http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/176
Foreign Policy In Focus | Commentary |
Too Much of Nothing
By Tom Athanasiou | August 01, 2005
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Oh, when there's too much of nothing,
No one has control.
Bob Dylan
It's getting harder to hide the climate crisis.
February, for example, saw a landmark conference1 in which leading
scientists, one after the other, stepped forward to draw a clear,
unambiguous line. No more "uncertainty" for these guys. As John
Schellnhuber, director of Cambridge's Tyndall Centre for Climate
Change, put it: "We now know that if we go beyond two degrees we will
raise hell."
Note to Americans: he means 2 degrees Centigrade. Which, since the
warming already clocks in at 0.7C, gives us about 1.3C to go, with an
additional half degree, or more, already "locked in." And beyond 2C
degrees, which is, alas, exactly where we're headed, the projections
pass from grim to terrifying. Which means that not only do global
carbon emissions have to drop, soon and substantially, but so does
the atmospheric carbon concentration itself, which has already passed
the highest point that can be plausibly called "safe." And it has to
do so while the developing world, well develops.
If, of course, we want to avoid "hell." To help you decide, imagine
the current global drought deepening, and settling in to stay;
imagine 3 billion people, packed into Southern mega-cities, under
"severe water stress;" imagine a loss of 1/3 or more of terrestrial
species, including, of course, polar bears; and imagine the die-off
of a drying Amazon. Imagine the melting of the Greenland and West
Antarctic ice, and the rising of the oceans. Imagine, too, that
"development" itself goes Up in Smoke.2 Do so because global warming
threatens to make the international targets on halving global poverty
by 2015, the "Millennium Development Goals," entirely unattainable.
No wonder, as all this seeps gradually into our resistant minds,
we're getting a wee bit alarmed. We have, in effect, run out over the
edge of the cliff, and just now, like Wiley Coyote tempting the laws
of physics, we're looking down.
The G8 (plus 5)
Obviously, this situation requires a global response. What seems less
obvious, at least among the elites, is that this can't be a
business-as-usual response in which the climate crisis becomes just
another excuse for strengthening the winds of neoliberalism.
The stakes would be clearer if it weren't for the Bush regime.
Because, frankly, even neoliberalism-especially the European sort-can
look pretty good when compared to the kind of fundamentalism now
being exported from Washington. Case in point: Tony Blair, and his
attempt to focus the recent G8 summit on two areas, climate change
and Africa, that rarely rise to the top of the elite agenda. Was this
an attempt to cover over the stench of his Iraq policies? Absolutely.
But the question here is if, whatever his motivation, he accomplished
anything useful.
Did he, in particular, manage to accomplish anything at the G8 summit?
Plenty of voices say he did, particularly on the debt relief side,
though he clearly failed in his (currently pointless) effort to bring
the United States back into the international climate regime. Even on
the climate front, however, the optimists cite Mr. Bush's
acknowledgement that climate change is real, and that human
activities lay beneath a significant fraction of the recent warming.
In fact, however, it wasn't Blair who won the point here; it was the
scientists, who with the help of some recently extreme weather have
begun to drive the denialists back toward their holes. And it was the
climate movement itself, which is weaving initiatives at every
level-local, regional, national, and international-into a net that
even GOP realists know they can't avoid much longer.3
The real action, though-and this gets us back to neo-liberalism, and
geo-politics as usual-is the one where the rich world and the poor
world circle each other on the global playing field, each working
towards a climate regime that, somehow, satisfies their "national
interests." Here, the big news at the G8 summit was the attendance of
high-level representatives from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and
South Africa, and the summit's concluding plans for a "dialogue" with
these same countries that will continue, quietly, before the next
session of the formal climate negotiations this November in Montreal.
