Corporate vs. Popular Solutions to the Climate Crisis

GJEP Presentation on Global Warming at Left Forum
Climate Change: Crisis and Opportunity

Anne Petermann, GJEP Co-Director, March 15, Global Justice Equality Project

Global warming is humanity's greatest challenge. As such, we must tackle this issue on several fronts. We must build opposition to the corporate-controlled false solutions to climate change that dominates the media, in order to open space for discussion of real solutions. We must make climate justice a core part of our work. We must make broad and visionary alliances with allied movements around the world, and we must begin the fundamental transformation of society that will be required to truly and effectively address the climate crisis.

Global Warming = Global War
Growing human population coupled with gross overconsumption in Developed Countries has culminated in a severely shrinking resource base, as evidenced by pandemic ecological crises and by global warming itself. The intensification of the impacts from climate change is further depleting resources such as water and soils, and threatens widespread destruction of forests and their biodiversity. Wars for resources have already begun. In February 2004, a Pentagon report on global warming was leaked. It predicted that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. They went on to say that the threat to global security vastly eclipses that of terrorism, concluding, "disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again warfare would define human life." In 1980 Jimmy Carter pronounced the Carter Doctrine that enables the US to go to whatever lengths are necessary to ensure an uninterrupted supply of oil from the Middle East.

Then there is the role of the World Bank, which is currently headed up by former US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Zoellick was one of the main architects of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and is one of the people behind the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative blueprint for American Empire. The World Bank is one of the primary engines of global warming. According to the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, when the World Bank was entrusted with promoting and developing renewable energies, they have spent well over $30 billion on fossil fuel exploitation (over 7 times what they spent on renewables). And where are these fossil fuels going? Over 80% of them are being exported to G8 countries. The World Bank has now insinuated itself into the global effort to stave off climate change by assuming the role of the world's carbon trading broker (and netting a tidy sum for itself in the form of a 13% trading commission). Hence the World Bank is a global funder of climate change at the same time that it is a central player in the promotion and implementation of massive-scale, market-based false solutions including carbon trading, carbon offsets like monoculture tree plantations, incinerators, large-scale hydropower and biofuels (more appropriately named agrofuels).

Some of the most extreme examples of the capitalist climate denial: With the spectre of climate catastrophe looming, fossil fuels companies are developing the tar sands in Alberta, Canada where they plan to destroy a tract of boreal forest the size of Florida to access the tar sands beneath. Extracting the fuel from the tarsands is very energy intensive and it takes about 2 gallons of fossil fuels to access 3 gallons of fuel from the tar sands.

As a second absurd example, at the same time that scientists and arctic peoples are raising increasingly urgent alarms about the melting of the arctic regions due to global warming and excessive carbon emissions, oil companies are competing to claim the vast oil reserves that lie beneath the melting arctic, while at the same time celebrating the opening of the Northwest Passage and new trade routes. The logical disconnect displayed here is frightening and exemplifies the disaster capitalism approach to climate change.

Disaster Capitalism and Climate Change

The disaster capitalists are seizing on global warming as the newest means to:
• expand and consolidate corporate power (biofuels, for example are being promoted through an unprecedented cooperation between oil, biotechnology, agro-industrial and timber corporations);
• take further control of the commons (through schemes like the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, the UN's REDD [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries] and through what we have seen since Hurricane Katrina, with land being taken away from people and handed over to developers).
• further the commodification of life (the most extreme example of this being the work by scientific extremists to manufacture entirely new organisms for the production of agrofuels)
• enhance personal wealth
• prolong the continuation of business as usual.

Among the various profit-making false solutions to climate change being promoted by the disaster capitalists, agrofuels are one of the more egregious examples. First came agrofuels manufactured out of food crops like corn. These food-based fuels were quickly and loudly denounced for their obvious impacts on the world food supply. But besides making food scarcer and more expensive, thereby driving up rates of starvation, agrofuels made from feedstocks like corn were also shown in studies to use more fossil fuels to create than the agrofuels that were produced, causing a negative impact on the climate. They also had nasty side effects. The diversion of corn in the U.S. into agrofuels led to record prices for the crop. This in turn caused many soy farmers in the U.S. to change over to corn. This was followed by a dip in the soybean market which drove up the price of soy, leading to a rapid acceleration of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest for the expansion of soy monocultures in Brazil.

