In his 2009 Legacy lecture, "An elder's vision for our sustainable future", David Suzuki points out that the Earth’s water, food and air are finite. If the Earth were a basketball, the biosphere — our only home -- would be thinner than a layer of varnish on its surface. What orthodox economics and our leaders assume, unlimited growth on a limited planet, is suicide.
Human population doubles every 42 years
Test Tube: this NFB animation asks what you would do "if you could find an extra minute". Just type one word and watch the 3 1/2 m video. Here's a note on how it was made using live Twitter data, constantly growing, as an analogue to the bacteria. And an app for your iPhone.
Suzuki proposes a thought experiment. Suppose we are bacteria in a test tube full of food. It’s huge compared to our tiny size, but still finite. Like humans, our population increases exponentially.
“At time zero you have one cell; one minute you have two; two minutes you have four; three minutes you have eight; four minutes you have 16. That is exponential growth and at 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left, a sixty minute cycle. When is the test tube only half full? Well the answer of course is at 59 minutes; but a minute later it is filled. So at 58 minutes it is 25% full; 57 minutes 12½ % full. At 55 minutes of the 60 minute cycle it is only 3% full.
So, if at 55 minutes one of the bacteria said to its companions that they had a population problem, the other bacteria would be incredulous because 97% of the test tube would be empty and they had been around for 55 minutes.
Yet they would have only 5 minutes left. At the 58th minute it would only be a quarter full. At the 59th minute, half full, And if just before the hour bacteria scientists invented 3 more test tubes, they would only buy 2 minutes of life: the 60th minute, one test tube full; 61st, two full, 62nd, all four. With no food left, the population crashes. Their technology quadrupled the supply (three more Earths), and bought just TWO MINUTES.
In real life can we add even a fraction of 1% more of air, water, soil or biodiversity? We cannot. The biosphere is fixed and finite -- we are past the 59th minute -- and every biologist I have talked to agrees with me, ”
Back on Earth, right now, we see no shortage. In our air conditioned supermarkets the food is stacked to the ceiling, tap water flows in our kitchens, oxygen supplied by the trees. We are in the 59th minute. Time to change. But rightwing deniers (like this one) insist the scientists must be wrong.
Eco-economics deals with the human impact on the biosphere in the anthropocene era.
The Kaya formula is
Some what better-known is the Commoner, Ehrlich and Holdren formula: I=PAT
Human Impact (I) on the environment equals P= Population multiplied by A= Affluence and T= Technology. The Quaker book Right Relationship (p.76+) includes E for ethics, I=PATE, to argue that we must both for scientific and moral reasons adjust our impact, making major changes in PAT to reach a sustainable whole earth economy. “Change the system not the climate,” as the protesters chanted at the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen and later. Humanity is still far from E action. We are robbing our grandchildren of their future.
Full text of the Obama speech at Georgetown University 25 June 2013. Its major points are: 1. executive action: EPA restrictions on coal emissions, citing national health reasons (an anticipated defense against court challenges) 2. "clean energy" funding 3. mitigation funding: federal aid to states and cities to protect roads, bridges, shorelines and other infrastructure threatened by climate change 4. international commitments to GHG targets along the lines of the Copenhagen accord and Durban text (dubious, given the failure of Kyoto 2 and last year's Rio+20 fiasco).The plan was carefully crafted over the last six months, to enrage the fewest corporate supporters, and to solidify the Democratic vote, faced by a Tea Party impasse in Congress. Comments (FCNL posted the first three): Hannah Solomon-Strauss of FCNL President Pivots to Climate Change summarizes the plan. Michael Shank of US News & World Report Obama Plays It Safe on Climate Change avoids carbon tax. Marilyn Chapman, Daily Record No More Delays Acting on Climate Change urged a carbon tax. US liberals: Peter Rugh. Waging Non-ViolenceThis land is your landThe Obama Administration has proposed new regulations for hydraulic
fracturing on 756 million acres of public and tribal lands. The rules
were written by the drilling industry and will be streamlined into
effect by a new intergovernmental taskforce,
established by the president, to promote fracking — a practice that has
been linked to water poisoning, air pollution, methane emissions and,
most recently, earthquakes. Rachel Smolker, Biofuelwatch Stop promoting false solutionssuch as CCSand ethanol. The US is a leading cause of the problem, and is obstructing international negotiations. Chris Williams, ecosocialistImperial recipes for a burnt planet argues that fossil fuels are built into capitalist growth and imperial realpolitik going back to PPS23 of 1948. Trip Van Noppen, Earth Justice Obama needs to step up CAP questions EPA "safe limits" for coal and methane; its lack of regulations for oil refineries, shipping, aviation and a renewable portfolio standard. Anne Petermann in Climate Connection Greenwash our way into oblivion US subsidies and Kyoto positions are unchanged since 2009; "global free trade in environmental services" means carbon markets rather than emissions cuts. Steve Horn in Counterpunch points to subsidies for nuclear plants, CCS (so-called 'clean coal'), fracking and natgas exports to the world. Michelle
Chan, Friends of the Earth notes up to $8 billion for 'advanced fossil fuel projects', danger with REDD (and other New Market Mechanisms) of a carbon casino profiting Wall St and polluters. The TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated with Europe will weaken environmental regulations. She praises phase-out of handouts to Big Oil, but sees US hypocrisy in continued export subsidies to coal and fossil fuels. Ecosocialist
critique
of climate plan as timid and grudging, will not keep the world below 2C, threat of national security state: "publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state" [cf. new Pentagon doctrine on civil unrest May 2013]. David Robert in GristThe significance of Obama’s cryptic Keystone comments: loopholes in the XL pipeline ban; The biggest oversight in Obama’s climate plan is a doozy: the hypocrisy of US coal exports to China. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of Slate.com The Best and Worst Parts of Obama’s Climate Plan
emissions are still rising, climate actions are trivial compared to coal exports, tarsands, and minimal support for some UN action. At best a good first step. Oscar Reyes, Institute for Policy Studies in DC, raises serious questions about US foot-dragging on international action in his July 16 report from the Green Climate Fund in Songdo, Korea.
