Many years ago, in a desperately poor village in Rajasthan, people decided to plant trees on the land adjoining their pond so that its catchment would be protected. But this land belonged to the revenue department and people were fined for trespass. The issue hit national headlines. The stink made the local administration uncomfortable. They then came up with a brilliant game plan—they allotted the land to a group of equally poor people. In this way the poor ended up fighting the poor. The local government got away with the deliberate murder of a water body.
I recall this episode as I watch recent developments on climate change. At the recent Durban climate change conference small island nations—from the Maldives to Granada —believed, rightly so, that the world has not delivered on its promise to cut emissions and is jeopardising their future. But they do not have the power to fight the powerful. So, this coalition of climate victims turned against its partner developing countries, targeting India, for instance, for inaction. These nations pushed for India to take legal commitments to reduce emissions, dismissing its concerns of equity as inconsequential.
What will the presidential election in November mean for U.S. environmental policy? Although we don’t yet know who the Republican candidate will be, we know all too well what will be on his environmental agenda. The endless televised debates have exposed what the New York Timescalled “the broken windows of the Republican idea factory.” It’s not a pretty sight.
The candidates all share the same approach to the environment. Ron Paul plans to govern primarily by abolishing things. His hit list includes America’s foreign wars, but also the Federal Reserve, most federal taxes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and all limits on offshore drilling and the use of coal and nuclear power. Rick Santorum agrees that energy companies must be entirely deregulated. Newt Gingrich will build a moon colony by 2020, and will replace the EPA with a new agency that “will operate on the premise that most environmental problems can and should be solved by states and local communities.” Mitt Romney promises to “eliminate the regulations promulgated in pursuit of the Obama administration’s costly and ineffective anti-carbon agenda,” and to slow down or block regulations in general whenever industry complains about their costs (i.e., always).
Ecuador must be one of the most exciting places on Earth right now, in terms of working towards a new development paradigm. It shows how much can be achieved with political will, even in uncertain economic times.
Just 10 years ago, Ecuador was more or less a basket case, a quintessential “banana republic” (it happens to be the world’s largest exporter of bananas), characterised by political instability, inequality, a poorly-performing economy, and the ever-looming impact of the US on its domestic politics.
In 2000, in response to hyperinflation and balance of payments problems, the government dollarised the economy, replacing the sucre with the US currency as legal tender. This subdued inflation, but it did nothing to address the core economic problems, and further constrained the domestic policy space.
A major turning point came with the election of the economist Rafael Correa as president. After taking over in January 2007, his government ushered in a series of changes, based on a new constitution (the country’s 20th, approved in 2008) that was itself mandated by a popular referendum. A hallmark of the changes that have occurred since then is that major policies have first been put through the referendum process. This has given the government the political ability to take on major vested interests and powerful lobbies.
For nearly a decade, Goldcorp’s Marlin gold and silver mine in the Guatemalan altiplano has been at the center of intense local conflict and international scrutiny. The conflict was ignited in 2005 when local Mayan communities overwhelmingly rejected mining in popular plebiscites called consultas. Chief among their concerns was the potential for water contamination in the agricultural areas.
Virtually every international human rights organization—from the ILO to the UN Special Rapporteur – has weighed in, urging Goldcorp and the Guatemalan government to suspend mine operations to ensure protection of the rights, health and livelihoods of the indigenous people. In mid-2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (IACHR) went one step further and issued precautionary measures ordering the Guatemalan government to suspend operations at the Marlin mine.
At this time 12 months ago, this column had highlighted how the dying year 2010 could be labeled the year of natural calamities, and predicted more on the way.
Sure enough, the year that has just passed witnessed even worse disasters. If 2010 was marked by the Haiti earthquake, 2011 surpassed that in impact (if not in deaths) by the Fukushima triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.
But Fukushima was only the worst of the calamities that included hurricanes in Central and Latin America, drought in parts of Africa, massive floods in Thailand and elsewhere, and many typhoons and storms in the Philippines.
Greenhouse gas emissions are a global problem. Regardless of who emits them, these gases impact everyone, everywhere around the world: raising average temperatures and sea levels, and changing historical weather patterns. But climate change will not affect everyone equally. The two dozen island nations of the Caribbean are a case in point. With 40 million people living on islands in a small geographic area, it would be easy – but incorrect – to expect that they will all face the same climate damages. In fact, according to new research from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Caribbean residents are not all “in the same boat” and should expect to face a very wide diversity of climate impacts.
Yes, each person living in the Caribbean will experience about the same change in climate – temperature increase and shift in weather patterns – and degree of sea-level rise as her neighbors over the next decades. And her children and grandchildren can expect about the same changes to weather and sea levels as their neighbors. But these changes in the physical world will not impact all Caribbean residents in the same way.
In Durban, South Africa, world officials and diplomats decided to do nothing about climate change. Although China produces per capita emissions that are four times lower than those of the United States, it should not ignore the fact that these emissions are already above the world average. Meanwhile, the US blames China for the rise in its aggregate emissions and refuses to make any commitments to reduce its own emissions. In Durban, rich countries pledged money, but also more carbon dioxide. Latin American countries took a variety of positions.
The Seventeenth International Climate Change Summit (Conference of Parties (COP-17)), which ended last month in Durban, should have forged a strong international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012.
With economic crashes and ecological calamities so prevalent in 2011, concluding with a do-little November G20 meeting in Cannes and a do-nothing December climate summit in Durban, January has opened with intense fear of eurozone deterioration. In this uncertain context loom the two most potent forces shaping the period ahead: China’s capital accumulation process and class struggle.
Because of the country’s uneven and combined development, within an extraordinary boom we can see the beginnings of a potentially world-scale bust, plus prodigious socioeconomic battles from below alongside brutal attacks on the environment such as coal-fired power and the Three Gorges Dam (notwithstanding exceptional ‘green economy’ advances).
Triple Crisis blogger Patrick Bond was recently interviewed by the Real News Network on why global elites are not interested in undertaking the changes that effective climate change policy requires.
Triple Crisis blogger Patrick Bond was recently interviewed by the Real News Network on why market-based mechanisms combating climate change, like carbon markets and the Green Climate Fund, are failing.