Talking heads: Words come cheap

I fully concur with these comments from Kevin Hester

The U.N. and Ban Kee Moon are nothing more than a useless apparatchik of the Fossil Fuel Industry and their shareholders.If anyone thinks they will achieve anything meaningful they are delusional and have rocks in their head.

Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey, former Bosnian foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations) is kidding himself if he thinks we achieved much with our Global Campaign to raise awareness about Climate Change and in fact the oft repeated mantra of we can still fix this problem is disingenuous and serves to distract us from the armageddon coming our way.

There will be no consensus.

There will be no mandatory commitments.Rather than decreasing our CO2 emissons we are increasing them.

As much as I respect Naomi Klein and her writing her telling people that we can fix this debacle is misinforming people,giving them false hope and losing time that should be used preparing for the societal chaos that we face.

We have commenced the 6th great extinction on this planet and it is happening faster than we all think.

Guy McPherson will be touring NZ next month discussing exactly this scenario, event link here.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1444740755800065/?ref=2&ref_dashboard_filter=hosting

Can the UN Help Curb Climate Change and its Consequences?

Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey -

Former Bosnian foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations

Huffington Post

26 September, 2014

If setting an example could make states and their leaders do the right thing, then the United Nations might be on the right track. A few years ago, the UN Secretary General ordered that heating be reduced in the winter and the air conditioning thermostat be raised in the summer -- on a recent July day at the UN Cafeteria the temperature was hot enough to brew tea. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) relies upon solar energy to power its HQ in Kenya. In several of its monitoring and peacekeeping operations around the globe the UN has sought to maximize efficiency and minimize its carbon footprint - most armies do not list environmental conservation as a top priority. This week, UNSG Ban Ki-moon joined global citizens in what has perhaps unexpectedly become the largest climate change march ever. But the example and message, at least up until now, appear to be largely illusory when it comes to securing substantive agreement/treaty between states to effectively counter the relentless advance of climate change.

UN Again Warns "Time is Running Out!"

One more time the UN is warning that we are on the verge of catastrophe, but has this become akin to the boy crying wolf? Regardless, the data does indicate a very worrying trend. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) latest annualGreenhouse Gas Bulletin stresses that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide caused a 34 per cent increase in global warming in the last 10 years. "Far from falling, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually increased last year at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years. We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases across the board," says WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

Peppered with climate change denial emboldened by the recent recession, remedying the ills threatening our earth has been presented as a choice between jobs and the environment within the borders of most states, from China to the US. Broad skepticism, even cynicism directed at the UN have undermined a multilateral approach to climate change. Since the Kyoto Protocol, The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1997, advocates have been seeking to just maintain whatever is left of the presumed agreement even as enhancement may be necessary to counter further damage inflicted by delays and insincere implementation. While emerging economy states have sought greater latitude to play economic catch-up to the industrial powers, more developed states as Canada and Australia have perhaps inflicted some of the greatest injury to a multilateral approach by backtracking in substance and commitment.

Do we need a multilateral approach? To those who understand that we are all global citizens increasingly linked by our successes, failures and shared commitments, the answer is obvious. It goes beyond the air, water and gusts of hot or cold trends that pervade the earth. Several UN member states' very existence is threatened by rising sea levels from smaller island states as the Marshall Islands, Bahamas, and the Maldives to Bangladesh (whose coastline is as vulnerable as that of the Netherlands but without the resources to construct defenses.) These states are in reality on death row at least for now strapped to a reality of pleas for clemency ignored and waiting to be overcome by rising tides. Many of us in the US from New Orleans to the New York/New Jersey coast discovered that we are more vulnerable than we had come to believe.

Hunger & Conflict Migrating to "Our" Porch?