The solution, we are now told, is second generation biofuel technologies that do not use food feedstocks, but rather cellulose-based feedstocks, such as trees and switchgrass. These, too, however are solely about corporate profit, not about truly sustainable fuels. First of all, cellulosic agrofuels do nothing to address the question of land being redirected out of producing food and into producing fuel crops. Second, agrofuels are being used to promote new and unproven technologies such as the highly controversial and dangerous genetic engineering of trees. GE trees are one of the main feedstocks being promoted for the manufacture of cellulosic ethanol. GE trees, (which, incidentally, are also being proposed for carbon offset forestry plantations), threaten to contaminate native forests and indigenous lands with engineered pollen and seeds, leading to devastating and irreversible impacts on forests, wildlife and nearby human communities. Corporations such as International Paper, MeadWestvaco, ArborGen and others stand to profit handsomely from the commercialization of GE trees.

Eliminating these corporate-controlled false solutions to global warming is critical to make room for the real, community-controlled solutions to global warming.

In addition to working against false solutions, we must also work for climate justice.
Indigenous and rural peoples, women and the poor are already on the front lines of the climate struggle, being impacted most severely by climate change. The UN estimates that between 1995-2005 over 500,000 people in so-called developing countries were killed as a result of climate change while another 2.5 million were directly impacted by it. Because in many regions indigenous peoples have been careful stewards of their ancestral lands, these lands are now being coveted by the World Bank, corporations, governments and others that seek to take control of these lands: for the rich resources they contain; for the development of agrofuel feedstocks or monoculture tree plantation carbon sinks; and now also for the important role they can play in carbon offsetting schemes under the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, or under the UN's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation scheme. Both of these schemes seek to take control of regions with intact forests and protect them as human exclusion zones by relocating resident communities so that the carbon absorbed by these forests can be used to offset the emissions of polluters in the North. This environmental protection = human exclusion model has been perfected over the years by the likes of Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy. In fact, at the World Bank's press conference during the UN Climate Convention in Bali where Zoellick first announced the Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, The Nature Conservancy pledged $5 million to the effort.

However, as one of the steps toward truly addressing climate change, Indigenous peoples must be given autonomy and the right to control their ancestral lands.

Because of the inherent injustice of REDD and the FCPF, indigenous peoples were joined by people from around the world to stage a loud and angry protest outside of Zoellick's press conference in Bali. This was, in fact, the most hopeful thing that emerged from the Bali talks where once again the US bullied the rest of the world into accepting "The Bali Roadmap"--a deal with no hard targets for emissions reductions, but rather a vague agreement to talk about potential action on climate change at future meetings.

Social movements, indigenous peoples organizations and NGOs came together numerous times throughout the UN Climate Convention in Bali to demand real action on climate change, oppose false solutions and to stand up for climate justice. Out of these actions emerged a new international alliance called Climate Justice Now!

balippt.pdf

One challenge for the international climate change movement is upping the ante sufficiently over the next two years to force the international climate negotiations to take real, effective action to address global warming. In the UN arena, all eyes are focused toward a new post-Kyoto Protocol agreement to take effect in 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. The negotiations for this post-2012 framework are happening now. They hope to finalize the terms for this agreement in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Convention there in December 2009. This means that the international climate movement needs to ramp up its militancy to force the negotiators to include action steps that are truly meaningful and not controlled by corporate interests.

As the London Guardian pointed out after the UN climate negotiations in 2000, "what has been singularly lacking [in the climate change debate] has been any widesprad popular campaign. There have been no Seattle-style protests... Politicians respond to pressure. When they have big, angry demonstrations outside their conference centers, it focuses their minds..."

Key role of the US movement against climate change
The movement against global warming in the United States plays a pivotal role in the global effort to stop climate change. This is for a few reasons:
• With 6% of the world's population, the US emits 25% of the world's GHG.
• The US and the US-controlled World Bank dominate the discussion of what to do about global warming with market-based false solutions.
• The historic role of the US in the international climate negotiations has been to obstruct any forward progress.

In much the same way that the Seattle protests bolstered the position of the underdog countries in the WTO negotiations, ultimately derailing them, a US mobilization in support of countries fighting for real action on climate change at the international level could help neutralize the obstructive role of the US by demonstrating that even the country's own citizens do not support the government's intransigence on this issue.