A new
Pew
poll
finds Americans the world's least concerned about climate
change. US media are overlooking 90% of global warming (with graphs) The hard right: Michael van Tandt, National Post (Canada) Smoke and mirrors cloak carbon emissions bottom line: Canada's rightwingers' wrong-headed attack on cap-and-trade as a "carbon tax", lobbying for Alberta tarsands and XL pipeline -- are making Obama's work harder. Obama's XL loophole. John Connor, Business Spectator (Australia) Carbon's unburnable truth the hypocrisy of Australia's coal exports and BAU; world carbon markets hope for $22.5 trillion expansion. Koch brothers' Reason.comObama's climate five-year plan is "communistic". Denialists in Investors.com Obama speech is full of lies [cf. this gallery
of leading US
politicians who are climate deniers, and 174 denialist
myths compared with scientific consensus] Further reading: this blog's previous posts on UNFCCC.
Patrick Bond is a South African ecojustice activist, director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His publications here. This TED video was recorded 24 May 2010.
Below is a reprint of his article in Pambazuka News14 Oct 2010, to be included in his forthcoming The Politics of Climate Justice.
Patrick Bond: Let us accept Pat Mooney’s six theses about damaging new world trends: Loss of diversity; the threat of shock-therapy bio-engineering; the profusion of state-subsidised technological fixes (mainly unworkable); the disempowerment of those promoting ecologically- and socially-preferable alternatives; amplified state-corporate control over body politics and individual bodies implied by many of these fixes; and ‘corporatist’ politics at global and national scales directly linking state resources to crony-capitalist private profit.
Accepting these premises and turning our attention to Africa, the questions posed in this article are: How do such zany schemes get funded by global capital and multilateral financial institutions? Can we derail the techie agenda with a defunding strategy, by cutting off the financial lifeblood? And following logically: If lack of finance is a barrier to achieving alternative visions, how then might we break that barrier? The most challenging case, in which the money will flow fastest and most inappropriately – and where the need for an alternative, fair and just financing arrangement is most acute – is the climate crisis.
Financing ebbs and flows
Setting aside hard-to-predict Chinese flows or the purchase of vast swathes of African land by other countries (India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia), it does seem that elites lack solid commitments for external financing to make possible both private sector speculative projects and public sector infrastructural investment in Africa. In some periods there is an overflow of such finance, such as the mid/late-1970s, mid/late-1990s and late 2000s, when bubbly Northern markets pushed credit into the pockets – and often the overseas bank accounts – of Africa’s venal rulers, to be repaid by the impoverished masses mainly through intensified mineral and cash crop exports, with structural adjustment programmes as the banker’s squeezing technique.
Then came the 2008-09 economic meltdown, when within a six-month period, half the value on the world’s stock markets disappeared. Credit for even profitable firms became hard to get in the North, much less Africa. Other factors that dried up African financing included the mid-2008 commodity price crash (still nowhere near recovery), ongoing military strife in key sites, and worsening austerity conditions in the many rich donor countries which are cutting bilateral aid. While South Africa has received large financial inflows through emerging-market speculative funds, few private investors would put money into the rest of the continent.
Soon, however, a surplus of official multilateral credit became available, albeit with tight strings attached. Led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose member states granted the institution more than US$750 billion in new lending capacity in 2009, the multilateral banks were financially re-empowered by the crisis. This was highly inappropriate, for their liberalising ideology was a central cause of the contagion, especially the 1990s command to drop capital controls and trade restrictions.
The World Bank, too, has a surplus of monies for investment, hence found it acceptable in April 2010 to dump US$3.75 billion into the largest coal-fired power station on the continent, the Medupi project in South Africa, in spite of myriad problems. But does new-found Bretton Woods Institution wealth translate into African credit-worthiness? The multilateral financiers would like us to accept their affirmative answer, yet the evidence is mixed.
