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Tom Athanasiou, the director of EcoEquity, a U.S.-based activist think tank on climate justice issues, has written a thoughtful reflection on the Copenhagen climate talks and where global efforts to curb climate change may go from here. An abbreviated vers
Tom Athanasiou, the director of EcoEquity, a U.S.-based activist think tank on climate justice issues, has written a thoughtful reflection on the Copenhagen climate talks and where global efforts to curb climate change may go from here.
An abbreviated version of his argument follows, or you can take a look at the full briefing.
First up, this is not another enumeration of confident judgments. I do not presume that Copenhagen was an unmitigated failure, or that this failure was Obama's fault, or, as is the fashion, that China was the ugliest of them all.
Nor do I suggest that the South's negotiators made impossible demands. Or argue, with disingenuous resignation, that the U.N. process is obsolete. Or believe that, finally, only a U.S. breakthrough really matters.
To be sure, Copenhagen was absolutely a failure, in the precise sense that it failed to catapult us into the fair and ambitious global mobilization that's needed to prevent climate catastrophe. But this was never going to happen.
What did happen, as the veteran Bangladeshi policy activist Saleem Huq put it, was "a shaking of the traditional pieces of the global geo-political puzzle and their landing in a new and unfamiliar configuration." In this sense, the question of success and failure is moot.
The real question is whether this new configuration offers us new ways forward, and if any of them lead beyond the "North/South impasse" (a misleading formulation that implies an equal division of blame) to enable a meaningful global mobilization.
... This is a time for reflection, not for pushing forward, one more meeting, one more demo, one more demand at a time. This time we need strategy as well as tactics, and we need it fast.
2010, which will culminate with another showdown in December in Mexico, is going to be another big year. As, for that matter, will 2011, and 2012, and all the other years in the brief period just ahead, the post-Copenhagen period in which we must, finally, begin to move.
START OF A NEW GEOPOLITICS?
It may be a bit hyperbolic to say this, but Copenhagen seems to have marked a defining moment, and not just in the climate war. COP15 also saw the long prepared debut of a new geopolitics.
In it, China looms large, though its emergence is hardly the end of the tale. Copenhagen, in fact, may mark the real beginning of the 21st century, in approximately the sense that 1914, and the start of WWI, is commonly taken to mark the real beginning of the 20th.
Copenhagen was more than the negotiations, and far more than the Copenhagen Accord. ... To make sense of Copenhagen, you have to see it as a milestone in a process that's still unfolding, within negotiating halls but also in civic spaces around the world.
... The obvious point is that, as a focus for public education and movement building, Copenhagen was an incalculable success.
Most everyone, from U.S. President Barack Obama on the one hand to Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the South's G77 negotiating bloc on the other, from you to me as well, dear reader, knows one hell of a lot more about the climate crisis, and its politics, than we did a year ago.
We already knew, of course, that we face a planetary emergency. This has been obvious for years. The difference now is that - thanks to 350.org, and Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, and the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, and a whole lot of terrified scientists - we know that we know it. And that we know it in a robust and appalling manner, with meaningful geographical precision.
We know, at least in outline, what will happen in Africa, though we may wish we didn't. And Tibet. And the Australian grain belt, and Florida, and the southern oceans, and of course Greenland.
We've talked about the bogs, and the permafrost, and the methane. We know about the feedbacks. And the forests, and the people. We know how they will suffer. How they will die.
Copenhagen failed - completely - to deliver the reduction targets and financial commitments needed to support a fair, ambitious, and binding global climate accord. But this, fortunately, isn't the end of the story.
We can also ask if Copenhagen was a failure when compared to, not what is necessary, but rather what was possible. And whether (this is a key twist) it opened new possibilities, or at least succeeded in preventing new possibilities from being foreclosed.
Clearly, there were successes in Copenhagen. The 350 campaign was one of the biggest, for by the end of the melee-cum-jamboree, the 350 parts per million target (aimed at limiting global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius), which once seemed so obscure, had become an object of plain speech, had been endorsed by 112 countries, and had in many ways supplanted the 2 degrees Celsius temperature target as the mark and measure of true climate stabilization.
... In this context, the emergence of a semi-organized bloc of "Most Vulnerable Countries" (the acronym is MVCs) is news that will stay news.
Indeed, with the post-Copenhagen appearance of the "BASIC" bloc (China, India, Brazil and South Africa) of "emerging" economies, and a widespread tendency to divide the world between the Major Emitting Countries (MECs) and the rest, the MVCs, now that they've come to know themselves as frontline states, will inevitably transform the global politics of climate&.
A CRYSTAL BALL FOR 2010
Copenhagen was only a moment, albeit a defining one. Positive surprises are still possible, as are turns in which Copenhagen - a glimpse into the abyss - leads to new resolve. We may yet see a return, this time with focused intent, to the cooperative realism of 2007's Bali Action Plan. Cooperative realism, after all, is the only approach that can possibly work.
For the moment, though, let's admit a few difficult truths. Like the fact that the U.S. did a great deal to poison the Copenhagen waters, and that, going forward, it may do even more.
And that, despite the situation in Washington, the ball is now unambiguously in the North's court. For there will be no breakthrough until the wealthy countries move decisively to pursue stringent domestic reductions, and as well to underwrite the larger transition.
The fact that the South's emerging emitters have, to a small extent, stepped forward from the G77's overall ranks does nothing to change this underlying reality. China's end-game posture makes this quite clear enough.
... Despite denialism, the science is clear. The need to protect the developmental rights to the poor, and the implications of this need are widely if not universally understood. The climate movement is growing, and may yet learn to speak, coherently, for the poor in the North as well as the poor in the South. The future is open.
As Copenhagen passes into history, the politics of climate obligation may well shift in significant ways. For one thing, though the rich countries may have succeeded in sidelining the Kyoto Protocol (we don't know yet), they failed to remove the presumption that it's still their move.
Nor, despite Copenhagen's shift toward a pledge-and-review system, was the momentum of the U.N. negotiations broken.
Copenhagen, rather, reaffirmed the need to devise a formal global accord that's fair, stringent, and capacious enough to contain both the U.S. and China, and at the same time to stabilize the Earth's climate system.
This gives us a clear mandate, one that may be challenged by events in Washington, but which will not be pushed aside - to fight for a framework within which all countries, but first of all the wealthy ones, make the commitments demanded by the science, and by their own historical responsibility and capacity to act. And just as importantly it gives us a context within which to do so.
Copenhagen, for all its disappointments, marked a turn. The need for an emergency mobilization is obvious, and with it a set of challenges that can no longer be denied.
These will get clearer in the days and years ahead, but the essential situation is already before us - with the atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon now critically limited, we face the greatest resource-sharing problem of all time.
And for all its complexity, the core of this problem can be stated simply enough - what kind of a climate transition would be fair enough to actually work?
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