Abbott to let the polluters play

On February 2, opposition leader Tony Abbott released the Liberal-National Coalition’s climate policy. For the Coalition, just as for the Rudd government, there’s one thing that’s irrelevant to climate policy — climate science. In Abbott’s 30-page document, the global warming crisis doesn’t rate one mention.

Abbott replaces the completely feeble carbon price stick of Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) with an even more futile bribe-the-polluters carrot.

The Coalition claims that over four years, its “direct action” approach can achieve for $3.2 billion what will cost $40.6 billion under the CPRS. It’s a good joke to see the outright neoliberals of the Coalition rejecting market mechanisms.

Both the government and opposition claim their policies will lead to a 5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Such a reduction is not remotely sufficient to avert catastrophe. And Abbott’s method of bribing the polluters to clean up is unlikely to reach even this inadequate target.

The Coalition policy would pay the big polluting corporations to do what they were probably going to do anyway.

Under Abbott’s plan:

• 20 millions trees would be planted by 2020, while the forest corporations would be allowed to continue to log millions more, including old-growth trees that draw down significantly more CO2 than younger trees;

• The older, most polluting, power stations would be allowed to wind down at their own pace. New coal-fired power stations aren’t mentioned;

• Other big polluting industries would also be free to carry on as usual;

• There is no mention of coal mining or road transport, two of the biggest emitters of carbon pollution;

• 60% of the planned reduction in carbon emission is planned to come from increasing soil carbon, over which there are big debates as to measurement, and where subsidy schemes could open up rich opportunities for rorting.

There is hardly a mention of large-scale industrial conversion to sustainable technologies. The “green shift” under an Abbott government would see tiny increases in energy efficiency, recycling and composting, and modest boosts to “solar energy roofs on homes” and tree-planting.

Like Labor, the Coalition has no serious plan for alternative green job creation in working class communities dependent on polluting industries, such as the La Trobe Valley, Hunter and Central Queensland. Abbott’s climate policy budgets $60 million to develop “Clean Energy Employment Hubs” in these areas.

The politics of climate denial

It might seem bizarre that although the science of human-caused climate change is more conclusive and worrying than ever, climate denial could enjoy a resurgence. But it’s happening — at least in Australia and a handful of other developed nations.

The comeback of climate denial is out of step with views on climate change in most of the world.

A BBC poll, released in December, said concern about climate change has risen sharply worldwide. Sixty-four percent said climate change was “very serious” — 20% higher than a similar 1998 poll. In Brazil and Chile, the figure was 86%. Eighty-three percent of Costa Ricans and Filipinos agreed.

But in Australia, Britain and the US, the trend appears to be running the other way.

A recent US poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that less than 50% of adults found global warming “worrying” or “somewhat worrying”. This is 13% less than an October 2008 poll.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they believed global warming was happening, down from 71% in 2008. Those who felt global warming was caused by human activity dropped from 57% to 47%.

A November poll by the London Times said only 41% of Britons now believed climate change to be an established scientific fact.

An October poll by the Lowy Institute said concern about the threat of climate change was weakening in Australia too. Fifty six percent said climate change was very important, down 19 points from a poll two years earlier.

So if climate denial is finding new supporters here, why is this the case? After all, no climate denier has published a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal in the past 15 years.

Among climate scientists there is no debate about the reality of global warming any longer. The research of many hundreds of scientists has proved that climate change is real, that greenhouse gases released by human activity cause climate change, and that climate change represents an immense danger to human civilisation as we know it.

But there are reasons why a political space for climate denial remains open. The first of these is that climate deniers have it easy.

Climate scientists are required to deal skeptically with facts and measurable data before drawing firm conclusions. Climate deniers have no such constraints. They don’t have to prove or justify anything, but merely have or throw enough mud in the hope some of it will stick. This gives deniers an advantage in public debates.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen explained something of the problem in his recent book on the science of global warming Storms of my Grandchildren.

He said climate deniers “tend to act like lawyers defending a client … presenting only arguments that favour their client.

“This is in direct contradiction to my favourite description of the scientific method, by Richard Ferryman: ‘The only way to have real success in science … is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good about it and what’s bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty’.”

Hansen continued: “The scientific method, in one sense, is a handicap in a debate before a nonscientific audience. It works great for advancing knowledge, but to the public it can seem wishy-washy and confounding.

“The difference between scientist-style and lawyer-style tends to favour the [denier] in a discussion before an audience that is not expert in the science.

“I long ago realised that the global warming ‘debate’, in the public mind, would be long-running. I also noted that [deniers] kept changing their arguments as the real-world evidence for global warming continued to strengthen, conveniently forgetting prior statements that were proven wrong.”

Australian paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glickson has referred to another typical denier tactic.

Typically, deniers “scan the field for real or imagined, major or minor errors, inferring such errors undermine major databases, theories, or even an entire branch of science”, he wrote on ABC’s Unleashed blog in July.

Glickson compared climate deniers approach to “the eternal search for errors and gaps in Darwin’s evolution theory by creationists, based on their belief in a supernatural creator.”

A recent example of this strategy was the hype about a small error in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the predicted timeframe for Himalayan glaciers to melt completely.

A paragraph in the IPCC report said that chances the glaciers would “disappear … by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. On January 20, the IPCC announced this particular prediction was wrong after leading glaciologists drew attention to the mistake.

However, it said: “Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century … This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment.” The loss of meltwater from retreating glaciers could affect the water security of up to one-sixth of the world’s population.

But this hasn’t stopped deniers from seizing on this one small error to allege the whole 938-page IPCC report is fraudulent and the entire science of climate change is bogus.