"Africa is growing again"
Judging by a raft of reports in 2009-10, as well as some offhanded comments by the World Bank’s leading economist for Africa, Shanta Devarajan, the neoliberal bloc is promoting a curious argument: Africa’s ‘growth has accelerated since the 1990s’ because ‘these countries adopted exactly the Washington Consensus policies in the mid-1990s… out of their own accord, out of domestic political consensus, rather than imposed from Washington or Paris or London. And I think that’s the point that people are not recognizing, that the actual policies that are generating the growth, are actually very similar to what was criticized in the structural adjustment era’. It is easy to argue with Devarajan – because the ‘growth’ is mythical, since GDP does not record the extraction of non-renewable resources. Once one makes this correction, as even the World Bank did in 2006, the net wealth associated with most African countries’ economies is negative (see Bond vs Devarajan 2010, Devarajan vs Bond 2010).
It is also easy to rebut the hubristic argument that in Africa the Washington Consensus ideology was adopted by ‘domestic political consensus’. And it’s easy to show how ‘growth’ has been so distorted in Africa – accompanied by rising inequality and macroeconomic imbalances – as to be untenable for anything more than building neocolonial rail lines, roads, ports and energy systems aimed solely at extracting more minerals, petroleum and cash crops. Backward-forward linkages and indigenous manufacturing were generally not on any financier’s agenda, and few if any African elites (aside from SA industry minister Rob Davies) have made efforts to balance their economies in a sensible way. As an ideology and political bloc stretching from Washington to the technocrats and politicians who manage every African capital, neoliberalism has simply been impervious to its own recent and soon-to-reappear crises.
Africa's environmental credits
For most foreign investors, Africa has always been a compliant site for not only mineral / petroleum extraction, but also abuse of the continent’s ‘ecological space’. Being on-grid for resource extraction and environmental exploitation in this manner is a curse. The looting of Africa’s environmental resources, the lack of industrial development and the role of the great central African rainforest as a prolific sink for the North’s CO2 emissions, together give rise to the argument that the industrialised powers owe Africa – and many other South sites – a formal debt for using too much ecological space, and for ripping out non-renewable resources in an unsustainable manner.
According to the Ecuador-based advocacy group Accion Ecologica (2000): ‘ecological debt is the debt accumulated by Northern, industrial countries toward Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases, from the industrial countries.’
The leading scientist in the field, Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Joan Martinez-Alier (2003), calculates ecological debt in many forms: ‘nutrients in exports including virtual water, the oil and minerals no longer available, the biodiversity destroyed, sulphur dioxide emitted by copper smelters, the mine tailings, the harms to health from flower exports, the pollution of water by mining, the commercial use of information and knowledge on genetic resources, when they have been appropriated gratis (‘biopiracy’), and agricultural genetic resources.’ As for the North’s ‘lack of payment for environmental services or for the disproportionate use of environmental space,’ Martinez-Alier criticises ‘imports of solid or liquid toxic waste, and free disposal of gas residues (carbon dioxide, CFCs, etc).’
How should this debt be repaid? Simply through forgiving financial debt? More than a quarter century ago, debt-for-nature swaps were pioneered in Latin America as a way local elites could maintain contractual obligations to global finance (thus not losing out on credit ratings and international standing) while *several rather unprincipled international environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) could tap into new donor pools to acquire ‘new enclosures’ for conservation purposes. [*see group 3 in EnvNet -- Ed.]
Kenya violence against indigenes: Intercontinental Cry and Madre.org Many organisations of indigenous people have been outraged, and today formally oppose the latest version of enclosures, the REDD programme ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries’(Evo Morales 29 Sep 2010).
Instead of such schemes, whose effects are to permit Northern polluters to continue business as usual and Northern financiers and ENGOs to gain greater control, those responsible for taking advantage of Africa’s natural resources should pay their ecological debt, according to the principle of polluters pay. This is an especially compelling argument, now that there is near-universal awareness of the damage being done by rising greenhouse gas emissions, and by the ongoing stubborn refusal by the rich to cut back.
However, demands by Jubilee South and others for no-strings eco-debt repayment plus dramatic cuts in Northern greenhouse gas emissions – to allow Africa its fair share of future industrial development – are the opposite of the elites’ strategy. Instead of repaying climate credits, the Northern capitalists have drawn African rulers into a financing game they much prefer: Carbon trading.
Carbon credits, not climate debt
In 1997 at the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, the Global North offered to assist Africa financially through Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects, in a context of declining overseas development aid associated with the end of the Cold War. Many African elites agreed, along with once reluctant environmental groups. Popular movements were unaware and uninvolved, and expert opinion was mixed about the efficacy and moral implications. The proponents of carbon trading argued that this would be the least painful – and least resisted – means of capping greenhouse gas emissions and allowing economies to adapt to new carbon constraints.
Market mechanisms – especially carbon trading and offsets – allow corporations and governments generating greenhouse gases to seemingly reduce their net emissions. They can do this, thanks to the Kyoto Protocol, by trading for others’ certified emissions reductions (e.g. CDM projects in the Third World) or emissions rights (e.g. Eastern Europe’s ‘hot air’ that followed the 1990s economic collapse).
