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Commentary by Ben Stewart, Greenpeace
“The most progressive U.S. President in a generation
comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World
War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well
have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in
private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to
any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in
American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t
summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth
from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has
taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in
the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith
(high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech
that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything
beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house
party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our
biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a
collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality
it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops
them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team
then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it
seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own
lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York
Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile
a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow
members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the
corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the
talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has
a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later,
as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively
condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By
now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to
present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the
directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have
been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines
laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet
skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European
diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This
deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no
indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a
declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises
below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’
behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us
crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to
welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming
apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no
indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer
countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our
politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed
Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President
Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries
to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on
the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak
we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States
offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of
the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans
for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were
dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an
unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that
coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime
agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead,
as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports
of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the
possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not
just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded
huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would
persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the
implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we
greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to
direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more
of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to
describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live
in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played
out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and
understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds -
and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts
of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I
will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have
given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and
whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last
living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if
Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the
Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”
