The US State Department, has been blocking progress in international climate talks, far too long.
In a silly game of brinkmanship, it seeks to win an unwinnable two-decade old debate about how to curtail global warming in an economically comfortable manner. Sort of having your cake and eating it too. Except this is a zero sum game we are into and there is no forgiveness from Nature nor is there a planet B where we can all migrate to. Even the ultra wealthy and their leaders will find it stiff going once the CO2 in the atmosphere hits 450 ppmv and the global warming exceeds 4 degrees Celsius Centigrade.
And the failure to solve the deadlock in Durban between rich and poor signifies this to be a clearly unwinnable future. Even though many people in the US celebrate that their Greenwashing machine killed off Durban and any HOPE for the future of a climate deal, the US state department engaged in some Greenwashing of it’s own. Claiming victory because with a brutal show of force they extracted a meaningless statement from China and India.
The US negotiator managed a big hole in the water, by getting China and India to move – at an undisclosed time in the distant future – toward an agreement with the “legal force” to limit their fossil fuel emissions. Woopty Dooo… — Tadeus monkey’s shit in the woods. Bravo big-fella for a job well and utterly screwed.
Not only this is a failure for all concerned but it also marks the beginnings of another colonial type policy toward resigning developing nations to a slow down in development if they dare to admit policies that go against the Greenwashing Capital of the world.
And that in and of itself is really bad but it has a great upside too. The good side of it is that at least we can flatten the world’s Darwinian playing field and have the same emission rules for the industrial nations as well as for the developing ones, when it comes to reducing pollution. In my mind this will give great advantages to the developing world to leapfrog the wealthy ones and supplant legacy technology with state of the Art current clean tech at a lower cost and thus become the energy providers of the future.
However the sad reality is that we won’t get to live long enough to see a ratified legally binding emissions treaty this generation. And it will surely be too late for the next generation too…
The US Senate has refused consistently to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – which limits greenhouse gases for industrial nations – and none of the US Presidents pushed very hard on this issue seeing it as a non starter all along. On the other hand this has allowed them to blame the developing nations such as China and India – who had no commitments under Kyoto – and thus in a clear failure of the protocol, the two developing countries have seen their emissions sky rocket in recent years to unsustainable levels that threaten the atmospheric commons and the climate of this earth. And although the US and Europe have historically been the largest emitters of carbon in the atmosphere, – in nominal terms – for this century it is certain that China and India will reign as number one and number two carbon emitters for the world due to their rising populations entering the consumer belt.
Yet what happened in Durban is a good study in Diplomacy and it’s systemic failures. What the U.S. saw as an opportunity to push China and India into accepting the same CO2 emission restrictions and rules and to push for their acceptance and legal observance – same as everyone else.
State Department’s climate change envoy Stern, approved the no name accord Saturday at the COP17 United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa. It is a typical Washington two step dance. One step forward and two steps backward…
The backwards steps are these: One is that by bringing the developing countries into the all legal enveloping system we are killing off Kyoto — and this is important because Kyoto regulates a third of greenhouse gas emissions already — and two is that the US China and India who have become the world’s three biggest polluters since the Kyoto protocol was approved in 1997, are now firmly in the same climate denier camp and they will refuse to approve legally binding emission controls for ever…
And thus unfortunately, the Durban climate talks have not brought us any closer to a long-term solution for the climate crisis — the greatest challenge facing our planet…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
China’s Position hasn’t changed at all, only now it can be seen as sharing the blame for the Climate failures with the developed countries and the US along with India.
China spoke in Durban about taking on mandatory targets only after 2020 and only if certain conditions are met. It has been more willing to take on voluntary measures and supported both the Cancun and Copenhagen accords but in measured tones here in Beijing the ruling party’s Politburo feels that curbing emissions will curb China’s growth and that is unacceptable .
And although in public statements the Chinese Ministerial Climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua said “This is a new arrangement, and we all support the serious decisions made at this conference which demonstrated that a multinational mechanism is functioning to address climate change,” after the talks finished, the Ministry of the Environment officials in Beijing concluded that with these developments, there will be no comprehensive Climate deal this century.
And among the savvy people involved in the Durban talks, there’s a concern that neither Durban nor the Kyoto rules seem to be having much effect on global warming.
Because we all believed 15 years ago that binding commitments were the answer, but it’s going to take a very long time to get there. So it appears that taxes will be the blunt instrument that just might do the job.
A Carbon tax like the one instituted in Australia could be a far more effective instrument that could help us solve this existential threat.
We just need some resolve at the Leadership level in order to do it.