The pro-trading rationale is that once property rights are granted to polluters for these emissions, even if given not auctioned (hence granting a generous giveaway), a ‘cap’ can be put on a country’s or the world’s total emissions. It will then be progressively lowered, if there is political will. So as to minimise adverse economic impact, corporations can stay within the cap even by emitting way above it, by buying others’ rights to pollute.
Crashing carbon capitalism
Although in 1997, this theory may been plausible, by 2010 it was clear that the main pilots had failed. CDMs fit within the broader carbon markets: roughly 6.5 per cent of the US$125 billion in 2008 trades, a ratio that fell substantially in 2009. For those Africans who bought into carbon trading, there were howls of protest about an obvious injustice: The share of CDM financing to Africa continued to be disproportionately low, around 3 per cent of all CDM projects. Most credits emanated from South Africa, with its huge emissions and large cadre of environmental technical specialists. Per capita CO2 emissions for Africa (green) and developed countries (red) 2002. Libya and South Africa are leading emitters. Click on graph to see details. source: UNEP GRID-Arendal
Given the controversies already evident in myriad European Union Emissions Trading Scheme credibility crises, corruption cases and price volatility problems – with the 2008-09 ‘value’ of a tonne of CO2 falling from €30 at peak to less than €9, before adjusting to around €15 during 2010 – the question emerged whether CDMs were not fundamentally flawed as a strategy for climate financing (Lohmann 2006, 2010). The apparent demise of carbon trading in the 2009-10 legislative session of the US Senate made this strategy a losing proposition not only for Africa but also at the global scale. [see US ACES aka Kerry-Boxer -- Ed.]
Even without the expected Washington gridlock, mainly as a result of sabotage by powerful fossil fuel interests, carbon trading had crashed on its own terms by early 2010. ‘The concept is in wide disrepute’, reported the New York Times (25 March 2010), with US Senator Maria Cantwell explaining that ‘cap and trade’ (the US description) was ‘discredited by the Wall Street crisis, the Enron scandal and the rocky start to a carbon credits trading system in Europe that has been subject to dizzying price fluctuations and widespread fraud.’
But it is to left-wing critics of emissions trading that we turn for a more rounded critique, especially the Durban Group for Climate Justice, founded in 2004 in South Africa. Most in the climate justice movement argue that the carbon market is not working:
The idea of inventing a property right to pollute is effectively the ‘privatization of the air’, a moral problem given the vast and growing differentials in wealth inequalities
Greenhouse gases are complex and their rising production creates a non-linear impact which cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange relationship (a tonne of CO2 produced in one place accommodated by reducing a tonne in another, as is the premise of the emissions trade)
The corporations most guilty of pollution and the World Bank – which is most responsible for fossil fuel financing – are the driving forces behind the market, and can be expected to engage in systemic corruption to attract money into the market even if this prevents genuine emissions reductions
Many of the offsetting projects – such as monocultural timber plantations, forest ‘protection’ and landfill methane-electricity projects – have devastating impacts on local communities and ecologies, and have been hotly contested in part because the carbon sequestered is far more temporary (since trees die) than the carbon emitted
The price of carbon determined in these markets is haywire, making mockery of the idea that there will be an effective market mechanism to make renewable energy a cost-effective investment
There is a serious potential for carbon markets to become an out-of-control, multi-trillion dollar speculative bubble, similar to exotic financial instruments associated with Enron’s 2002 collapse (indeed, many Enron employees populate the carbon markets)
As a ‘false solution’ to climate change, carbon trading encourages merely small, incremental shifts, and thus distracts us from a wide range of radical changes we need to make in materials extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal; and
The idea of market solutions to market failure (‘externalities’) is an ideology that rarely makes sense, and especially not following the world’s worst-ever financial market failure, and especially not when the very idea of derivatives – a financial asset whose underlying value is several degrees removed and also subject to extreme variability – was thrown into question.
African advocates of carbon trading
Notwithstanding the chaos and corruption, there are prominent supporters of environment and development – including at least three leading Africans – who continue promoting the emissions trade. For some, this can be attributed to substantial conflicts of interest, which arose in joint roles as climate cooling advocates and carbon traders. According to Michael Dorsey, professor of political ecology at Dartmouth College, ‘After more than a decade of failed politicking [on behalf of carbon trading], many NGO types... are only partially jumping off the sinking ship – so as to work for industries driving the problem. Unfortunately, many continue to influence NGO policy from their current positions, while failing to admit to or even understand obvious conflicts of interest’ (cited in Bond 2009).
In the highest-profile African case, Wangari Maathai, the former Kenyan deputy environment minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, such conflicts were not a factor. But there were certainly self-interested reasons for Valli Moosa, South Africa’s former environment minister (1999-2004), to promote carbon trading as minister at the critical 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. In the latter half of the 2000s, Moosa went on to preside over the IUCN and chaired the board of the continent’s largest energy company and CO2 emitter, Eskom, and became actively involved in the trade as a sideline. Then in March 2010, he was implicated, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC) financing committee, in unethically channelling tens of millions of rands in earnings to the ruling party by signing Eskom purchase orders for Medupi’s new boilers in a way that directly benefited the ANC, which in turn was financed by the controversial World Bank loan.
