| Cancun's over. Done. We're finished until next year, in South Africa. I am planning to go next year, come hell or high water. While it's obvious that the UN wants civil society to stay the hell away from these talks, I hear from those who are there that Cancun was incredible from a networking perspective, helping those of us who are actually "doing something" to connect with one another and work together going forward.
The official process in Cancun resulted in what is being called a "modest" agreement, which sounds to me more like "a modest proposal." I spent yesterday listening about it on Democracy Now! and crying, but now I think I'm ready to write about it.
We are witnessing nothing less than the end of our planet, I am afraid. And this process is much more painful and irreversible to some countries, compared to others. If we "compromise" to limit the average global temperature rise to a certain number of degrees, or total emissions to a certain number of tons of CO2 per year, it's not much of a compromise for the island nations who end up underwater, or for countries like Bolivia who lose their glaciers and become deserts. It's not much of a compromise if only half of the countries on earth become uninhabitable and the corporations only forego half of their profitability from emitting carbon, and yet that seems to me where we are heading. More below. |
| The Kyoto Protocol, which includes mandatory cuts in emissions but ends in 2012, has not been extended beyond its current 2012 end date. Instead, as the U.S. requested last year, countries get to volunteer how much they wish to cut emissions. This leaves room for incredible inequality, as some countries are free to pledge more (or less) than others, and it also comes with no guarantee that the total amount pledged will be enough to curb the climate crisis sufficiently.
A good analogy for this, I think, is when a large group of people eats at a restaurant and then has to pay the bill. Everyone forks over what they think they owe, and - very often - the amount of money contributed is not enough to cover the bill plus tax and tip. Then people slowly hand over more money, a dollar or two at a time, until the whole bill is paid. Naturally, you can't leave the restaurant until the full bill is paid, and you're a jerk if you don't come up with enough for a decent tip too.
In this case, the "bill" is equivalent to the amount of carbon we must stop emitting and/or sequester in order to save the planet. Every country is free to toss in as much money (i.e. emissions cuts) as they want to cover it, but when those amounts added together fall short of the total bill, there's no one to keep them from leaving the restaurant without paying enough to cover it.
The other thing that has happened is the creation of a fund - administered by the World Bank - to pay poor countries to ease the pain of the damages they incur from climate change. Given the general history of aid as well as the tendencies of the World Bank in particular, I wonder what sort of strings will come attached to this aid money. And, truly, I don't think there is an amount of money in the world that will keep the oceans from swallowing entire island nations as the seas rise, or an amount that will put the glaciers back on Bolivia's mountains.
Additionally, it seems that REDD, the scheme in which polluters in rich nations pay poor nations to protect their forests, is going forward. Despite proclamations that "the rainforests have been saved," I have huge doubts about this, having visited the Amazon myself this year. The issues in that region are incredibly complex, and at stake are the homes, cultures, and rights of the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. I don't see why rich countries aren't being held responsible for protecting their own forests, or replanting them. Why don't we have a scheme to recover massive amounts of prairie lost across the midwestern United States? Why isn't our country being held accountable for the deforestation and environmental degradation of our past?
Last, and perhaps most importantly, the UN's consensus process broke down when Bolivia dissented from the final agreement, and their dissent was ignored. When every nation except one acquiesced to the deal, those in charge suddenly decided that the requirement for unanimity was a stupid one and could be skipped.
If that's the case, I wonder why they can't just have majority rule, one country, one vote. And I also know the answer. There are far more countries who will be hurt by a weak deal than countries who will profit from it. If a country's number of votes are proportional to its GDP, then the votes are there for a piss-poor deal like the one we've got. If we had one country, one vote, you could probably require a 2/3 majority to ratify an agreement, and you'd still get a strong, binding agreement that would actually save our planet.
Yesterday, the Society of Environmental Journalists sent around a "Cancun Roundup" of media coverage describing the end of the talks. (Drinking game: Take one sip of beer or... if you dare, shot of something stronger... for each time the word "modest" is used in an article. Two sips or shots if it's used in a headline and not just in the article. Hopefully, by the end, you will be drunk enough to numb the pain of this news.)
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