Klimaatverandering 155

What Was Really Decided in Copenhagen?

Tuesday 29 December 2009

by: Brian Tokar, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Théo La Photo, woodleywonderworks,TexasEagle, Burning Image)

Fifty thousand people went to Denmark and all they got was a lousy three-page political agreement.

Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still coming in, but a few things are already quite clear, even as countries step up the blame game in response to the summit's disappointing conclusion.

• First, the 2-1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to "take note" of are completely self-contradictory and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn't even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a "sham agreement," British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in "saving face," and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to "take note" of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even "welcomed," a common UN practice.
• Second, the global divide between rich and poor has never been clearer, and those countries where people are already experiencing droughts, floods and the melting of glaciers that provide a vital source of freshwater expect to find themselves in increasingly desperate straits as the full effects of climate disruptions begin to emerge. Not to mention the small island nations that face near-certain annihilation as melting ice sheets bring rising seas, along with infiltrations of seawater into their scarce fresh water supplies. Especially despicable was the changing role of the governments of the rapidly developing "BASIC" countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), who claim to speak for the poor - in their own countries and around the world - when it is convenient, but mainly seek to protect the expanding riches of their own well-entrenched elites.
• Third, even the meager and contradictory progress of the past 17 years of global climate talks is now at risk, as is the flawed but relatively open and inclusive UN process. After the 2007 climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, the Bush administration tried to initiate an alternate track of negotiations on climate policy that involved only a select handful of the more compliant countries. That strategy failed, partly because its figurehead was George Bush. Now that the Obama administration has adopted essentially the same approach, with the full collaboration of the "BASICs," the utterly substanceless "Copenhagen Accord" can be seen as this coercive strategy's first diplomatic success.

As I wrote just as the Copenhagen meeting was getting underway (see my "Repackaging Copenhagen," posted in early December), the US had planned for some months to attempt to replace the quaint notion of a comprehensive global climate agreement with a patchwork of informal, individual country commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and undertake other appropriate measures. If the Copenhagen document means anything at all, it establishes that process as a new global norm for implementing climate policy. Nothing is binding and everything is voluntary, only to be "assessed" informally after another five years have passed. (Pages 4 and 5 of the "accord" actually consist of a pair of high school-caliber charts where countries are free to simply write in their voluntary emissions targets and other mitigation actions, nominally by the end of January.)

The document was hammered out in a back room, WTO-style. It hedges all the important issues and appends loopholes and contradictions to every substantive point it pretends to make. While discussions will nominally continue under the two UN negotiating tracks established two years ago in Bali, the "accord" provides a justification for leading countries in the process - which Bill McKibben has termed the "league of superpolluters," plus a few wannabes - to continue subverting and undermining those discussions in the name of a more efficient and streamlined process to continue business as usual for the benefit of the world's elites.

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/1229091