http://socialistaction.org/paris-climate-talks-produce-hot-air/
Paris climate talks produce hot air
Published January 20, 2016. | By Socialist Action.
Jan. 2016 Climate Paris
By CARL SACK
After 10 days of talks at the COP 21 climate conference in Paris,
negotiators from 195 countries celebrated the adoption of an agreement
that calls for a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5o Centigrade
above pre-industrial levels.
On one hand, the agreement goes farther than any previous accord to
acknowledge the need for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Its preamble includes the “principle of equity” that rich countries must
do more than poor countries. It even pays lip service to indigenous
rights, gender equality, and a “just transition of the workforce.” It
calls for holding the global average temperature “well below 2o C above
pre-industrial levels”—the suicidal temperature ceiling advocated by the
U.S. and European countries—and aspires to limit the temperature rise to
1.5o C. Many poorer nations pushed for the 1.5o target.
On the other hand, despite the enlightened preamble, the document is
utterly empty of any concrete measures to curb planet-destroying carbon
emissions. It relies on countries to set their own “intended nationally
determined contributions” or INDCs, which are to be updated every five
years. The language used is revealing; INDCs are voluntary pledges that
are non-binding and therefore have no real impact.
The agreement does not lay out any roadmaps for how individual countries
will achieve their pledges. It fails to even mention reducing the
consumption of fossil fuels beyond a vague reference to “domestic
mitigation measures.” Even if all countries were to follow through on
all of the pledges made just prior to the Paris conference, scientists
at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research peg the result as a
disastrous 2.7o C warming by the year 2100—just 0.9 degrees below the
“business-as-usual” scenario.
Worse, like its predecessors, the Paris agreement endorses
counterproductive market-based carbon-trading schemes. Carbon markets
introduced under the Kyoto Protocol (called the “Clean Development
Mechanism”) have attracted rampant corruption, promoted big development
projects like hydropower dams that displaced sustainable communities,
and ultimately collapsed due to a lack of demand for carbon offsets.
Forest protection credits, sold as carbon offsets under the UN REDD
program, have accelerated corporate land grabs in developing countries
and hastened the conversion of natural forests into private monoculture
tree plantations.
Provisions of the agreement could also be interpreted as promoting
speculative carbon-capture technologies and risky geo-engineering schemes.
NASA climate scientist James Hansen called the agreement “a fraud” and
“a fake.” “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming
target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just
worthless words. There is no action, just promises,” Hansen said in an
interview with The Guardian. Hansen supports a carbon tax with public
redistribution of the proceeds as a means of curbing fossil fuel use.
Perhaps proving Hansen’s point, the Paris talks do not seem to have
spurred any immediate action to curb emissions by the world’s worst
polluters. In fact, just before the Paris talks, President Barack Obama
signed a transportation bill including a provision that fast-tracks
environmental review of new oil and gas pipelines and strictly limits
lawsuits aimed at stopping such projects. Just after the talks, he
signed a spending bill that ended the 40-year-old oil export ban,
allowing U.S. fossil fuel corporations to ship crude oil overseas.
India has said it still plans to double its use of coal-fired
electricity. Japan is currently building 43 new coal-fired power plants,
and China is adding a new 600-megawatt coal plant every 10 days for the
next decade. Both countries are adding renewable energy sources as well,
but not enough to offset their growth in energy demand. Much of that
growth is due to increased manufacturing of goods exported to the U.S.
and Europe.
In 2009, the U.S. pledged to spearhead a $100 billion per year “Green
Climate Fund” to finance renewable energy development in poorer
countries. But to date, the fund has only received a fraction of that in
actual contributions, and wealthy countries have sought to dedicate the
money that has been pledged to promoting “public-private partnerships”
resulting in private, for-profit energy infrastructures.
Meanwhile, climate change is causing unprecedented weather conditions
globally; 2015 was again the hottest year on record—surpassing 2014, the
hottest year before that. In late December, 43 people died from
unseasonable megastorms across much of the U.S. The storms spawned
tornadoes in 10 states and dumped enough rain on the Upper Midwest to
cause the worst floods on the Mississippi since at least 1993. Record
rains also caused flooding in South America and Europe. The North Pole
saw temperatures rise above freezing in what should have been deep winter.
