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Copenhagen Negotiators Bicker and Filibuster While the Biosphere Burns
George Monbiot despairs at the chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous climate summit
First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from the text. This is no longer about saving the biosphere: now it's just a matter of saving face. As the talks melt down, everything that might have made a new treaty worthwhile is being scratched out. Any deal will do, as long as the negotiators can pretend they have achieved something. A clearer and less destructive treaty than the texts currently being discussed would be a sheaf of blank paper, which every negotiating party solemnly sits down to sign.
A journalist reads the latest draft of the Copenhagen Accord at the climate summit. (Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/AP) This is the
chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous summit. The
event has been attended by historic levels of incompetence. Delegates
arriving from the tropics spent 10 hours queueing in sub-zero
temperatures without shelter, food or drink, let alone any explanation
or announcement, before being turned away. Some people fainted from
exposure; it's surprising that no one died. The process of negotiation
is just as obtuse: there's no evidence here of the innovative methods
of dispute resolution developed recently by mediators and coaches, just
the same old pig-headed wrestling.
Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn't allowed in either), it strikes me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years. There's a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or pickelhaubes, but otherwise, as the world's governments try to decide how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the conference of Berlin in 1884. It's as if democratisation and the flowering of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.
At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been addressed or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests of the world's people are not the same. Often they are diametrically opposed. In this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought through these talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for themselves as they can - to grab bigger rights to pollute than their competitors. The process couldn't have been better designed to produce the wrong results.
I have spent most of my time at the Klimaforum, the alternative conference set up by just four paid staff, which 50,000 people attended without a hitch. (I know which team I would put in charge of saving the planet.) There the barrister Polly Higgins laid out a different approach. Her declaration of planetary rights invests ecosystems with similar legal safeguards to those won by humans after the second world war. It changes the legal relationship between humans, the atmosphere and the biosphere from ownership to stewardship. It creates a global framework for negotiation which gives nation states less discretion to dispose of ecosystems and the people who depend on them.
Even before this new farce began it was beginning to look as if it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.
Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.
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79 Comments so far
Show AllI wonder if the title of this piece, "Copenhagen Negotiators Bicker and Filibuster While the Biosphere Burns", is a tiny bit exaggerated!
We are currently arguing over a warming of a few tenths of a degree - in fact the warming has paused at least for the past decade - yet we have to pretend that the biosphere is already burning as I write this.
Of course, it is burning, in the sense that the rain forests are being destroyed, but everyone seems to have forgotten tangible issues like that!
nonsense, 8 of 10 hottest years in last decade
where do you get your science?
the forests are burning
ice melting at alarming rates
bugs birds and four leggeds moving north
deserts expanding
severe droughts
untimely floods
hurricanes
corn still in the fields in snow
are you nuts or what?
Yes the forests are burning - but that is because people are burning them down, in part to clear land to grow biofuel!
When drought desiccates a forest the tinder builds up and decay slows down. Think Yellowstone. Other forests in the north, boreal forests, lose their footing as permafrost melts. Bugs survive winters farther north and invade trees without resistance. Deforestation operations are insult to injury. Trees are one of Nature's great carbon sinks. As they die, burn or decay, the carbon release literally and figuratively add fuel to the climate change fire. Please look for more information before hopping on the denier band wagon.
matthew loughran
hmm i see a climate denying clown here. and the rainforests are being destroyed by big corporate interests also genius.
If you live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific, you are probably getting concerned over global warming--or if you have been in one of the latest super-hurricanes that have been devastating our gulf states. Having your home submerged is pretty tangible.
So long, and thanks for the fish!
Ha! And don't forget your towels.
I believe climate change is a truly serious issue, but I think it's caused a great deal of myopia in environmental circles. Bill McKibben was recently quoted as saying that the environmental movement has now become the climate change movement. I think he's right, and that's the problem.
It seems the unspoken mantra of environmentalism has become "Climate change isn't everything; it's the ONLY thing." What about, as David Bailey suggests, rainforest destruction? What about biodiversity? Water scarcity? Human population growth? Overconsumption? Energy and resource depletion (possibly a greater threat than climate change)?