Moosa’s successor as minister of environment, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was an apartheid-era youth spy for the white regime during the 1980s, who took control of the National Party in the late 1990s and then dissolved it into the ANC in exchange for the ministerial position (although in 2009 he was demoted to tourism minister). Van Schalkwyk (cited in Bond, Dada and Erion, 2009) argued in 2006 that ‘The 17 CDM projects in the pipeline in Sub-Sahara Africa account for only 1.7 per cent of the total of 990 projects worldwide. To build faith in the carbon market and to ensure that everyone shares in its benefits, we must address the obstacles that African countries face.’ At the International Emissions Trading Association Forum in Washington a year later, he insisted, ‘An all-encompassing global carbon market regime which includes all developed countries is the first and ultimate aim.’ Van Schalkwyk was nominated by South Africa to replace Yvo de Boer as UN climate negotiations director in early 2010, but his candidacy barely failed (to Costa Rican carbon trader Christiana Figueres).
Maathai, too, promoted carbon trading through her own Greenbelt Movement in the expectation that CDMs and emerging proposals for REDD would reward tree-planting in both her indigenous strategy as well as monocultural timber plantations. She was also the leading proponent of the document ‘Africa speaks up on Climate Change’, which fed into the African Climate Appeal’, a statement which insists upon more CDM finance with fewer strings attached, especially for afforestation: ‘African governments should ensure that there is equity in geographical distribution of CDM projects and that this is entrenched in the international policy process. They should negotiate for the requirement of up front funding of CDM projects to be waived for many African countries who cannot afford it. The appeal calls upon African countries to embark on the development of CDM capacities and projects including capacity building and development of centers of incubation for CDM projects. African governments should explore possibilities of accessing grants to provide upfront funding for CDM projects and also project development and financing through bilateral arrangements’ (Matthai, 2009, p. 4). [no longer available on the Böll Foundation website -- Ed.]
Maathai criticised three existing funds – the Special Climate Change Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Bali Adaptation Fund – because these funds have not been able to address concerns of African countries on adaptation, namely:
‘[A]ccess, adequacy and equitable geographical distribution. The funds are largely inadequate and inappropriately structured; currently relying on a 2 percent levy on CDM projects. Access to the funds has been made difficult, among others, by bureaucratic bottlenecks of the Global Environmental Fund and the World Bank.’ (Matthai, 2009, p. 4).
Demanding debt repayment by the North
Instead of requesting more CDM carbon trading funds, many more civil society groups instead insisted on raising climate debt as the optimal financing route. In August 2008, African chapters of Jubilee South converged in Nairobi to debunk limited ‘debt relief’ by Northern powers and to plan the next stage of financial campaigning. Nairobi-based Africa Jubilee South co-coordinator Njoki Njehu concluded, ‘Africa and the rest of the Global South are owed a huge historical and ecological debt for slavery, colonialism, and centuries of exploitation’ (cited in Bond and Brutus, 2008, p. 1).
Behind African elite considerations is the threat to repeat their performance in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003, when denial of consent in World Trade Organisation negotiations was the proximate cause of the summits’ collapse on both occasions. On 3 September 2009, Meles Zenawi issued a strong threat from Addis Ababa about the upcoming Copenhagen conference: ‘If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threatens to be another rape of our continent’ (cited in Ashine 2009). To gather that power, Zenawi established the Conference of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change: chairpersons of the AU and the AU Commission, representatives of Ethiopia, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, Chairpersons of the African Ministerial Conference on Environment and Technical Negotiators on climate change from all member states. They met at the AU Summit in Sirte, Libya in July 2009, agreeing that Africa would have a sole delegation to Copenhagen with a united front and demands for compensation.
The most important African negotiator – and largest CO2 emitter (responsible for more than 40 per cent of the continent’s CO2) – is South Africa (Bond, Dada and Erion, 2009). Long seen as a vehicle for Western interests in Africa, Pretoria’s negotiators have two conflicting agendas: Increasing Northern payments to Africa (a longstanding objective of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which requested US$64 billion per annum in aid and investment concessions during the early 2000s); and increasing CO2 outputs through around 2050, when the Long-Term Mitigation Scenario – South Africa’s official climate cap – would come into effect and emissions declines are offered as a scenario. In the meantime, Pretoria has earmarked more than US$100 billion for emissions-intensive coal and nuclear fired electricity generation plants due to be constructed during 2010-15, which would amplify Africa’s climate crisis, requiring more resources from the North for adaptation.
But the current South African environment minister, Buyelwa Sonjica, made a demand in September 2009: ‘We expect money. We need money to be made available... we need money as of yesterday for adaptation and mitigation’ (Engineering News 2009). What Sonjica didn’t comprehend is that any just calculation of financing responsibilities for climate debt would identify South Africa as a debtor not creditor country.