Why, in the face of oncoming catastrophe, don’t capitalist leaders do
more than make high-minded pronouncements while the planet burns? As
Institute for Social Ecology director Brian Tokar notes in his analysis
of the Paris climate talks, “The world the diplomats inhabit couldn’t be
farther removed from the places where the impacts of continuing climate
chaos are felt the most.” It is the frontline communities facing
droughts, wildfires, unprecedented storms, and inundation by rising
seas—not the global capitalist class—that can bring about the system
change necessary to avert the worst devastation.
The fact that the Paris agreement pays lip service to the goals of the
global climate justice movement is a testament to the growing power of
that movement and the ability of mass action to shift the conversation.
In the lead-up to the conference, 785,000 people took to the streets at
over 2300 events in 175 countries.
Protests around the Paris summit were large and colorful despite the
French government’s attempts to squelch them. The administration of
François Hollande used the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris as a
pretext to outlaw all street protests during the climate summit. The
government even placed 24 environmental activists under preemptive house
arrest before the talks.
International protest organizers bowed to the ban and officially
canceled a march scheduled for Nov. 29. But up to 10,000 protesters took
to the streets of central Paris anyway. They were met by riot cops
firing tear gas and stun grenades. Media images of heavily armed cops
trampling a memorial to victims of the Nov. 13 attacks in order to
arrest 200 peaceful protesters were broadcast worldwide.
The New Anti-capitalist Party, which includes Socialist Action’s
co-thinkers in France, participated in the protest and pointed out: “EDF
(the formerly state-owned electricity company), BNP Paribas (one of the
country’s biggest banks), Air France (the formerly state-owned airline),
GDF Suez (the formerly state-owned gas company), all of them sponsors of
the COP 21, are among the biggest polluters worldwide. Dictators from
around the globe are welcomed with honors by Foreign Affairs Minister
Laurent Fabius and President François Hollande, but the people who want
to protest for a better world are being repressed.”
Left-wing Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, who is renowned for her
writing on capitalism’s failure to address climate change, also called
for activists to defy the protest ban. On the last day of the Paris
talks, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, carrying
banners representing “red lines” that climate negotiators crossed in
their final agreement. The French government permitted the protest at
the last minute, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Nov. 29 debacle.
The crackdown on civil liberties itself hints at the effectiveness of
mass protest. If world powers had nothing to fear from mass
mobilization, why would they insist on a “state of emergency” to curtail
it while football matches and public markets go on as usual? Indeed, the
only way to challenge capitalism’s march toward the abyss is by
mobilizing for system change. The modern capitalist economy simply
cannot exist without climate-changing fossil fuels, and global leaders
are willing to go to any lengths to continue extracting them—even if it
means planetary destruction.
An investigation by InsideClimate News revealed that virtually every
fossil-fuel company has known that burning fossil fuels causes climate
change since the 1970s. The American Petroleum Institute ran a task
force on CO2 between 1979 and 1983, but then campaigned against the
Kyoto Protocol and spread lies about the uncertainty of climate change.
That revelation followed an exposé of documents showing that oil company
Exxon conducted top-notch research into global warming starting in 1977.
The company went so far as to outfit its largest supertanker with
instruments to measure the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide and
developed its own in-house climate models that accurately predicted
future atmospheric CO2 levels and warned of global temperature changes.
But by 1989, the company had switched to funding climate-change deniers
and lobbying to block any political action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
These investigations merely confirm what was already known: fossil fuel
companies are criminally liable for the deaths of millions from climate
change-related disasters. So why do $775 billion in direct government
subsidies still flow to fossil-fuel corporations, rather than to
transitioning to clean, renewable energy sources?
It’s not that such a transition is technically impossible. In fact, a
recent study conducted by a group of engineers at Stanford University
not only confirms that it would be possible to convert all 50 U.S.
states to 100% wind, solar, and mostly existing hydroelectric power by
2050 using current technology, but details exactly how each state could
do so. The study considers not just the electric grid, but
transportation, heating and cooling, and industry as well. The
researchers have published their peer-reviewed findings in an
interactive website, www.thesolutionsproject.org.
But such a transition requires immediate, massive, sustained investment
in new renewable energy sources; so far, only a few U.S. states have
taken some half-measures toward meeting these goals. Further, it would
only work if all of the new energy from renewables were to replace
existing fossil fuel sources, rather than just increasing the energy
supply. Currently, this is not the case. Fossil fuels are more in demand
than ever.
Capitalism requires constant expansion and replacement of human labor
with machinery (what Marx termed “constant capital”).
