Day 1 — COP17, Durban: Monday, November 28, 2011
iicat scholars John Foran and Richard Widick are in fact here, in Durban, at the international climate negotiations, participating, as it were, in the process. This first entry comes to you after 33 hours of travel and then many technological trials and tribulations, beginning with network failures at LAX, Paris de Gaulle, and our lovely residence here in Durban. After 3 days, this is our first opportunity to get word out of our progress.
That said, in every other respect we are having great luck. We arrived at the heavily fortified ICC and registered last night, a very easy process. This morning we walked to the C17 Peoples Space at KwaZulu Natal University (UKZN) and registered for the COP17 Civil Society Peoples Space counter summit before 8AM and grabbed a taxi down to the ICC. Entry to the ICC COP17 is equivalent to airport security screening for international flights. Concrete barriers topped with wire fencing surround the entire affair, and hundreds of police are everywhere–the feeling is very peaceful and even subdued. The Hilton Hotel, where many of the delegates are staying, is actually inside the policed grounds of the conference, a sort of Green Zone of climate change.
Today’s highlight:
The Third World Network held an open meeting this afternoon titled ‘What Must Durban Deliver? Is the international climate regime evolving or unraveling?’ At this side event we hope to begin what promises to be a 10 day marathon of formal documentation of the process, networking and interviews. The session was superb, with excellent presentations from Martin Khor of the South Centre delivering a devastating account of the the global atmospheric commons, which requires global CO2 emissions to stay under approximately 1,000 gigatons to prevent global warming of less than 2 degrees centigrade, whereas at present the world puts up around 45-48 gigatons of Co2 per year, at which rate the world would have to reduce emissions to zero by 2032. To stay under the more stringent rise in temperature of 1.5 degrees, the demand of the most progressive countries here (Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, and other members of the ALBA coalitions of radical Latin American states), we would have to emit less than 500 gigatons of C)2, meaning reaching zero emissions by 2022. This means that the world must take very strong measures without delay. Every passing year makes these targets more unlikely to be reached.
Linda Lim of the Third World Network pointed out that Canada, Russia, and Japan have already said they will not seek a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing global agreement on climate change measures. The first commitment period expires at the end of 2012 (although this does not mean the end of the Protocol itself, as almost everyone in the world believes, she pointed out). The most progressive governments of the Third World, such as ALBA in Latin America, and the 47-member Association of Small Island States which includes the Maldives and Tuvalu, who among others face complete inundation of their countries if the COP process doesn’t soon (either at Durban or next year) deliver the sort of agreement mentioned above. By the weay, it is these nations, and these nations alone, who are putting forth proposals here that are in keeping with the global scientific consensus of what needs to be done, produced by the UN’s own International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) in a series of reports over the past decade.
Meena Rahman of the Third World Network warned of the danger that the proposed Green Climate Fund — whereby the rich nations are ethically bound to contribute to a vast fund (at least $100 billion a year) to be used to transfer the best alternative technology to allow both development and fewer greenhouse gas emissions — is in danger of being turned by the rich nations (our preferred term for the First World — let’s call it what it is) into a “Greedy Corporate Fund” that would be driven by profitable carbon trading markets that do nothing to halt emissions and are frequently abused by FW governments and global corporations. She points out that the target of $100 billion dollars a year which they are backing away from — and even the $800 billion to $1.5 trillion that Martin Khor said was really needed — could easily be raised from the rich nations if they redirected their budgets away from military expenditures to the Fund. Let us not forget that the US annually spends over $1 trillion on its military (not even counting the expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which would double this figure), a sum equivalent to the military spending of every other country on the planet.
Kate Horner of Friends of the Earth US provided a sharp attack on US actions, calling out the corporations, Wall Street, carbon lobbyists, and US government, at home and abroad, on many issues, for a long time, and here again at COP17.
The final speaker, Muhammad Adow, of Christian Aid, underscored that even the supposedly enlightened European Union was backing away from its commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, to which they are bound by an international treaty they signed at Kyoto in 1997, simply letting Canada, Japan, and Russia, among others, do the dirty work of stating publicly what the EU is concluding privately. Indeed, the Guardian newspaper, one of the best on these issues in the world, reported last week that the rich nations were essentially saying in private that the world should let the Kyoto Protocol die quietly, and start over, with goal of agreeing to a binding treaty by 2016, to go into effect in 2020 (because the global financial crisis they are responsible for means that climate change must take a back seat to their own development). That this would spell disaster for us all is spelled out in Martin Khor’s figures above.
It was a spectacularly good analysis of the COP process by some of global civil society’s most eloquent voices, and it is vital that such NGOs have a presence here, if only to shame those delegates who strut around so importantly in their expensive suits.
What should be done? Linda Lim and other speakers on today’s panel, suggest that the measures called for by the existing Kyoto Protocol be adhered to, and that a strong second commitment period be agreed.
Meanwhile, Michael K. Dorsey of Climate Justice Now!, a network of many of the world’s clijmate justice organizations, whose Durban chapter is hosting the People’s Space, was scheduled to be the first civil society speaker at the opening plenary of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation, was told at the end of the seesion that they had run out of time. His statement will instead be entered into the proceedings of the SBI. One hopes that the official delegates will read it, for it reports that recently “the largest Swiss Bank UBS, repeated what is becoming a common mantra: carbon prices are too low to even have an environmental impact” so CJN is calling for the abandonment, completely, of the so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM, the COP loves acronyms) and the de-linking of any forms of climate financing to market mechanisms, etc.
Why is this important in the present context? In our view the sentiment reflects what we are hearing and seeing everywhere here — no one we are meeting is hopeful for a great Durban outcome at the international level, which more and more appears to leaning further into market solutions. Hope lies with the most progressive of the country delegations, as mentioned above, and with the global climate justiuce moevemtn itself, which is alive and well in Durban, South Africa.
In fact, it is growing stronger with every passing day.
More on all of this later…. This evening at Durban City Hall the UNFCCC is hosting an open reception, at which we hope to be rubbing shoulders with world dignitaries from, well, all over the world!
Occupy!
Richard and John