Farce and realpolitiks in Copenhagen climate talks

ARHUS, Denmark—The climate talks in Copenhagen were a farce – and an expensive farce at 200+ million bucks – but they were important in exposing the world political order for what it is. And it’s not pretty.

The farce was so complex and deep-seated, and there were so many unlikely characters complicit in it, that it’s hard to begin to describe it. The circus of us “primordial apes,” in the words of George Monbiot, presuming that we really know what we’re doing to the planet, and speaking loudly and confidently about numbers like 2 degrees and 350 parts per million and the idea that it’s all killing Africa, now, and swamping Bangladesh, now — it was breathtaking. Our descendants, watching us on their gerry-rigged solar-powered DVD machines, will laugh their asses off at our conceits. “Those silly monkeys,” they’ll call us.

Africa has been getting killed, without pause or pardon, for a long time. Climate change might make it worse, or it might green the Sahara and invite back the hippos and gazelles, but we don’t need to wait for 2050 to see the impacts on Africa of crimes in places like Washington and Brussels and Beijing. It’s not so easy as turning on our TVs to see this, fortunately for the good couch people just trying to relax after a long day of burning fossil fuels. But it’s happening at a growing rate, as the Great Powers scramble for whatever is left of Africa to pillage.

It was the explicit emergence of these Powers, which included importantly China, that was the defining moment of the climate talks. President Obama stormed into a secret meeting of the major emerging countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – and pulled together a “deal,” reflecting how the world is now structured. The UN is a dying body, its diplomacy revealed as a charade. The curtain has been drawn back on the real world of big power politics, struggles over resources, and the right to pollute the skies.

Two weeks earlier, the conference started off in familiar but fantastical territory. It featured a great chasm of interest reflecting the colonial era and its turbulent aftermath. On one side stood the so-called G77 group plus China, which actually includes more than 130 countries of what formerly was known as the Third World and should be so known again. It was a bizarre grouping, throwing together countries like Saudi Arabia and China with Madagascar and Fiji. On the other side stood the US, the EU, Japan and a few good lackey countries like Canada and Australia.

The rhetoric from the developing world was of a strong moral character, which made sense until you realized that they were talking about a world that no longer exists. Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese negotiator, said the text negotiated by the Americans asked “Africa to sign a suicide pact.” Saying it was “devoid of any sense of responsibility and morality,” he added: “The promise of $100 billion will not bribe us to destroy the continent.”

Who knows, maybe $200 billion might have been enough. Negotiators from Western countries and the hangers-on trying to hustle big-ticket tech solutions or just trying to tap into climate “aid” money don’t have much time for weeping about Tuvalu and Bangladesh. But for a lot of the tens of thousands of people either in the Bella Center or trying to get in, the idea was simple and compelling: the “historical emitters” like the US and UK, which became “rich” from burning fossil fuels, are responsible for the loss of lives and livelihoods of countries that are most vulnerable to climate-related impacts like bad storms, drought and pest attacks. The US delegation might reject the logic of reparations, reflecting probably the majority view of US consumizens, but there were a lot of people here, like this writer, who see the sense of it.

There are many devilish details to discuss about dumping money on notoriously corrupt governments, who are complicit in their role as conveyor belts of bad development and brutal iniquity stretching from the US to uranium mines in Uzbekistan and everywhere else on the planet. But the idea that the wealth of Illinois owes something to the poverty of Peru was out front in these climate talks, as leaders rapped eloquently or stridently about the need for both less fossil fuel burning by rich countries and more money for poor countries to survive the burning we’ve already done. US and European negotiators were revealed as agents of mean-spirited and ignorant people stretching across most of the northern hemisphere. Obama came to Copenhagen, took the stage and then spoke right past the assembled dignitaries to Fox News and its hordes, telling them not to worry about America caving to these rabid ferrners. I’m one of you, he said, but he wasn’t talking to the rest of the world.

Anyway, that was the show. Who knows what Obama thinks, what his longer-term game plan is, or what his bright people have in store for us. He has a desperate fight back home that naturally weighs heavier for him than does the show of indignation by a gaggle of elite national leaders and their crews.

What we do know is that he found himself locked out of a meeting by the so-called Basic gang: Brazil, South Africa, India and China. He bulled in to the meeting, apparently calmed some ruffled feathers, and then helped broker a deal that split the fictitious G77 and brought into the sun one of the key relationships of our future world: the realpolitik of the big burners and the big polluters, with everyone else standing outside either clutching their bribes or rubbing their bruised egos. In the end, if the seas are to really rise, then Tuvalu is still screwed. The people of Europe who want to assure a safe and prosperous future for their children – and one that won’t require any sacrifices today – were sold out by a pact between mainly the US and China to divide up the great waste dump in the sky.

The pact didn’t really sell in the end. The conference “took note” of the thing and agreed to do next year what they had earlier agreed to do this year. The UN gave it some predictable spin, with the side-lined secretary general making some nonsensical but predictable statement about “sealing the deal.” Obama put a happy face on it, but he gave the Republicans basically what they want and will still be excoriated for it by the Know Nothings. Anyway, his fight is in the Senate now, not with the Third World or Brussels or anywhere else.

The US will probably pass a law that will take halting steps toward reducing coal burning, with maybe some good stuff in investments in renewable energy and efficiency. But it will not be party to an international treaty that says it has to do these things. China will probably make big strides toward renewable energy, while at the same time dramatically increasing its burning of coal. They’ll both keep going after the rest of the oil, probably coming to blows over it, for the rest of our lives.

The EU will move toward energy self-sufficiency, but in the medium term will stay trapped in an unfriendly co-dependent relationship with Russia. Brazil and India will grow and grow and the high-consuming segments of their populations (also known as high emitters) will combine with their counterparts in China and the US and try to suck the life out of what’s left of the biosphere.

The biosphere, in its turn, together with the world’s burgeoning gang of have-nots, will take corrective action, and we’ll all be in for a wild and bloody show. The world is now divided between the big emitters and everyone else. There are small emitters in the ghettos of D.C. and the villages of China, but the Great Game of the future will be played between those in each country with the power to determine, and disproportionately profit from, the burning and spewing that’s to come.

The drama and conflict that will play out, though, will be independent from the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. Our theft of oil from local people and future generations, and the biological and economic chaos that will accompany the race to use up the rest of the black stuff, will precede the potential consequences of carbon pollution by decades. They talk a lot at these conferences about the flooding of Tuvalu, but they never talk about the coming war with Iran or the invasion of Venezuela. But these things, and many others, will probably herald the arrival of the Four Horseman a lot more quickly than the melting of Antarctica.

A big remaining question mark is what the so-called civil society will do. The big NGOs like WWF and Greenpeace, not to mention age-old centrists like the Sierra Club, etc., have too much to lose by going out into the cold and challenging the burners from outside the system. They’re a big part of the Climate Industry, and it would be a bad career move to suggest that the whole UN climate process was a big hustle and distraction.

Still, some of their rhetoric is promising. One example, from John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK: “It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

If they really mean that, and the anti-WTO gang gets really involved, the next conference in Mexico City next year could actually be pretty interesting. On the street, anyway.

No climate and farming blog yet, sorry; had to get the politics out of my spleen first.