A second reason climate denial is winning some new support is that it exploits peoples fear of change and the unknown. The science of climate change is frightening. It makes plain that unless radical changes are made in our economy and society, humanity faces an uncertain future.

People are responding differently to such an all-encompassing threat. A growing number are determined to win a safe climate for future generations and want to force governments to deal with the problem. But some have become despondent and assume runaway climate change is inevitable and cannot be stopped.

Others respond with denial — finding it easier to believe nothing is wrong at all, rather than accept modern capitalism is driving humanity to a precipice. For many, climate denial is a soothing psychological balm and reflects a desperate need to escape from a troubling reality.

A third reason for the recent rise in climate denial is that denial is now a well-funded industry in its won right.

PR consultant Jim Hoggan, author of the 2009 book Climate Cover-up, has said he has found it “infuriating … to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.”

“Few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as this attack on the science of climate change. It has been a triumph of disinformation — one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world”, he wrote on the Desmogblog in June.

The mainstream media’s coverage of climate change must also share some of the blame. Despite the scientific consensus, “journalists continued to report updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier — as if both were equally valid”, Hoggan said.

The highly publicised Australian tour of prominent British climate denier, Lord Christopher Monckton, laid bare this problem.

Monckton is not a scientist, but a former journalist, a semi-professional eccentric and a one-time advisor to the conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Yet despite his lack of qualifications his climate denial speaking tour generated a vast amount of media coverage.

Monckton lies at the most kooky end of the climate denier spectrum. Even National Party leader Barnaby Joyce, himself an uncompromising climate denier, has said Monckton’s views are on the “fringe”. Even so, federal opposition leader Tony Abbott met with Monckton to discuss climate policy on February 4.

Among Monckton’s most absurd claims are that the Copenhagen climate conference was “a sort of Nuremburg rally”, that US President Barack Obama wants to use climate change as an excuse to set up a world communist government, and that the young protesters calling for strong climate action outside the Copenhagen summit were akin to the Hitler youth.

While in Australia, he even claimed NASA sabotaged the launch of its own multi-million dollar satellite a year ago because the satellite, designed to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, would have given evidence that climate change is untrue.

Monckton has a history of making wild claims. In 1987, he wrote that AIDS victims should be locked away to stop the spread of the disease. He claims to have found the cure for diseases such as Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis and influenza. In a letter to US senator John McCain he also falsely said he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

A final reason for resurgence of open climate denialism in Australia is the federal ALP government’s closet climate denialism.

PM Kevin Rudd is fond of ridiculing climate denial, but his own climate policies do nothing to address the climate crisis. The proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will cost taxpayers billions and reward the big polluters. Yet it will do nothing to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions.

By promising to take strong action on climate change, but failing to do so, the Rudd government has opened the door for climate deniers to make ground. In the face of obvious government greenwashing, some are concluding that the threat may not be all that severe after all.

The politics of climate denial and climate greenwash share much in common — both are ways of denying reality. To win against the climate deniers also requires victory against the business-as-usual policies of the major parties, which acknowledge the science in words but betray it in practice.

Should Climate Activists Support Limits on Immigration?

by Ian Angus and Simon Butler

Immigrants to the developed world have frequently been blamed for unemployment, crime and other social ills. Attempts to reduce or block immigration have been justified as necessary measures to protect “our way of life” from alien influences.

Today, some environmentalists go farther, arguing that sharp cuts in immigration are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change. However sincere and well-meaning such activists may be, their arguments are wrong and dangerous, and should be rejected by the climate emergency movement.

Lifeboat ethics and anti-immigrant bigots

“Environmental” arguments for reducing immigration aren’t new. In a 1974 article, “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor,” US biologist Garrett Hardin argued that “a nation’s land has a limited capacity to support a population and as the current energy crisis has shown us, in some ways we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our land.” Immigration, he said, was “speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries.”[1]

Elsewhere he wrote: “Overpopulation can be avoided only if borders are secure; otherwise poor and overpopulated nations will export their excess to richer and less populated nations.”[2]

Hardin’s ideas have been very influential in the development of the right-wing, anti-immigration movement in the US and elsewhere. In 1979, he helped to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant lobbying group that has been named a “hate organization” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[3] In addition to the usual array of anti-immigrant arguments FAIR has made a particular point of linking concerns about the environment with opposition to immigration.

Virginia Abernethy, a Hardin collaborator who calls herself an “ethnic separatist,” argues that the ability to migrate to rich countries gives people in poor countries an incentive to have bigger families. “The U.S. would help, not harm, by encouraging an appreciation of limits sooner rather than later. A relatively-closed U.S. border would create most vividly an image of limits and be an incentive to restrict family size.”[4]

Shifting gears

In the past, the “environmental” anti-immigration argument was: immigrants should be kept out because their way of life is a threat to our environment. That argument is still made by anti-immigrant groups and some conservationists.

Recently, as concern about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming increased, the anti-immigrant argument has taken on a new form. Now the argument is: immigrants should be kept out because our way of life is a threat to the world’s environment.