Machinery—including not just factory belts and motors, but labor-saving
devices like computers and farm tractors—requires energy to run. As an
energy source, fossil fuels are extremely energy-dense and relatively
easy to extract, store, transport, and sell. They can be used wherever
and whenever a capitalist needs them, in any quantity the capitalist can
afford.
By contrast, wind and solar energy are less concentrated, requiring more
capital investment and a slower return on that investment. Fossil fuels
are a form of solar energy, but ones that have been concentrated by the
work of nature over millions of years; collecting energy directly from
the sun requires an investment of human labor to replace this use value
of nature. The availability of both wind and sun are also impacted by
local weather conditions. From an ecological perspective, it makes sense
to reorganize the economy around clean, renewable energy sources,
producing goods when energy is available and relaxing when it isn’t.
From a capitalist perspective, it only makes sense to consider the
bottom line: fossil fuels enable unlimited mechanization and profit.
In the short term, we need to continue building mass mobilizations to
demand an immediate transition to clean renewables—water, wind, and
solar. There are many immediate demands that can be made, such as ending
fossil fuel subsidies, banning fracking, tar sands, and mountaintop
removal coal mining, stopping new oil and gas pipelines, caps on power
plant emissions, new government investment into mass transit systems,
and forcing utilities to replace fossil fuel generators with renewables.
All of this should be done with an eye toward providing transition jobs
for displaced fossil fuel workers at union wages.
But ultimately, the transition that is needed will require workers and
the oppressed—including the frontline victims of climate changes—to
unite in revolution against the capitalist class. Another world is both
possible and necessary for human survival.
Photo: Demonstration for climate justice near the Arc de Triomphe in
Paris, Dec. 12. David Sassoon / Inside Climate News
California gas leak: The worst environmental disaster since BP Deepwater
Horizon
A methane leak at a natural gas storage facility in southern California
that began in October continues to spew the toxic, highly potent
greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Experts are calling the leak the
worst environmental disaster since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Aliso Canyon leak has caused health symptoms such as headaches,
nausea, and vomiting among residents of the upscale Porter Ranch
community in suburban Los Angeles, where the underground storage
facility is located. In addition to methane, the leaking gas contains
benzene, a carcinogen. Two local schools have closed, and more than 4500
families have left following a voluntary evacuation order.
But the leak has global implications. Methane is a greenhouse gas that
is 28 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a
100-year time span, and 84 times more powerful over a 20-year time span,
according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The leak
is releasing about 1200 tons of methane a day, causing an impact roughly
equivalent to the daily emissions produced by 2.4 million cars.
The leak was first reported by gas company employees on Oct. 23. But
Southern California Gas, the corporation that operates the storage
facility, publicly denied that there was a leak for five days. The
source of the leak is 470 feet underground in one of 115 aging wells
drilled into a depleted oil reservoir, now used to store natural gas. A
safety valve about 8500 feet down the well could have shut the leak down
immediately—except that the valve wore out in the 1970s, and the company
decided to simply remove it rather than replace it.
Initial attempts to stop the leak by pouring heavy liquids down the well
failed because the gas is shooting out at high pressure. While the
methane is invisible to the naked eye, infrared video shows the gas
spewing out in a dark plume that reaches far up into the atmosphere. The
gas company now expects the leak to continue until at least March.
That’s when they will finish drilling a relief well to intercept the
leaking well 8000 feet down.
Most of the natural gas produced in the United States now comes from
hydraulic fracturing or fracking, which has poisoned the air and water
of thousands. Injection of fracking wastewater into deep wells has
caused hundreds of earthquakes in Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and other states.
While the scale of the Aliso Canyon leak is unprecedented, small leaks
at storage facilities and other natural gas infrastructure are common.
Studies using on-the-ground measurements and satellite imagery have
indicated that 9-10% of the methane produced by U.S. natural gas
extraction leaks directly into the atmosphere. Computer models indicate
that this rate of leakage outweighs the climate benefit of switching
power plants from coal to natural gas, which produces less carbon
dioxide when burned.
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Related
IPCC: Global warming is ‘unequivocal’
October 1, 2013
In "Environment"
Real climate action demanded in Paris
December 2, 2015
In "Actions & Protest"
Scientists say: End fossil fuel use now!
September 8, 2015
In "Environment"
Posted in Actions & Protest, Environment, Europe, International. |
Tagged Aliso Canyon, climate, fracking, global warming, Paris.
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