Deal or No Deal

In 2008, when the global financial bubble burst, governments around the world took just 15 days to decide to use trillions of dollars of public funds to save private banks and avoid what threatened to become a collapse of the financial system. The climate crisis has the potential to be immeasurably worse than any financial crash, yet still there is procrastination—despite the abundance of scientific evidence and of viable, creative and appealing solutions. As the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP20) talks enter their final days in Lima, Peru there seems to be very little in terms of moving the talks closer to the kind of agreement experts say are necessary to adequately tackle the crisis of human-caused global warming. So far only one paragraph of a 60 page statement has been agreed. Unlike tobacco control talks where tobacco lobbyists are banned, the UN climate talks allow the fossil fuel industry free reign in their halls. At the UN climate talks, a group called the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) was been passing around a booklet of side events they are hosting an event hosted by the Global CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) Institute that features speakers from Shell and the World Coal Association. The title: "Why Divest from Fossil Fuels When a Future with Low Emission Fossil Energy Use is Already a Reality?" The title couldn't be more convoluted. First, low emission fossil fuels are an oxymoron. Second, even if they did exist, they're certainly not a reality today: carbon emissions are increasing each year and are directly tied to fossil fuel use.

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 The Climate Accountability Institute (CAI) highlights the fossil fuel industry's role in the climate crisis. Among the Institute's findings:

65 percent of all anthropogenic CO2 emitted since 1751 from fossil fuels and cement are caused by just 90 entities. Nearly one-third of all global industrial CO2 since that time is from carbon fuels produced by the top twenty fossil fuel companies, which include Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP. "The delegates at the climate conference are dealing with emissions country-by-country," stated Richard Heede, the principal researcher who runs CAI. "Looking at emission through the lens of the relatively few companies that are actually producing the fuels paints a different, and complementary picture."

"Even if emissions plummeted today, climate change impacts will continue to mount," stated Angela Anderson, Director of Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program.

Both Dr James Lovelock (top UK climate scientist, Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society, famous for his Gaia Hypothesis and atmospheric research) and Professor Kevin Anderson ( Deputy Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that only about 0.5 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming.

The Scotsman reported on Professor Anderson’s estimates of “only half a billion surviving”: "Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the century. Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were 'terrifying'. 'For humanity it's a matter of life or death,' he said. 'We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it's extremely unlikely that we wouldn't have mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion people surviving'."

“If we can keep civilization alive through this century perhaps there is a chance that our descendants will one day serve Gaia and assist her in the fine-tuned self-regulation of the climate and composition of our planet. We have enjoyed 12,000 years of climate peace since the last shift from a glacial age to an interglacial one. Before long, we may face planet-wide devastation worse even than unrestricted nuclear war between superpowers. The climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence.” James Lovelock said in the Guardian

Already 16 million people (about 9.5 million of them under-5 year old infants) die avoidably every year due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease – and man-made global warming is already clearly worsening this global avoidable mortality holocaust. However 10 billion avoidable deaths due to global warming this century yields an average annual avoidable death rate of 100 million per year. Noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050 (UN Population Division), these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century

Naomi Klein summarizes the seriousness of our predicament and the need for rapid and radical change to our economic system: “Indeed emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a utopian dream… Can we pull it off? All I know is that nothing is inevitable”

Politicians who recognize the problem but who refuse to take requisite urgent action are effectively culpable as change deniers. Naomi Klein describes how multi-billionaires and major GHG polluters have backed climate action schemes that avoid the clear imperative of cessation of GHG pollution. Thus Richard Branson backed biofuel (that contrary to industry propaganda carries a huge Carbon Debt), Warren Buffett made green noises but remains a major polluter, and Michael Bloomberg has backed a coal-to-gas transition (that is disastrously counterproductive). An insidious aspect explored by her is Big Money funding Big Green with a consequent “softening” of the Green agenda. A serious trend is Big Money (e.g. Bill Gates) and Big Polluter (e.g. Richard Branson) backing of “carbon sucking machines” as alternatives to the obvious imperative of cessation of GHG pollution.

