Climate Red - News and Views on Climate Change Issues.

Hurray! We’re Going Backwards!
Posted December 17, 2007
Bush trashed the climate talks. But look what Gore did.


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17th December 2007

“After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could … even lead to emission increases. … The highly compromised political deal … is largely attributable to the position of the United States which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all night session …”(1)

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th - I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.


The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then it did something worse: it destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries(2). When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the FSU countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Factories in India and China have made billions by raising their production of potent greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up(3).

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don’t. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the protocol, the world cursed and stamped its feet. But his intransigence affected only the United States. Gore’s team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the US delegation is not the only thing that hasn’t changed. After the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, the British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced that “this is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions.”(4) Ten years later the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that “this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever all the world’s nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change.”(5) Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases the United States demanded terms which appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore’s proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. United States negotiators have pulled the same trick twice and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto Protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Al Gore’s trading scams, the clean development mechanism(6). Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Though Gore does a better job of governing now that he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but US politics had made it impossible. In July 1997 the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones(7). Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading(8). But even when he succeeded he announced that “we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate”(9). Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the United States act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media (particularly in the US) in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it(10). I won’t bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after “Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity” and “Florida store sells ‘Santa Hates You’ T-shirt”(11).

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things(12).

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US(13). Transport companies have given $355m(14). The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000(15), while transport companies gave him $347,000(16). The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don’t believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George W Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don’t have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

www.monbiot.com
ere

Prof Garnaut said it was more important to achieve an overall greenhouse-gas reduction target longer-term - for example over 40 years - than to meet short-term targets in particular years.

Instead, the market should decide how quickly to cut emissions, he said.

"By focusing on a particular date you may diminish the environmental impact of what you're trying to do and you may increase the economic costs of it," he told ABC radio today.

"We're trying to address the question of how we can meet the strong environmental goals in a way that minimises cost.

"You have to ask a question about how strongly you focus on particular dates and how much you look at the overall impact over a number of years."

He denied this amounted to a recommendation that governments set looser rather than tighter emissions-reduction targets.

"You're looking at a binding total amount of emissions over a long period of time," Prof Garnaut said.

"If you just focus on one year or particular years then you can do an awful lot of emitting in other years and so you don't meet the environmental objective that's absolutely crucial - and that's the total amount of emissions going into the atmosphere."

Gore predicts worsening climate change
The former US vice-president took to the stage at Davos to claim that the North Pole ice cap could disappear in five yearsDavid Charter in Davos
Climate change is taking place even faster than the worst predictions made by the UN's Nobel prize-winning panel on climate change, Al Gore said this morning.

The former US vice-president and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize said that there were forecasts that the North Pole ice cap could disappear during summer months within five years.

Mr Gore, who shared the Nobel with the panel for his own efforts to counter climate change, said: "We could take the whole session talking just about the new scientific evidence of the last few weeks and months.

"The climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] projections had warned us."


Mr Gore added that any of the main Democrat or Republican candidates would make a better US President than his own nemesis, George Bush, who defeated him in the controversial presidential race in 2000, in the fight against global warming.

He said that John McCain, the Republican front-runner, had a "reasonable position that did not go far enough", while he believed that the evangelical background of other Republican candidates meant that they would be driven by moral reasons to do more on climate change.

But for the maker of An Inconvenient Truth, the film that gave warning of the emergency of global warning, only a compulsory, global carbon trading system could really tackle global warming.

He argued that seemingly expensive renewable energy sources were actually comparable in price with fossil fuels when carbon costs were taken into account, "when coal is adjusted to reflect its true price, the cost of capturing carbon from burning coal".

Sharing the platform, Bono, the U2 frontman, accused the world's richest countries of reneging on promises made in 2005 for a $50 billion rise in aid by 2010. Overall, aid to Africa fell in real terms in 2006.

The musician said: "The G-8 are not making good on their commitments. This is a scandal. It makes the kind of dialogue that social movements have been having with governments look preposterous."

But, ever keen to share his personal contacts with world leaders, he said he had fresh verbal pledges from the leaders of Germany and France.

"[Chancellor] Angela Merkel has promised to meet her commitment and that is courageous" given Germany's other spending, he said.

President Sarkozy of France told him last week that he, too, would try to keep his country's promise to the world's poorest people.

Bono said: "Sarkozy said: 'It is very hard for me, I made a promise to the French people to make their lives better, but I commit to you — we will get to work and keep our promise'."

There had been some successes. "There are now two million Africans on retroviral drugs and that is pretty astonishing," Bono said.

"This is something that the IPCC was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it."