witnessed both explicit terrorism by religious extremists on 
November 13 and a month later, implicit terrorism by carbon addicts 
negotiating a world treaty that guarantees catastrophic climate change. 
The first incident left more than 130 people dead in just one evening’s 
mayhem; the second lasted a fortnight but over the next century can be 
expected to kill hundreds of millions, especially in Africa.


But because the latest version of the annual United Nations climate 
talks has three kinds of spin-doctors, the extent of damage may not be 
well understood. The 21^st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UN 
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) generated reactions 
ranging from smug denialism to righteous fury. The first reaction is 
‘from above’ (the Establishment) and is self-satisfied; the second is 
from the middle (‘Climate Action’) and is semi-satisfied; the third, 
from below (‘Climate Justice’), is justifiably outraged.


Guzzling French champagne last Saturday, the Establishment quickly 
proclaimed, in essence, “The Paris climate glass is nearly full – so why 
not get drunk on planet-saving rhetoric?” The /New York Times /reported 
with a straight face, “President Obama said the historic agreement is a 
tribute to American climate change leadership” (and in a 
criminally-negligent way, this is not untrue).


Since 2009, US State Department chief negotiator Todd Stern successfully 
drove the negotiations away from four essential principles: ensuring 
emissions-cut commitments would be sufficient to halt runaway climate 
change; making the cuts legally binding with accountability mechanisms; 
distributing the burden of cuts fairly based on responsibility for 
causing the crisis; and making financial transfers to repair 
weather-related loss and damage following directly from that historic 
liability. Washington elites always prefer ‘market mechanisms’ like 
carbon trading instead of paying their climate debt even though the US 
national carbon market fatally crashed in 2010.


In part because the Durban COP17 in 2011 provided lubrication and – with 
South Africa’s blessing – empowered Stern to wreck the idea of Common 
But Differentiated Responsibility while giving “a Viagra shot to 
flailing carbon markets” (as a male Bank of America official cheerfully 
celebrated), Paris witnessed the demise of these essential principles. 
And again, “South Africa played a key role negotiating on behalf of the 
developing countries of the world,” according to Pretoria’s environment 
minister Edna Molewa, who proclaimed from Paris “an ambitious, fair and 
effective legally-binding outcome.”


Arrogant fibbery. The collective Intended Nationally Determined 
Contributions (INDCs) – i.e. /voluntary /cuts – will put the temperature 
rise at above 3 degrees. From coal-based South Africa, the word 
ambitious loses meaning given Molewa’s weak INDCs – ranked 
by 
ClimateActionTracker as amongst the world’s most “inadequate” – and 
given that South Africa hosts the world’s two largest coal-fired power 
stations now under construction, with no objection by Molewa. She 
regularly approves increased (highly-subsidised) coal burning and 
exports, vast fracking, offshore-oil drilling, exemptions from pollution 
regulation, emissions-intensive corporate farming and fast-worsening 
suburban sprawl.


A second narrative comes from large NGOs that mobilised over the past 
six months to provide mild-mannered pressure points on negotiators. 
Their line is, essentially, “The Paris glass is /partly/ full – so sip 
up and enjoy!”


This line derives not merely from the predictable back-slapping 
associated with petit-bourgeois vanity, gazing upwards to power for 
validation, such as one finds at the Worldwide Fund for Nature and 
Climate Action Network, what with their corporate sponsorships. All of 
us reading this are often tempted in this direction, aren’t we, because 
such unnatural twisting of the neck is a permanent occupational hazard 
in this line of work.


And such opportunism was to be expected from Paris, especially after 
Avaaz and Greenpeace endorsed 

[Marxism] The failure of the Paris environmental summit, COP21

[Joseph Green via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

The "red lines" demonstration in Paris was the best thing that happened at 
the Paris climate change summit, COP21. It showed that activists aren't going 
to leave things to the governments, and they demonstrated in the face of the 
"state of emergency" of the government of "socialist" president Francois 
Hollande. "We are the red lines" demonstrations also took place elsewhere, 
such as in Seattle and New York City. The demonstrators were concerned that 
the negotiators in Paris would cross various "red lines".

The media is making a big fuss over the outcome of the Paris summit on global 
warming. The Paris agreement has been hailed as encouraging progress, more 
than what various environmentalists expected, or even a landmark agreement. 
Even many demonstrators and critics of COP21 generally regarded that it was 
positive in many ways. Yet the reality is that the Paris summit was an 
environmental flop. Compared to the infamous Copenhagen summit of 209, Paris 
was a smashing success in giving positive spin to the actions of the 
bourgeoisie and the governments, but it remained an abject  failure in 
dealing with the danger of global warming.

It declared grand goals while ignoring the question of how to achieve them. 
Its standpoint: let everyone do what they want - "clean coal", nuclear, 
so-called transitional fuels, biofuels, or just hocus-pocus - so long as they 
declare it part of a plan. It closed its eyes to the failure of the market 
measures of the past, such as cap and trade, and these measures will 
continue. It talks about "transparency", and there will be no real 
transparency.

The environmental writer George Monbiot wrote about the Paris summit as 
follows: "A combination of acidifying seas, coral death and Arctic melting 
means that entire marine food chains could collapse. On land, rainforests may 
retreat, rivers fail and deserts spread. Mass extinction is likely to be the 
hallmark of our era. This is what success, as defined by the cheering 
delegates, will look like." ("Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined 
by squalid retrenchments", Dec. 12, "Guardian")

His article added:"In Paris the delegates have solemnly agreed to cut demand, 
but at home they seek to maximise supply. The UK government has even imposed 
a legal obligation upon itself, under the Infrastructure Act 2015, to 
'maximise economic recovery' of the UK´s oil and gas. Extracting fossil fuels 
is a hard fact. But the Paris agreement is full of soft facts: promises that 
can slip or unravel. Until governments undertake to keep fossil fuels in the 
ground, they will continue to undermine the agreement they have just made."

Yet, surprisingly, while saying that the Paris agreement is a disaster 
compared to what's needed, Monbiot also writes in his article that "By 
comparison to what it could have been, it's a miracle." No, not at all. 
There's nothing positive in the destroyers of the environment pretending that 
they are protecting it. In that respect, the environmental scientist and 
climate change activist James Hansen hit the nail on the head when he said of 
the Paris summit that "It's a fraud really, a fake. It's just bullshit for 
them to say: 'We'll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little 
better every five years.' It's just worthless words. There is no action." 
("James Hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls Paris talks 'a 
fraud'," Dec. 12, "Guardian")

Unfortunately, Hansen advocates that the carbon tax is the solution (as well 
as mistakenly backing an increase in the use of nuclear power). He doesn't 
understand that the carbon tax is simply a variant of the market methods that 
have gotten us into this mess in the first place. We need direct planning and 
regulation of energy production, not reliance on market incentives. We also 
need economic planning to back up the planning and regulation of energy, to 
deal with other environmental problems, and to protect people's livelihood in 
the massive economic dislocations that are coming. None of this will happen 
unless there is a militant movement insisting that the planning be done in 
public with the broadest mass participation, and unless there is a strong 
working class trend within the environmental movement. Neo-liberal fake 
planning and regulation, which means companies "self-regulate" and 
governments subcontract out their functions to company stooges, is worse than 
useless.

---
Joseph Green
m...@communistvoice.org




_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.ht