Copenhagen showdown
The effect of the Africans’ rhetoric appeared to entail some immediate concessions. In September 2009, the European Union announced it would begin paying its climate debt, but only up to US$22 billion annually to fund adaptation, roughly one seventh of what EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas observed would be required by 2020 (US$145b). Some of that would be subtracted from existing aid. The EU damage estimates were considered far too conservative, as China’s mitigation and adaptation costs alone would be US$438 billion annually by 2030, according to Beijing. According to one report, the EU view is thatemissions trading should be the basis of ‘much of the shortfall’: ‘The international carbon market, if designed properly, will create an increasing financial flow to developing countries and could potentially deliver as much as €38bn per year in 2020’ (Chaffin and Crooks 2009: 24).
Because this offer was widely judged as inadequate, Zenawi carried out a trial run of his walk-out threat just prior to Copenhagen, in November 2009 at a Barcelona UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) meeting. Sufficient concessions were not on the table, so his technical negotiators registered a protest. But at the crucial moment in Copenhagen, during the final week when heads of state would arrive to negotiate a new protocol, Zenawi diverted his own flight from Addis Ababa via Paris, where he met French premier Nicolas Sarkozy. Shortly thereafter, he announced the halving of Africa’s climate debt demands (Vidal in Guardian 4 Nov 2009).
According to Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), this act had the effect of ‘undermining the bold positions of our negotiators and ministers represented here, and threatening the very future of Africa… Meles wants to sell out the lives and hopes of Africans for a pittance. Every other African country has committed to policy based on the science’ (cited in Reddy, Climate Chronicle 18 Dec 2009, p. 2).
Then on 17 December, US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton offered what appeared to be a major concession (US State Dept. 2009):
‘… in the context of a strong accord in which all major economies stand behind meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to their implementation, the United States is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries. We expect this funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.’
Yet there was no firm line-item in the US budget to this end, just a promise (the US had regularly broken similar aid promises in the past, and at the same time the US President Barack Obama was cutting back AIDS medicines funding to Africa). The private sources of finances alone could easily exceed US$100 billion, with CDMs at the time in excess of 6 per cent of the US$125 billion emissions markets. If, as predicted, the size of the 2020 carbon market reached US$3 trillion, it would take just 3.3 per cent dedicated to CDMs to reach the US$100 billion target. So given the private sourcing and likelihood of loans not grants, Clinton’s offer could readily be rejected as meaningless.
However, several countries had insisted on climate debt as a negotiating framework even before Copenhagen, including Venezuela, Paraguay, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. But in Copenhagen, only Sudan stood out, partly because its UN Ambassador, Lumumba di-Aping, had such a visible role as G77 chief negotiator. At one point, when briefing civil society a week before the fatal Copenhagen Accord deal, he ‘sat silently, tears rolling down his face,’ according to a report, and then said, simply, ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ For much of the continent, said Di-Aping, 2 degrees C globally meant 3.5 degrees C: ‘certain death for Africa’, a type of ‘climate fascism’ imposed on Africa by polluters, in exchange for which the Third World would get a measly US$10 billion per year in ‘fast track’ funding, although ‘US$10 billion is not enough to buy us coffins’. Agreeing with leading US climate scientist James Hansen, the Copenhagen deal on offer was ‘worse than no deal’, said Di-Aping, concluding, ‘I would rather die with my dignity than sign a deal that will channel my people into a furnace.’ As for the main negotiator, he had this prophesy: ‘What is Obama going to tell his daughters? That their [Kenyan] relatives’ lives are not worth anything? It is unfortunate that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we [Africans] are still considered “disposables”’ (cited in Welz 2009).
Continuing climate justice advocacy
After this debacle, it was up to the Bolivian government to pick up the baton. In Cochabamba April 2010, the World Conference of Peoples on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (PWCCC) issued demands for a formal compensation mechanism for climate debt. The conference’s Working Group on Climate Debt (2010, p. 1) argued as follows:
‘Climate debt is an obligation of compensation that is generated because of the damage done to Mother Earth by the irrational emissions of greenhouse gases. The primary responsible for these irrational emissions are the so-called ‘developed countries ‘, inhabited by only 20% of the world population, and which emitted 75% of historical emissions of greenhouse gases.
‘These states, which stimulated the capitalist development model, are responsible for climate debt, but we shouldn’t forget that within these states, there live poor and indigenous peoples which are also affected by this debt…‘The responsibility for the climate debt of each developed country is established in relation to the level of emissions, taking into account the historically emitted amount of tons of carbon per capita.’
The Working Group (2010, p. 2) made suggestions for payment as follows:
The re-absorption [of emissions] and cleaning the atmosphere by developed countries
Payment in technology (eliminating patents) and in knowledge according to our worldview for both clean development and for adaptation to developing countries
Financing
Changes in immigration laws that allow us to offer a new home for all climate migrants
The adoption of the Declaration on the Mother Earth’s Rights.
The Working Group also called for funding to be routed through the UNFCCC, ‘replacing the Global Environment Facility and its intermediaries such as the World Bank and the Regional Development Banks.’ A further suggestion was that ‘The financial mechanism must respect the sovereign control of each country to determine the definition, design, implementation of policy and programmatic approaches to climate change.’ As for timing, ‘The financial mechanism shall be defined and approved at COP16, and be made operational at COP17.’ These documents were based upon visionary civil society demands that had emerged over the prior months and years. Some earlier, very ambitious demands – such as the end of apartheid or access to AIDS medicines – were only won after years of struggle, after initially appearing equally audacious and unrealistic.
