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The following article was written by someone I know who attended the recent 9th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Milan, Italy. It's not pretty.
Hello ****
The following is a report to members, et al. I think you may be interested.
The "climate talks" have two official faces: the Kyoto
Protocol--which most newspaper-reading Americans know has been rudely
rejected by the Bush administration--and the much less visible annual
meetings, the "Conferences of the Parties," at which the critical
negotiations take place. What most Americans do not know is that the
overall legal framework here is set by the UNFCCC, and that it,
rather than Kyoto, is the reason the negotiations have held together.
There's something else you must know about the UNFCCC--it divides
the world's nations into two, establishing this division as one
between "Annex 1" and "non-Annex 1" countries (the first are listed
in an annex to the main treaty). In so doing, it reflects the
historic division between "developed" and "developing" countries,
though in an odd and imperfect way that reflects the political
compromises that underlie the UNFCCC: Annex 1, for example, excludes,
in spite of their wealth and high per capita emissions, the "Asian
Tigers" and other relatively rich developing countries such as Israel
and the Mid-East OPEC nations.
This division has had consequences. In the negotiations leading up
to the Earth Summit, the European Union and many other countries
favored the establishment of national "targets and timetables" for
the reductions of greenhouse gases. But these national
caps--quantified emission limits of exactly the type embodied in the
subsequent Kyoto Protocol--were adamantly resisted by the U.S. and
had to be thrown overboard. The result, which we've inherited, was a
viable framework treaty (good), without teeth (bad).
Soon, however, it became quite evident that, without targets and
timetables, the Annex 1 countries' commitment to reduce their
emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2000 was largely symbolic.
And with the scientific evidence for climate change becoming
increasingly convincing, the need for binding targets had become
clear. However, and herein lies the rub, the vast disparity in
per-capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions (both historical and
current) between the rich and poor countries meant that not all
countries could be expected to take on targets. Thus, it was agreed,
in a text called the "Berlin Mandate" at the first Conference of the
Parties in 1995, that, initially, only the developed Annex I
countries would have binding emission caps.
In the context of the climate negotiations, the Clinton
administration had little choice but to agree to this. But at home in
the U.S., where public knowledge of climate change was minimal, the
fossil-fuel industry mounted a campaign to portray this mandate as
"unfair" to the U.S. because it would have to pay to reduce emissions
while large developing countries like India and China would not. In
1997, with the Kyoto negotiations on the horizon and the
environmental community unable to effectively counter this message,
the Senate voted 95-0 (the Byrd-Hagel Resolution) to assert that it
would accept no treaty that did not also contain binding targets for
the developing countries. In so doing, it effectively repudiated the
Berlin Mandate and set the stage for an ongoing crisis in the
negotiations, a crisis that is now coming to a head.
The U.S. response was twofold. First, Clinton and Gore lobbied hard
for the inclusion in the Kyoto Protocol of "flexibility mechanisms"
which would allow Annex 1 countries to reduce the cost of their
emissions reductions. These include both Kyoto's emission trading
provisions, which allow high-emitting countries like the U.S. to buy
emissions credits from countries with surplus allowances, and the
Clean Development Mechanism, by which Annex 1 countries can invest in
and obtain "credits" for carbon reduction projects hosted in
non-Annex 1 countries. Both of these, by the way, are very long
stories indeed. Second, once Kyoto was negotiated, Clinton never
submitted it for ratification to the Senate, where, of course, it
would have been promptly rejected.
By the rules of the Protocol, it only "enters into force" after it
is ratified by at least 55 countries, including enough Annex 1
countries to account for 55% of combined 1990 Annex 1 emissions. With
the U.S. rejection of the Protocol and its subsequent rejection by
Australia, the only way this was possible was if all other Annex 1
countries ratified. Europe, Japan, and (somewhat surprisingly) Canada
all did in fact do so, and the only country whose ratification is
still required is Russia. However, knowing that they have effective
veto power over the treaty, the Russians have been playing hard to
get, and there are evidently both conflicts in Russia over
ratification and covert efforts by the U.S. to persuade them not to.
