While earth burned
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
This year is expected to be among the three hottest since climate data began to be systematically collected more than 150 years ago. Indeed, there is a fair chance that 2010 may turn out to be the hottest year on record. Yet, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that global climate change is real, largely the result of human activities (anthropogenic), and certain to produce serious adverse consequences for nations, individuals, and the world ecosystem, the political will to deal with the problem has been waning.
Evidence for this assertion is abundant. In 2009, armed with the formidable and undemocratic parliamentary weapon known as the filibuster, Republicans in the Senate thwarted President Barack Obama’s efforts to pass cap-and-trade legislation designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. By abusing the filibuster rule, the 41 Republicans (out of 100 Senators) plus a handful of Democrats from conservative or energy-producing states managed to overcome the will of the majority and prevent Obama from fulfilling his campaign promise to vigorously tackle the climate change problem.
As a result, the U.S. president went empty-handed to the much-anticipated December 2009 Copenhagen talks on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the fifteenth such meeting held since the adoption of the framework. The Copenhagen talks, attended by the leaders of over 100 nations and 45,000 delegates, journalists, activists, and business leaders from across the world, were expected to produce a global agreement binding countries to reduce the level of carbon emissions (as of 1990) by as much as 50 percent by the year 2050. Among those attending the event in the Danish capital were many members of the U.S. Congress, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Also in attendance were various climate change deniers, including Oklahoma GOP Senator James Inhofe. Inhofe, one the most virulent deniers of climate change, attended the meeting as a self-proclaimed one-man “truth squad.”
By all accounts, the Copenhagen conclave ended in a fiasco. The countries were unable to reach consensus on a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, set to expire in 2012. Instead, a vague document known as the “Copenhagen Accord,” drafted by the United States and a group of four nations — China, India, South Africa, and Brazil — was the final product of the conference, the last governmental-level climate meeting before the expiration of Kyoto.
The process and the results of Copenhagen were deeply disappointing to environmentalists and everyone who cares about the fate of the planet. Among the many flaws: The document was drafted by only five nations; many key meetings were held in secret; the Accord is not legally binding; and no real emission targets were set.
Since the Copenhagen gathering there has been more bad news, namely the stunning announcement that Japan would definitely not join in a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol. That inauspicious announcement set the stage for the 16th edition of talks on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which this year is being held in Cancun, Mexico (Nov. 30-Dec. 10).
So far the Cancun conference has more than lived up to the diminished expectations that came out of the Copenhagen debacle. The number of attendees this year is way down, as is the level of the participants. Few if any heads of states will be in the Mexican resort town for the climate negotiations, one reason Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva predicted that nothing will be accomplished in Cancun. Along the same lines, this time leading members of the United States Congress are staying in Washington and not even bothering to send staff to attend the conference.
The downbeat tone of the conference reflects the harsh reality of the new political and economic forces at work as a result of the economic crisis and the rightward turn in the United States. In the wake of Republican victories in the November elections, Senator Inhofe will be joined in Congress by a whole host of new climate change deniers — a species which in any case has never been rare in the twenty-first century version of the Republican Party. In addition, high unemployment, sluggish growth, and large budget deficits in Europe and the United States militate against new environmental rules that target industries such as coal and oil that still provide a substantial number of jobs (and big political contributions).
One of the few positive developments that came out of the Copenhagen conference was a pledge by the rich countries to give $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries curtail emissions and mitigate the damages from global climate change. The establishment of such a “Green Fund” would be a significant achievement that might come out of the Cancun climate conference. This is at least the hope of the developing countries, who hope such a fund would be administered by the UN rather than the World Bank, which is dominated by the United States and other rich nations.
The stakes could not be higher. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN climate science panel, has said “that further delay in international action to slow warming would endanger vast numbers of lives in the world’s poorest countries, but Cancun can still deliver decisive progress to help avert disaster.”
Perhaps, but it would take a very different U.S. Congress than the one that will be seated in 2011 — a Congress not only loaded with global warming deniers but also full of UN haters and budget slashers — to appropriate billions of dollars a year to prevent small island states from disappearing and sub-Saharan populations from suffering from drought and starvation.
