The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects 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.
A meeting in China at the beginning of next month is supposed to clear the way for Cancun. The hosts have already made it clear that it’s going nowhere — there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still “huge differences between developed and developing countries.”
Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move, but nobody cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously 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.
In 2012, the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions — the Kyoto protocol — expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it lapses.
MOVING BACKWARDS
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 in 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements, we spiraled backwards.
Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis published 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 — after the hopeless failure of the scheme’s first phase we were promised that 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 1 percent.
Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the recession has allowed 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.
Plenty of nations — like the UK — have produced what appear to 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 2˚C of global warming.
FAILURES
Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions that are outsourced to other countries and that are now imported 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 percent.
Rather than cutting the UK’s contribution to global warming by 19 percent since 1990, as the government boasts, it has been increased it by about 29 percent.
It’s the same story in most developed nations. The UK’s apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.
MISSING IN ACTION
Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the US is not going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If the US Congress couldn’t pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little more than loopholes while Barack Obama was US president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for action in other circumstances?
Last Tuesday it was reported that of the 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November, only one accepted that man-made climate change is taking place. Who was he? Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, producing a full house of science deniers.
The enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.
What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern — the economist who produced the influential Stern review on the impact of global warming — as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen,” is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.
Nature won’t wait for us. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of this year were as hot as the first eight months of 1998 — the warmest ever recorded, but there’s a crucial difference. In 1998 there was a record El Nino — the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. This year’s El Nino was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8˚C, rather than 2.5˚C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years. Since May, the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Nina) — even so, June, July and August this year were the second-warmest on record. The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.
BATTLING GOLIATH
Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not to 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.
Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice 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?
I don’t know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialize and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid.
The conversation starts here.
China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve. By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will. Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe
After more than three weeks since the Honduran elections took place, its National Electoral Council finally certified the new president of Honduras. During the campaign, the two leading contenders, Nasry Asfura and Salvador Nasralla, who according to the council were separated by 27,026 votes in the final tally, promised to restore diplomatic ties with Taiwan if elected. Nasralla refused to accept the result and said that he would challenge all the irregularities in court. However, with formal recognition from the US and rapid acknowledgment from key regional governments, including Argentina and Panama, a reversal of the results appears institutionally and politically
In 2009, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) made a welcome move to offer in-house contracts to all outsourced employees. It was a step forward for labor relations and the enterprise facing long-standing issues around outsourcing. TSMC founder Morris Chang (張忠謀) once said: “Anything that goes against basic values and principles must be reformed regardless of the cost — on this, there can be no compromise.” The quote is a testament to a core belief of the company’s culture: Injustices must be faced head-on and set right. If TSMC can be clear on its convictions, then should the Ministry of Education
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) provided several reasons for military drills it conducted in five zones around Taiwan on Monday and yesterday. The first was as a warning to “Taiwanese independence forces” to cease and desist. This is a consistent line from the Chinese authorities. The second was that the drills were aimed at “deterrence” of outside military intervention. Monday’s announcement of the drills was the first time that Beijing has publicly used the second reason for conducting such drills. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is clearly rattled by “external forces” apparently consolidating around an intention to intervene. The targets of
RSS