Great powers sacrifice climate on the altar of profit

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Great powers sacrifice climate on the altar of profit
21 December 2009

Scientists around the world are agreed that in order to avert a
catastrophe the speediest possible action is necessary to halt
man-made climate change. In the coming decades, the living conditions
of billions of people are threatened by rising sea levels, storms,
droughts and the loss of harvests.

Despite the urgency of finding a solution to global warming, the
representatives of 193 states at the world climate conference in
Copenhagen last week were utterly incapable of agreeing on any
effective steps to reduce global levels of greenhouse gases. The
verdict on the conference by environmental groups and broad sections
of the media was devastating. “What a disaster” begins the report on
the conference on the online site of the German newspaper, Der
Spiegel. “Shame, farce, disaster” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

After two weeks of discussions, the conference delegates produced a
final text of barely three pages that is non-binding. It outlines
goals generally recognized by scientists to be completely inadequate
to deal with the danger of accelerating global warming.

Several smaller countries objected to the agreement, hashed together
in closed-door meetings. In the end, conference participants did not
commit to accept the deal, and instead voted to “take note of the
Copenhagen Accord.”

The presence of around a hundred heads of government during the last
two days—including US President Barack Obama, Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown, and French President Nikolas Sarkozy—did nothing to break the
deadlock. It was once again the US president who laid down the
parameters for the final agreement, reassuring right-wing political
circles in the US that the United States “will not be legally bound by
anything that took place here today.” Obama’s declaration of US
self-interest was echoed by other leading industrial nations.

In the final analysis, it was the antagonistic interests of the major
economic powers—in particular, the US, China, and the European
Union—that prevented any agreement. The two weeks of disputes in
Copenhagen had more to do with strategic interests, commercial
conflicts and competitive rivalries than with how to rescue the
world’s climate and environment.

The leading industrialized countries addressed the issue of their CO2
emissions entirely from the standpoint of the economic and strategic
interests of their respective ruling classes. In fact, the
geostrategic questions behind the discussions in the Danish capital
are the same as those that resulted in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and numerous other international conflicts.

According to the estimates of the International Energy Agency, demand
for energy worldwide will rise by more than 50 percent over the next
twenty years. The economic strength of a country will depend
considerably upon its access to sources of energy. This is why the US
has invested around one trillion dollars in wars aimed at securing its
supremacy over the world’s most productive oil and gas reserves.

With its military presence in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan—the
gateway to Central Asia—the US is not only securing its own energy
needs. It seeks to obtain an important lever to apply pressure on its
rivals in Europe and Asia, which are heavily dependant on imported
energy from the Middle East. The development of alternative
technologies would reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, which still
constitute nearly 80 percent of world energy consumption. The US has
little interest in spending billions on pollution-free technologies
that could help make its rivals more independent.

Additional pressure is exerted by the lobby of those energy groups and
industries dependent on fossil fuels. They regard any reduction of CO2
emissions as a cost factor and obstacle to their competitiveness,
undercutting profits. They have repeatedly used their power to
sabotage any effective emission-reduction measures in the US Congress.

Finally, the leading industrialized countries, which at present
consume half of the world’s energy, are using the issue of climate
change as a weapon against developing nations, whose energy
consumption is increasing commensurate with their industrialization.

In Copenhagen the US demanded that emerging and developing countries,
in particular, China, commit themselves to concrete and verifiable
reductions of their CO2 emissions. Representatives of the 77 poorest
nations vehemently protested against this attempt at blackmail.

China, whose industrial expansion is based particularly on heavy
industry, has rejected any inspection process into the verifiability
of its environmental measures as an unacceptable violation of its
national sovereignty. It argues that the older industrial nations are
responsible for global warming, rather than the newly developing
countries. It therefore demanded financial support for developing
countries to reduce their CO2 emissions. China has also expressed the
concern that carbon emission limits could become a rationale for
imposing trade barriers—a position advocated by sections of the US
political establishment.

For its part, the US has offered only a 17 percent reduction in its
CO2 emissions by 2020 compared to 2005. Based on the levels
established in the Kyoto agreement of 1997, which the US never
ratified, this represents a reduction of less than 4 percent. As is
the case on the question of war and social issues, there is little
substantive difference between the climate policies of Obama and that
of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

The European countries, in particular, Germany and France, have sought
to present themselves as responsible and environmentally conscious, in
contrast to the US and China. The European Union declared it was
prepared to lower the continent’s CO2 emissions by around 30 percent
by 2020, instead of its previous pledge of 20 percent. In addition,
the EU promised during the first week of the summit to contribute €7.2
billion to developing countries over the next three years.

However, the EU member states are just as keen to advance their own
economic interests as the US and China. Most scientists agree that
even a reduction of around 30 percent in emissions is not enough to
limit global warming to two degrees Celsius. Moreover, the EU states
have made their offer conditional on a comparable reduction by the US
and China.

Germany and France, which lack fossil energy reserves and are highly
dependant on imports, hope to reduce their dependence through the
development of alternative technologies. In this respect, they are in
conflict with the US. At the same time, they are counting on winning
markets for their new technologies.

Meanwhile, the carbon credit-trading scheme has already become a vast
moneymaking enterprise.

The climate conference in Copenhagen proves that it is impossible to
implement a scientifically guided and internationally coordinated
policy to prevent a climatic disaster within the context of the
capitalist system. The private ownership of the means of production
and the system of rival nation-states, upon which capitalism is based,
exclude any rational policy based on common social interests and
needs. The major imperialist powers, particularly the US and Europe,
are using the issue of climate change to impose an agenda reflecting
their own economic and political interests.

Even the most radical forms of protest are incapable of halting this
self-destructive policy, which inevitably leads to new wars, misery
and environmental disaster. The only genuine solution lies in the
unification of the international working class on the basis of a
socialist program, to rationally organize society and production
world-wide according to the needs of humanity, including all necessary
measures to protect the environment from a climate catastrophe.

Dietmar Henning

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d21.shtml

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