[DEBATE] : Climate

[Patrick Bond]

(Is everyone ready to sign on to a climate change appeal? Next month's 
Bali conference will be yet another globo-governance mirage, of course, 
not least because of the SA government's dreadful stance, which I 
witnessed yesterday in the form of Peter Lukey of DEAT openly admitting 
to a Joburg conference, 'We are the America of Africa', referring to 
SA's no-cuts negotiating position and ongoing subsidisation of 
ridiculous projects like Coega. As part of my CO2 footprint expansion 
before the great contraction I was in Edmonton for a superb conference - 
reportback below - that consolidated the 'keep the oil in the soil' 
position, and there's another one there this weekend that e-debater 
Shannon will go to. Anyhow, do send a note to Victor at IFG if you want 
your name on this petition to the Big Powers 'that set the rules of our 
economies' - and this is the last such call I'll sign to ask the Rulers 
to do anything...)

November 2007
A Call for Climate Talks to
Accelerate Global Economic and Energy Transition:
What Bali Must Achieve

We, the undersigned, call on governments, businesses, civil society, and 
the other institutions that set the rules of our economies to lead a 
systemic shift to stabilize our global climate by launching a global 
economic and energy transition.

The December 3-14, 2008 meeting of the United Nations Framework 
Convention on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, aims to agree on a 
mandate to negotiate a framework that will succeed the first phase of 
the Kyoto Protocol when it ends in 2012. We welcome UN Secretary General 
Mr. Ban Ki Moon’s recently reminding climate negotiators that, during 
the high-level event on climate change that convened in New York on 24 
September 2007, world leaders made a strong call for negotiations to 
begin on a future comprehensive multilateral framework.

Bali must begin a pathway toward new global agreements that recognize 
and operate within our planet’s limits and equitably share its 
ecological space. Our concern is that the scope and scale of the 
proposals being discussed dangerously underestimate the challenges 
confronting us and remain far from addressing the underlying causes of 
today’s climate crisis.

We support the goal of creating deeper binding targets to reduce 
greenhouse gas emissions by at the very least 80 percent below 1990 
levels by 2050, on average with solutions that place the greatest burden 
of adjustment on the richer nations, and the richer segments within all 
nations. Achieving these targets will involve dynamic actions at every 
level of our societies, with rich countries leading through commitments 
to cut emissions by increasing energy efficiency and reducing overall 
energy use (“powering down”), while at the same time enabling poorer 
nations to leapfrog over the rich nations’ dirty model of development to 
one that is equitable and sustainable. Adequate and equitable reductions 
in emissions require a fundamental reordering of priorities and the 
transformation of almost every aspect of the way we live. Today’s 
situation is desperate; for the full dimensions of the multiple crises 
we face, plus an outline of the necessary corrective steps, see the 
International Forum on Globalization and the Institute for Policy 
Studies’, “Manifesto on Global Economic Transitions” (September 2007, 
see www.ifg.org).

To cut overall consumption while improving standards of living for the 
poor, we cannot get to where we need to be within 40 years by using 
current development models, measurements of economic growth, or today’s 
outdated rules governing trade, technology transfer, investment, and 
finance. Coherence in policies at both the national and international 
levels is essential to any meaningful multilateral effort. Immediate 
actions are urgently needed within the existing institutions, but we 
also have to rethink and transform global governance. New international 
instruments are needed.

To create the truly transformational change in the global economy we 
call on governments to include in the forthcoming Bali Mandate a work 
program to re-write the much-needed rules, incentives, and institutions 
in order to transition our villages, cities, countries, and world toward 
socially just and ecologically sound economies.

This parallel track of talks must acknowledge that the globe’s 
environmental challenges are multi-faceted and intertwined. They involve 
at their core the challenges of climate chaos, the end of cheap energy, 
accelerating species extinctions, and collapse in fresh water, 
fisheries, forests, and other vital natural resources and natural 
systems. Solutions to each should be solutions to all. These changes 
should aim to redefine development, and abandon economic growth as a 
primary goal. They must also drastically reduce consumption of energy 
and others resources, materials, and commodities, especially among 
northern industrialized nations. Incentives for conservation and 
re-localizing cycles of ownership, production and consumption are the 
fastest, cheapest most efficient means toward "powering down." We 
support movements toward subsidiarity that shift power away from global 
and national governance, and toward local economies, especially energy 
and food systems, as much as possible.

