The road to Copenhagen has become torturous. The ghosts of things past such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol whose provisions the Copenhagen Climate Conference hopes to rectify and revise continue to haunt the imperative climate negotiations and the ultimate climate deal.
Kyoto’s promise of 5% emissions cuts (by 2012, from 1990 levels) is now impossible. ‘Obama’s people hope the world will accept 2005 as a new starting date; a 20% reduction by 2020 then only brings the target back to around 5% below 1990 levels. Such pathetically low ambitions, surely Obama knows, guarantee a runaway climate catastrophe – he should shoot for 45%, say the small island nations.’
The reason why the Kyoto Protocol failed to gain popular support and adherence ‘is its provision for carbon trading rackets which allow fake claims of net emissions cuts. Since the advent of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, the Chicago exchange, Clean Development Mechanism projects and offsets, vast evidence has accumulated of systemic market failure, scamming and inability to regulate carbon trading.’
Likewise, the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘weak, market-oriented approach’ needs to be revised because the ‘devastation caused by climate change will hit the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people far harder than those in the North. Reparations for the North’s climate debt to the South are in order. The European Union offered a pittance in September, while African leaders are stiffening their spines for a fight in Copenhagen reminiscent of Seattle a decade ago.’
The core principles of the progressive movement are non-negotiable. There will surely be protests at the Copenhagen Bella Center where the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 will be held. These protests will surely fight for ‘leaving fossil fuels in the ground, reasserting peoples’ and community control over production, relocalizing food production, massively reducing overconsumption particularly in the North, respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights, and recognizing the ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of the South and making reparations.’
The hard lessons of the failure of the Kyoto Protocol should be acknowledged and learned fast before any climate negotiations and deals are made.
Via counterpunch