That’s the argument made in a recent briefing from the US Centre for Immigration Studies, a “think tank” founded by FAIR: it says that immigration worsens CO2 emissions “because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher polluting country.” CIS calculated that the “average immigrant” to the US contributed four times more CO2 than in their country of origin.[5]

Otis Graham, a founder of FAIR, made the same argument in his 2004 book Unguarded Gates:

“Most immigrants … move from poor societies to richer ones, intending to do what they almost always succeed in doing, take on a higher standard of living that carries a larger ecological footprint. This being the case, the logic of the relationship is straightforward. Population growth in both poor and wealthy societies, but especially in the latter, intensifies environmental problems. Where immigration shifts population numbers to wealthier societies, it does not leave global environmental damage the same, but intensifies global as well as local environmental degradation.”[6]

A recent FAIR report claims that increased population is the primary cause of the huge increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions between 1973 and 2007 – and that the population increase was caused by immigration. “The United States will not be able to achieve any meaningful reductions in CO2 emissions without serious economic and social consequences for American citizens unless immigration is sharply curtailed.”[7]

The racist British National Party, which likes to call itself the “true green party” because it opposes immigration, also uses this argument. BNP leader Nick Griffin recently told the European parliament that climate change isn’t real – but that hasn’t stopped him saying immigrants will make it worse. He told author Steven Farris that by accepting immigrants from the third world, “We’re massively increasing their impact of carbon release into the world’s atmosphere. There’s no doubt about it, the western way of life is not sustainable. So what on Earth is the point of turning more people into westerners?”[8]

(It is significant that none of these supposed defenders of the environment take their argument to its logical conclusion: if immigration to the North is bad for the climate then emigration to poor countries with low emissions must be good and should be encouraged.)

Greens versus immigration

For anti-immigration bigots, concern for the environment is just a ploy – they’ll say anything to justify keeping immigrants out. It’s an example of what author and feminist activist Betsy Hartmann has called “the greening of hate — blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color.”[9]

But it is particularly disturbing to witness the promotion of similar arguments in the mainstream media, and by environmental activists whose political views are otherwise hostile to those of FAIR and the BNP.

For example, Ross Gittins, economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, said in 2008 that cutting Australia’s immigration was “one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce the growth in our emissions” because “it’s a safe bet they’d be emitting more in prosperous Australia than they were before.”[10]

Australian renewable energy expert Mark Diesendorf has urged the Australian Greens to call for immigration restrictions because Australia is such a big polluter. “Australia is world’s biggest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases. So every additional Australian has a bigger impact than anywhere else.”[11]

Even the highly respected U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben has written that, “the immigration-limiters … have a reasonable point,” because “If you’re worried about shredding the global environment, the prospect of twice as many world-champion super-consumer Americans has got to worry you.”[12]

Noted environmentalist and journalist Tim Flannery made a similar argument during a debate on immigration policy broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in September 2009:

“Growing Australia’s population has a much greater impact than growing the population of a poor country. We are the heaviest carbon users in the world, about 23 tonnes per capita, so people that come to this country from anywhere on the planet will result almost certainly in an increase carbon emissions ….”

As these examples show, “green” arguments against immigration are no longer the exclusive property of anti-immigrant bigots. They are increasingly heard within the climate movement, and so require strong answers from climate activists.

Wrong Diagnosis, Wrong Cure

The view that stopping immigration to wealthy countries is a good way to fight global warming rests on a the simplistic idea that because immigrants come from countries with low per capita emissions to countries with high per capita emissions they supposedly increase total emissions simply by moving.

This argument is false on its face.

To calculate “per capita emissions,” we simply divide a country’s total greenhouse gas emissions by its total population. This provides a useful baseline for comparing countries of different sizes – but it tells us nothing at all about the emissions that can actually be attributed to individuals.

In fact, most emissions are caused by industrial and other processes over which individuals have no control.

In Canada, for example, no change in the number of immigrants will have any effect on the oil extraction industry at the Alberta Tar Sands, described by George Monbiot as “the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions.”[13]

Reducing immigration to the United States will have no effect whatsoever on the massive military spending – up 50% in the past decade – which ensures that the Pentagon is the world’s biggest consumer of oil.[14] To put that in context: a study published in March 2008 found that the CO2 emissions caused directly by the Iraq war until then were equivalent to putting 25 million more cars on the road in the U.S.[15]

Closing Australia’s borders would have had no effect on the climate denial policies of the previous Liberal Party government, or on the current Labor government’s determination to continue Australia’s role as “the world’s largest ‘coal mule.’”[16]

As US immigrant rights campaigner Patricia Huang has pointed out, “the relationship between population growth and environmental destruction is shaped by how we use our resources, not by the number of people who use them.”[17]

Labeling migrants as a climate change problem is not only unjust, but it obscures the real challenges the climate movement faces. The decisive question we must address is who makes decisions about resource use in society. In capitalist society, the big financial institutions, multinational corporations and fossil-fuel companies wield this power with devastating results for the planet’s ecosystems – and governments do their bidding.

Focusing on immigration diverts attention from the real social and economic causes of global warming, and makes it more difficult to solve them. This approach mistakenly links the trends of population and ecological harm, and so misdiagnoses the root causes of the current environmental crisis. It leaves social change out of the equation or consigns it to the far future. It downplays or ignores the fact that immigration would have a very different impact in the zero-emissions economy we need to fight for.

A pessimistic outlook

As we’ve seen, the argument that reducing immigration will protect the environment originated with right-wing, anti-immigrant bigots. Our major concern, however, is that virtually identical arguments have been adopted by progressive activists and writers who are sincerely concerned about global warming.

Despite their sincerity, their arguments betray regrettable pessimism about our common ability to build a climate emergency movement that is powerful enough to win the anti-emissions fight. As Larry Lohmann of Cornerhouse writes, the anti-immigration argument “relies on the premise that changing Northern lifestyles is a lower priority, or less achievable, than preventing others from sharing them.”[18]

In fact, including “close the borders” as an anti-emissions demand tends to make their pessimistic outlook self-confirming, by making it more difficult to build a mass movement. Not only does targeting immigration divert attention from the social causes of global warming, but it divides us from our allies, while strengthening our enemies.

