Patrick Bond16 December 2010analysisPositive spin about the global climate summit in Cancun is based on reaching international consensus and establishing instruments to manage the crisis using market-based strategies - even though these are 'failing everywhere they have been tried'. Looking 'soberly at what was needed to reverse current warming and what was actually delivered, negotiators in Cancun 'failed by any reasonable measure,' Patrick Bond writes from Mexico.
The 11 December closure of the 16th Conference of the Parties - the global climate summit - in balmy Cancun was portrayed by most participants and mainstream journalists as a victory, a 'step forward'. Bragged US State Department lead negotiator Todd Stern, 'Ideas that were first of all, skeletal last year, and not approved, are now approved and elaborated.'
After elite despondency when the Copenhagen Accord was signed last December 18 by five countries behind the scenes, resulting in universal criticism, there is now a modicum of optimism for the next meeting of heads of state and ministers, in steamy Durban in the dogdays of a South African summer a year from now. But this hope relies upon a revival of market-based climate strategies, which, in reality, are failing everywhere they have been tried.
The elites' positive spin is based on reaching an international consensus (though Bolivia formally dissented) and establishing instruments to manage the climate crisis using capitalist techniques. Cancun's defenders argue that the last hours' agreements include acknowledgements that emissions cuts must keep world temperature increases below 2°C, with consideration to be given to lowering the target to 1.5°C.
Negotiators also endorsed greater transparency about emissions, a Green Climate Fund led by the World Bank, the introduction of forest-related investments, transfers of technology for renewable energy, capacity-building and a strategy for reaching legally-binding protocols in future. According to UN climate official Christiana Figueres, formerly a leading carbon trader, 'Cancun has done its job. Nations have shown they can work together under a common roof, to reach consensus on a common cause.'
STATUS QUO OR STEP BACK?
But look soberly at what was needed to reverse current warming and what was actually delivered. Negotiators in Cancun's luxury Moon Palace hotel complex failed by any reasonable measure. As Bolivian President Evo Morales complained, 'It's easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger. People here in Cancun have no idea what it is like to be a victim of climate change.'
For Bolivia's UN ambassador Pablo Solon, Cancun 'does not represent a step forward, it is a step backwards', because the non-binding commitments made to reduce emissions by around 15 per cent by 2020 simply cannot stabilise temperature at the 'level which is sustainable for human life and the life of the planet.'
Even greater anger was expressed in civil society, including by Meena Raman of Malaysia-based Third World Network: 'The mitigation paradigm has changed from one which is legally binding - the Kyoto Protocol with an aggregate target which is system-based, science based - to one which is voluntary, a pledge-and-review system.' As El Salvadoran Friends of the Earth leader Ricardo Navarro lamented, 'What is being discussed at the Moon does not reflect what happens on Earth. The outcome is a Cancunhagen that we reject.'
Most specialists agree that even if the unambitious Copenhagen and Cancun promises are kept (a big if), the result will be a cataclysmic 4-5°C rise in temperature over this century, and if they are not, 7°C is likely. Even with a rise of 2°C, scientists generally agree, small islands will sink, Andean and Himalayan glaciers will melt, coastal areas such as much of Bangladesh and many port cities will drown, and Africa will dry out - or in some places flood - so much that nine out of of ten peasants will not survive.
The politicians and officials have been warned of this often enough by climate scientists, but are beholden to powerful business interests which are lined up to either promote climate denialism, or to generate national-versus-national negotiating blocs destined to fail in their race to gain most emission rights. As a result, in spite of a band-aid set of agreements, the distance between negotiators and the masses of people and the planet grew larger not smaller over the last two weeks.
WIKILEAKING CLIMATE BRIBERY
To illustrate, smaller governments were 'bullied, hustled around, lured with petty bribes, called names and coerced into accepting the games of the rich and emerging-rich nations,' says Soumya Dutta of the South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy. 'Many debt-ridden small African nations are seeing the money that they might get through the scheming designs of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), and have capitulated under the attack of this REDD brigade. It's a win-win situation, both for the rich nations, as well as for the rich of the poor nations. The real poor are a burden in any case, to be kept at arms length - if not further.'
Bribing those Third World governments which in 2009 were the most vocal critics of Northern climate posturing became common knowledge thanks to WikiLeaks disclosures of US State Department cables from February 2010. Last February 11, for example, EU climate action commissioner Connie Hedegaard told the US that the Alliance of Small Island States 'could be our best allies, given their need for financing.'
A few months earlier, the Maldives helped lead the campaign against low emissions targets such as those set in the Copenhagen Accord. But its leaders reversed course, apparently because of a US$50 million aid package arranged by US deputy climate change envoy Jonathan Pershing. According to a February 23 cable, Pershing met the Maldives' US ambassador, Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed, who told him that if 'tangible assistance' were given his country, then other affected countries would realise 'the advantages to be gained by compliance' with Washington's climate agenda.
The promised money is, however, in doubt. Hedegaard also noted with concern that some of the US$30 billion in pledged North-South climate-related aid from 2010-2012 - e.g. from Tokyo and London, she said - would come in the form of loan guarantees, not grants. Pershing was not opposed to this practice, because 'donors have to balance the political need to provide real financing with the practical constraints of tight budgets.'
Even while observing Washington's tendency to break financial promises, Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, the leading African head of state on climate, was also unveiled by WikiLeaks as a convert to the Copenhagen Accord. This appeared to be the outcome of pressure applied by the US State Department, according to a February 2 cable, with Zenawi asking for more North-South resources in return.
REDD AS WEDGE
Besides Bolivian leadership, the world's best hope for contestation of these power relationships rests with civil society. Along with La Via Campesina network of peasant organisations, which attracted a Mexico-wide caravan and staged a militant march that nearly reached the airport access road on the morning of December 7 as heads of state flew into Cancun, the most visible poor peoples' representatives were from the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). On December 8, IEN spokesperson Tom Goldtooth was denied entry to the UN forum due to his high-profile role in non-violent protests.
According to Goldtooth, Cancun's 'betrayal' is 'the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord.' For Goldtooth, an ardent opponent of REDD, 'Such strategies have already proved fruitless and have been shown to violate human and Indigenous rights. The agreements implicitly promote carbon markets, offsets, unproven technologies, and land grabs - anything but a commitment to real emissions reductions. Language "noting" rights is exclusively in the context of market mechanisms, while failing to guarantee safeguards for the rights of peoples and communities, women and youth.'
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