Today, after the ninth Conference of Parties in Milan, there's still
widespread belief among climate experts that Russia will in fact
ratify the Kyoto Protocol and that it will enter into force in the
next year or so. Further, much of the climate community's effort is
now going into debates over "next steps," over how to structure a
post-Kyoto agreement that includes both developed and developing
countries. This is an extremely important problem, and the debate is
fascinating indeed, but progress has been made extremely difficult by
the fact that the U.S., the world's largest polluter by far, has
rejected Kyoto and is not taking any significant action to reduce its
emissions. Given this, the developing countries have refused to even
discuss taking on quantified emissions targets similar to those of
Annex 1 countries.
It's widely recognized that a real solution to the climate problem
will require that developing as well as developed countries reduce
their emissions well below current per capita levels. It's a
monumental challenge, and with the Bush administration unwilling to
engage, it is not clear how it can even be approached.
While the U.S. has been the center of resistance, the real enemy is
larger, more diffuse, and more terrifying than even the Bush
administration. It needs a name and "the carbon cartel," though not
ideal (it seems to imply an active, centralized conspiracy, when in
fact it is far more) will do. The term, in any case, is useful to
name the corporations, states, elites, institutions, and capital that
are bound up with the logic and interests of not just oil, but the
whole fossil sector.
Global warming may soon be the greatest challenge our species has
ever faced. So far, unfortunately, this is not widely understood in
either the U.S. (where the denialists are in power, and their allies
control most of the media) or in the South (where the elites still
generally consider global warming to be only a long-term problem).
Nevertheless, the reality is slowly becoming clear: to the Europeans,
who've just suffered a wave of killing weather, to the increasingly
anxious scientists who, staring into their data sheets and
simulations, are seeing a terrifying picture begin to clearly emerge,
and to the activist community, which is finally finding its own way
to the challenges of global warming.
These challenges are manifold, though for the purposes of
simplicity, let's just say that we desperately need a crash global
clean-energy transition, and, indeed, "just and sustainable
development." Unfortunately, both remain largely rhetoric and dreams.
And let's add that, for the most part, and particularly in the South,
the term "development" still conjures images of development-as-usual.
And that this will no longer do.
It isn't going to be easy to clear this up. The rich, after all, did
not become so by developing "sustainably." And development, or at any
rate poverty reduction, from which it still derives its legitimacy,
remains the top priority of the South. Consider that, according to a
recent report from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, the greenhouse body count has already reached 160,000
deaths a year. (The majority of these occur in Africa, Southeast
Asia, and Latin America, where people are highly vulnerable to
malnutrition, malaria, and diarrhea as hotter temperatures settle in
and floods and droughts become more common.) It may seem a huge
number, but to put it in perspective, note that the World Health
Organization estimates that indoor air pollution alone causes 1.6
million deaths per year. That's an even power of ten greater than the
greenhouse body count, and in this case the killer is poverty pure
and simple. Poverty, and with it murderously obsolete heatin
g and cooking technologies.
And the Kyoto Protocol, even if the carbon cartel manages to kill
it, must be seen as the first halting step in the construction of the
most significant environmental and economic treaty of all time.
Because as the climate regime becomes, as it must, a global regime,
it will also become quite impossible for the global justice movement
to proceed as if the greenhouse crisis and the climate treaty are of
merely secondary importance. The challenge, now, is to find a way
beyond the Kyoto Protocol, a way, eventually, to incorporate both the
developing world and the U.S. into an effective and politically
acceptable international climate regime. In this regard, two bits of
jargon, "adequacy" and "equity," must be understood, for between them
they define and contain the heart of the problem.
"Adequacy," in the dialects of the climate world, means facing the
challenge of preventing a dangerous degree of global warming. It
means that, whatever the science tells us, we cannot deny it, not
even if we think that the political and social changes that will
thereby be needed to stabilize the climate are "unrealistic." It
means that, even though a large amount of warming is already locked
in, we must at all costs avoid crossing the line into a world in
which the "impacts" of global warming are no longer "tolerable."
"Equity," of course, means justice. It means "just transitions," in that the rich must pay to help impacted and vulnerable communities "adapt" to the impacts and changes that will soon be upon us (think flooded villages in the global South, or coal miners here in the U.S.). It means that those who are the most responsible for the warming--and this means, again, the rich--must pay to "mitigate" the emissions that cause the warming. And it means that, in a world where the oceans and the skies are clearly revealed as fragile and finite, that these "environmental spaces" must be fairly shared by all and protected as a global public good. It means that emission rights must ultimately be apportioned on the basis of equal per-capita rights.
--
Best regards,
****
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