But today it's all climate change, climate change, climate change. Why? Has the environmental movement gotten too fatigued dividing its attention in multiple directions? Is the movement too hooked on the apocalyptic image of a burning globe as opposed to the vision of a biosphere killed by a thousand cuts?
Sadly, the ecological imagination has been considerably narrowed by the obsession over climate change. That's not a good thing.
Everything you mention is related to climate change. Maybe that's the answer to your questions.
Because it's all one thing at bottom. To solve the problem of global overheating (aka climate change) we must solve nearly all the other, 'smaller' problems, and those solutions will have the knock-on effect of solving the remaining 'smaller' problems.
it's about climate change because vagueness exists...the last thing anyone wants to do at this juncture is address real, current, undeniable problems, like industrial devastation, chemical toxification, continental land theft and property ownership...climate change allows for all sorts of positioning around what may happen years from now...doubt...delay...
it also keeps 'change' and 'sacrifice' at the level of 'country', 'government', 'corporation'...far above the level of 'individual'...
hypocrisy...that is why it is all about climate change...it fosters hypocrisy...
I agree. Our problem is humankind's excessive ecological impact - overshoot. Climate change is a very serious symptom of this overarching problem, but it is NOT the problem itself. It's possible to pretend that climate change can be solved by political deals and technology. No such pretense is possible with overshoot. It compels us to address broad civilizational issues, most importantly the expansionist logic of capitalism. This is something that Bill McKibben and the other reformists refuse to discuss.
I recently posted a YouTube video titled "Reorienting Environmentalism", which seeks to revolutionize the environmental movement so that overshoot can be addressed. I informed every Greenpeace office on the planet. So far I've received one response (from France), telling me that "Greepeace is not willing to focus on this question for now ..." Until there is a tectonic shift in environmental thought and action, there is no realistic hope of avoiding ecological collapse.
Environmentalists used to focus on single issues in localized situations.
Different groups targeted specific problems; deforestation, waterways, endangered species, unhealthful air, toxic chemicals, etc.
Climate change, caused by warming, effects all environments simultaneously.
Human Being,
It is all one problem, but it doesn't have to be called "climate change." The destruction of forests, air pollution (looking at many pollutants besides carbon dioxide), the pollution of the ocean, the salinization of soils, overfishing, withdrawal of water from aquifers, habitat preservation, urban sprawl--you can attack these problems without mention of climate change. Maybe in this country it is better if you don't mention it. There are tangible benefits to solving every one of the above problems, benefits that go beyond the human sphere. Human health, for one. Lower prices, for another. Places fit for recreation for a third. Better hunting and fishing, for a fourth. People don't care about their carbon footprint very much here, but they do care about some of those things. More people will join in if you can convince them it is in their personal self-interest to behave reasonably. It might work better than yelling at people every time they get out of their Ford F-150s.
"Maybe in this country it is better if you don't mention it."
No, never stop mentioning it.
You should be shouting it in the street.
Selfish concerns;
lower prices
recreation
hunting-fishing
Your interest should be everyone's interest
respect for all life forms
sustainable lifestyle
healthful food
peace
A few tenth of a degree - and already glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising, Arctic ice is thinning, freak weather events increasing etc. This gives an indication how fragile and sensitive earth in reality is. The big danger is runaway climate change, positive feedback loops that spiral climate change out of control in no time at all. Once this happens, humanity can only cut down CO2 emissions to zero and hope that things change back in less than a million years.
There might be a pause in the heating, but earth is not a rock, it is a dynamic system and dynamic systems do not react linearely, they show oscillations. Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia theory, has warned years ago that before a jump takes place towards a new climate equilibrum (which might be 7 degrees C warmer and not just 2) you might experience a steady state or even a cooling.
This kind of insight is built on very simple science (the relationship between CO2 concentrations and trapped heat - not even deniers deny this simple correlation), millions of data, thousands of scientists have accumulated them, there is worldwide scientific consensus- apart from a few paid "scientists" who do the bidding of the energy industry. Only in the US do you have this strange pseudo-scientific denier debate, and I don't think it is because Americans are by and large better educated. Your media have brainwashed you, courtesy of Exxon and others.