Sadly, some groups that favor immigration control seem oblivious to the danger of lending credibility to bigots and racists who view immigrants as a threat to “our” way of life.

For example, last year the Australian Conservation Foundation praised Labor MP Kelvin Thompson, and Sustainable Population Australia named him to its “Population Role of Honour” when he called for immigration cuts to deal with climate change. Both ignored the fact that just 10 days earlier Thomson had revealed his real motives by calling for immigration cuts “to minimize the risk that people who do not respect Australia’s laws and legal system will enter this country.”[19]

The anti-immigration response to climate change raises a huge wall between the climate movement and the most oppressed working people in the imperialist countries. How can we possibly win migrants and refugees to the climate movement while simultaneously accusing them of responsibility for rising emissions and asking the government to bar them and their families from entering the country?

What’s more, it undermines efforts to work with the growing and important climate justice movement in the Third World, where global warming is now producing its first and most devastating effects. How can we expect to be taken seriously as allies, if we tell those movements that migrants are not welcome in our countries?

The Climate Justice and Migration Working Group, an international coalition of human rights and immigrant rights groups, estimates that between 25 and 50 million people have already been displaced by environmental change, and that could rise to 150 million by 2050. It calls for recognition of the right of human mobility across borders as an essential response to the climate change threat.[20]

The climate justice movement in the rich countries has a particular responsibility to support this demand – but blaming immigrants in general for global warming will make it more difficult to win public support for climate refugees.

Despite the good intentions of its green advocates, support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to stop climate change.

It gives conservative governments and reactionary politicians an easy-out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while doing nothing to reduce real emissions.

It hands a weapon to climate change deniers, allowing them to portray the climate movement as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.

People are not pollution. Inserting immigration into the climate change debate divides the environmental movement along race, class and gender lines, at a time when the broadest possible unity is essential. It is a dangerous diversion from the real issues, one the movement cannot afford and should not support.

Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism and co-editor of Socialist Voice. Simon Butler is a member of Australia’s Socialist Alliance and a staff writer for Green Left Weekly. This article first appeared in Socialist Voice.

________________________________________

[1] Garrett Hardin. “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor.”

[2] “Garrett Hardin Quotations.” l

[3] Southern Poverty Law Center. “New SPLC Report: Nation’s Most Prominent Anti-Immigration Group has History of Hate, Extremism.”

[4] Virginia Abernethy. “The Demographic Transition Revisited: Lessons for Foreign Aid and U.S. Immigration Policy.”

[5] Leon Kolankiewicz & Steven Camarota. “Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Centre for Immigration Studies, August 2008. http://www.cis.org/GreenhouseGasEmissions.

[6] Otis L. Graham Jr. Unguarded Gates A History of America’s Immigration Crisis. Rowman & Littlefield. Lanham·MD. 2004. p. 140.

[7] FAIR. “Immigration, Energy and the Environment.”

[8] Fred Pearce. “How can Nick Griffin’s racist policies belong to the only ‘true green party’?” Guardian, December 10, 2009. .

[9] Betsy Hartmann. “Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad.”

[10] Ross Gittins. “An inconvenient truth about rising immigration.” Sydney Morning Herald, March 3, 2008.

[11] Mark Diesendorf. “Why Environmentalists must address Population as well as Technology and Consumption.” Powerpoint presentation to a meeting organised by the NSW Greens, June 2008.

[12] Bill Mckibben. “Does it make sense for environmentalists to want to limit immigration?”

[13] George Monbiot. “The Urgent Threat to World Peace is … Canada.” December 1, 2009.

[14] Sara Flounders. “Pentagon’s Role in Global Catastrophe: Add Climate Havoc to War Crimes.” December 19, 2009.

[15] Ian Angus. “Global Warming and the Iraq War.”

[16] Guy Pearce. “Quarry Vision: coal, climate change and the end of the resources boom.” Quarterly Essay, March 2009. .

[17] Patricia Huang. “10 Reasons to Rethink the Immigration-Overpopulation Connection.” DiffernTakes, Spring 2009. .

[18] Larry Lohmann. “Re-imagining the Population Debate.” Corner House Briefing 28, March 2003.

[19]Emily Bourke. “Migrants may pose terrorist threat.” ABC News, August 7, 2009.

Australian Conservation Foundation. “Population boom will bust environment and quality of life.” September 22, 2009.

Sustainable Population Australia. “Kelvin Thomson Joins Population Roll Of Honour.”

[20] “Climate Justice and Migration: Position Statement.”

Carbon traders move in on PNG forests

During December’s climate summit in Copenhagen, fresh allegations emerged that unscrupulous carbon traders active in Papua New Guinea (PNG) were buying-up the rights to the carbon stored in forests from Indigenous landowners.

One man told SBS news he was forced to signup at the point of a gun.

Abilie Wape, the head of a landowner group in Kamula Doso, told SBS’s Brian Thomson on December 12 that he had at first refused to sign a deal with Australian carbon trader Kirk Roberts.

“They came and then they told me: ‘We came to see you.’ And I told them: ‘I’m not your small boy. I am not going to listen to anybody. I represent the village people. If I sign then that means I am selling my birthrights away’.”

Later, “the police came with their gun”, said Wape. “They threatened me. They forced me to get on the vehicle and we came to the hotel. They told me: ‘You sign. Otherwise, if you don’t sign I’ll lock you up, I’ll get the police and lock you up. I was like a criminal. They treated me like that. They threatened me like that. So it was my first time so I signed the document.”

Douglas refused an interview request from SBS to respond to the allegation.