From the standpoint of civil society forces that have lost confidence in states, multilateral agencies, donors, corporations and ENGOs, how might debt repayments in the form of financing be best distributed? It became clear to many civil society groups in recent decades that postcolonial African governments were too easily corrupted, just as were United Nations and aid (and even international NGO) bureaucracies. One solution to the payment distribution problem appeared in 2009: The idea of simply passing along a monthly grant – universal in amount and access, with no means-testing or other qualifications – to each African citizen via an individual ‘Basic Income Program’ payment. According to Der Spiegel, the village of Otjivero, Namibia is an exceptionally successful pilot for this form of income redistribution (Krahe 2009). First priority would be to supply a Basic Income Program to Africans who live in areas most adversely affected by droughts, floods or other extreme weather events. Logistically, the use of Post Office Savings Banks or rapidly-introduced Automated Teller Machines would be sensible, although currency distortions, security and other such challenges would differ from place to place. The Namibian case has much to recommend it, in part because it amongst the driest sites in Africa.
Such a strategy would be just an emergency salve on a burning problem:
How to ensure that the greenhouse gas ‘polluters pay’ in a manner that first, compensates their climate change victims;
that permits transformation of African energy, transport, extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal systems;
and that in the process assures the ‘right to development’ for Africa in a future world economy constrained by emissions caps.
Extremely radical changes will be required in all these activities in order not only to ensure the safety of the species and planet, but also that Africans are at the front of the queue for long-overdue ecological and economic compensation, given the North’s direct role in Africa’s environmental damage. The contemporary argument for climate debt to be paid is simply the first step in a long process, akin to decolonisation, in which the master – the polluting Global North – must know that not only is it time to halt the reliance on fossil fuels, but having ‘broken’ the climate, it is his responsibility to foot the clean-up bill.
Conclusion: changing the financing power balance
In contrast to financing for techie fixes via carbon trading – and similar strategies associated with other fields of bio-engineering – there is an alternative approach to financing based upon climate justice and an awareness of historic responsibility.
To get climate justice higher on the agenda will require higher levels of eco-social protest. So far the grassroots, NGO and labour components of various climate justice movements have developed extremely unevenly across space, with mainly Northern radical environmentalists only fusing with Southern economic justice advocates outside the 2007 Bali Conference of the Parties. The fusion of red and green influences was called the Climate Justice Now! network, and after the elites’ Copenhagen summit fiasco in December 2009, gained momentum in an April 2010 ‘World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth’ in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
As for intergovernmental cooperation, it appears hopeless going into the Cancun Conference of the Parties 16. The Latin American left leadership will be squashed by the US and most of the United Nations, and although before Copenhagen the African elites engaged in rhetorical challenges to climate apartheid, their role was ultimately to polish the chains, not break them. Most African elites will follow the path of Moosa, van Schalkwyk and Maathai, and will have similar levels of success: Negligible or even negative.
Mooney’s theses about the false technological solutions rely upon flows of money to support the flows of bad ideas. But like many dysfunctional, malevolent or incompetent development projects over the ages, these flows can be halted if the balance of forces improves. Fortunately, when dealing with environmental financing, elites – especially in the World Bank, the United Nations and donor agencies – invariably choose unsustainable schemes, though unfortunately they never pay the price, leaving the damage to be carried by social and environmental victims.
Still, the elites’ record of financing climate change strategies does suggest a growing awareness of how impossible it is to commodify nature, turn environmental credits into derivatives, sell these in the global financial markets, dress them up with multilateral pseudo-credibility, and expect the inverted pyramid to stay aloft. The record of the carbon market’s demise in 2009-10 (below)
should encourage critics to include financing handles in their campaigning against technological eco-fixes. To move from demands for climate debt payment – now explicitly on the world agenda – to a broader agenda of ecological debt advocacy, is just the next step in connecting the dots between these related issues, and building African-led alliances that can ultimately prevail.
The debate about climate change is divided between the “Copenhagen Accord” that failed to be imposed by a group of countries led by the United States at the Copenhagen Conference held in December 2009, and the “People´s Agreement” that synthesizes the conclusions of the 17 working groups at the World People´s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth carried out in Cochabamba, Boliva from April 20th to 22nd, 2010.
The “People´s Agreement” stems from an integral vision of climate change, incorporating the issue of the structural causes of the climate crisis, the rupture of harmony with nature, the need to recognize the rights of Mother Earth in order to guarantee human rights, the importance of creating a Tribunal of Climate and Environmental Justice, the development of global democracy so that the people can decide on this issue affecting and the planet and all of humanity.
On the other hand, the Copenhagen Accord represents a step backward with relation to the Kyoto Protocol by proposing a methodology of voluntary commitments for the industrialized countries that are principally responsible for climate change.
