Automobiles Check 1

The world’s attention is focused on Copenhagen, Denmark, where on December 7, the United Nations Climate Change Conference began. The two-week meeting—the 15th Conference of the 193 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the fifth meeting of the 189 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol—is supposed to be the culmination of a process set in motion in Bali in 2005, where Parties to the UNFCCC agreed to conclude negotiations on a new global deal by 2009. Highlighting the growing alarm at the effects of climate change, 110 leaders of countries will have attended the conference by its conclusion.

While delegates gathered inside the Bella convention center in suburban Copenhagen, thousands of protesters mobilized to demand real action to stop climate change.

On Saturday, December 12, as many as 100 thousand people marched demanding, “Change the system, not the climate.” In a pre-emptive move against a youth contingent, Danish police arrested nearly 1,000 activists. In the subsequent days, hundreds more have also been detained. Protesters have come from all over the world including from many European countries as well as the United States, Kenya, Belarus, Japan, Mongolia, China and Turkey.

Demonstrators plan to attempt to invade the conference on Dec. 16, in a massive non-violent civil disobedience action to turn the conference into a Peoples Summit for Climate Justice. According to the Rising Tide Network Web site: “Our goal is not to shut down the entire summit. But this day will be ours, it will be the day we speak for ourselves and set the agenda: climate justice now! We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies”

Debunking ‘climate skeptics’ on eve of Copenhagen

In an op-ed article in which she urged President Obama to boycott Copenhagen, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote, “We can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes.” Like many prominent “climate change skeptics” (many of whom happen to be on the payroll of the energy industry), Palin took heart at the revelation of stolen private emails among climate scientists in the UK to once again cast doubt on the scientific basis for the dangers of climate change.

Alan Leshner, executive publisher of Science magazine, sharply rebuked Palin on the science of climate change: “It is wrong to suggest that apparently stolen emails, deployed on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit, somehow refute a century of evidence based on thousands of studies.”

Leshner is unequivocal that climate change caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation is now underway and its scientific basis is clear. “Now, policymakers must decide whether to act on the evidence or to avoid facing one of the most crucial issues of our generation,” he wrote.

Because of human activity, carbon dioxide is rapidly accumulating in the atmosphere. These gases trap the sun’s radiation, causing temperatures on Earth to rise. Research on tree rings shows that there is now more atmospheric carbon than there has been for at least the past 650,000 years. Data also show that the global temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. Because of climate change the planet faces melting glaciers, rising sea levels, shifts in species ranges, and other effects.

Who is to blame for climate change?

Often, developing nations such as China and India are blamed for the deepening crisis. But the United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible 25 percent of greenhouse gases, the most of any nation.

The primary source of carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions is the burning of fossil fuels. The bulk of these come from energy industry emissions and from the use of private automobiles. The energy and auto industries have fought tooth and nail to oppose any controls on carbon emissions, because this would cut into their profits.

Meanwhile, developing countries bear over nine-tenths of the costs of climate change, including an annual death toll of 300,000 from weather-related disasters, and economic losses amounting to $125 billion per year.

Negotiations in Denmark have bogged down as the world’s richest nations demand binding emissions reductions be imposed on poor and underdeveloped countries, while seeking to lock in a higher rate of emissions in perpetuity for the richest nations. This was evidenced by the “Danish text,” a leaked secret draft agreement written by the United States and Denmark.

A relatively moderate draft agreement was strongly criticized by the United States, the European Union, Japan and Australia. The language of this draft called for major developing nations to reduce emissions with outside financial help. The imperialist nations want binding emissions reductions from poor countries even if they do not receive outside financial assistance in making these reductions.

The arrogance of wealthy nations is nowhere more apparent than in this demand. The richest imperialist countries created a profound, deepening crisis with their unfettered industrial production. Now they demand the countries they exploited in their pursuit of profit be the ones to make the sacrifices urgently needed to reduce emissions.

According to Don Marut of Peoples Movement on Climate Change, “A deal like this will effectively lock rich countries’ disproportionate share of the atmospheric space, and take away from developing countries and their poor majorities the right to develop. It asks the poor to remain in poverty, while they suffer from climate change. Poor countries cannot be expected to prioritize emissions cuts, not while millions in them still struggle to overcome poverty and realize their rights.”

Protesters are also demanding an end to market-based “solutions” to global warming. “Nuclear energy, biofuels, carbon trading, carbon capture and storage, biochar, genetically modified crops, geo-engineering—they all try to keep the unsustainable corporate-led and profit-centered economic system that caused climate change in the first place, and they also pose threats to the health, security, and livelihood of local and indigenous communities. They should all be rejected,” said Wahu Kaara of PMCC.

In fact, nothing of real substance could ever emerge from the Danish conference. Capitalist methods will never solve the crises caused by capitalism itself. Only a progressive people’s movement can do that, led by those who place the needs of humanity over the growing wealth of a small clique of rulers. Climate change might one day become the urgent catalyst for a global movement of resistance to the domination of the world’s resources by a tiny rich minority.