Most of the carbon traders that have recently flooded into PNG are Australians. Although, carbon trading for forests has no international legal framework or recognition, the traders hoped Copenhagen would endorse a market-based forest scheme called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).

The promise of REDD is that owners of forests in the global South can be paid to stop deforestation as a way of reducing carbon emissions. In theory, each tonne of forest carbon thus “saved” can be sold as carbon credits companies overseas. The new market will supposedly ensure it’s more profitable to keep forests standing than to cut them down.

Copenhagen ended without an agreement on REDD. Yet countries like Australia may decide to go it alone and strike bilateral carbon trading deals with countries such as PNG and Indonesia.

The ALP government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme allows 100% of Australia’s emissions cuts to be meet in carbon projects overseas. REDD projects could be among cheapest ways for Australian business to avoid cuts at home under the CPRS.

The idea that rich countries should pay for preserving forests in the global South isn’t a bad idea. Deforestation is a very big driver of carbon emissions and saving forests is essential if we are to escape the climate crisis.

But REDD critics such as REDD-Monitor.org’s Chris Lang have pointed out that a market-based scheme, which uses forests in the South to offset emissions in the first world, would simply allow the rich countries to claim emissions reductions on paper while they keep on polluting as before.

“We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stop deforestation. We cannot trade off one against the other”, Lang wrote in a recent book on carbon markets,Upsetting the Offset.

The Durban Group for Climate Justice, a coalition, which includes Carbon Trade Watch and the Indigenous Environmental Network, has also condemned REDD as an “ineffective and unjust solution to climate change”.

“REDD’s focus on the mass production of pollution licenses for industries in rich countries would inevitably neglect the needs and rights of ordinary people throughout the world”, the group said in a statement posted on REDD-Monitor.org on January 7.

“In the South, REDD would transform the carbon in living trees into private property so that it can be awarded or transferred to private corporations in the North. In the worst case, it could inaugurate a massive land grab.

“In the North, meanwhile, REDD credits would enable fossil fuel-related corporations to maintain business as usual, to the detriment of communities affected by fossil fuel extraction and pollution.”

Even Marc Stuart, a founder of the UK carbon trading firm EcoSecurities, posted his own concerns about REDD on Cleantechblog.com in May last year.

“REDD … is the most mind twistingly complex endeavor in the carbon game. The fact is that REDD involves scientific uncertainties, technical challenges, heterogeneous non-contiguous asset classes, multi-decade performance guarantees, local land tenure issues, brutal potential for gaming and the fact that getting it wrong means that scam artists will get unimaginably rich while emissions don’t change a bit.”

Despite these very real problems, Stuart still supports an international forest carbon trading scheme such as REDD. But in PNG, concern is growing that carbon traders are signing up Indigenous landowners to deals they don’t fully understand and that are not in their interests.

The governor of PNG’s Eastern Highlands province, Mal Kela Smith, told SBS the carbon traders are “just coming up from Australia looking for a quick quid and they see that they can get in with a few people and make some promises. As far as I’m concerned they are not very genuine people and they’re not really interested in the Papuan New Guineans.

“Most of the deals I’ve seen, the landowners are completely ignorant of what’s happening”, he said.

Glacier melt threatens West Antarctic ice sheet

A new study has revealed that a major glacier in Antarctica could collapse because of warmer seas caused by climate change. Even worse, the glacial melt could destabilise the West Antarctic ice sheet — a 3 kilometre thick block of ice the size of Texas.

The research team, led by the University of Oxford’s Richard Katz , concluded the Pine Island glacier is most likely past its tipping point. It could lose half its ice in a century. This alone would add about 24 centimetres to world sea levels.

The nearby Thwaites glacier is also thinning rapidly. The melting of the two glaciers combined could raise sea levels by half a metre or more.

Past studies relied on satellite measurements to show the Pine Island’s glacier’s ice flow was about 25% faster than 30 years before. The January 13 New Scientist said Katz’s study of the glacier was the first to model changes in three dimensions.

The team found warmer water has found its way underneath the glacier’s “grounding line” — the point where the ice meets the ocean floor — melting it from below.

The model suggested the warm water has encroached far enough to mean the glacier has passed the point of no return. The rate of melting is predicted to rapidly increase. However, the team also warned that their model is probably over-optimistic and the glaciers could vanish even faster that projected, said New Scientist.

The Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers drain about 20% of the huge West Antarctic ice sheet. The collapse of the glaciers could cause the ice sheet to change rapidly.

Katz told ScienceDaily.com that if the ice sheet’s grounding line is pushed back too far the consequences could be dramatic: “Our model shows how instability in the grounding line, caused by gradual climatic changes, has the potential to reach a ‘tipping point’ where disintegration of the [West Antarctic] ice sheet could occur.”

In his 2009 book Storms of my Grandchildren, NASA climate scientist James Hansen said loss of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet could lead to sea-level rises of 6-7 metres.

“The West Antarctic ice sheet is especially vulnerable to removal of its ice shelves, because much of that ice sheet rests on bedrock several hundred metres below sea level.”

Hansen said preventing the loss of the ice sheet is of great importance.

“Once the ice sheets’ collapse begins, global coastal devastations and their economic reverberations may make it impractical for humanity to take actions to rapidly reverse climate forcings. Thus if we trigger the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, sea level rise may continue to even much higher levels via contributions from the Greenland and East Antarctica ice sheets.”

Estimates of ice sheet loss in Antarctica were absent from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Instead, the report assumed the climate change would not affect the Antarctic. As a result, the IPCC’s median prediction for sea-level rise by mid-century was only 44 centimetres.

