The world’s attention is focused
on Copenhagen, Denmark, where on December 7, the United Nations Climate Change Conference began.
The two-week meeting—the 15th Conference of the 193 Parties to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the fifth meeting of the 189
Parties to the Kyoto Protocol—is
supposed to be the culmination of a process set in motion in Bali in 2005,
where Parties to the UNFCCC agreed to conclude negotiations on a new global
deal by 2009. Highlighting the growing alarm at the effects of climate change,
110 leaders of countries will have attended the conference by its conclusion.
While delegates gathered inside
the Bella convention center in suburban Copenhagen, thousands of protesters
mobilized to demand real action to stop climate change.
On Saturday, December 12, as many
as 100 thousand people marched
demanding, “Change the system, not the climate.” In a pre-emptive move against
a youth contingent, Danish police arrested nearly 1,000 activists.
In the subsequent days, hundreds more have also been detained. Protesters have
come from all over the world including from many European countries as well as
the United States, Kenya, Belarus, Japan, Mongolia, China and Turkey.
Demonstrators plan to attempt to
invade the conference on Dec. 16, in a massive non-violent civil disobedience
action to turn the conference into a Peoples Summit for Climate Justice.
According to the Rising Tide Network Web site: “Our goal is not to shut down
the entire summit. But this day will be ours, it will be the day we speak for
ourselves and set the agenda: climate justice now! We cannot trust the market
with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies”
Debunking ‘climate skeptics’ on eve of Copenhagen
In an op-ed article in which she
urged President Obama to boycott Copenhagen, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin
wrote, “We can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes.”
Like many prominent “climate change skeptics” (many of whom happen to be on the
payroll of the energy industry), Palin took heart at the revelation of stolen
private emails among climate scientists in the UK to once again cast doubt on
the scientific basis for the dangers of climate change.
Alan Leshner, executive publisher
of Science magazine, sharply rebuked Palin on the science of climate change:
“It is wrong to suggest that apparently stolen emails, deployed on the eve of
the Copenhagen climate summit, somehow refute a century of evidence based on
thousands of studies.”
Leshner is unequivocal that
climate change caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation is now underway
and its scientific basis is clear. “Now, policymakers must decide whether to
act on the evidence or to avoid facing one of the most crucial issues of our
generation,” he wrote.
Because of human activity, carbon
dioxide is rapidly accumulating in the atmosphere. These gases trap the sun’s
radiation, causing temperatures on Earth to rise. Research on tree rings shows
that there is now more atmospheric carbon than there has been for at least the
past 650,000 years.
Data also show that the global temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees
Fahrenheit over the past century.
Because of climate change the planet faces melting glaciers, rising sea levels,
shifts in species ranges, and other effects.
Who is to blame for climate change?
Often, developing nations such as
China and India are blamed for the deepening crisis. But the United States,
with just 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible 25 percent of
greenhouse gases, the most of any nation.
The primary source of carbon and
other greenhouse gas emissions is the burning of fossil fuels. The bulk of
these come from energy industry emissions and from the use of private
automobiles. The energy and auto industries have fought tooth and nail to
oppose any controls on carbon emissions, because this would cut into their
profits.
Meanwhile, developing countries
bear over nine-tenths of the costs of climate change,
including an annual death toll of 300,000 from weather-related disasters, and
economic losses amounting to $125 billion per year.
Negotiations in Denmark have
bogged down as the world’s richest nations demand binding emissions reductions
be imposed on poor and underdeveloped countries, while seeking to lock in a
higher rate of emissions in perpetuity for the richest nations. This was
evidenced by the “Danish text,” a leaked secret draft agreement written by the
United States and Denmark.
A relatively moderate draft
agreement was strongly criticized by the United States, the European Union,
Japan and Australia. The language of this draft called for major developing
nations to reduce emissions with outside financial help. The imperialist
nations want binding emissions reductions from poor countries even if they do
not receive outside financial assistance in making these reductions.
The arrogance of wealthy nations
is nowhere more apparent than in this demand. The richest imperialist countries
created a profound, deepening crisis with their unfettered industrial
production. Now they demand the countries they exploited in their pursuit of
profit be the ones to make the sacrifices urgently needed to reduce emissions.
According to Don Marut of Peoples
Movement on Climate Change, “A deal like this will effectively lock rich
countries’ disproportionate share of the atmospheric space, and take away from developing
countries and their poor majorities the right to develop. It asks the poor to
remain in poverty, while they suffer from climate change. Poor countries cannot
be expected to prioritize emissions cuts, not while millions in them still
struggle to overcome poverty and realize their rights.”
Protesters are also demanding an
end to market-based “solutions” to global warming. “Nuclear energy, biofuels,
carbon trading, carbon capture and storage, biochar, genetically modified
crops, geo-engineering—they all try to keep the unsustainable corporate-led and
profit-centered economic system that caused climate change in the first place,
and they also pose threats to the health, security, and livelihood of local and
indigenous communities. They should all be rejected,” said Wahu Kaara of PMCC.
In
fact, nothing of real substance could ever emerge from the Danish conference.
Capitalist methods will never solve the crises caused by capitalism itself.
Only a progressive people’s movement can do that, led by those who place the
needs of humanity over the growing wealth of a small clique of rulers. Climate
change might one day become the urgent catalyst for a global movement of
resistance to the domination of the world’s resources by a tiny rich minority.