This was interesting. Because if we're going to avoid global climate
catastrophe, we're going to do it by way of a new future in which the
South takes a low-carbon path. Everyone (serious) knows this, though
when it comes to the shape of this new future, and the best strategy
for pursuing it, the consensus immediately breaks down. The Europeans
want real engagement with the South, at meetings that begin with
clear-eyed, cold-coffee presentations from the scientists, while the
Americans still prefer to leverage their old faiths in power politics
and technological salvation. As for the developing world, well let's
just say that the tension is rising. Soon now, very soon, the formal
debate on the future regime is going to begin, and one thing we know
for sure is that neither Beijing, New Delhi, nor Brasilia has any
intention of bargaining away its "right to development."
Not that the G8 is a proper venue for global negotiation. But the G8
communiqué (one of Blair's small victories) is quite explicit that
the proposed dialogue is not to be seen as an alternative to the
official UN talks, which after all won the Kyoto Protocol against all
efforts by the Bush administration and its allies. And, frankly, the
G8+5 dialogue may well make for a reasonable sort of ad hoc executive
session, and even offer a helpful supplement to the official
negotiations.
Or maybe not. Again, the problem is that the Bush people can make
even neo-liberalism-as-usual look good. Paul Wolfowitz, as the new
head of the World Bank, was already on message at the end of the
summit, emphasizing that the G8 has asked the Bank to construct a
"new framework for mobilizing investment in clean energy and
development." 4 Other commentary makes it clear, as if there was any
doubt, that the Bank sees its role as one that will persist even
after 2012 when, if the Bush people get their way, Kyoto will expire
without an heir.5
This is neoliberalism as usual. For the Bank, as we should all know
by now, is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It has
single-handedly financed over $25 billion in fossil fuel-based
projects since 1992, when the UN Climate Convention was signed at the
Earth Summit. And even when taken together with the Global
Environmental Facility, a nominally autonomous financing arm that was
created to, in part, finance climate change mitigation, it has
invested over 17 times more in fossil fuels and fossil power plants
as in renewable forms of energy and energy efficiency.
You'd think that this would be enough, but not for the Bush crowd.
Only a few weeks after the G8 summit faded into the echoes of the
London bombings, the United States moved to undercut the G8 process,
as it has sought to undercut the UN negotiations themselves, by
pursuing a high-concept, technology-centered strategy of overlapping
bilateral agreements in which it can maneuver freely, without the
troublesome presence of either grim climatologists or European
surrender monkeys.
The Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate
The Partnership, as I will call it, surfaced on July 27th, though
it's clear that its building blocks-a series of bilateral technology
agreements between the United States and other countries-have been in
the works for at least three years. Now, as the run-up to the
Montreal climate conference begins, White House managers decided it
was time to go public. And going public requires, as well all know, a
good marketing plan and flashy packaging. Thus the "Partnership," and
thus the very focused messaging about the "post Kyoto" era that went
along with it. The New York Times story, for example, began by
announcing that "The United States plans to join China and India in
an Asian-Pacific climate agreement intended to replace the Kyoto pact
as a method to control greenhouse emissions "6
This isn't actually what the agreement says-the Partnership "vision
statement"7 goes out of its way to say that the partnership "will be
consistent with and contribute to our efforts under the UNFCCC and
will complement, but not replace, the Kyoto Protocol"-but it's the
spin. And this is all about spin.
The Partnership consists of the United States, Australia, China,
India, South Korea, and Japan, and is designed, unsurprisingly, to
address the climate crisis without mandatory emissions targets.
Instead, it emphasizes the development of a variety of energy
technologies, many if not most of them focused on coal, and implies
some as-yet-unspecified terms for transferring those technologies to
the developing world. It is entirely voluntary; in fact, under the
wrappings, it looks a lot like a trade pact. And it vividly displays
the U.S. political/rhetorical strategy, which far too few climate
analyses have taken seriously enough: it grants the primacy of
development to the South, beginning with "Development and poverty
eradication are urgent and overriding goals internationally," and
going on to remind us that "the international community agreed in the
Delhi Declaration on Climate Change and Sustainable Development [this
was three years ago] on the importance of the development agenda in
considering any climate change approach."