In addition to national governmental representatives, this track of 
negotiations should involve local officials, social movement leaders, 
indigenous leaders, and thoughtful innovators of new ideas on renewable 
energy and sustainable forestry and agriculture transitions. Changing 
international institutions can create policy space to support bottom-up 
initiatives and help give greater visibility to innovative steps already 
taken at the local level (such as “transition towns” that are rapidly 
reducing energy needs and shifting energy supplies; many innovations of 
“green cities” that are making urban societies sustainable; the 
Greenbelt Movement of Kenya, which combines women¹s empowerment with 
tree-planting programs; sustainable agriculture practices that are being 
undermined by current international trade rules and regimes; legal 
innovations that give communities control over their natural resources); 
the national level (such as carbon taxes, green border fees, and other 
programs to transform energy use); and the global level (such as the new 
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the more than 
200 multilateral environmental agreements).

A Bali Mandate on Global Economic and Energy Transitions can set forth a 
new negotiating process to solve the inter-related ecological crises 
enumerated above. Essential elements of a new architecture for global 
economic and energy governance include the following:[1]

Articulate and implement new development models which give priority not 
to economic growth per se, but to satisfying basic human rights and 
basic human needs for all (such as survival, sufficiency, freedom, 
identity). These basic human needs are required for genuine human 
happiness and well-being, and are needed by those in industrialized 
nations as well as developing nations. This requires a fundamental 
refocusing of policy priorities at all levels of government.

Replace today’s main measurement of economic well-being, Gross Domestic 
Product (GDP), with new economic indicators that measure meaningful 
progress toward economies designed to remain within the earth’s carrying 
capacity. Climate and other systemic ecological crises compel us to 
re-set the central guidepost of economic policymaking on a course that 
improves living standards while conserving natural wealth. Governments 
should invigorate the discussions about measures that account for 
natural wealth and peoples’ health, such as the Genuine Progress 
Indicator (GPI).

Create global trade and financial institutions so that their core 
mission supports these global transitions in an equitable and democratic 
fashion.[2] With the World Bank still funding over 15 times more fossil 
fuels than clean energy, and the World Trade Organization declaring how 
most of the measures governments are enacting to counter climate change 
could violate its overlapping agreements, a Bali Mandate must aim to 
develop recommendations for global economic policy coherence that 
ensures climate and overall ecological security. These adaptations 
should especially address current world trade rules on: 1) intellectual 
property which make it very difficult to transfer clean energy 
technologies to poorer nations in affordable ways; 2) prohibitions that 
restrain governments from enacting climate measures such as 
energy-efficiency standards or support programs for sustainable energy; 
and 3) agriculture that make it difficult for small farmers from 
developing countries to survive in the face of unsustainable, subsidized 
agribusiness in rich countries. International financial institutions 
must shift their own funding away from fossil fuels to clean energy.

Create a Global Financing Mechanism that enables economically poor but 
resource rich nations to keep their forests and biodiversity intact, and 
their fossil fuels under the ground, without sacrificing their own 
ecologically sustainable development (as Ecuador has recently offered to 
do with 20 percent of its oil).

Create a Global Clean Energy Fund that would generate finances from rich 
nations and the rich within all nations (through debt cancellation, 
green border fees, or fees on arm trade, or fees on speculative 
financial transactions across borders) to help poorer nations leapfrog 
over the dirty industrial paths of most rich nations. It is urgent that 
effective formulas for these transfers be successfully conceived, 
negotiated, agreed, and implemented at the soonest possible time, before 
the climate and resource emergencies get truly out of control. Many 
organizations are already hard at work on this. All alternative energy 
sources and technologies must be assessed for their systemic impacts on 
the atmosphere, biodiversity, water, soil, and universal human rights, 
so as to help the public and governments better decide between false 
solutions and genuinely sustainable climate stability alternatives. The 
internalization of social and ecological cost will drive ecological 
solutions that transform today’s patterns of production and consumption, 
replacing long-distance trade and absentee-ownership with decentralized 
economic activity under community control.

