“It’s already clear that the climate talks in December will go nowhere – so what do we do?” asks Monbiot
do we do?
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/09/20/the-process-is-dead/
from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake
during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments
lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want
to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade
negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic
limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.
Cancun(
top Chinese climate change official explains, still "huge differences between
developed and developing countries"(
that everyone else should move.
entrenched and muted. The doctor’s certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to
save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the
process is dead.
Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before
it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight
years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate
change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just
that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and
grand announcements we spiralled backwards.
a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon
that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU’s emissions
trading system, in 2012(
the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon
will it save by then? Less than one third of one per cent.
big polluters to build up a bank of carbon permits which they can carry into the
next phase of the trading scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank
down the proposed carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies
and the weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will
vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the EU’s emissions trading
system will remain alive. It will also remain completely useless.
be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception (the
Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed to prevent more
than two degrees of global warming.
gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form
of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the
aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, the UK’s
emissions would rise by 48%(
as the government boasts, we have increased it by around 29%(5). It’s the same
story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures
elsewhere.
going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If Congress couldn’t pass
a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little but loopholes while Barack
Obama was president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does
hope lie for action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported
that of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only one
accepted that manmade climate change is taking place(
the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, producing a full house of science
deniers. The Enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.
manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which
was described by Lord Stern as "a result of the greatest market failure the world
has seen"(
Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the
first 8 months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded(
of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Nino was smaller (an
anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to
those of recent years(
not see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists
tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people
feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster
hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes.
Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there
is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against
us have always been stronger than we are.
of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see.
To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic
power, acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider
interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting
and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent
people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So
what do we do now?
but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about
an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political
reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.
emissions suggests a rise of 225Mt, CO2 equivalent.