Copenhagen Climate Conference: Obvious evident showing the global development model and the UN system fail

Arief Wicaksono

Climate change convention has successfully provided us the most expensive learning curve ever. First lesson is, the global development model that has long been imposed by the rich industrial countries, as well as through their multilateral trade and economic machineries, obviously fail. Second lesson is, the United Nations (UN) has been an unequivocal failure of the expensive and ambitious gigantic global bureaucracy that cannot demonstrate its impartiality but following power and money. COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, held in early freezing December 2009, is the stage for those to perform power abuse but at the same time for the naive strong spirited activism that is believing the UN is the solution, not part of the problem instead.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an intergovernmental treaty developed to address the problem of climate change. The Convention was negotiated from February 1991 to May 1992 and opened for signature at the June 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) — also known as the Rio Earth Summit. The UNFCCC entered into force on 21 March 1994, ninety days after the 50th country’s ratification had been received. By December 2007, it had been ratified by 192 countries.

Parties to the Convention continue to meet on a regular basis in order to take stock of progress in implementing their obligations under the treaty, and to consider further actions to address the climate change threat. They have also negotiated a protocol to the Convention. The Kyoto Protocol was first agreed in December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, although ongoing discussions still held between 1998 and 2004 to finalise the “fine print” of the agreement. The Protocol obliges industrialised countries and countries of the former Soviet bloc (known collectively as “Annex I Parties”) to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by an average of about 5% for the period 2008-2012 compared with 1990 levels.

Under the terms agreed in Kyoto, the Protocol only enters into force following ratification by 55 Parties to the UNFCCC, and if these 55 countries included a sufficient number of Annex I Parties that at least 55% of that group’s total carbon dioxide emissions for 1990 were represented. Although the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States, refused the Kyoto Treaty in 2001 soon after the election of President George W. Bush, a majority of other Annex I Parties, including Canada, Japan, and the countries of the European Union ratified the treaty. In November 2004, the Russian Federation also ratified the Protocol, thus reaching the 55% threshold. The Protocol finally entered into force as a legally-binding document on 16 February 2005. By December 2007, the Protocol had been ratified by 177 countries, including Annex I parties representing 63.7% of Annex I greenhouse gas emissions in 1990.

Despite its bureaucratic and complicated architecture UNFCCC grew as one of the significant multilateral treaties along with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rounds and others. Unlike its sister conventions, UN Convention of Biological Diversity (UNCBD) for instance, UNFCCC provides a greater space of participation for non-party, such as non-government organisations (NGOs), business NGOs (BINGOs), research NGOs (RINGOs) and other funny abbreviations representing wide variety of core interest and expertise of caucus of the organisations. Other avenue by UNFCCC that provides greater non-party participation is the flexible mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, such as emissions trading (ET), the clean development mechanism (CDM) and joint implementation (JI) to allow Annex I Parties to meet their GHG emission limitations by purchasing GHG emission reductions credits from elsewhere, through financial exchanges, projects that reduce emissions in non-Annex I Parties, from other Annex I Parties , or from Annex I Parties with excess allowances. This perhaps is making UNFCCC as attractive as WTO, creating numerous opportunities for creative, if not innovative, consultancies in the areas of financial investment, cost curve abatement, and even in fabricated pseudoscience of meteorology and atmospheric fields, forestry, agriculture, and so forth. 

The simple message of the Rio Summit that the “rich” developed countries politically and ecologically indebted to the “poor” developing countries in the global tropical belt due to colonialism and historical exploitation that reached its tipping point in the Industrial Revolution era, has sophisticatedly been engineered by consistently using the logic and lingos of altruism. The political obligation of the “rich” developed countries had been fabricated into alms relying on their willingness and control to determine type and amount of the donations. Of three Kyoto Protocol’s flexible mechanisms CDM is the only space where the developing countries can participate with the least control, by providing opportunity for the developed one to invest in a “more sustainable business”, following the standard developed by the CDM Executive Boards assigned by UNFCCC. The CDM itself cannot be freed from the power of the developed countries in terms of intellectual property of certain technological innovations, as well as in the sense of the project scale that is believed can be a trade off of their obligation to cut their greenhouse gases emissions referring to the Kyoto Protocol.

All those stories are far from the actual business of usual of ongoing implantation of the global development model that is addicted to fossil fuels, hunger of land, thirst of enormous amount of water, greed to raw natural materials, consistently seek for sweatshops, and always engaging the violence apparatus. The aforementioned destructive power of the global development model is hidden under the rug covered by glossy and fancy advertisement of modern lifestyle promoting efficiency and practicality that had long been successful encroaching the social and cultural system of the people in the developing world, creating of what so called consumerism to the industrial goods and services. These had been worsened by the intrusion of values and system in the state governance imposed through both bilateral and multilateral economic and trade “cooperation” with the removal of State’s obligation to secure important public services, such as healthcare, education and fulfillment of food, water and energy, and high pace and extensive privatisation of such services. These complexes had long been the winning menu of the global development assistance to the developing countries that is obviously not for free. Ironically, but expectedly, these complexes occur in the UNFCCC system and processes.

The NGOs movement has been considered to as an alter-ego mobilised by the community of the State system failure in certain area of public services. The environmental NGOs, for instance, is reflecting the failure of the State’s performance to manage the environment. The growing development of NGOs for the past four decades, however, is not sterile to intrusion by the corporatism due to its non-profit and tax-exempted nature of the works. NGOs becomes the perfect safe haven for the corporatism to wash their dirt due to the inevitable destructive power of the industry’s business as usual as inbuilt part of the global development model. It is hard to find a genuine NGOs movement that is free from the corporatism machinery, ranging from the grant-making and resource mobilisation modality, financial management system, to even a small element of the administrative drill of the office management. The counter argument by the NGOs towards the global development model is seen absurd since the modus operandi and modus Vivendi of the NGOs works are as the same as the object they criticise. Even worst, there are common knowledge that there will no resistance without adequate (funding) resources due to high demand of the NGOs to get huge victory (and impact).

Witnessing the absurdity of COP15 in Copenhagen, in early freezing December 2009, I’ve been astonished by the faithful of many activists demanding something that would not ever happen from the system that has proven to be an inherent part of the massive global dehumanisation problem, the UN system. There is no way for me to deny that I am part of the that due to lack of creativity to find the most sophisticated and intelligent argument countering the climate change as an unequivocal evident of the global development failure without entrapping myself in the mainstream. Julian Hunt says, failure at such a grand level means we have to act locally, commenting the “end result” of COP15 in the Guardian Online. But, do we still need to think and act reactively with a simple reversal as put by Hunt? To be sure, the closest milestone we have to reach is to build critical mass of savvy and concerned people. But how we can move forward to come up with a meaningful action without involving thousand kilometers of travel to solidify our thoughts and ideas? Or, perhaps we should follow what John Lennon had done, making and singing “Imagine” that had long been inspiring social and political movement across the planet for decades, without being entrapped in endless frustration?

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