The global warming crisis opens the door to the fundamental transformation of society toward which the left has been working for countless years.

While raising the militancy of the movement toward international climate negotiations is a crucial component of forward motion on climate change, we must also take lessons from the social movements around the world that are already taking direct action on issues related to climate change. Indigenous peoples in Brazil are taking back their ancestral lands, cutting the eucalyptus plantations and re-establishing villages. A few days ago 900 women from Via Campesina occupied a eucalyptus plantation and cut down the trees. 800 women and children were violently arrested. Social movements based on small island nations in the Pacific are struggling for the very survival of their peoples. The US climate movement must project these voices and stand in solidarity with them. The model of community action at the local level is a key part of the solution to climate change.

Let's be clear, we cannot buy our way out of this crisis. Consuming more stuff, even energy efficient stuff, is not the answer. This still requires fossil fuels to mine the resources for the stuff, to manufacture the stuff and to transport the stuff.

An issue as comprehensive and wide-reaching as global warming, however, does offer us the critically important opportunity to identify and address its root causes, which are the same root causes of social injustice, economic domination and environmental destruction.

The myriad solutions to global warming will come, not from the top down, but from communities identifying locally appropriate sustainable solutions that are both decentralized and recognize the importance of local control and bioregional distinctions.

This is the future toward which we are working. We urge you to join us.

GJEP Co-Director Orin Langelle contributed to this presentation.

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

[This is quite an interesting article, however the one confusion that i have is the distinction between CO2 and CO2e. I thought that the Stern report and other reports have indicated the need to stabilise CO2e to approx 450ppm to avoid anything more than a 2degC temp increase? Yet here it talks about 450ppm in terms of CO2 (only). Perhaps someone reading my blog can help?

Nonetheless i think the last point is the key one, i.e. the analogy with Cholesterol. What we need is a qualitative change in the way humanity interacts with nature, that is - to stop climate change we need social change. The key question for environment activists is how are we going to acheive it? Well to borrow a phrase from Lenin, without Marxist theory you can't have proper practice.

I hope to write about this question soon, as i feel there is an ever pressing need to outline some of the key tasks of eco-socialists, such as the need for a class analysis of society, what specific features of capitalism are responsible for climate change, how democratic centralised planning of socialised means of production can avert the crises (and even achieve negative GHG emissions reductions), the need to connect the organised sections of the working class with the environment movement, and the vital role a Leninist Party can play in leading the environment movement to achieve its necessary tasks - putting the strategic (and polluting) industries under control of the world's working people.

But in the meantime to borrow another phrase from Lenin (although he also borrowed this one from Napolean) we need to "engage and then see", throw ourselves into the environment movement and then see what the key problems are and how we can assist.]

Bill McKibben, December 28, 2007, Washington Post

This month may have been the most important yet in the two-decade history of the fight against global warming. Al Gore got his Nobel in Stockholm; international negotiators made real progress on a treaty in Bali; and in Washington, Congress actually worked up the nerve to raise gas mileage standards for cars.

But what may turn out to be the most crucial development went largely unnoticed. It happened at an academic conclave in San Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future.

To understand what it means, you need a little background.

Twenty years ago, Hansen kicked off this issue by testifying before Congress that the planet was warming and that people were the cause. At the time, we could only guess how much warming it would take to put us in real danger. Since the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million, scientists and policymakers focused on what would happen if that number doubled -- 550 was a crude and mythical red line, but politicians and economists set about trying to see if we could stop short of that point. The answer was: not easily, but it could be done.

In the past five years, though, scientists began to worry that the planet was reacting more quickly than they had expected to the relatively small temperature increases we've already seen. The rapid melt of most glacial systems, for instance, convinced many that 450 parts per million was a more prudent target. That's what the European Union and many of the big environmental groups have been proposing in recent years, and the economic modeling makes clear that achieving it is still possible, though the chances diminish with every new coal-fired power plant.

But the data just keep getting worse. The news this fall that Arctic sea ice was melting at an off-the-charts pace and data from Greenland suggesting that its giant ice sheet was starting to slide into the ocean make even 450 look too high. Consider: We're already at 383 parts per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways. So, what does that mean?