The consequences can be deadly for a much broader segment of the population inflicted by spread of diseases beyond current borders as malaria as well as famines and water shortages. People may flee hunger as much as Ebola and thus facilitate the spread of disease and conflict. Wars between and within states are more likely - perhaps not so coincidentally, Ukraine and the Sudan/South Sudan have emerged as conflict zones at same time when their capacity/potential for food production has been increasingly recognized. Perhaps most threatening to the psyche of Western citizens are the waves of new migrants largely un-managed that climate change and its consequences are likely to stir like a hot southeast gale. The flow will be reversed from underdeveloped territories as dumping grounds for hazardous waste to their unwanted and/or unsustainable populations flowing now in the other direction toward presumably more developed lands.

Recent failures from Syria to Ukraine to tackle political and human rights crisis have undermined the UN's image as well overwhelming priorities and resources. However, much of the success of the UN and even more of the failures of the UN can be tracked back to member states, particularly the P-5 of the UN Security Council. The most visible manifestations of failure, as Bosnia before, the image of failure is dropped upon the UN's doorstep looking like a "selfie" but in reality framed by the big power capitals seeking to avoid responsibility and accountability. Of course, the competition for ever more valuable resources may be fueling conflict including DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) Myanmar, Ogaden, South Sudan, Ukraine as well as Israel/Palestine.

Following the citizens' climate march in cities around the globe, the UN hosted one more summit this week of global leaders as part of the annual gathering at its NYC HQs. The meeting also drew a broad range of industry leaders many who "pledged" efforts to mitigate climate change. However, even if honored, the pledges may still not be enough to meet goals of keeping the rise of global temperatures to levels established in Copenhagen only at the end of the previous decade. Substantive action trails speeches and symbolism. New political set of priorities may be stalled by some business leaders and politicians even as they make "pledges" for public consumption.

Capturing Imaginations & Economic Interests:

Some have argued that climate change is a myth that is both costly and destroys jobs like those of coal miners, whether in West Virginia or Turkey or Brazil or Australia or China. Vested economic interests will not surrender to a more encompassing rationale if their own is threatened. A miner's work may be all that some know, but other options and opportunities may also open for them or at least their children. Global citizenship and national wealth are not only compatible but symbiotic. Creating new ventures and disrupting outmoded businesses has been the creator of the greatest entrepreneurial wealth and new jobs even if taking into consideration the dislocation of existing enterprises and their workforce, from Kenya to China to the US. Silicon Valley has proven that he who sees the future also leads it. Further, rather than encouraging vast migrations from underdeveloped countries, is there not more opportunity in developing those markets and enhancing the capacity of such populations? Cross-border can be an advantage rather than the perceived threat as seen by many. The evolving consciousness of global citizen and social media offer connectivity but what of the content: "Retweeted by the UN Secretary General: Educating the new Citizen Diplomat."

When I started writing this blog I was less optimistic in regards to the global consciousness. The Climate March has swelled activism and expectations, but it must be more than a one-day phenomena. We need to see sustained awareness about economic opportunity as well as threat of climate change.

Loving the earth is not treating it like a one-night stand. Our professed love is not new. Recall that "Earth Day" started and blossomed in the early 70's about the same time we first heard Marvin Gaye's eternal "The Ecology Song - Mercy, Mercy Me."

India does NOT have a monopoly on hypocrisy!!

The UN climate summit reveals India's hypocrisy on saving forests

Environment minister argues for historical justice on cutting carbon, but denies it to tribes living in the country’s forests

A flower grows close to a thermal power plant on the outskirts of Nagpur in Maharashtra, India. Photograph: Arko Datta/Reuters

the Guardian

26 September, 2014

On Tuesday, India’s minister for environment, forests, and climate change, Prakash Javadekar, scoffed at the idea of the country reducing emissions to counter climate change. He held the US chiefly responsible for the climate crisis, and therefore it had to bear the responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That has been India’s position on climate change at international negotiations for a while.

Developed nations have polluted the atmosphere and brought the planet to the crisis it faces today. The developing world, lagging behind in industrial development, did little to create the situation. But China is now the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and India is fast catching up as its economy grows.