“The ‘market-based’ climate solutions favored by so many large foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole”. resulting in dangerous and counterproductive policies such as support for the disastrous coal-to-gas transition that locks in GHG pollution for decades (yet because methane can have a GWP 105 times greater than that of CO2, depending on the rate of gas leakage, gas burning can be dirtier GHG-wise than coal burning) and support for fraudulent :market-based” cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme (ETS) approaches (that have been empirically unsuccessful, are accordingly counterproductive, invite gross market manipulation, and are utterly fraudulent in that they involve particular governments selling licence to pollute the one common atmosphere and ocean of all nations.

Environmentalist campaigns must not be “Not in My Back-Yard” but as the French anti-fracking activist say, “Ni ici, ni ailleurs” – neither here, nor elsewhere. The environmentalist movement “must be the catalyst to actually build the world that will keep us all safe. The stakes are simply too high, and the time too short, to settle for anything less”, according to Klein.

The relentless destruction of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest will endanger the global climate unless it can be stopped and restored, says a new report entitled The Future Climate of Amazonia,  by Dr Antonio Donato Nobre, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Approximately 20% of Brazil’s Amazon forest has been clear cut, while forest degradation has disturbed the remaining forest to varying degrees—directly affecting an additional 20% or so of the original area. The total deforested area is greater than the size of two Germanys or two Japans. It is equal to 184 million football fields—which means that, over the last 40 years, the equivalent of 12,635 football fields have been deforested per day.

Multi-national corporations from Europe are destroying the environment and causing climate chaos in Latin America with destructive mining practices. A new report details how multi-national corporations are destroying the environment and causing serious climate damage in Latin America brings attention to an important area not being discussed at the UN COP 20 climate negotiations being held in Peru. “Multinational corporations are relentlessly expanding their operations into ever more vulnerable and remote regions of the world,” says the report, written by three public interest groups: The Democracy Centre of San Francisco, the Corporate Europe Observatory of Brussels, and the Transnational Institute of Amsterdam. Accused in the report are Repsol, the Spanish fossil fuels giant; the Swiss-based mining and resources conglomerate Glencore-Xstata; and Enel-Endesa, an Italian consortium. “In the case of Repsol, the Spanish fossil fuels giant, we see how the relentless pursuit of new gas and oil reserves in Peru takes direct aim at the region’s indigenous territories and forests, leaving social destruction and in its wake,” says the report. “Another Peruvian case is that of Glencore-Xstata. Political manipulation has allowed the Swiss-based mining and resources conglomerate to expand its copper mining operations in the region. Scarce water resources, already stretched by climate change, are being contaminated with impunity.” In Colombia, the Italian-based consortium Enel-Endesa is attempting to portray a massive hydroelectric dam as a ‘clean energy’ project via its Latin American subsidiary Emgesa. But rather than benefitting local people, the electricity is destined for dirty industry at discount prices.

What is not being considered in the COP 20 talks is that most developing world governments are not capable of forcing corporations to be more respectful of the environment and climate. Moreover, back in Europe, corporations are not held accountable for what they do in developing countries. With profits down at many Northern corporations since the 2011 recession, they are “invading” every country in Latin America. The report explains that powerful, wealthy multi-national corporations manage to overcome resistance to their damaging environmental practices by infiltrating a country’s political process, making promises that are never met, or by simply ignoring local opposition. Spanish corporations have become so well known for their numerous and ambitious development projects in Latin America that they are often called the “Corporate Conquistadors”, a referenced to the way the Spanish conquered much of Latin America centuries ago in search of gold, silver and cheap labor. Repsol – one of the largest of the many Spanish companies – is criticized for extracting natural gas from the middle of Peru’s delicate rainforest, using dozens of drilling platforms, hundreds of kilometres of pipelines, and the construction of a recovery plant, and roads, etc. The report says that Repsol will be expanding further  “at the cost of devastation of indigenous communities and their cultures, as well as the destruction of forests, biodiversity and water resources …”