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.

And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.

That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know.

From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change

Patrick Bond, January 05, ZNET

Amidst her welcome critique of the biofuel mania, Vandana Shiva's ZNet commentary last month (December 13, 2007) also made this point: 'The Kyoto Protocol totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Instead, Kyoto put in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in these rights to pollute.'

Indeed in 1997 at Kyoto, Al Gore bamboozled negotiators into adopting carbon trading as a central climate strategy in exchange for Washington's support - which never materialized.

Likewise last month's Kyoto Conference of Parties in Bali allowed the 'everyone v. the USA' debate to obscure much more durable problems. Even many environmentalists and well-meaning citizens think that building on Kyoto is the correct strategy for post-Bali negotiations.

These include the Climate Action Network of NGOs and corporate-funded environmental groups including the IUCN, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund. Senators Sanders, Kerry, Lieberman, McCain, Leahy, Feinstein, Bingaman, Snow, Specter, Alexander and Carper proposed laws in 2007 featuring emissions trading.

'Fixing a market problem (pollution) with a market solution' is still a mantra to some light-greens, notwithstanding a year's worth of scandalous reports from practitioners and the press.

A year ago, Citigroup's Peter Atherton confessed in a powerpoint that the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS) had 'done nothing to curb emissions' and acted as 'a highly regressive tax falling mostly on poor people.' On whether policy goals were achieved, he admitted: 'Prices up, emissions up, profits up... so, not really. Who wins and loses? All generation-based utilities - winners. Coal and nuclear-based generators - biggest winners. Hedge funds and energy traders - even bigger winners. Losers... ahem... Consumers!'

The Wall Street Journal confirmed last March that emissions trading 'would make money for some very large corporations, but don't believe for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming.' The paper termed the carbon trade 'old-fashioned rent-seeking... making money by gaming the regulatory process.'

Speaking to Channel Four news last March, the European Commissioner for Energy offered this verdict on the ETS: 'A failure'. Yvo de Boer, the sanguine head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned of 'the possibility that the market could collapse altogether.' In April 2006, the price of carbon in Europe's market fell by half overnight due to authorities' mismanagement of the ETS.

But not just in Europe. According to Newsweek magazine's investigation of Third World carbon trading (through the Clean Development Mechanism) last March, 'It isn't working... [and represents] a grossly inefficient way of cutting emissions in the developing world.' The magazine called the trade 'A shell game' which has transferred '$3 billion to some of the worst carbon polluters in the developing world.'

After an exhaustive series on problems associated with carbon trading and offsets, the Financial Times concluded they were merely a 'carbon "smokescreen"'.

In June, The Guardian newspaper headlined its investigation with equal scorn: 'Truth about Kyoto: Huge profits, little carbon saved... Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming... The inconvenient truth about the carbon offset industry.'

Meanwhile the Big Green groups' professionalism and reasonableness - or simple cronyism (since key personnel from CAN now work in the industry) - have made them utterly useless as watchdogs on the carbon trade.

So then who do we turn to?

The Bali conference featured an alternative movement-building component outside: a Climate Justice Now! coalition made up of Carbon Trade Watch (the Transnational Institute); the Center for Environmental Concerns; Focus on the Global South; the Freedom from Debt Coalition, Philippines; Friends of the Earth International; Women for Climate Justice and the Global Forest Coalition; the Global Justice Ecology Project; the International Forum on Globalisation; the Kalikasan-Peoples Network for the Environment; La Vía Campesina; the Durban Group for Climate Justice; Oilwatch; Pacific Indigenous Peoples Environment Coalition; Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (Institute for Policy Studies); The Indigenous Environmental Network; Third World Network; Indonesia Civil Society Organizations Forum on Climate Justice; and the World Rainforest Movement.

The coalition criticised carbon trading and called for genuine solutions: 'reduced consumption; huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation; leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy; rights-based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples' sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and sustainable family farming and peoples' food sovereignty.'

In October 2004, the Durban Group was founded to tackle the problems in the carbon trade, warning of all the dangers above, especially Shiva's point that the transfer of the right to pollute is a multitrillion dollar giveaway to the people who caused the bulk of the climate problems.