Adopt an Oil Depletion Protocol, which creates a framework for oil 
producing and consuming nations to reduce production and imports to keep 
ahead of the global depletion of oil supplies (as Sweden, Iceland, Cuba 
and a few other nations are already doing). We need to reduce global 
energy demand. As recent reports of runaway energy demand make clear, 
the world needs a crash diet to curb its overall energy consumption or 
it faces ecological catastrophe and violent conflicts over resources. 
The planet’s carrying capacity must be collectively measured and 
monitored, with an agreed program that both decreases over-consumption 
and redistributes real resources and wealth to the poorest, while taking 
meaningful measures to slow population growth that advance the economic, 
educational, and reproductive rights of women. Projections of energy 
needs are unnecessarily high and we can close the gap by powering down 
and re-localizing production and consumption cycles, led by the 
industrialized countries.

Adopt a UN Covenant on the Right to Water, which will be in ever shorter 
supply due to accelerating climate change and entrenched patterns of 
unsustainable development, to clarify the role of governments to provide 
clean, affordable water to all citizens. The UN Covenant must recognize 
water as an ecological trust and oblige governments to take bold actions 
to ensure water conservation and water quality, as well as water equity.

Strengthen the United Nations’ overall system of multilateral 
environmental agreements (MEAs) to protect forests, fisheries, 
biodiversity, fragile ecosystems, and endangered species. Adequate 
resources for implementation and enforcement of the Convention on 
Biodiversity, the Convention on the Law of the Seas, the Convention on 
the International Trade in Endangered Species, and many others must be 
secured. Also, the legal relationship between MEAs, which sometimes may 
restrict trade, and the WTO, which generally prohibits restrictions on 
trade, must be clarified to establish a clear hierarchy of public values 
prioritizing people and the planet over profits for private corporations.

Just as one of the oldest global bodies, the International Labor 
Organization, includes representatives from governments, labor, and 
business, these new negotiations must involve all of the sectors of 
society to be effective.

We call on our governments in Bali to accelerate a Global Energy and 
Economic Transition.

Signed:

1.John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies
2.Jerry Mander, International Forum on Globalization
3.Debi Barker, International Forum on Globalization
4.Maude Barlow, Council of Canadians
5.Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South
6.Nicola Bullard, Focus on the Global South
7.Tony Clarke, Polaris Institute
8.Randy Hayes, International Forum on Globalization
9.Richard Heinberg, author, The Oil Depletion Protocol
10.David Korten, author, The Great Turning
11.Sara Larrain, Chilean Ecological Action Network (RENACE)
12.Caroline Lucas, UK representative, European Parliament
13.Nadia Martinez, Institute for Policy Studies
14.Victor Menotti, International Forum on Globalization
15.Helena Norberg-Hodge, International Society for Ecology and Culture
16.Simon Retallack, climate change author and campaigner
17.Wolfgang Sachs, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy
18.Jack Santa Barbara, Sustainable Scale Project
19.Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Tebtebba Foundation
20.the rest of you

[1] These proposals are elaborated in the September 9, 2007 paper by the 
Institute for Policy Studies and the International Forum on 
Globalization entitled: “Steps Towards a Global Grand Bargain.”

[2] None of the current institutions: the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO 
and their regional counterparts, were set up to deal with these 
environmental crises. Indeed, the actions and jurisdiction of the 
current global economic agencies often undermines environmental goals.

***

http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=7525

ISSUES
IF PROSPEROUS ALBERTA CAN'T CREATE SUSTAINBILITY, THEN WHO CAN?

Ricardo Acuña / ualberta.ca/parkland

Virtually every speaker at this year’s Parkland Institute conference, 
held Nov 16-18 at the U of A, articulated the fact that we in Alberta 
are currently positioned at a crossroads.

We are over-heating our planet, destroying the land and killing our 
lakes, rivers and oceans.

As a result of this reality, our lives and communities are about to 
undergo a drastic set of changes. As Jeff Berg from Post-Carbon Toronto 
said at the conference, regardless of anything we do or don’t do, we are 
heading for a post-carbon world.

Where we do have choice, however, is in what we to do about it. We can 
close our eyes, do nothing, and face the chaos when it hits. Or we can 
begin the process today of implementing genuine solutions which will 
help us transition to that reality with significantly less shock and 
upheaval along the way.

That word “genuine” is critical, because there are so many false 
solutions currently being offered up by corporations and governments 
around the world.

Take for example the suggestion by governments, corporations and even 
some environmental groups, that we can somehow stop global warming by 
allowing the world’s heaviest emitters to continue emitting at current 
levels as long as they pay to plant to trees or fund ‘green’ projects 
elsewhere in the world. These mechanisms are built right into the Kyoto 
Protocol, and as keynote speaker Patrick Bond pointed out, they 
accomplish nothing to reduce global emissions, and they are having 
disastrous effects on people and communities in countries like South 
Africa.