In a recent article on Geology.com, the University of Texas’ Marc Airhart said, “the IPCC’s restrained estimate about the ice flow, and its possible contribution to sea level rise, was not, however, a heartening sign. Rather, it reflected the consensus view that changes in the Antarctic have been so rapid, science can not yet account for them.”

However, a group of 26 climate scientists issued a report in December to update the outdated science in the IPCC report. In The Copenhagen Diagnosis the scientists said world sea-level rises has been “about 80% higher than IPCC projections from 2001.”

“Accounting for ice-sheets and glaciers, global sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 meters considered an upper limit by this time. This is much higher than previously projected by the IPCC.”

One of the report’s authors, Professor Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia said: “Climate change is accelerating towards the tipping points for polar ice sheets. That’s why we’re now projecting future sea level rise in metres rather than centimeters.”

The scientists concluded, “global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to ten years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change”.

Billions lost in Europe carbon trading fraud

The integrity of the European Union’s embattled Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was rocked by revelations in December that carbon-trading tax fraud has cost European taxpayers more than €5 billion.

On December 9, the EU’s law enforcement agency Europol estimated up to 90% of all market volume was fraudulent in some countries.

Europol spokesperson, Rafael Rondelez told the December 10 EU Observer the intangible nature of carbon credits make them “an incredibly lucrative target for criminals”.

“It makes it easier for fraudsters because it’s an intangible good”, he said. “Before, goods actually had to be transported from one member state to another. You had to prove that goods were really being transported. With this, it’s just the click of a mouse.”

Carbon Trade Watch’s Oscar Reyes told the EU Observer the ETS should be abandoned in favour of the direct regulation of polluters.

“While the ETS has so far not resulted in reduced emissions, the European Commission has regularly pointed to the high volume of trading on emissions exchanges as a sign that the market was working”, he said. “Europol has now revealed this to be a sham.”[iii]

In a November briefing titled “Carbon credit fraud: The white collar crime of the future”, accounting firm Deloitte said the Rudd government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme could also be open to fraud.

“An emissions trading scheme may well attract highly organised fraudsters from overseas and Australia prepared to exploit arrangements that will be trading in billions of dollars”, said Deloitte Forensic’s Chris Noble. “The warning signs are already apparent, with many schemes falling into the traditional rationalisation approaches.”[iv]

Meanwhile, the independent think-tank Open Europe found the EU ETS had delivered millions in dollars in windfall profits to some of Europe’s biggest oil, gas and cement companies due to the over-allocation of free permits.

It also found the two biggest carbon trading exchanges made more than €57 million in transaction fees alone in 2009.

“It is a perverse situation when our chief environmental policy is granting such huge benefits to companies that pose the most harm to the environment”, said Open Europe’s Stephen Booth. “Profits should be greasing the wheels of the emissions trading system rather than lining the pockets of the biggest polluters and carbon exchanges.”

If the climate were a bank they would have saved it by now

The formal outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit was a huge fiasco. It confirmed that the world’s corporate rulers are simply unwilling to act in defense of people and the planet.

Human civilization stands at the precipice. The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is already too high for a safe climate. Remaining fossil fuels must be kept in the ground and replaced with renewable energy sources at emergency speed.

More emissions will further disrupt the Earth’s ecological balance, threatening the lives of billions with dangerous climate change.

Yet the rich countries, including Australia, went to Copenhagen to defend their stakes in the capitalist world economy ahead of all else. Each of these nation’s so-called “world leaders” spoke passionately to the cameras about the need to fight climate change. In practice, they worked to wreck hopes of a meaningful agreement.

The wealthy countries refused to discuss the real measures needed to avert dangerous climate change. Carbon markets, adaptation funding and empty words were on the agenda. Rapidly phasing out coal, oil and natural gas were not.

As the summit closed, US President Barack Obama put forward the Copenhagen Accord with the help of the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Ethiopian and South African governments – a document that sidelined the concerns of most the world’s nations without discussion.

The accord is not legally binding and set no emissions goals. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s claim that it was a “big step forward” should fool no one. As REDD-Monitor.org’s Chris Lang pointed out, “the only step that the Copenhagen Accord takes is over the edge of the abyss”.

“They didn’t seal the deal”, wrote the Independent’s Johann Hari. . “They sealed the coffin for the world’s low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.”

But the rich nations didn’t get everything their own way. Inside the summit, protests and dissent from the poor nations could not be ignored.

Delegates from the G77 bloc of 132 poor nations staged a number of walkouts to protest the dirty Copenhagen deal. “We will not die quietly”, they chanted.

The plucky stand of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu was especially noteworthy. Despite huge pressure from the rich countries, Tuvalu, together with Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Sudan, stood firm to reject the Copenhagen Accord outright.

Outside, climate protesters took over Copenhagen’s streets for days. This included a protest of 100,000 people — Europe’s biggest climate demonstration ever.

Inside the summit, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez repeated two key slogans raised by the protesters: “Change the system, not the climate” and “If the climate were a bank they would have saved it by now.”

The unofficial counter-summit, the Klimaforum, attracted 25,000 activists to discuss and debate how the people can force political change. Klimafoum issued a radical People’s Declaration on Climate Change, which was everything the Copenhagen Accord was not.

It called for the development “of a global movement of movements dedicated to the long-term task of promoting a sustainable transition of our societies”.

The failure at Copenhagen showed the climate action movement cannot rely on lobbying efforts at future international climate summits to make the breakthrough. Such summits can only reflect political changes that have already occurred inside each country.

The climate movement in Australia and other rich nations is not yet powerful enough to make the corporate politicians fearful. Building this movement so it becomes an unstoppable force is the most important task of all.

The most hopeful thing to come out of Copenhagen is the evidence that this radical movement against climate change has arrived and is growing.