But establishment figures will continue confusing matters. At the Bali meeting, a key Third World leader was South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk - successor to FW de Klerk as leader of the National Party after serving the apartheid police as a spy against fellow students (he later folded the NP into the ruling African National Congress and was rewarded with a do-little ministry). His strategy for bringing the US into the fold came at the price of evacuating any emissions target and accountability mechanism in the official declaration, and reinforcing the carbon trade.

Van Schalkwyk's leadership is a travesty, for he has said nothing about South Africa's own $20 billion in new investments - partly privatised through the US multinational AES - in cheap coal-fired electricity generation for the sake mainly of large corporations; he endorses nuclear energy expansion. SA already has an emissions output per person per unit of GDP twenty times worse than the US, and van Schalkwyk's official carbon trading policy argues that it is primarily a 'commercial opportunity.'

This is true only if there is resistance; in Durban, Sajida Khan fought carbon trading before her death by cancer caused by an apartheid-era landfill next door - SA's Clean Development Mechanism pilot for methane-extraction.

In contrast to carbon trading, what is reverberating within grassroots, coalface and fenceline struggles in many parts of the world is a very different strategy and demand by civil society activists: leave the oil in the soil, the resources in the ground.

This call was first made as a climate strategy in 1997 in Kyoto by the group OilWatch when it was based in Quito, Ecuador. Heroic activists from Accion Ecologia took on the struggle to halt exploitation of oil in part of the Yasuni National Park. This led President Rafael Correa to declare in mid-2007 that the North should pay Ecuador roughly $5 billion in compensation for its commitment to permanently forego exploitation of Yasuni (albeit with concern amongst indigenous people about nearby oil extraction especially by the voracious Brazilian firm Petrobas).

A year ago at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, many other groups became aware of this movement thanks to eloquent activists from the Niger Delta, including the Port Harcourt NGO Environmental Rights Action. For example, women community activists regularly disrupted production at oil extraction sites with sit-ins in which, showing maximum disrespect for the petro multinationals, they removed their clothing.

In my own neighbourhood, which includes two of Africa's largest oil refineries, the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance has been mobilising against corporate and municipal environmental crime, including three major explosions and fires since September and a massive fish kill at Christmas from toxic dumping in Durban's harbour, the busiest in Africa.

But the legacy of resisting fossil fuel abuse goes back much further, and includes Alaskan and Californian environmentalists who halted drilling and even exploration. In Norway, the global justice group ATTAC took up the same concerns at a conference last October, and began the hard work of persuading wealthy Norwegian Oil Fund managers that they should use the vast proceeds of their North Sea inheritance to repay Ecuadorans some of the ecological debt owed.

Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George Monbiot, so it was revealing that last month, instead of going to Bali, he stayed home in Britain and caused some trouble, reporting back in his Guardian column:

'Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it to you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called ... leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

'On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this policy into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will be used.'

Canada is another Northern site where activists are working to leave the oil in the soil. In an Edmonton conference last November, the University of Alberta's Parkland Institute and its allies argued for no further development of tar sand deposits (which require a litre of oil to be burned for every three to be extracted, and which devastate local water, fisheries and air quality).

Institute director Gordon Laxer laid out careful arguments for exceptionally strict limits on the use of water and greenhouse gas emissions in tar sand extraction; realistic land reclamation plans and financial deposits; no further subsidies for the production of dirty energy; provisions for energy security for Canadians (since so much of the tar sand extract is exported to the US); and much higher economic rents on dirty energy to fund a clean energy industry (currently Alberta has a very low royalty rate).

I have mentioned this demand in many sites over the past two years, enthusiastically commenting on the moral, political, economic and ecological merits of leaving the oil in the soil. Unfortunately, in addition to confessing profound humility about the excessive fossil fuel burned by airplanes which have taken me on this quest, I must report on the only site where the message dropped like a lead balloon: with dear comrades in petro-socialist Venezuela.

Never mind, there are a great many examples where courageous communities and environmentalists have lobbied successfully to keep nonrenewable resources (not just fossil fuels) in the ground, for the sake of the environment, community stability, disincentivising political corruption and workforce health and safety.

The highest-stake cases here in South Africa at present are the vast Limpopo Province platinum fields and the titanium and other minerals in the Wild Coast dunes (where, ironically, the film Blood Diamond was shot). Tough communities are resisting multinational corporations, but will need vigorous solidarity, because the extraction of these resources are extremely costly in terms of local land use, peasant displacement, water extraction, energy consumption and political corruption, and require constant surveillance and community solidarity.