On the strength of future emissions, the west wants these countries to commit to reducing their impact on climate change. To do so, developing nations want transfer of costly new green technology at low or no costs and compensation from developed nations for reducing their emissions. This is where past climate conferences have remained stuck, with each side entrenched in its position.

At the UN climate change summit in New York on Tuesday, Javadekar is reported to have said: “The moral principle of historic responsibility [those countries which have historically emitted the most] cannot be washed away.”

But while he champions historic responsibility abroad, he’s an instrument of eroding historic justice at home.

India legislated the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972, a law that granted state protection to wildlife. But it criminalised many communities living in wildlife areas. Unlike the west, India’s forests are not people-free wildlife havens.

Conservationists and the country’s forest department regarded the presence of marginsalised people – mostly adivasis (tribal communities who have been living in the forests for centuries) – as a blight. They were, and still are, looked up on as people who degraded forests by cutting trees for firewood, clearing land for tilling and hunting wildlife for the pot. They received little support from the government. Some got paltry compensation to give up their traditional lands and settle outside forests.

"Tribal women walk through rain in Pandwa village of Dang district of Gujarat, India. Tribal people in Dang depend on forest produce, being allowed agriculture only in limited patches of the densely forested area. Photograph: Siddharth Darshan Kumar/AP

Much of India was cleared of forests and its wildlife over centuries, some conservationists living in cities had no qualms seeking the eviction of people from forests. They argued that since only 5% of the country’s land area was set aside for wildlife, it should be free of human disturbance. In short, the indigenous people of India’s forests had to bear the cost of conservation, even though most of the country had been denuded of its forests by others.

In 2006, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers Act (popularly called Forest Rights Act) came into force with stipulations for compensation against resettlement. Should any company wish to set up an industry or mine in tribal lands, it had to first seek the consent of forest-dwelling communities. This law sets right historic wrongs suffered by tribals. It also gives them a say in state’s plans that impact their lands and lives.

Although the act is enacted by the parliament, many states haven’t implemented it. Now Narendra Modi’s pro-development government is seeking to do away with the right of forest dwellers to veto industries coming into their neck of the woods.

Earlier this month, Javadekar stated the government would amend the act so it would not be mandatory any more to seek forest people’s consent. So much for historic justice.

In New York, however, he declared India will take action against climate change voluntarily and not at the behest of any other country. Yet at home, if a forest-destroying mine or a carbon-polluting coal plant chooses to plonk down on forest land, local people won’t have a choice.

The question at the heart of both issues is: who bears the cost of arresting climate change and conserving forests?

On the international stage, India argues beneficiaries of past pollution have to bear the responsibility of mitigating climate change. But at home, it shows its hypocrisy by insisting that historically disenfranchised forest dwelling citizens bear the cost of conservation and development.

The world has lost the will to fight climate change

What does it say when the Rio Earth Summit does not even figure in most of the world press?

There is so much denial, so much cognitive dissonance that the world does not care any more about its future.

How The Rio+20 Text Could Have Been Stronger

The final draft text of the Rio+20 Earth Summit agreed on today has disappointed many delegates and activists around the world. Other than the Brazilian chair of the meeting, no one seems to be strongly defending the document.

Think Progress,

22 June, 2012

The World Wildlife Fund has declared the text “a colossal failure of leadership and vision.” Ida Auken, the Danish Environment Minister and Chair of the European Environment Council, remarked that “the EU would have liked to see a much more concrete and ambitious outcome, so in that respect I’m not happy with it.” 

Even Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, said that he had hoped for a more “ambitious” outcome, though he quickly added that we should understand the difficulty has been over resolving “conflicting interests” among the parties.

Some of this criticism could be overwrought. Unlike the first Rio Earth Summit 20 years ago, this meeting never aimed to produce a new international treaty or a process that would lead to an international agreement. From the start, its most ambitious aim was to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals that would replace the Millennium Development Goals, which were agreed to in New York City in 2000 and are set to expire in 2015. Given the conflicting interests identified by Moon, it is impressive that the parties were able to go on the record supporting as many progressive changes in the development and environment agenda that they did. But while the current Rio text acknowledges (and occasionally even underlines, underscores, and stresses) that action on sustainable development and climate change is urgently needed, it is deficient in specific goals, details on how to achieve them, and target dates.