Australia at Copenhagen

With the help of an all-too submissive local media, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has crafted an image for himself as a world leader on climate change. This image took a beating at December’s Copenhagen climate change summit.

The Australian government, and Rudd in particular, was singled out by delegates from the poor nations for blocking progress on a strong climate deal. As the summit ended in failure, Australia’s reputation among most countries was that of a climate villain, not a climate leader.

During the summit, the chief negotiator of the G77 group of 132 poor countries at Copenhagen, Lumumba Di-Aping, appealed to Australians to see through Rudd’s dishonesty on climate change.

“The message that the Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it’s fiction, it does not relate to the facts because his actions are climate change scepticism in action”, Di Aping told ABC radio’s AM.

In part, his comments were prompted by Australia’s push, along with other big polluters, to kill-off the most progressive parts of the Kyoto protocol climate treaty.

Kyoto included the recognition that nations had “common but differentiated responsibilities” to cut emissions. This meant the rich countries, responsible for about 75% of past emissions, had the biggest duty to curb carbon pollution.

Australia, the industrialised world’s worst polluter, was part of the push to remove this legally-binding obligation in favour of a “single track” climate treaty against the protests of poor countries.

India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, denounced Australia’s aggressive attempts to shift more of the burden for emissions cuts onto poor countries. He told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Australia is sort of the ayatollah of the single track”.

The Australian government’s involvement in drafting a secret climate agreement, known as the “Danish text”, also earned the ire of the majority of the world.

The Danish text was leaked to the British Guardian on December 8 — the second day of the Copenhagen summit. It proposed the Kyoto protocol be abandoned in favour of a new treaty that allowed rich countries to emit twice as much. It also sidelined the UN’s involvement in future climate talks and set a global warming target of 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, up from today’s 0.8°C.

The December 9 Age said Australia took part in a so-called “circle of commitment” of rich countries that helped draft the agreement. The US, Britain and Denmark were also involved.

Di Aping said the Danish text was “incredibly imbalanced … intended to subvert, absolutely and completely, two years of negotiations. It does not recognise the proposals and the voice of developing countries.”

Referring to the Australian sponsored text at a December 8 meeting at the conference he said: “We are being asked to sign a suicide pact … I would rather die with my dignity than sign a deal that will channel my people into a furnace.”

Throughout the Copenhagen summit, the poor nations argued for an agreement to limit average global warming to a maximum of 1.5°C. Such a target would require a rapid shift away from burning fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, especially in the industrialised world.

The tiny Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu argued passionately at Copenhagen for a 1.5°C target. It said that 2°C of warming would mean the nation would disappear due to rising sea-levels. Tuvalu’s president, Apisai Ielemia, told ABC Radio: “To go over that [1.5°C] limit, it will be a graveyard for all the living things in Tuvalu.”

Yet at a press conference at the end of the summit, Ielemia revealed that Australian officials had tried to bully Tuvalu to change its position.

“There are some countries like Australia who have been trying to arrange a meeting with us to probably water down our position on 1.5 degrees Celsius”, said Ielemia on December 17.

“We did not attend that meeting, but I heard from other small islands that Australia was trying to tell them if they agree to the 2 degrees limit, money would be on the table for adaptation process. That’s their choice to accept the money and back down. But Tuvalu will not. As I said in my speech, 1.5 degrees celsius is our bottom line.”

Tuvalu’s chief negotiator at Copenhagen, Ian Fry, told ABC television that Rudd had approached him in person to tell him Tuvalu’s position was “unproductive”.

On December 18, the international NGOs Azaav and the Climate Action Network awarded Australia their Fossil of the Day award for “bullying Tuvalu and other small island nation states”.

Towards the close of the conference Australia’s performance had become so unpopular that an address by Australian climate change minister Penny Wong was interrupted with jeers and chants.

By contrast the next speaker, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, received “a standing ovation” for his call for system change to stop climate change. “Socialism … that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell … let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us”, he said.

People power in Copenhagen

A December 30 interview with Radio Adelaide’s Backstory.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

Copenhagen: People’s summit sets climate counter-plan

Lauren Carroll Harris, Copenhagen

From Green Left Weekly

Just over a week into the December 7-18 United Nations climate change conference at Copenhagen (COP15) talks, thousands of people from around the world have already participated in what is being billed as the “people’s climate summit”, Klimaforum09, taking place in the Danish capital.

The difference between the two forums could not be more stark.

The outside of Copenhagen’s Bella Centre, where COP15 is being held, has a circus-like quality, with delegates battling their way through a gauntlet of protesters and lobbyists. One group carries a banner emblazoned with the slogan “EU: pay your climate debt”, and chants “The world is watching”.

Inside, registered delegates, government diplomats and NGO members make their way through airport-style security checks to participate in what is increasingly seen as a redundant talkshop.

By contrast, the Klimaforum, which takes place on the same dates as COP15, is open, free and a genuine meeting of different groups, activists, scientists, farmers and artists to discuss a democratic, people-powered response to the climate crisis.

Organisers estimate 25,000 people have already taken part in hundreds of plenaries, workshops, stalls, films, exhibitions and theatre pieces. Issues discussed include: the impact of global warming on women; nuclear power; alternatives to the false market solution of carbon trading; climate justice and tourism; indigenous communities’ responses to climate change; agriculture; Cuba’s experience of creating a post-oil economy; and how to strengthen the climate justice movement.

The forum is truly accessible and international in scope. Interpreters translate the major talks into four different languages and special effort has been made to include speakers and participants from underdeveloped countries already feeling the effects of global warming.