COMPARISON
PEOPLE´S AGREEMENT
COPENHAGEN ACCORD
Limit for Average Global Temperature Increase
Limit global temperature increase during the present century to 1º C in order to reduce the effects of climate change. For this, it is proposed that the world return to greenhouse gas concentrations of 300ppm.
Limit the increase in temperature to 2º C, and, following an evaluation in 2015, see if it is possible to reach the goal of 1.5 º C.
Greenhouse Gas Reductions
50% reduction based on 1990 levels for the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol (2013-2017), excluding carbon markets or other types of compensation.Demands that the United States ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Puts forth that all developed countries must make comparable reductions: for example, the US cannot reduce by 3% and the EU by 30%. Rejects attemps to annul the Kyoto Protocol.
Does not set an aggregate goal for all developed countries. Proposes voluntary reductions commitments by developed countries, which means that they must only state what they plan to do.Does not establish criteria for comparable reductions among developed countries.Does not state that reductions should occur under the framework of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.According to the European Comission, voluntary commitments allocated thus far under the Copenhagen Accord represent real reductions of just 2% based on 1990 levels.
Climate Debt
Developed countries have a climate debt toward developing countries, Mother Earth, and future generations.
This climate debt consists of: returning the atmospheric space that has been occupied by the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries, thereby affecting other countries; a debt to Mother Earth that should be honored through the recognition and implementiation of a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth at the United Nations; a debt to climate change migrants; a debt with regard to adaptation and development consisting of the costs developing countries must incurr to respond to the grave impacts of climate change.
No mention of climate debt.
Financing
Financing should be set aside for climate change in an amount greater than that which developed countries currently budget for defense, war, and security spending.Financing should should reach 6% of GDP for the developed countries historically responsible for climate change, should come from public funds not linked to carbon market mechanisms, and be in addition to Official Development Assistance.
Approximately 30 billion US dollars for the period 2010-2012, which represents 0.005% of the annual GDP of developed countries.Mobilize 100 billion US dollars by 2020 to attend to the needs of developing countries, which amounts to 0.05% of GDP.Approximately 50% of this financing would come from the carbon market.
Technology Transfer
Creation of a Multilateral and Multidisciplinary Mechanism that guarantees technology transfer for climate change that is free of intellectual property rights.
Proposes a Technology Mechanism, but it is unclear whether this will simply be a showcase of available technologies.No mention of the need for changes to regimes of intellectual property rights.
Carbon Markets
Rejects the carbon market and other forms of dealing with climate change based on the market.
Promotes the use of carbon markets and proposes the creation of new market mechanisms.
Forests
Rejects market mechanisms for the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.Proposes the creation of a mechanism that, unlike REDD+ or ++, respects the sovereignty of States, guarantees the rights of indigenous peoples and communities that live in forests, and is not based on carbon market mechanisms.
Proposes incentives for actions related to REDD based on the carbon market.
Food and Agriculture
To confront the climate crisis, we must bring about a profound shift toward the sustainable models of agricultural production used by indigenous and farming communities, and other models and ecological practices that contribute to solving the problem of climate change and guaranteeing food soveriegnty.
No mention of food and agriculture.
Reclassification of Countries
Rejects the reclassification of developing countries according to their vulnerability. Respect for and application of Article 4.8 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Promotes the reclassification of developing countries according to climate change, giving preferential treatment according to vulnerability.
Climate Migrants
Protection and recognition of the rights and needs of those forced to migrate due to climate change. Highlights the need to raise this issue in negotiations.
No mention of migration caused by climate change.
Justice and Fulfillment of International Commitments
Proposes the adoption of legally binding mechanisms to guarantee compliance with international treaties, as well as the creation of a Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal.
Does not propose any mechanism for remedying compliance with international commitments by developed countries.
Referendum on Climate Change
Proposes a World Referendum on Climate Change so that the people can decide on this issue, one that is of vital importance to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.
No mention of a mechanism for consulting populations.
Indigenous Peoples
Recognition and revalorization of indigenous roots of all humanity and full respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.
No mention of indigenous peoples.
Rights of Mother Earth
Proposes to discuss and approve in the United Nations a Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to reestablish harmony with nature. In an inter-dependent system, it is impossible to recognize rights for only the human side of that system. The only way to defend human rights is to also recognize the rights of Mother Earth. These rights include the Earth´s right to life, the right to regenerate its biocapacity, the right to maintain its integrity, and the right of all to a clean environment.
No mention of the rights of Mother Earth.
Structural Causes
Proposes to analyze and modify the structural causes of climate change. Affirms that these have to do with the capitalist system that is centered on the maximization of profit and the exploitation and commodification of nature.
No mention of the structural causes of climate change.
“At time zero you have one cell; one minute you have two; two minutes you have four; three minutes you have eight; four minutes you have 16. That is exponential growth and at 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left, a sixty minute cycle. When is the test tube only half full? Well the answer of course is at 59 minutes; but a minute later it is filled. So at 58 minutes it is 25% full; 57 minutes 12½ % full. At 55 minutes of the 60 minute cycle it is only 3% full. 