Some, like former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth, President of the U.N. Foundation, reply that we shouldn’t focus on the text as much as we should focus on the public-private partnerships that are being announced at the meeting around initiatives such as Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All initiative, which has drawn $2 billion in support from the U.S.

Wirth has a good point. At this moment, there may be no need to wrangle further over why the Rio text is as weak as it is. Instead, we should move on to make these newly emerging institutions of international cooperation work as well as they can. In the end, what was produced at Rio looks much more like a G20 text, simply articulating the lowest common denominator among the parties. While activists may have hoped for more, this could be the best we could hope for in this kind of process when an actual treaty is not on the table.

Still, there are some interesting lessons to be learned here from how this text went wrong. If we go back and look at the development of the Rio text, we can see that it could have been bolder if some parties had been allowed to strengthen it.

The Evolution of the Text

We compared the current final text in Rio with the text as it had been negotiated up to June 2nd. We chose the June 2nd version because it still identified requests by parties to put in or take out language from the document. Parties at the time were half-way through a two-week long meeting at the UN in New York during the third round of informal negotiations to draft a text. In contrast, the final draft from earlier this week is a text determined by the Brazilian chair of the meeting to be the best compromise between the competing interests of the parties.

Our main conclusion is that while responsibility for this final text now rests with all the assembled parties in Rio, the chair of the meeting could have pushed harder on the parties to produce a more ambitious text by negotiating throughout the week. Instead, the pattern seems to be one of eliminating any disagreement on any item, which resulted in a joint declaration now charged with failing to provide adequate targets, timelines, or guidelines for achieving any of its aspirations.

Our comparison reveals another conclusion as well: Had the United States’ position prevailed in the negotiations, the final text would have been stronger in terms of its chief weaknesses of specific goals and roadmaps for success.

Of course, the same could be said of the changes requested by many other parties. But the comparison with the United States’ position is particularly instructive because the U.S. is often criticized for being one of the most conservative parties in international climate negotiations. For example, in the part of the Rio text devoted to supporting the Millennium Development Goals as they move toward their completion in 2015, the United States wanted to eliminate language calling for increased contributions to achieve those goals. But if a party that many perceive as one of the more conservative in these talks was in favor of a stronger agreement, then we can only imagine what would have happened if the negotiations were pushed harder.

Take, for example, the paragraph on Ban Ki-moon’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative (SE4ALL). SE4ALL has three goals: (1) to eliminate global energy poverty by 2030, (2) to double the rate of energy efficiency improvement by 2030, and (3) to double the share of renewable energy in the global mix by 2030. Prior to the Rio meeting, Ban Ki-moon was promoting it as a potential centerpiece of a Rio agreement. Although the United States sought to curtail language in the earlier text that implied financial assistance from UN member countries to achieve these ends, it strongly pushed for including language in the text on private sector engagement. The final text, interestingly enough, scrapped both avenues for funding these initiatives – and just made no mention of funding whatsoever.

So far as we can tell, the Sustainable Energy for All provision in the draft Rio document, as the United States would have had it, is:

We note the Secretary General’s “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative and its aspirational goals of ensuring universal access to modern energy services by 2030; doubling the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030; and doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by 2030. We recognize that resources will be necessary to achieve these results particularly through enabling environments that unlock private sector investments. We encourage voluntary follow-up efforts to coordinate and to catalyse public-private partnerships and to track progress towards its three goals and, in this regard, we encourage States and relevant stakeholders, including the private sector, to conduct, as appropriate, collaborative international research and capacity development based on a roadmap to be developed through a multilateral process, involving all stakeholders.