Twice daily, forum organisers share report-backs and analysis of the latest developments from the Bella Centre.

Radical demands

Copenhagen is flooded with an almost hysterical atmosphere of greenwashing — the city is plastered with a “Hopenhagen” PR campaign to promote Denmark’s “green” credentials, alongside corporate partners such as Coca Cola and Siemens.

By contrast, at the core of the Klimaforum is an understanding that the outcomes — if any — of the COP15 talks, will reflect the needs of the big businesses most governments are subservient to.

The overwhelming sentiment is that the people of the world can no longer wait for world leaders and the free market — that is, those fuelling the crisis — to act, and that the solutions to runaway climate change cannot be purely technological or environmental, but must be based on social justice.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the climate justice movement — the radical wing of the environment movement — is picking up where the anti-corporate globalisation movement left off. It is adopting a more holistic critique of the system that has created not just the environmental crisis, but cyclical economic depressions and widening inequality between the First and Third Worlds.

Ten years ago, the anti-corporate movement burst onto the international stage when thousands converged to overshadow another meeting of world leaders in which the rich countries aimed to make the poor pay more — the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in November 1999.

In fact, the 100,000-strong protest on December 12, and the Klimaforum, were an explicit attempt by activists to “Seattle” Copenhagen. Like the climate justice movement, the protesters at Seattle created their own parliament of the streets and exposed the hypocrisy of the official talks.

Like those at the Klimaforum, protesters at Seattle were scathing of an inherently volatile financial system based on a tornado of speculative, exponentially multiplying debt.

Like the climate justice movement, the protesters at Seattle critiqued the dominance of corporations on governments, and the impact of unchecked industrialism and rampant consumerism on the environment, on worker’s rights and on deepening Third World inequality.

The issues that the anti-corporate globalisation movement flagged 10 years ago, unsustainable nature of a system based on bottomless corporate greed, seem more relevant than ever in the wake of the biggest global economic crisis since the Great Depression and the growing climate crisis. The two are increasingly linked in many people’s minds as have a common, systemic, cause.

However, there is less clarity, and more debates, about the systemic alternatives to capitalism. The forum is characterised by a great receptivity to radical ideas and of genuine, constructive debate and discussion.

Conference participants offered sharp critiques of the market-friendly proposals put forward by the First World at COP15, particularly carbon trading.

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, addressed the forum’s 1000-strong opening meeting. She said “the polluter pays” principal must be at the heart of any meaningful emissions reduction deal.

Cuban biologist and activist Roberto Perez hosted a workshop of more than 100 people on Cuba’s organic agricultural and urban garden system.

A session on “Capitalism and the Climate Crisis: Left Alternatives”, attended by several hundred people mostly from the European left, revealed a consensus among those present about the need to actively combat the false market-based solutions to climate change.

Ian Terry, a British employee of wind turbine manufacturer Vestas (occupied by its workers in mid-2009 after it was closed) and a Socialist Workers Party member, spoke of “the need for the workers’ movement to relate to environment sentiment” and vice versa.

Discussion was mostly limited to how to advance the immediate demands of the radical climate justice movement. Socialist solutions — the need for radical economic and social restructuring to achieve a shift to a carbon-free society while pushing for real social justice and preserving workers’ rights — were briefly touched upon.

COP15 fights

COP15 has become more and more discredited over the last week, in part due to the leaking of the draft “Danish text”, leaked on December 8.

Put together by the Danish, US and British governments, the document puts forward a range of proposals that would hand administration of any emissions reduction deal to the World Bank. This institution has long been an instrument of First World control over the indebted Third World.

The leaked text also obliterates any difference of obligation between the poor and rich countries, treating North and South as equal.

Third World nations have insisted any COP15 deal should place the largest burden for emissions reduction on the industrialised countries responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions — and these nations should provide ample financial assistance to repay their ecological debt and assist with sustainable development of the poor nations.

The Danish text leak has prompted outrage from, threats of a walkout by, many Third World delegates, and spread public cynicism about the aims of COP15.

In contrast to COP15’s behind-closed-doors style of wheeling and dealing, the Klimaforum is putting forward its own plan for a sustainable world, which people around the world can sign onto (see below).

The declaration will be handed over to COP15 leaders, “supplying them with inspiration as to how a fair climate justice deal can be put together”.

The declaration, finalised by forum participants, emphasises “the need to create substantial changes in the social and economic structures in order to meet the challenges of global warming and food sovereignty”.

Major cornerstones of the declaration include: “a complete abandonment of fossil fuels within the next 30 years’ including specific five-year deadlines”; “recognition, payment and compensation of climate debt for the overconsumption of atmospheric space and adverse effects of climate change on all affected groups and people”; “a rejection of purely market-oriented and technology-centred false and dangerous solutions such as nuclear energy, agro-fuels, carbon capture and storage”; and “real solutions to climate crisis based on safe, clean, renewable, and sustainable use of natural resources, as well as transitions to food, energy, land, and water sovereignty”.

The declaration recognises that such changes would require “a restoration of the democratic sovereignty of our local communities and of their role as a basic social, political, and economic unit”.

What is clear from the Klimaforum is that the climate justice movement has the determination and openness to grow in breadth and size — and to become broader and more radical in the wake of the inevitable COP15 failure.

The Klimaforum09 declaration is intended to be a unifying call to arms, a guideline for inclusive movement-building.

It declares: “We call upon every concerned person, social movement, and cultural, political or economic organisation to join us in building a strong global movement of movements, which can bring forward peoples’ visions and demands at every level of society.

“Together, we can make global transitions to sustainable futures.”

Read the full declaration here. Visit the Klimaforum website.