After Poznan and the EU climate change summit, has anything changed?

It seems not, unfortunately. At the time the biggest economies are spending trillions of dollars trying to keep business as usual (in every sense) it appears that climate change summits continue to be talking shops for defending short-term narrow economic self-interests.

And so after Poznan, European leaders were arguing late last night about whether to agree on cutting CO2 emissions by 20% by 2020 or not, with Poland and Germany dragging their feet because of their reliance on coal generators in the case of the former, and massive manufacturing output, in the case of the later.

Nobody seemed to remember that the Kyoto agreement signed all those years ago committed them to cut emissions by 5% by 2012. So far, those emissions have increased by 9% (on 1990 levels), not decreased, so it seems highly unlikely that meagre target will be reached on time.

The obvious problem with high-level political ‘efforts’ to save the world from cooking itself is that they pretend to be able to do so whilst challenging none of the premises on which our current predicament is based. They pretend that CO2 emissions are the only culprit to our current situation and that somehow, we can reduce those without affecting our current consumption levels and promise of endless economic growth. This really is a case of having your cake and eating it.

Like with the global economic crisis, Bolivia is one of those little countries that has done least to exacerbate the current global climate crisis but also one of those that is already paying a heavy price for it. According to the UK’s ambassador in Bolivia, average temperatures here are increasing 70% higher than in the rest of the world and the effects of climate change could cost 7.3% of GDP in the next 30 years.

In a recent open letter, president Evo Morales put the blame for climate change on capitalism itself, because ‘in the hands of Capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under Capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business.’

So, as you can imagine, his proposals go a little further than those paper promises of reductions in CO2 emissions. What to do?:

a) Challenge the root causes of the problem. As he sees it, this is driven by a capitalist system in which economic growth is all, even at the expense of the planet’s survival. We need to change that before it is too late, and we need to decrease our unsustainable consumption levels.

b) We need to meet CO2 reduction targets and to do it now, not at some unspecified future date. Overall reduction by 2050 should reach 90%, instead of the UK’s current target of 80%.

c) The worst polluters need to address their ecological debt to the world, creating an international fund that transfers at least 1% of their GDP to poor countries to help them adapt to, and mitigate, the worst effects of climate change.

d) Future technological advancements expected to aid the process of adaptation need to be made available to all and not subject to a private regime of patents.

e) Politically, the planet’s survival will require more than market and carbon trading mechanisms for it to work. It will require the participation of global citizens in a way that current efforts don’t envisage. At the top of the political hierarchy, it will require a new UN for climate change to which all financial and trade global institutions are subordinated.

That’s it. It sounds easy, right?