On Dec. 15, countries at the U.N.-sponsored Bali conference on climate change reached an agreement to start a two-year period of negotiations for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The “roadmap” contains no firm actions or commitments against global warming, instead setting an agenda and schedule for negotiators.
The final roadmap has no specific targets for emissions reductions, although the European countries had initially
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“The people of the world wanted more. They wanted binding targets,” said Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil.
“It starts a negotiation that allows but doesn’t require an outcome where the U.S. takes a cap,” said David Doniger, the climate policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Now, the United Nations will start at least two years of talks to develop a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which includes 37 industrialized nations committed to cutting greenhouse gases by an average of five percent between 2008 and 2012. The United States had refused to sign the Kyoto protocol.
As the Bali conference moved toward adopting the final “roadmap,” developing nations raised the issue of additional technological help from rich countries. The United States objected to adding language addressing this, instead calling for further talks. Delegates jeered and booed the U.S. delegates. One delegate was heard to shout, “If you are not willing to lead; then get out of the way!”
The United States bowed under the pressure and signed off on the added language.
The Bali conference highlights the differences in approach to global warming between countries.
The European countries’ negotiators had argued for specific government-imposed caps on emissions and wanted industrial countries to lead the way in adopting such limits.
While binding limits are a positive step toward halting the dangers of climate change, the European countries are not operating from altruistic motives. Setting new limits will support markets in emissions credits, which are seen as a potential means of profiting from the global climate crisis.
Emissions credits markets give companies the “right” to create a certain amount of greenhouse gases. If the company does not “use up” all of the pollution credit it has, the credit can be sold to another company, allowing the purchaser to emit additional greenhouse gases.
Radical environmentalists have critiqued the credits approach as a market based “false solution” that turns the global resource of fresh air into a commodity to be bought and sold. The approach allows capitalists alone to determine how much pollution is “acceptable.”
The United States supports “aspirational” goals, non-polluting technology research, and miscellaneous measures, such as efficiency standards for vehicles and appliances to be set by individual countries. In other words, the U.S. government wants to create the appearance of an appropriate level of concern for the problem of global warming without actually doing anything that will impact on the profits of the capitalist economy.
Developing countries also formed a bloc and a consensus at Bali. Diverse nations from China to Costa Rica asserted that rich, fully industrialized countries should take the first step to reduce emissions, pointing out that the rich countries spent more than a century creating the current crisis through untrammeled development.
All research on the emerging climate change crisis points to the fact that it is the poorest countries and people that will be impacted most by global warming. The 2007 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change report projects serious problems that will effect working-class people disproportionately—through droughts, famine, floods, epidemics and other health crises.
Why no unity?
For some, it may be hard to understand why a conference of countries found it so hard to reach an agreement on fighting global warming. Shouldn’t every country be concerned? After all, we all live on the same planet and we all will be affected by the devastation of climate change.
Yes, every country should be concerned. But everything depends on the class outlook of each participating government. Marxism can help us make sense of the Bali conference.
Capitalism—the economic system shared by most countries at the conference—is driven by the quest for short term gain. “Expand or die” is a primary mantra.
In the relentless competition that characterizes the system, no individual capitalist—or capitalist government, representing the interests of its “own” capitalist class—is willing to accept a plan that would put it at a relative disadvantage vis-?-vis other capitalists.
There are vast differences within the capitalist countries to be sure. Some, like the United States and most EU countries, are imperialist and are focused on maintaining world economic and political domination. Others, like Brazil and South Africa, are oppressed by imperialism and concerned with national development, among other things.
Workers’ states, like Cuba, which are developing on a socialist basis, binding climate change agreements, while initiating programs to reduce emissions on their own.
The main EU imperialist countries have adopted what appears to be a position closer to that advocated by moderate environmentalist groups, and friendlier to the concerns of the developing bloc. Their position, however, must be viewed in the context of the secondary role these countries play in the global imperialist pecking order. Countries that once divvied up the world and established empires now play second fiddle to U.S. imperialism.
In the struggle around global warming, the European bourgeoisie has decided to carve out a niche position, which will enable them to profit first from emissions credits markets.
The U.S. imperialists are hesitant to commit to any agreement on climate change. They do not want to jeopardize the hegemony of U.S.-based industries on the world capitalist market.
The imperialists’ endless maneuvering to protect the interests of the super-rich, and against the interests of the world’s workers and poor, illustrates the irrational character of the capitalist system.
A planned, socialist solution to the global warming crisis is what is necessary.