Likewise with the suggestion that moving to nuclear energy will make a 
positive contribution toward the long-term sustainability and viability 
of our communities. Beyond the unacceptable risks to public health and 
public safety, is the reality that uranium mining is an incredibly dirty 
and fossil-fuel-intensive enterprise, and that nuclear reactors consume 
a tremendous amount of fresh water. Moreover is the reality that global 
uranium supplies have also peaked. How absurd is it to present as 
sustainable a non-renewable energy source whose key feed-stock is 
already in decline? I guess it’s no less absurd than to ignore nuclear’s 
dubious past performance record and its overwhelming cost to taxpayers.

Now there is a new move in North America towards coal as a clean and 
sustainable alternative. They do this by focusing on how the coal will 
be converted to energy, and ignoring the massive land footprint, 
watershed destruction and freshwater consumption required by coal. These 
folks also conveniently ignore the amount of fossil fuels burned during 
coal-mining and in the process of coal transportation.

These “solutions” all have one thing in common—the only benefit they 
offer is to the bottom line of the corporations championing them.

Despite all of these false “solutions,” however, the essence of this 
year’s Parkland conference was hope. The conference’s closing speaker, 
Dr Ann Dale, perhaps articulated that hope best when she said that there 
are clear solutions to our current crisis. More importantly, she 
emphasized, these are solutions that can be implemented on a broad scale 
today, and which are entirely based on common sense.

What are some of these common sense solutions? We need to stop 
subsidizing dirty and unsustainable fuels and energy sources with tax 
dollars, and move that money to renewable energy sources instead. One of 
the speakers referred to southern Alberta as the “Saudi Arabia of wind 
power.” Why are we focusing on tar sands, nuclear and coal when we could 
easily be a global power in a genuinely renewable energy source.

We need to start designing our cities and communities to be walkable 
rather than for vehicles. And in recognition that sometimes walking is 
impossible, the solution needs to be effective and usable public transit 
rather than single-occupancy vehicles.

We need to change our relationship with food, returning to greater use 
of local foods that are grown organically and sustainably. We have based 
our entire food system on petrochemicals and long-distance transport, 
when this is clearly not necessary nor sustainable.

We cannot speak of sustainable communities if those communities are not 
also just. Things like a living wage, affordable housing and 
community-based primary health care are crucial to long-term quality of 
life, and we have the resources and knowledge to make these things a 
reality today.

In Alberta today we have the resources, the knowledge and the public 
will to begin building a just and sustainable future. The only thing 
standing in our way is a government so tied to the financial interests 
of the fossil fuel industry that they refuse to do what is clearly right 
for Albertans.

The solutions are clear and make sense, and the price of doing nothing 
is high. If our leaders refuse to lead, then it’s up to Albertans to 
push them out of the way and start moving on the right path 
ourselves—the future depends on it. V

Ricardo Acuña is Executive Director of the Parkland Institute, a 
non-partisan public policy research institute housed at the University 
of Alberta.


***

*An Interview with Patrick Bond*

Parkland Institute

The 2007 Parkland conference, entitled “From Crisis to Hope: Building 
Just and Sustainable Communities” features a keynote presentation by 
South Africa-based academic and activist Patrick Bond. In his address, 
Bond will discuss why so-called market solutions for environmental 
crises do not work. Specifically, he will look at the Kyoto Protocol’s 
Clean Development Mechanism and carbon trading and at the impact these 
programs have had on countries like South Africa.

In preparation for his talk at the conference, the Parkland Institute 
recently interviewed Patrick Bond by e-mail. Here is the text of that 
interview:

/PI (Parkland Institute): To start off with, what is the Clean 
Development Mechanism and how did it come to be included in the Kyoto 
process?/

PB (Patrick Bond): It's a way to pay for a project in a Third World 
country that, in theory, reduces greenhouse emissions, such as a 
methane-conversion in a landfill, or a forestation project, or a solar 
retrofitting. By paying for these projects through CDM investments, the 
buyer—a Northern government or corporation—gains credits which allow 
their pollution levels to stay the same at home.

The CDM was a compromise arrangement in Kyoto, promoted on the one hand 
by companies which wanted an offset gimmick to avoid emissions cuts at 
home; by Al Gore who was trying to find a way to placate US 
conservatives by offering a bone to get Kyoto through Congress (which 
the Clinton administration then failed to attempt); by that section of 
the environmental NGO community that believes in market solutions; and 
finally by some Third World leaders who foresaw an inflow of foreign 
funding. With an unholy alliance like that, sceptics were overruled and 
a grand mystical experiment in market-making began.


