Copenhagen: The Betrayal - by Jonathan Neale

A great wrong has been done in Copenhagen, and a new global movement has been born.
This article is about the wrong. My companion article is about the movement.

We Had No Idea

The agreement that has come out of the UN climate talks is worse than any of the 35,000 activists and experts who went to Copenhagen expected.
None of us saw this coming. Cynics like me expected a failure to agree and a postponement to next year's talks. We had no idea.
Instead, what happened was this. Barack Obama flew in on the last day – Friday. He gave a short rude speech that promised nothing. Then he met with Premier Wen of China for 55 minutes. Then the two of them met with Lula of Brazil, Singh of India and Zuma of South Africa.
Those five men agreed the 'Copenhagen Accord'. The White House issued it to the press with no further agreement from anyone. Obama then flew home.
The UN Climate Conference finished at three the next morning. The chair said they 'noted' the Accord and banged down the gavel.

The Copenhagen Accord

The Accord is two and one half pages long. Previously the Kyoto agreement had agreed reductions targets for rich countries. In the Accord every country will choose its own targets, whatever they feel like, and tell the UN by 31 January.
We had expected further negotiations in Mexico City next December. Most countries still expect that. But the Accord says the first review of the targets will be in 2015.
There is no enforcement or legally binding targets in the Accord. There are no 'politically' binding targets. Nothing.
We expected a failure to agree, and continued negotiations. This is not a failure. This is a quick, brutal coordinated destruction of any international agreement to cut emissions. It is a success for those who want to prevent action.

The Killers

All the hype in the media, and among most activists, had been that the Copenhagen meeting would be a contest between the rich countries and the Global South: Asia, Africa and Latin America. Many had hoped against hope that Obama would be the saviour on the last day.
In fact the leaders of destruction were the rulers of the US, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. Lula, the leader of the great strikes under the dictatorship in Brazil. Zuma, the freedom fighter, the choice of the left and the unions in South Africa. Obama.
As Saturday unfolded, I spoke with one environmental expert after another. They all knew. The former leader of a British environmental NGO, a moderate man, showed me the Accord, tears in his eyes, saying, 'Why did they bother? Two years, tens of thousands of people, all for this, this, this,' - the paper shakes in his hands – 'this piece of shit?'

Why?

How did this happen?
After all, the governments did start out two years ago looking for a flawed, weak agreement. We were going to criticise them, and they were going to feel satisfied.
What has changed in those two years is the scale of the global economic crisis. Capitalism is competition. But the economic crisis means that each bit is in increasingly desperate competition with each other bit. National alliances of corporations – American capital, Indian capital, German capital, Chinese capital, Japanese capital – compete with each other now, with very little margin for success. The capitalists, and their politicians, do not think they can afford the cost to their bit of capital of doing anything about climate change.
Two years ago they thought they could make small moves. Now they don't.
So over the last year all the major governments in North America, Europe and the Global South have been moving away from doing anything.

The Five

Look at the five countries that wrote and signed the accord all by themselves: the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Between them they have just under half the world's population, just under half the world's CO2 emissions, just over a third of the world economy in dollar terms, and over half of the world's industrial workers.
These are coal producers. Coal is the worst fossil fuel, because it is almost all carbon. China, the US and India are the three biggest coal producers in the world. South Africa is fifth.
Brazil has major oil reserves and is destroying the Amazon forest.
All these countries will find it harder, and more expensive, to cut emissions than the industrial powers of the European Union. That is why they sabotaged hope. Copenhagen is the triumph of Big Coal.
But the European leaders were not prepared to fight them. Brown and Milliband crawl to Washington by reflex. For Merkl of Germany and Sarkozy of France it's different. Their governments have stood up to the US before. Here they did not.
No one attacked Obama in public. No one publicly refused to sign the deal. No one walked out of the conference and stayed out.
Sometimes this is because their leaders were personally bought or threatened by the rich countries. But it is also because the corporations and banks in France and Germany are afraid of the cost of doing anything about climate change.

The Consequences

I went to many of the workshops and talks at the NGO run alternative Climate Forum in Copenhagen. Reports from scientists, and from activists in country after country, made clear that the consequences of climate change are here, now.
Scientists from the great universities of the world came, together, to tell us that the prospects were much worse than the UN report had predicted back in 2007.
A delegate from Ghana spoke in one meeting, and I asked a question about the effects of climate change in Northern Ghana. I knew the rains have failed there for the last four years.
'You want to know about the effects of climate change in the north, do you?' he said. He was angry. 'You want to know how many people died this year of climate change in the last place I visited in the North? 261. They took me and showed me where they did the operations in the hospital, and while they were doing them the electricity went off. They showed me where after the birth they had no water to wash the baby or the mother.'
'They are leaving the North.' He was angry at me, at the babbling ineffectual meeting, at the lack of rage in Copenhagen. 'We have nothing for them in the South. They are coming to you.'
The rulers of the world have betrayed those suffering now – the people of Bangladesh, Sudan, Kenya, Chad, Ghana, Afghanistan, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tuvalu the Maldives, and many more. They have betrayed the future of Africa, Asia, and the great coastal cities like New York, Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, Calcutta – and Copenhagen. They have betrayed you, and me. And my children. They have betrayed not just the polar bears and the frogs but the future of every living thing on the planet.
The companion article is about the new global movement to stop them.