This September activists from 21 countries came together in Copenhagen to plan for direct action during the 2009 UN Climate talks that will be held in that city. Activists in North America are beginning to organize for what will be a historic day. To read the call to action go to click here. The following essay explores the many reasons we should be skeptical of the UN Climate talks. Hopefully this essay from the UK will spark some debate within the US climate movement on the role of corporations, market based mechanisms, and large NGO’s in fighting for climate justice.
Another world is possible only without a global resource management shaped by structures of domination
U. Brand
September 2008
In the last twenty years, climate change and its potential and real impacts have become more and more obvious. This is due to the results of scientific research but also to environmental movements, media, critical intellectuals, progressive state officials and alternative energy producers who have focussed social and political attention on the implications of the problem. With the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol, an international political mechanism was developed in the 1990s.
More recently, i.e. in the last two years, the issue of climate change has climbed to the top of the political agenda: This has to do with the publications of the Fourth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern Report, the latter with its simple and economistic message , with sky rocking energy prices and the argument that ‘peakoil’ has been reached, which refers to the fact that from now on less new oil resources are found than are consumed. The IPCC and Al Gore won the Peace Nobel Price, the G8 summits in 2007 in Germany and 2008 in Japan had energy and climate change questions high on the agenda. The Conferences of the Parties of the FCCC in Bali in December 2007 became a gathering with global mass media coverage.
Nonetheless, we can observe that not much has changed in the last twenty years. Oil and gas consumption have increased enormously, production and consumption patterns are still the same and, moreover, these processes have rapidly been globalised through transnational capital, state policies and the way of life of a global middle class.
This has one major reason: Environmental policies in general and climate change policies in particular are formulated in line with dominant politics and related interests. Today, the dominant politics are neoliberal and neoimperial, orientated towards competitiveness and maintaining and enhancing the power of Northern governments, corporations and societies. Policies are in the interest of the owners of assets and of the global middle classes including the middle classes of economically emerging countries such as China, India or Brazil. The Western lifestyle still promotes its attractiveness worldwide. Human wellbeing and social security are still equated with economic growth and this means resource intensive growth of car production, of airports, of industrialised farming etc. Continue reading ‘Towards radical critique and action on climate change politics and Copenhagen 2009′