Be clear here. There's absolutely no chance that we can avoid a
climate catastrophe without a massive energy technology revolution,
and without financing and tech-transfer regimes that rapidly spread
the best new low-carbon energy technologies around the world. The
question is if the menu here, which (like the Energy Bill) is heavy
with "clean coal" technologies and puts in a good word for nuclear,
is the proper infrastructure of the greenhouse transition. The
question, too, is if Wolfowitz's World Bank is soon going to announce
a link between the Partnership and its "new framework for mobilizing
investment in clean energy and development." And, ultimately, the
question is if China and India-both countries with huge coal
reserves-are going to throw their lot in with the United States.
It's possible, especially in the short term, and especially if the
bribes are large enough. The bribes and the linkages. The Bush
administration is in the process of radically upgrading its
"strategic partnership" with India,8 and the next few years could see
even joint U.S. / India military operations. And as for China, let's
just say that its need for energy has been prominent in the news
lately. It's not really very hard, all things considered, to
understand why either country sees "The Coal Pact," as it's being
called in Australia, as being in its national interest.
In the long run, and probably soon, the Partnership will pass, for at
bottom it's mostly packaging. It's not like it's going to mobilize
the capital and initiative needed to open a real road to low-carbon
development, a road wide enough for China, and India, and the rest of
the developing world, to actually take. Not like it's going to set
off an efficiency revolution in the North. Not like it's going to
close the gap between the threat and the still-missing response. Not
like it can actually work.
But it is clever, and it is dangerous, and it is a warning. It
certainly portends another wave of political sleaze, as the U.S. and
Australian governments campaign, once again, to declare Kyoto
irrelevant, and to further muddy the waters of the post-2012 debate.
And there's this: The South really does not intend to agree to
anything that does not guarantee it a path to developmental equity,
and until a regime that meets this rather daunting criteria is on the
table, the Bush people, and indeed the whole fossil-fuel /
development-as-usual cartel, are going to find it easy to sow discord
and division.
The bottom line: there's nothing much here, but it's a dangerous nothing.
End Notes
1. www.stabilisation2005.com
2. Andrew Simms, John Magrath, and Hannah Reid, with
contributions from the Working Group on Climate Change and
Development, Up in smoke? Threats from, and responses to, the impact
of global warming on human development, New Economics Foundation,
October 20, 2004, at
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=196
3. Juliet Eilperin, "Senators Struggle to Act on Global
Warming," Washington Post, July 22, 2005, at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005
072102235.html
4. Statement By Paul Wolfowitz, President Of The World Bank, At
Conclusion Of G8 Summit, Press Release No:2006/011/S, at
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/
ORGANIZATION/EXTOFFICEPRESIDENT/0,,contentMDK:20576899~
menuPK:51175739~pagePK:51174171~piPK:64258873~theSitePK:1014541,00.html
5. Lesley Wroughton, World Bank to take lead in new climate
change plan, Reuters, July 20, 2005, at
http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=
URI:urn:newsml:reuters.com:20050720:MTFH17554_2005-07-20_15-25-03_N19392712:1
6. Jane Perlez, "U.S. to Join China and India in Climate Pact,"
New York Times, July 27, 2005, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/27/international/asia/27emissions.html?
7. Vision Statement of Australia, China, India, Japan, the
Republic of Korea, and the U.S. for a New Asia-Pacific Partnership on
Clean Development and Climate, Fact Sheet, Bureau of Oceans and
International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Washington, DC,
July 28, 2005, at http://www.state.gov/g/oes/rls/fs/50335.htm
8. Praful Bidwai, "India Moves Toward a New Compact with the
United States," Silver City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In
Focus, July 14, 2005, at http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/157
Tom Athanasiou is the co-director of EcoEquity (www.ecoequity.org)
and, most recently, the co-author, with Paul Baer, of Dead: Heat:
Global Justice and Global Warming.
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