Still, the awareness that local activists are generating in these campaigns makes us all more aware of how damaging bogus strategies like carbon trading can be, in contrast with a genuine project to change the world.

(Patrick is co-editor of a book on climate change which will be launched in several sites in the Northeastern US in Feb-March; details will be posted at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs)

The Day After….

Walden Bello, 17 December, Focus on Global South

(Bali, Dec. 16). A day after the dramatic ending of the Bali climate talks, many are wondering if the result was indeed best outcome possible given the circumstances.

The US was brought back to the fold, but at the cost of excising from the final document--the so-called Bali Roadmap--any reference to the need for a 25 to 40 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 to keep the mean global temperature increase to 2.0 to 2.4 degrees Celsius in the 21st century.

Reference to quantitative figures was reduced to a footnote referring readers to some pages in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Report which simply enumerates several climate stabilization scenarios. The alternative scenarios ranged from a 2.0 to 2.4 degree rise in temperature to a 4.9 to 6.1 degree increase. This prompted one civil society participant to remark that "The Bali roadmap is a roadmap to anywhere."

Would it have been better to have simply let the US walk out, allowing the rest of the world to forge a strong agreement containing deep mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the part of the developed countries? With a new US president with a new policy on climate change expected at the beginning of 2009, the US would have rejoined a process that would already be moving along with strong binding targets. As it is now, having been part of the Bali consensus, Bush administration negotiators, say skeptics, will be able to continue their obstructionist tactics to further water down global action throughout the negotiations in 2008.

One wonders what would have happened had Washington remained true to its ideological propensities and decided to stomp out of the room when the delegate from Papua New Guinea, releasing the conference's pent up collective frustration, issued his now historic challenge: "We ask for your leadership and we seek your leadership. If you are not willing to lead, please get out of the way." As everyone now knows, after last-minute consultations with Washington, the American negotiator backed down from the US's hard-line position on an Indian amendment seeking the conference's understanding for the different capacities of developing countries to deal with climate change and said Washington "will go forward and join the consensus."

The single-minded focus on getting Washington on board resulted in the dearth of hard obligations agreed upon at the meeting except for the deadline for the negotiating body, the "Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention," to have its work ready for adoption at the Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP 15).

Many delegates also felt ambivalent about the institutional arrangements that were agreed upon after over a week of hard North-South negotiations.

*An Adaptation Fund was set up, but it was put under the administration of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) of the US-dominated World Bank. Moreover, the seed funds from the developed countries are expected to come to only between $18.6 million to US$37.2 million--sums which are deemed severely inadequate to support the emergency efforts to address the ongoing ravages of climate change in the small island states and others on the "frontlines" of climate change. Oxfam estimates that a minimum of US$50 billion a year will be needed to assist all developing countries adapt to climate change.

*A "strategic program" for technology development and transfer was also approved, again with troubling compromises. The developing countries had initially held out for the mechanism to be a designated a "facility" but finally had to agree to the watered-down characterization of the initiative as a "program" on account of US intransigence. Moreover, the program was also placed under the GEF with no firm levels of funding stated for an enterprise that is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

*The REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) initiative pushed by host Indonesia and several other developing countries with large forests that are being cut down rapidly was adopted. The idea is to get the developed world to channel money to these countries, via aid or market mechanisms, to maintain these forests as carbon sinks. However, many climate activists fear that indigenous communities will lose be victimized by predatory private interests that will position themselves to become the main recipients of the funds raised.

Still, many felt that the meager and mixed results were better than nothing.

Perhaps the best indication on whether the conference was right to bend over backward almost 180 degrees to accommodate the US will come next month in Honolulu during the Major Economies Meeting, a Washington-initiated conference that was originally designed to subvert the United Nations process. The question on everyone's lips is: Will the Bush adminstration revert to form and use the conference to launch a separate process to derail the Bali Roadmap?

*Walden Bello is senior analyst at Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. He was an NGO participant at the Bali Conference on Climate Change.