Creationism is rife in the United States. So how can you be surprised that other aspects of pseudo-science are also rife. De Nile no longer runs in Africa--it flows right down the middle of the United States. Pseudo-science is one of the hall marks of a fascist society. Just look at Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
I'm totally disgusted by Copenhagen, though not surprised. I've never experienced such mass stupidity as I have in the last few years. Makes me wish I were an alien, or a dolphin.
hopefully not a dolphin in one of those ridiculous marine parks where stupid humans go to watch them performing tricks................
'mass stupidity' is being too kind............
media is a powerful weapon
You are an alien and a dolphin
all life is interconnected
part of the whole
Get a grip, folks....the super rich are planning to leave this planet behind when the shit hits than fan. (Spaceship Richard Branson-Virgin Air is warming up its rockets.
I prefer the French Revolution's method of helping the rich leave the planet....
Get out the rust remover, sharpen the blades. There must be a few of them old guillotines left.
Richard Branson is leaving the planet?
Hmmm... there's probably a down side I'm just not seeing.
· Yr Obd't Servant
There is nowhere for them to go.
We are stuck with them here.
Take appropriate action.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/5012
It's become thoroughly embarrassing to be an American citizen. Besides alternate People's policy- and decision-making bodies (Klimaforum sounds wonderful), I propose new names for residents of nations whose governments have consistently acted distinctly apart from and against the people's wishes and welfare.
Decades of abuse, foreign and domestic, have afflicted us; countless evil actions have been perpetrated in our name. The world does not always pause to distinguish between Americans and our government, and neither do we, thanks to propagandistic jingoism. We need to be clear about who we are. We are not hubristic lying criminals and sociopaths.
We might, for instance, embrace our neighbors north and south, calling ourselves North Americans. 'World citizen' is nice, too. It's not about politics, it's about life on earth.
I have a sweater I bought 15 years ago. It has the earth on the front. Beneath the earth are the words, "CREW MEMBER, SPACESHIP EARTH".
Scotty, the CO2 is building up. Check the atmospherics and make sure the dilithium crystals are functionng.
Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller
i'm sorry mr. monbiot for your disappointment with the 'copenhagen fiasco'. perhaps in eons(decades/centuries?) to come your words will have meaning to some distant 'peoples'. but given the mess we are now faced with, i doubt that homo sapiens will have learned anything better than the times of the ancient egyptians. no-one knows what happened to them, but at least they left a beautiful world behind them.............
If all nations but Empire USA and those in Europe would disown the UN,
then light could force the darkness to give way on this smoke screen
confusion. All this blinding of the mind by the richest, by their
burning the emotions of the poorest.
COPENHAGEN – President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.
The accord calls for the participating countries to list specific actions they have taken to control emissions and the commitments they are willing to make to achieve deeper reductions.
As for the U.S., he said, "We will not be legally bound by anything that took place here today," pre-emptively answering congressional critics who had warned repeatedly that Congress will have the final say in any U.S. emission reduction commitments"
Wow.
Maybe Obama can reach a similar agreement with Iran, where Iran provides a unverified list of all the nuclear weapons it didn't produce, and we take the rest on faith
How are we "saving the planet" by keeping it cool. When the planet was hotter and covered with thick jungle and teeming with life, it was a lot healthier. Isn't the issue whether some cities are flooded or not? Shouldn't it be "save our cities" or something?
Bingo. It isn't about saving the planet. The planet can do fine on its own thanks. Its about saving our sorry asses and even then it is about saving some of our sorry asses because for a lot of people it really isn't going to matter much if the coasts flood.
This is big news for island nations and India and Africa primarily. Some parts of Europe and North America are at risk, but not that much really and for North America, the time it will take for the seas to rise will be longer than the time that most cities have been here even. Plenty of time to build on higher ground as needed for the economies that can afford it, disaster for those that can't.
Worth saving our cities and our brothers in the littoral regions of the Earth, but Earth herself isn't in any danger.
Considering our history of trying to "save" the developing world and its people, I can see why they are resisting yet another attempt by us.
