Paris climate talks produce hot air
2016Carl Sack 2016-01Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 12 →
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After 10 days of talks at the COP 21 climate confer ence in Paris, negotiators from 195 countries cel ebrated the adoption of an agreement that calls for a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5o Centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
On one hand, the agreement goes farther than any previous accord to acknowledge the need for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Its preamble includes the “principle of equity” that rich countries must do more than poor countries. It even pays lip service to indigenous rights, gender equality, and a “just transition of the workforce.” It calls for holding the global average temperature “well below 2o C above pre-industrial levels”—the suicidal temperature ceil ing advocated by the U.S. and European countries— and aspires to limit the temperature rise to 1.5o C. Many poorer nations pushed for the 1.5o target.
On the other hand, despite the enlightened pream ble, the document is utterly empty of any concrete measures to curb planet-destroying carbon emis sions. It relies on countries to set their own “intended nationally determined contributions” or INDCs, which are to be updated every five years. The language used is revealing; INDCs are voluntary pledges that are non-binding and therefore have no real impact.
The agreement does not lay out any roadmaps for how individual countries will achieve their pledges. It fails to even mention reducing the consumption of fossil fuels beyond a vague reference to “domestic mitigation measures.” Even if all countries were to fol low through on all of the pledges made just prior to 12 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2016 the Paris conference, scientists at the Potsdam Insti tute for Climate Impact Research peg the result as a disastrous 2.7o C warming by the year 2100—just 0.9 degrees below the “business-as-usual” scenario.
Worse, like its predecessors, the Paris agreement endorses counterproductive market-based carbontrading schemes. Carbon markets introduced under the Kyoto Protocol (called the “Clean Development Mechanism”) have attracted rampant corruption, promoted big development projects like hydropower dams that displaced sustainable communities, and ultimately collapsed due to a lack of demand for car bon offsets. Forest protection credits, sold as carbon offsets under the UN REDD program, have accelerated corporate land grabs in developing countries and has tened the conversion of natural forests into private monoculture tree plantations.
Provisions of the agreement could also be interpret ed as promoting speculative carbon-capture technol ogies and risky geo-engineering schemes.
NASA climate scientist James Hansen called the agreement “a fraud” and “a fake.” “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worth less words. There is no action, just promises,” Hansen said in an interview with The Guardian. Hansen sup ports a carbon tax with public redistribution of the proceeds as a means of curbing fossil fuel use.
Perhaps proving Hansen’s point, the Paris talks do not seem to have spurred any immediate action to curb emissions by the world’s worst polluters. In fact, just before the Paris talks, President Barack Obama signed a transportation bill including a provision that David Sassoon / Inside Climate News (Above) Protest for climate justice near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Dec. 12.
fast-tracks environmental review of new oil and gas pipelines and strictly limits lawsuits aimed at stop ping such projects. Just after the talks, he signed a spending bill that ended the 40-year-old oil export ban, allowing U.S. fossil fuel corporations to ship crude oil overseas.
India has said it still plans to double its use of coalfired electricity. Japan is currently building 43 new coal-fired power plants, and China is adding a new 600-megawatt coal plant every 10 days for the next decade. Both countries are adding renewable energy sources as well, but not enough to offset their growth in energy demand. Much of that growth is due to in creased manufacturing of goods exported to the U.S. and Europe.
In 2009, the U.S. pledged to spearhead a $100 billion per year “Green Climate Fund” to finance renewable energy development in poorer countries. But to date, the fund has only received a fraction of that in actual contributions, and wealthy countries have sought to dedicate the money that has been pledged to promot ing “public-private partnerships” resulting in private, for-profit energy infrastructures.
Meanwhile, climate change is causing unprecedent ed weather conditions globally; 2015 was again the hottest year on record—surpassing 2014, the hottest year before that. In late December, 43 people died from unseasonable megastorms across much of the U.S. The storms spawned tornadoes in 10 states and (continued on page 7, in “Grassroots environmental struggles in China”)