Copenhagen cop-out - “a historic failure that will live in infamy”

Written by Editorial from February 2009 edition of Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales) Monday, 01 February 2010 14:40

The UN conference on climate change (Cop15), held in Copenhagen 7-18 December, was a fiasco. The Independent called it “a historic failure that will live in infamy”. After years of preparation, the representatives of 193 countries discussed and wrangled for two weeks. In the closing hours, leaders such as Barak Obama and Wen Jinbao (and Gordon Brown) flew in, supposedly to break the deadlock. All of them accepted the urgency of reaching agreement. Unless global warming is limited to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the planet faces catastrophe. But no agreement was reached, let alone the framework for a binding international treaty, Cop15’s original aim. Backroom discussions between the US, China and a handful of neo-colonial states (Brazil, India, South Africa, etc) produced an ‘accord’ – a brief memo of vague aims and even vaguer pledges. Completely sidelined, the Cop15 assembly merely ‘noted’ the accord. Almost immediately, China’s representative, Su Wei, announced that, as it was not a formal UN agreement, China reserved the right to repudiate even the accord.

Fermanagh flooding

Written by Domhnall O’Cobhthaigh, Fermanagh Socialist Party Thursday, 28 January 2010 00:00

Communities victims of Executive inaction

After six weeks of rain in which there were only two dry days, many parts of Fermanagh were under water in the early weeks of December. The county, which is divided diagonally by Upper and Lower Lough Erne, saw many of its tributary rivers burst their banks and flow over fields and roads criss-crossing the countryside. The lough itself rose from about 45.8 metres to 48.2 metres flooding large areas of farmland leaving families living on raised positions cut-off as water engulfed their access roads and made them impassable. My own great-aunt had to be evacuated as her home in Innisroosk was cut off once again making sense of a townland name signifying an island. Many other families suffered this experience as inadequate infrastructure failed in the face of exceptional rainfall.

Copenhagen Climate failure exposes failure of the profit system

Written by Owen McCracken Wednesday, 13 January 2010 00:00

The UN’s Copenhagen climate summit has failed to deliver any significant response to the rising threat of global warming. This is unsurprising given recent history of such events, with most industrialised countries currently failing to meet even the grossly insufficient targets agreed at Kyoto back in 1997. This further demonstrates the inability of capitalism to solve the key problems facing the world today.

No capitalist solutions to climate change

Written by Administrator Monday, 26 October 2009 00:00

World leaders are to meet in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol in an attempt to control greenhouse gas emissions. But after their failure to reach the modest target set at Kyoto of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2% from 1990 levels we should not expect that whatever agreement they reach will seriously tackle the threat of climate change.

By Daniel Waldron

Sammy Wilson bans climate change!!

Written by Administrator Wednesday, 26 August 2009 00:45

IT DOES not come as much of a surprise to most people in Northern Ireland to hear that, yet again, the Assembly has managed to make a monumental mess of things. But the decision of Environment Minister Sammy Wilson to ban the broadcasting of a government TV ad encouraging people to switch off electrical appliances when not in use in order to save energy has left even the most hardened political cynics open-mouthed.

News stations around the world have broadcast the story in disbelief. Wilson’s reason for this unprecedented move was that the ad was just more “insidious New Labour propaganda” about the impact of climate change. Incredibly, Wilson has said that the world-wide “uninformed hysteria” surrounding the issue was “a con” which had been launched into without examining the “science and implications”. Yet he ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming and virtually universal acceptance that emergency action is urgently required to prevent a major environmental crisis.

Needed: a socialist 'deal' for the environment

Written by Administrator Wednesday, 26 August 2009 00:44

BARACK OBAMA put the environment at the centre of his US presidential election programme by pledging to bring in a 'Green New Deal' that could tackle the threat of climate change while generating many new jobs to combat the growing economic recession.

His proposal to spend $150 billion over ten years to develop new green technologies echoes the New Deal introduced by Roosevelt, the US President in the 1930s, who pumped money into the economy to try to counteract the effects of the economic depression.

An urgent programme to tackle climate change is clearly desperately needed, since the latest scientific evidence points to a rapidly deteriorating situation. The rate of melting of the polar icecaps is exceeding already dire predictions. Climate scientists now say that it is 'one minute to midnight' before decisive action needs to be taken if global warming's worst effects are to be avoided.

A huge programme of public spending on the environment could introduce green technology rapidly and create millions of jobs in the process worldwide, because the technology will be relatively labour-intensive.

Roosevelt's New Deal had a minimal effect on ending the 1930s depression. Obama's green new deal will probably have even less impact on climate change. The vast majority of people would prefer money to be spent on fixing the planet rather than on bailing out speculators and bankers, but Obama's deal relies on continuing with a Kyoto-style 'cap and trade' treaty, which since it was introduced eleven years ago has been a fiasco.

It has totally failed to tackle climate change. In fact, since Kyoto came in, the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming have sharply accelerated upwards because the treaty had huge loopholes built into it, that firms exploited to avoid paying any penalty if they exceeded their pollution target.

Also, just as importantly, the world's biggest emitter historically, the USA, that accounts for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gases, refused to take part in the system because US firms stood to lose by far the most.

Will Barack Obama's election make a difference? He pledged that the USA will join a revamped Kyoto-style permit trading system and further, that it really will 'make the polluter pay' this time.

The indications, however, are not good. Climate sceptics in the US Congress already cite the economic crisis as a reason to dump action on the environment, claiming it would 'push the economy over a cliff'. Even a Senator who sponsored a new bill to include the US in a Kyoto-type scheme says that action will now have to be put off.

This opposition by the big corporations and their government mouthpieces reflects the brutal reality of the capitalist system, particularly in a time of economic crisis. For them, profits are what matters, and the multinational companies that will lose profits if action is taken to tackle climate change, who form by far the majority, will fight ruthlessly to undermine any proposed 'new deal' on global warming that has teeth.

Firms battle to survive on a world scale, and national governments represent the interests of the monopolies inside their borders. So any 'new deal' that remains inside the capitalist system will be a cosmetic deal. Openly or not, it will allow the culprits, the multi-nationals, to exploit loopholes to keep polluting, since meaningful agreement between competing capitalist nations is impossible.

What is needed is an alternative to capitalism, a Socialist Green Deal, that will take control out of the hands of capitalist institutions and the firms they represent and for the first time will permit the genuine international co-operation needed to tackle global warming.

Such a Deal must include the nationalisation, under democratic control by workers and the community, of the energy generating companies, a huge investment programme to develop public transport and research into improved green technologies.