Will There be a Climate Agreement?

Repackaging Copenhagen

By BRIAN TOKAR

On the eve of the UN’s long-awaited Copenhagen climate summit, officials are pulling out all the stops to spin the conference as a success, no matter what actually happens. Barack Obama’s announcement that he will briefly pass through Copenhagen was a headline story, as was China’s commitment to reduce their economy’s “carbon intensity,” merely lowering their rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Some are proclaiming the advantages of a non-binding “political” or “operational” agreement, as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions. Others are preoccupied with the manufactured scandal stemming from some UK climate researchers’ stolen emails (see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack). It’s everything but what was once promised: the setting for a new binding global treaty to forestall catastrophic climate changes.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. For several years now, environmentalists in North America, Europe, and around the world have been describing this as a decisive moment in the history of the global climate crisis. Since the passage of the still-controversial Kyoto Protocol in 1997, signatories to the Protocol, and to the more comprehensive UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), have held major biennial conferences to further these documents’ implementation. With the first so-called “commitment period” of Kyoto scheduled to end in 2012, the Copenhagen meeting has long been described as the crucial moment to forestall increasingly uncontrollable climate disruptions.

For well over a year now, environmentalists have been planning events, drafting reports, and coordinating action plans with the Copenhagen conference in mind. The October 24th “350.org” events around the world — over 5000 recorded activities in 181 countries dramatizing the need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to below 350 parts per million — were timed to influence Copenhagen. Until mid-November, the timetable for Congressional action on US climate legislation was also partly aimed toward the international stage. Speculations about whether Obama would go to Copenhagen were the subject of countless news reports, blog postings, and impassioned pleas by Greenpeace and other well-known organizations.

For much of this fall, however, most public statements by both US and UN officials have been pointedly aimed at lowering expectations. US climate negotiators have been evasive for months about what if any commitments they would bring to the table. Senate committees began deleting the climate bill from their year-end calendars in mid-November, after a Republican boycott of Senator Boxer’s hearings allowed for only a pro-forma passage of a highly flawed bill by the Environment and Public Works Committee, which she chairs. Earlier in the fall, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer began refocusing his public statements toward the ‘art of the possible.’

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Fortunately, while diplomats seek to wish the problem away – even as they devise ever more complex and less effective means to alleviate climate chaos – people around the world are beginning to confront the full magnitude of the climate crisis. Climate justice activists in Europe, in indigenous and small farming communities worldwide, and even in North America, are beginning to challenge the inequities underlying current climate policies and demand real solutions. They are highlighting the voices of the communities most affected by the climate changes that are already underway, and challenging corporate-friendly false solutions, from carbon trading and offsets, to the myths of “clean coal” and nuclear power and the onslaught of industrial-scale biofuel (more appropriately “agrofuel”) plantations. Simultaneously, they are challenging the growing dominance of corporate interests in the UN process itself, a phenomenon that led one participant in the 2007 UN conference in Bali to describe it as “a giant shopping extravaganza, marketing the earth, the sky and the rights of the poor.”

The climate justice movement in North America had its first continent-wide day of action on Monday, November 30th, the tenth anniversary of the mass demonstrations that confronted the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Hundreds of people marched and rallied and dozens were arrested at locations from San Francisco’s Bank of America headquarters to the Chicago Climate Exchange, home of the US’ largest voluntary carbon market. South Carolina activists blocked the shipment of a generator for a new coal plant, Canadians sat in at the office of their Finance Minister – a proponent of the massively destructive scheme to extract oil from the tar sands of central Alberta – and New Yorkers marched from a local Bank of America to the offices of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading advocate for carbon trading. (For more on the N30 actions, see http://actforclimatejustice.org.)

Meanwhile in Europe, thousands marched in Geneva at the outset of the WTO’s first ministerial conference in four years. The momentum is building rapidly for massive actions on the streets of Copenhagen, where activists will demand that fossil fuels be kept in the ground, indigenous and forest peoples' rights be respected and reparations for ecological and climate debts be paid by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters. For some of the organizers, Copenhagen has come to represent capitalism’s last attempt to come to terms with the climate crisis. With African delegates threatening another walkout, and the US pushing for an agreement in name only, the disturbing analogy raised by international activists between the Copenhagen climate conference and the November 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle may prove to be truer than most environmentalists ever imagined.

Brian Tokar is the Director of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology. His books include Earth for Sale, Redesigning Life? and the forthcoming collection (co-edited with Fred Magdoff), Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press).