Arctic ice melt worse than predicted: scientists

Barbara Miller, December 13, ABC

A year ago US scientists caused alarm when they predicted the Arctic Ocean could be free of summer ice by 2030, but now researchers say those estimates were too conservative.

A US-based team has told a conference in California that the northern polar waters could be ice-free in summer by 2013.

This year's northern summer melt in the Arctic reduced the ice cover to just over 4 million square kilometres, the smallest ever amount recorded in modern times.

It is this kind of data that has led researchers to say previous estimates of when the Arctic waters will be completely free of ice in summer are far too conservative.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey in California says scientists are now moving the date closer.

He has been presenting his work to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

"We're just moving this date closer and closer to us simply because I believe what is happening, the system in the Arctic Ocean is very complex and from a mathematical point of view, it's non-linear," Professor Maslowski said.

"So there is a feedback loop that may accelerate this harder in a linear sense ... which is simply where you remove ice, you heat, you warm the ocean, which can melt more ice even further, and those kind of feedbacks are actually in place in Arctic right now, which is possibly causing this accelerated melt."

Two major impacts

Professor Maslowski says there are two major impacts from the climate point of view.

"One impact is that if we remove the sea ice, which is a very reflective ice cover in the high northern latitudes, we'll be observing much more solar radiation into the ocean and the feedback from the warmer ocean," he said.

"The ocean will expand so we may see some associated increase of sea level due to the warmer ocean in the Arctic.

"The second important thing to keep in mind is that if we melt all this ice that is currently out there in the Arctic, every summer we will be exporting a lot of fresh water, much more than currently, into the North Atlantic.

"And this fresh water export from the Arctic may affect the ocean circulation, which in turn can effect regional or global climate."

When he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize earlier this week, former US vice-president and environmental campaigner Al Gore referred to Professor Maslowski's work.

"Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented alarm that the north polar ice cap is in their words, 'falling off a cliff'," Mr Gore said.

"One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years.

"Another new study to be presented by US Navy researchers later this week warns it could happen in as little as seven years - seven years from now."

As the world meets in Bali, Mr Gore went on to repeat his calls for tough action on climate change.

But the trouble is, it looks increasingly like it may already be too late.

Strong support for climate change action

[Note that this study shows that a whopping 77% think that "the Government should begin phasing out existing coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy generation by 2010." That is a huge! Particularly given just how much of Australia's mining and energy industries are based on coal. Even if Rudd decided to implement this there would be a massive backlash from the coal companies, and its unlikely it could be won easily. Nonetheless its obvious that the demands of most in the environment movement don't go far enough and the majority of people are even going further. We need to very seriously raise the demand to phase out coal fired power stations to be replaced with renewable energy generation at least by 2020, and make sure that its not nuclear power stations that will replace them!]

December 13, Herald Sun

AN overwhelming 86 per cent of Australians said the new Rudd Government should move swiftly to cut the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, a new poll shows.

The Greenpeace-commissioned Newspoll survey, which polled 1202 adults early this month, also found strong support for phasing out and replacing the nation's coal-fired power stations with renewable energy sources by 2010.

"Australians clearly understand the link between burning coal and climate change," Greenpeace spokesman Steve Campbell said today.

"They want to see the nation end its reliance on coal by beginning to phase out coal-fired power and move to renewable energy technologies."

The survey found 86 per cent of Australians supported new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd introducing new policies that will ensure Australia's greenhouse gas emissions begin to decrease within the next three years.

Seventy seven per cent also said the Government should begin phasing out existing coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy generation by 2010.

When asked about Australia's export coal industry, 73 per cent of respondents said coal exports should be capped or reduced.

"Reducing our emissions matters to the Australian public but the results show they also want to see Mr Rudd take global responsibility by adopting policies that will see coal exports stay at current levels or decrease," Mr Campbell said.

He said Labor's existing climate policies would see Australia's total emissions increase to 15 per cent over 1990 levels by 2020, and instead cuts of 25 to 40 per cent were needed to prevent global warming from "topping the danger threshold".

"This week Mr Rudd has the opportunity to show leadership at the Bali climate talks and help gain consensus on the 25-40 per cent range of reductions," Mr Campbell said.

"This poll shows that such a move would be extremely popular with the people of Australia, who delivered Mr Rudd a firm mandate at the last election, and want him to take even stronger action by reducing Australia's emissions within his first term."