Such narrow vision. Food supplies are already down due to extreme climate changes. Africa and Australia are suffering sever extended droughts. Other places are flooding with crops ruined. In the u.s. northern regions, 20% of the corn is still in the field. 75 or 80% of the human population lives near coasts. You two are way off base and standing in the dark.
OK, but it is still about saving humanity or civilization or something but not the planet. The planet is healthier and life on the planet flourishes when it is much hotter than now.
You are VERY confused about what the issues are around global warming. Please go and do some reading on the subject. Unchecked and we could actually have a dead planet.
Do you any suggestions? I have read many sites like Union of Concerned Scientists and I don't see killing the planet as one of the impacts of global warming.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/
Wow. It's not simply about warming a few degrees.
It's about chemical changes that are harmful to all life on this planet. A sharp spike in methane gas that is stored deep in the poles right now can possibly make the earth unbearable for many life forms, not just on the surface, but in the ocean as well. This is believed to be the cause, or one of the main causes, of the largest mass extinction on this planet before the triassic period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
The Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event, informally known as the Great Dying,[1] was an extinction event that occurred 251.4 million years ago,[2][3] forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods. It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with up to 96 percent of all marine species[4] and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct; it is the only known mass extinction of insects.[5][6] Fifty-seven percent of all families and 83% of all genera were killed. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on earth took significantly longer than after other extinction events.[4] This event has been described as the "mother of all mass extinctions".[7]
The Great Dying is not understood at all and there's no agreement on what caused it. I think the only thing we know for sure about the release of massive amounts of methane is that it would cause the planet to get hotter. The ice ages and the planet getting cooler is a sign of a dying planet. A planet getting hotter leads to more life.
One common aspect of several theories for many mass extinctions is sea level regression, so the sea level rise from global warming is also good for the planet I would think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_regression
Once again, my point is that trying to maintain as cool a planet as possible and keeping sea levels from rising to save civilization is purely out of self-interest for humans and civilization because warmer climates are better for life on the planet.
"Plenty of time to build on higher ground..." I will be sure and pass this thought on to the City Planners in Manhattan, New Orleans, Houston, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Stinson Beach, Bolinas, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, San Pedro, San Diego et al. Then of course there's London (but by then the Gulf Stream will already be dead and England will be an ice cube, and ice cubes float, don't they) and Venice Italy of course has a great future as an underwater theme park. The Pope of Rome can deliver the the requiem Mass from a barge.
I'm sure those City Planners have creative "tricks" to compensate for a 27' (9 meter) rise in the oceans. Somehow the idea of "stilts" just doesn't seems to get it. Any suggestions other than gondolas?
You are correct of course, as George Carlin pointed out years ago, the Planet is FINE. It's the humans that are toast. The Planet and its systems will be here long after the psychotic monkeys have all eaten each other - unless we ionize the atmo (in the process of cannablizing each other) and turn the planet into a close approximation of Mars.
So. We must act ourselves and POWERDOWN our lifestyles as quickly as possible. It doesn't make any sense to complain so bitterly about Copenhagen from our comfortable big homes after driving home in our comfortable big cars, while eating food that has been brought to us from great distances, while watching an electronic screen brought to us from many thousands of miles away, all of which uses much energy to source, manufacture, ship, sell, use and dispose of. We are not servants to the energy industries...they don't own us and we can choose to reduce our dependence upon them substantially, and still live relatively well.
Let's make this last day of failed efforts at Copenhagen a call to action- a collective action of unplugging 80% of our energy use? In two year? Three? What you say, Common Dreamers?
"Population, root cause of all world problems." The Truth, from grafitti I observed decades ago during a visit to Santa Cruz, CA. Why is this issue not mentioned as integral to the climate situation?
...because we're not willing to sterilize the Males yet.
"Population, root cause of all world problems."
You're almost right. Just substitute "money/power" for "population."
(And quit trying to find 'The Truth' from graffiti and go to a library instead. You can start with Marx.)
John Lennon's Opinion about Over Population
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yRh5NNiFG0&feature=player_embedded
I need a new computer.
And the kids are going to the mall today.
I need a computer too. I'm dipping my toe into the heliostat business. However, I know that a used computer is a lot cheaper (or free in many cases) and it will work fine.