How to whip up even stronger super typhoons

After teetering yet again on the brink of collapse, governments that participated in the latest UN climate change summit in Lima, Peru, managed to squeak through a deal that lays the groundwork for a new international climate change agreement intended to be signed in Paris next year.

Following previous UN summits allowing all governments to decide on their own how they want to contribute to addressing climate change, the Lima deal moves the process forward by putting pressure on countries to submit by March next year their plans and targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions – but not their plans and targets for enabling other countries to invest in low-carbon technologies, adapt to climate change, and recover from their losses and damages.

 

These pledges would then form the basis of the new agreement that is now unlikely to establish a process to assess whether countries’ pledges are adequate for averting climate chaos and helping those affected and a mechanism to compel countries to increase their pledges if they are found wanting.

Pushed largely by developed-country governments led by the US and the European Union, such an approach is likely to condemn millions of people to face more vicious super typhoons and other severe climate-change impacts, and to leave them to fend for themselves, dependent on the benevolence of the rich to get by or survive.

Foiled resistance

Many developing-country governments could have prevented – and did try to prevent – the negotiations from further moving toward this weak and unjust agreement.

As the talks drew to a close, many if not most other developing-country governments decided to risk driving the conference to collapse – or at least to force negotiators to spend another sleepless night – by blocking consensus on a proposed “decision text” containing the main elements of the deal described above.

This text was supported by all developed countries and a number of developing countries, including— unexpectedly for many—the Philippines: lashed by yet another typhoon as the talks proceeded, and until this year, one of the developed countries’ most vocal critics in the negotiations.

But the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group, a negotiating bloc of the world’s poorest nations, stood against the text because the reference to countries being obliged to provide them resources for the loss and damage they suffer from climate change had conspicuously disappeared from the latest draft.

The African Group, representing nearly all the countries of the continent and also among the most vulnerable to even “mild” climate change, was angry that the decision was too focused on “mitigation;” governments were being enjoined to reduce emissions but were not being obliged to provide countries like them with the finance and technology to adapt to an already deteriorating climate.

Finally, the Like-Minded Developing Countries’ Group – an unlikely grouping that unites leftist Latin American countries with emerging giants like China and India together with oil-dependent economies like Saudi Arabia-shared the LDC’s and the Africans’ specific grievances. But they also advanced a more general objection to what they considered a concerted attempt by developed countries – those they consider “historically responsible” for climate change – to pass on their obligations to them.

Saying they were not opposed to, and have in fact been making efforts at, reducing their own emissions, they insisted that they should only be obliged to reduce their emissions if developed-country governments are also obliged to provide resources and technology to them—not as charity but as a way to help developing countries fulfill their emissions-reductions obligations, and also as some kind of compensation for the suffering and damages developing countries have caused in causing climate change.

Towards global neoliberal re-regulation

But in the end, even these dissenting developing-country governments eventually dropped their objections and allowed the process to move forward.

 

In the course of a delicate 8-hour long dance behind closed doors, several concessions were given: Among others, a nod to a previously established but still toothless mechanism on the issue of loss and damage was inserted in the decision text’s preamble. A sentence was tweaked to specify that mitigation and adaptation, finance, etc., would indeed be treated “in a balanced manner.” And a new paragraph was brought in to “reaffirm” that the 2015 agreement would still reflect the principle that countries should contribute according to their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

All of these go some way in making the text more “balanced;” at the very least, they allow developing countries to keep pushing their demands when the negotiations resume. None, however, sufficiently changed the basic character of the decision.

For despite the concessions, the Lima decision still appears to lay the ground for a mitigation-focused agreement in Paris because while it puts pressure on governments to communicate how they plan to reduce their emissions, it fails to oblige them to communicate how they plan to provide finance and technology to enable others to cope with and recover from the impacts of climate change.

It still sets the stage for an agreement without any mechanism to assess whether countries’ pledges are enough to actually avert catastrophic climate change and help those affected by its impacts – and to force countries to ramp up their pledges if they prove inadequate.

All these, in turn, build the foundations for the broader strategy for addressing climate change that developed-country governments, joined by a few developing-country governments, have been pushing in recent years: that of 1) setting up norms enjoining all governments to contribute to the goal of reducing total global emissions but ultimately leaves it to each government to decide whether, how, and by how much it wants to do so, while at the same time 2) orchestrating and relying on market mechanisms (carbon markets, taxes, and other carbon pricing schemes) to entice capital to transition to “low-carbon” investments and technologies and to allow them to find “cost-effective” solutions to achieve their targets.

In short, an approach we could think of in terms of “global neoliberal re-regulation:” re-regulation rather than deregulation because it actually requires concerted – and globally coordinated – state intervention instead of state withdrawal, and neoliberal because it seeks to achieve such regulation through the disciplinary inculcation of norms through market categories and technologies.

Challenging the consensus

Promoted as the most, if not the only, “realistic” solution to climate change, this approach is unlikely to prevent climate chaos because normative and market pressures will not be enough to counter the drive for economic growth and constantly-increasing profits that pushes governments and businesses to continue to choose “cheaper” but dirtier energy sources, technologies, or practices.

It is also unlikely to help those who are and will be suffering from climate change because appealing to people’s desire for a good reputation or for higher returns would not mobilize enough resources to enable people worldwide to rebuild their houses or evacuate their entire islands.

An alternative approach that seems to have a more realistic chance of succeeding is an agreement to compel those who make the decisions about production to prioritize the urgent needs of people and nature over GDP growth and profits – something that requires fundamentally modifying if not supplanting the current economic system.

Few of the governments that participate in the negotiations are likely to rally behind this because – for all their bitter fights about who should cut their emissions more or about who is to blame – many if not most ultimately agree on one thing: that climate change can, or must, be solved with the least possible disruption to capitalism.

System change, not climate change

But a new global social force seems to be (re)emerging to question this deeper, unchallenged consensus.

As the standoff inside the UN summit continued, thousands gathered at the “People’s Summit” went beyond the questions being discussed inside the UN to instead debate the following issues:

How can we better support indigenous peoples and other frontline activists fighting against giant mining and other transnational corporations? Why are even governments led by professed socialists like Ecuador and Venezuela driven to continue to pursue “extractivist” development? How do we mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to march in the arrondisements of Paris and across the globe next December? What would an effective and attractive “systemic alternative” look like?

And as the UN summit remained deadlocked, nearly 20,000 people joining and representing so many others around the world, marched in downtown Lima behind a big green banner proclaiming a new, increasingly resonant call that few, even in the environmental movements, have until recently dared say out loud: “System change, not climate change!”

Whether the Philippines continues to be threatened by more frequent, stronger supertyphoons into the future, and whether we’re able to recover and build resilience, may yet depend on whether this global social movement grows – and wins. – Rappler.com

Herbert Villalon Docena is a sociologist who has been studying the climate change negotiations.