The final text was dramatically shorter and cut out several important clarifications, including the U.S. comment on enabling private sector investments. Equally important, if not more so, especially given the criticisms of the text now circulating in the media, is the fact that the final version cuts out any mention of the need to develop a roadmap to achieve these goals inserted by Kazakhstan apparently due to objections by China and the “Group of 77” developing countries. To add insult to injury a caveat is added at the end of the statement essentially letting off the hook any party which doesn’t want to try to achieve these goals.

We note the launching of the initiative by the Secretary General on “Sustainable Energy for All,” which focus on access to energy, energy efficiency and renewable energies. We are all determined to act to make sustainable energy for all a reality, and through this, help eradicate poverty and lead to sustainable development and global prosperity. We recognize that countries’ activities in broader energy-related issues are of great importance and are prioritized according to their specific challenges, capacities and circumstances, including energy mix.

An important caveat to this claim is that while the earlier draft text reveals what parties wanted inserted or taken out, it doesn’t show what all parties thought about every provision. A country would not have been able to articulate an objection if another country already registered a reservation. Still, absent any other evidence, a push for stronger support for SE4ALL would have delivered a better conclusion to the meeting.

At some point though, SE4ALL was eclipsed in the negotiating process by an attempt to use Rio to create a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, which could eventually replace the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015. Here too, we see a pattern where even cautious improvements in the text were rejected.

Sustainable Development Goals are not articulated in the text. The attempt to express them resulted in a burgeoning list of goals, as parties pitched in their favorite priorities. Instead, the final document establishes a new “high level political forum” charged with starting a process this fall at the opening of the U.N. generally assembly in New York that will come up with a set of new sustainability goals. It is entrusted with a range of things, such as encouraging system-wide participation by all U.N. agencies, enhancing the consultative role of relevant stakeholders in the process, strengthening the science-policy interface for setting goals, and making decision-making more evidenced-based. It will be composed of 30 members, nominated by the member states and representing all regions of the world, and is charged with delivering a final set of recommendations by 2014. This forum also will have an institutional home in the U.N. system and will eventually replace the existing U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development, which was the official convener of the Rio summit.

Still, some of the more interesting additions to the text, which could have improved this process and even staved off some of the criticisms now being levied against it, were jettisoned last week in the push to find consensus early in the meeting.

In the section on financing these new goals, the U.S. moved in several places to modify the overwhelming reliance on public assistance common in the U.N. system. But they did offer an alternative in a proposed section on tax reform to help the poor, which was struck entirely in the final text. Here’s the U.S. proposal:

We reaffirm that national ownership and leadership of development strategies and good governance are important for effective mobilization of domestic financial resources and fostering sustained fiscal reform, including tax reform, which is key to enhancing macroeconomic policies and mobilizing domestic public resources. Countries should also continue to improve budgetary processes and to enhance the transparency of public financial management and the quality of expenditures. We emphasize the need to enhance tax revenues through modernized tax systems, more efficient tax collection, broadening the tax base and effectively combating tax evasion. We stress that these efforts should be undertaken with an overarching view to make tax systems more pro-poor. – US (adapted from Monterrey 16)]

This entire section was struck. The final text, which merely says that member nations recognize “the crucial importance of enhancing financial support from all sources for sustainable development” is not nearly as specific. There were additional attempts to give the financial portions of the Sustainable Development Goals a needed boost, but those proposals were also dropped from the text.

Conclusion

In responding to criticisms of the final text, Brazil’s Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said that if you convened 193 of the protestors in Rio, “they would have difficulty finding a common denominator, too.” He’s likely correct. But given the legacy issues at stake for how this conference will be remembered – and the possibility that the summit will come to be seen as a reason to abandon meetings of this scale – a harder push on the assembled parties to strengthen their commitments would have been worth it.

The opportunity to do that, of course, is now over. We hope that the new commission begins its work by mining earlier drafts of the Rio document for actionable ideas.

Adam James is a Special Assistant and Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Gwynne Taraska is Research Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University.