/PI: The image most people in Canada seem to have of emissions trading 
is that we are investing in projects like solar and wind or energy 
efficiency in the Majority World. What is the reality of the kinds of 
projects that are emerging as a result of the CDM in countries like 
South Africa?/

PB: The image is nice, but the tragedy is that where genuinely good 
investments are available, such as the Cape Town ghetto solar water 
heater retrofitting called Kuyasa, which is a 'gold standard' CDM, the 
funding available through the mechanism is not nearly enough to pay for 
the subsidies required. In Kuyasa's case, only 20% of the cost is 
available, which means donations have to cover the rest. Moreover, in 
that case, the G8's Gleneagles summit of 2005 was the purchaser of 
credits. But due to the vast bureaucracy that must be put in place, the 
hundreds of thousands of dollars anticipated from the world’s major 
leaders, and hyped by Tony Blair, have still not arrived. The leader of 
Kuyasa was on a panel debating the CDM with me a few weeks ago and 
conceded he would never again recommend this route.

But for most big CDM projects, the funding goes to large companies which 
should be doing emissions reductions in any case, and so the dilemma of 
'additionality' arises. By what standard do we judge the financing 
genuinely necessary to make the reductions happen? How do we know when a 
company claims they need the additional funding, that they really do? 
There is usually no way of knowing except to take a company's word for 
it, and so cheating and corruption are increasingly common, as numerous 
reports in the financial press have demonstrated.


/PI: You’ve written that the CDM is essentially “carbon colonialism” and 
the “privatization of the air”. Can you explain what you mean by that? /

PB: The big process unleashed in the 1980s with the rise of right wing 
governments and financial markets can be termed commodification. A price 
gets put on everything. We thought, as Council of Canadians leaders 
Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke showed, that they might have hit the final 
frontier with water, but then came the carbon market, which in effect is 
a place a big corporation or government can buy the right to 
legitimately pollute the air.


/PI: Do you think that there is any role for market mechanisms to play 
in combating climate change? The CDM is just one type of emissions 
trading in Kyoto. There are also domestic offset schemes for personal 
emissions. I’m wondering if you see value in any of these kinds of 
programs or if it’s just greenwashing? Can the CDM be altered to be more 
fair/effective?/

PB: One mechanism that might be used to good effect, once we have a 
broad social commitment to a full overhaul of the energy/transport 
infrastructure, would be punitive taxes for luxury consumption of CO2, 
which for instance would apply to me as I fly out to Edmonton from South 
Africa. The taxes wouldn't, in this framework, just tweak the system so 
as to gain a bit of revenue and bring emissions down a marginal amount, 
but would be extremely punitive (rising ever higher at hedonistic fossil 
fuel consumption levels). The point would be to change behaviour 
radically. The old 'command and control' that has worked often in the 
past should be applied.

Until a radical change is accepted and serious changes in 
production/consumption ensue, most of what goes under the rubric of
offsetting is pissing against the wind, and may do more damage than good 
by creating an illusion that climate change is being mitigated.


/PI: Many environmental organizations have jumped on the carbon 
emissions trading bandwagon. Why do you think there is this support 
among so many mainstream organizations for something they initially were 
opposed to? Is it an issue simply of trying to make Kyoto work?/

Corporate greenwashing is a very powerful force, and corporate 
sponsorship of many environmental NGOs has risen to quite destructive 
levels. Amongst the major international groups, Friends of the Earth 
stands out as a crucial voice of reason amidst the mindless opportunism 
found in many ENGOs.

/PI: Thank you, Patrick, for taking the time out of your schedule to 
talk to us about these issues. We look forward to hearing your talk in 
Edmonton./

PB: Thank you. I’m looking forward to being in Alberta and at the 
Parkland Institute in particular.


/Patrick Bond’s presentation at the Parkland conference will be on 
November 16 at 7:30 pm (doors at 6:30) at the Horowitz Theatre, U of A 
Campus, Edmonton. The keynote is included in the full conference 
registration, but tickets can also be purchased just for this 
presentation. For details phone (780) 492-8558 or visit 
www.ualberta.ca/parkland <http://www.ualberta.ca/parkland>./