Despite the large marches and impassioned rhetoric, the UN’s recent Climate Week was mostly just another reminder of how hard it has become to achieve any progress on global climate change. International summits keep sounding alarms about the environmental crisis, and they even flirt with radical solutions, but they almost always close with toothless resolutions and return us to the status quo.
Instead of genuine progress, we have begun to settle for well-intentioned gestures. Consider, for instance, Norway’s US$150M donation to Liberia to prevent further deforestation. If this turns out like Norway’s other carbon reduction schemes – with Brazil, Guyana and Indonesia – during the last five years, initial optimism will soon fade to scepticism. Shortly after its deal, Brazil changed the law that protects its forest to allow further exploitation of the Amazon; Indonesia also found a way to increase its deforestation. Guyanese will recall some of the issues our own REDD initiative has faced. (In July 2012, an audit reported that just three of ten verification indicators for the project had been fully attained, four were partially met, and there was no measurable progress on the others.)
Meanwhile evidence of irreversible human-caused climate change keeps mounting. Last year, the Global Carbon Project recorded a 2.3 per cent jump in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to economic growth in China and India. As the growing middle class in these countries adopt the West’s carbon-intensive lifestyles, emissions will rise even faster.
The Copenhagen target of limiting global warming to just a 2-degree Celsius increase by 2050 already seems unattainable. It is worth remembering that when the 2 degrees target was chosen, many delegates at the summit worried that it was a “death sentence” for Sub-Saharan Africa and islands struggling to fend off rising sea levels. Since then, with global temperatures rising just under half of that target, the oceans have become noticeably more acidic – unsurprisingly, since 500 billion tons of carbon have been placed in them – and in Greenland the ice sheet has melted much faster than predicted.
Frightening as this is, worse scenarios can be imagined. If, for example, we pass the tipping point at which the permafrost in the earth’s polar regions melts irreversibly, it could unleash terrifying amounts of the 1,600 billion tons of carbon trapped within it. The environmentalist Bill McKibben warns that “A hundred billion tons could be released this century, mostly in the form of methane, which would have a warming effect equivalent to 270 years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels.”
Why, then, is so little being done? A recent book by Naomi Klein addresses the political and economic stakes in the climate change debate, and argues that genuine progress will remain elusive until the neoliberal assumptions of globalization are refuted. Unless and until this happens, the system is geared towards climate denialism and summits at which trade always trumps the environment.
One indicator of the present muddle is the way we account for global trade’s carbon emissions. Klein points out that “emissions from the transportation of goods across borders — all those container ships, whose traffic has increased by nearly 400 per cent over the last twenty years — are not formally attributed to any nation-state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their polluting impact.” Furthermore there is “little momentum at the UN for changing that” even though shipping emissions will likely double or even triple by 2050.
Klein blames this “deeply flawed” system of accounting for carbon emissions for allowing “rapidly de-industrializing wealthy states to claim that their emissions have stabilized or even gone down when, in fact, the emissions embedded in their consumption have soared during the free trade era.” In 2011, the US National Academy of Sciences published a study which showed that while industrialized countries which signed the Kyoto Protocol had stabilized their emissions, “that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production overseas.” In fact, emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was “six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.”
On recent evidence, it is hard to disagree with Klein’s central claim that until industrialized economies are prepared to wean themselves off the hyperconsumptive habits that globalisation has facilitated, and to grapple with the profound restructuring that post-neoliberal “degrowth” would entail (such as an overhaul of mass transit systems, the creation of affordable and environmentally sustainable urban housing, and unprecedented increases in the generation of energy from renewable sources) significant action on climate change will remain elusive.
