Copenhagen: was China the problem?
The December 7-18 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen was supposed to “seal a global deal” to tackle climate change. It failed miserably
Simon Butler | Green Left Online | 13 February 2010
A number of commentators have put forward a simple explanation: China did it.
A December 22 British Guardian opinion piece by British environmentalist Mark Lynas, who attended Copenhagen as an advisor to the Indian Ocean island nation of the Maldives, argued: “China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame ...
“China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again.”
Lynas said he was “certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks in every corner of the world.”
The argument is flawed. It wrongly absolves the rich countries from their role in the sabotage of a strong climate deal.
Neither the US nor the European Union — the nations most responsible for historic carbon pollution — were prepared to offer emissions cuts in line with the climate science, which requires a minimum 40% cut on 1990 levels by 2020.
The US offer was a tiny 4% emissions cut — even less than Australia’s irresponsibly low 5% pledge.
On December 17, the Guardian reported on a leaked UN study that said the actual emissions cuts offered by each country at Copenhagen would lead to a 3°C average temperature rise.
The actions pledged would not meet the stated goal in the Copenhagen Accord for a 2°C warming limit and were far beyond the maximum 1.5°C rise the poor countries demanded.
Lynas himself wrote on his blog on December 9: “3°C may be the ‘tipping point’ where global warming could run out of control, leaving us powerless to intervene as planetary temperatures soar.”
With or without China, no serious environmentalist could have cracked open the champagne bottles had the rich countries got their way.
Lynas’s article gives the false impression that the rich countries were stopped by China from agreeing to significant emissions cuts. But the leaking of another document on the second day of the conference — the infamous “Danish text” — had already exposed the dirty deal being prepared in secret by European, US and Australian governments.
Sudanese representative Lumumba Di-Aping, chair of the G77 group of poor countries, said: “This [Danish] text destroys both the UN convention on climate change and the Kyoto protocol. This is aimed at producing a new treaty, a new legal initiative that throws away the basis of [differing] obligations between the poorest and most wealthy nations in the world.”
After the summit, Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, pointed to the real reason for Copenhagen’s failure in a statement on Foei.org: the rich countries flatly refused to make the sharp emissions cuts required or provide adequate funding to help poor countries develop low-carbon economies.
He said: “Instead of committing to deep cuts in emissions and putting new, public money on the table to help solve the climate crisis, rich countries have bullied developing nations to accept far less.
"Those most responsible for putting the planet in this mess have not shown the guts required to fix it and have instead acted to protect short-term political interests.”
By putting the biggest blame on China, Lynas ignores the powerful influence the fossil fuel industry, with its legions of paid lobbyists and bought politicians, had over the Copenhagen conference.
And, inexcusably, he papers over the fact that the rich world sought to use Copenhagen to shift more of the burden for greenhouse gas cuts onto the underdeveloped world.
That said, China’s role at Copenhagen was not praise-worthy. China’s capitalist government is also guilty of putting its short-term interests ahead of the future of the planet.
To point out that China is not climate enemy number one doesn’t mean China has a right to increase carbon pollution indefinitely.
Focus on the Global South’s Walden Bello has warned against viewing global politics as a simplistic division between the rich North and underdeveloped South. This division is very real, but the class divisions that exist within each nation must also be taken into account.
In 2007, he said: “It is the national elites that spout the ultra-Third Worldist line that the South has yet to fulfill its quota of polluting the world while the North has exceeded its quota.
“It is they who call for an exemption of the big rapidly industrialising countries from mandatory limits on the emission of greenhouse gases under a new Kyoto Protocol.
“When the [US] administration says it will not respect the Kyoto Protocol because it does not bind China and India, and the Chinese and Indian governments say they will not tolerate curbs on their greenhouse gas emissions because the US has not ratified Kyoto, they are in fact playing out an unholy alliance to allow their economic elites to continue to evade their environmental responsibilities and free-ride on the rest of the world.”
The good news is that the revolt of the poorest nations inside the official summit combined with the protests of tens of thousands outside on Copenhagen’s streets. The position pushed by these sectors rejected both the line of the rich nations and the rapidly developing nations, such as China and India.
This marked a new high point in the campaign to change the system, not the climate.
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1 comment:
Whatever the motives alleged, Western politicians need to understand, China simply can't afford it. There will be much more hardship soon with a looming Chinese collapse bigger than the Soviet Union's.
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