“Due to global warming, our people are suffering a constant variation of the climate,” said Klaus Quicque Bolivar, who lives in the Peruvian Amazon. “There is an excess of heat. The rivers are warming up; there are less agricultural production and natural reproduction of fishes. Some animal species are disappearing and the cycle of wild fruits are varying.” While the indigenous community had its say during a brief session, delegates from the multi-national corporate sector are getting much more attention and have been busy lobbying national government delegates at the conference to adopt industry-friendly solutions to fight climate change. If the outcome of this UN climate conference is anything like others held in recent years, the recommendations of the indigenous community will receive only token acknowledgement in the final communique – an outcome that is sure to remind them of what it’s like to fight powerful corporations back in their own countries.

Germany’s plan to phase out nuclear energy and switch to renewables by 2022 is unrealistic as the country is doomed to remain dependent on fossil fuels like oil and gas for the next 70 years, energy expert Matthias Dornfeldt, a research fellow at Center for Caspian Studies in Berlin, covering geopolitical issues and energy security, told RT. Renewables can’t replace fossil fuels overnight because there’s not enough infrastructure, said Dornfeldt in an interview with RT. He believes the 21st century will be the century of gas, as the 20th century was the century of oil. “We are going to be dependent on oil as well as on gas, as I see, for the next 50, 60, 70 years”, he said, adding there is “a huge impact of fossil fuels on the national economy in Germany.” His comments echo a study by the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) that said Germany would remain dependent on fossil fuels for decades. Oil, natural gas, coal and lignite account for 80 percent of German energy consumption. Germany’s game plan to switch to renewables known as Energiewende, and the recently approved National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency looking very unrealistic, the report added. Even oil production in Germany, which is small compared with the big international producers, contributes more to power generation than all of domestic solar energy put together.

As the world warms, growing hunger and insecurity, the Canadian prime minister has disavowed his longstanding commitments to the international community, Canadians and future generations to meet his greenhouse-gas reduction targets.   According to Stephen Harper, it would be “crazy” to regulate the oil and gas industry now, the fastest-growing source of emissions, after promising regulations for all these years he’s been in power. They say we couldn’t regulate them then because the economy was fragile and oil was profitable; we can’t regulate them now because the economy is fragile and oil is not profitable. This crazy energy economics fuels climate chaos and economic fragility. Under Harper’s reign, Canadians are world leaders in subsidizing this toxic industry, to the tune of about $34 billion a year, according to a 2013 International Monetary Fund report titled Energy Subsidy Reform: Lessons and Implications. 

Many have simply lost faith in global climate negotiations summits such as COP 20. The process has not delivered the climate action we need. But the Socialist Party has repeatedly warned that the short-term requirements of capital accumulation over-rides peoples’ and the planet’s needs. Only a fool would argue that the action proposed by polluters themselves will be enough to halt global warming, much less begin to reverse it. Environmentalists usually argue renewables are the most economical solution but we witness how they are no longer economically viable as the era of low-cost oil returns.

This system is responsible for upward of half of all greenhouse-gas emissions after considering deforestation, animal factory farms, fossil-fuel-dependent industrial monocultures, etc. At the same time, our ability to grow food is significantly threatened by climate change. Our money-driven agro-economic system is presently incapable of feeding the world, leaving billions hungry and malnourished and the basic ecology unaccounted for. Alternatively, ‘agro-ecological’ food-production methods have the potential to sequester mass amounts of carbon in the soil, grow local economies and regenerate biologically diverse ecosystems. Reforest underused farmland by integrating perennial poly-cultures — crops growing better together. By growing healthy food and biodiversity, we can capture carbon. Socialists are slowly but surely achieving a consensus — the idea that big changes are needed to cool us humans down before we overheat our planet . It is no longer enough to protect our planet from a potential three or four degree Celsius rise in global temperatures - with all the disastrous consequences that would have for us, our children, and our ecosystems. We need socialism. Or we face possible extinction as a species.