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Exploding the Myths of “Carbon Offsets”
Is the New UN Global Warming Report Too Conservative?
The War Machine is Addicted to Oil
The Dialectics of Climate Change
Carbon Neutrality
The Engine of Eco Collapse: Jared Diamond Ignores His Own Lessons
Green Lefts and Left Greens Perspectives on Climate Disaster…
Human Rights Commission to Hear Inuit Challenge to U.S. on Global Warming
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
The Obscenity of Carbon Trading
Australian Text Demolishes Neoliberal Environmental Policies
Omission and Censorship Mark Climate Change Debate
by Zoe Kenny
Global warming has “very likely” been caused by humanity’s actions. This is one of the main conclusions of the fourth assessment report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released on February 2.
The IPCC’s assessment is that it is at least 90% sure that humanity has caused global warming, up from 66% certainty in 2001 when it released its last report. However, despite the media fanfare accompanying this announcement, the IPCC’s conclusions are nothing new.
A 2004 survey by Dr Naomi Oreskes published in Science magazine and made famous by Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, illustrates the level of scientific consensus on the human origins of global warming. The survey examined 928 peer-reviewed articles on global warming between 1993 and 2003 and found that none of them questioned the consensus among scientists that human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global warming.
The fact that it took the IPCC until 2007 to acknowledge this, when an increasing number of the world’s leading climate scientists believe there is a window of only 10 years to take decisive action on global warming, shows that the IPCC is lagging behind, rather than leading, on the fight against global warming.
The IPCC’s long delay on acknowledging the scientific consensus has also given credibility to the views of corporate-funded climate-change sceptics. In a report released on January 3, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) claimed that ExxonMobil (the most profitable fossil-fuel producing company in the world), channelled US$16 million between 1998 and 2005 to groups that seek to confuse the public on the science of global warming in a bid to delay action.
The UCS also released a survey on January 30 that revealed that 150 US government-employed climate scientists have experienced, or felt pressure, to remove the words “climate change” or “global warming” from their reports.
The IPCC report underlines many of the now-familiar, yet still horrifying, facts about global warming — more heat waves, increasingly severe tropical storms, water scarcity, desertification and the continued melting of the world’s ice will devastate the environment and will impact most on the poorest, and therefore most vulnerable, nations.
The report also notes the risks associated with “positive feedback loops”, one being atmospheric concentrations of water vapour, due to warming of the oceans, which intensifies the greenhouse effect. The report also acknowledged that global temperature rises will probably be higher than previously expected, with rises of between 2°C and 4°C almost inevitable, while anywhere up to 6°C cannot be ruled out.
However, despite this grim picture, some scientists have criticised the report for being “too rosy” for seriously underestimating possible sea level rises. The report states that sea level rises could be as little as 60cm by the end of the century rather than the 90cm predicted in previous reports.
Major omission
Lonnie Thompson, an Earth sciences professor at Ohio State University, was quoted in the January 29 Chicago Tribune as saying the IPCC’s low sea level rise estimates are the result of the report not taking “into account [the melting of] the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica”.
According to NASA data, Greenland has been losing 85 square kilometres of ice each year to melting. The Antarctic ice sheet is the world’s greatest mass of ice and is vitally important to the Earth’s weather patterns. If all its ice were to melt, this would raise sea levels by up to 70 metres.
The report’s assessment of potential melting in Antarctica is that, “Current global studies project the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall”.
However, this assessment contradicts the findings of a group of scientists led by Dr John Turner from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), whose studies of Antarctic weather patterns were published in Science in 2006. Turner studied weather patterns between 1971 and 2003 and found that winter air temperatures above the continent had risen by more than 2°C over that period. This was “the largest regional warming on Earth at this level”, according to Turner.
In 2002, the 2000 square kilometre Larsen B ice shelf (weighing 500 billion tonnes) broke off and melted in just over a month. The BAS researchers also reported that in October 2006 another huge ice shelf collapsed into the sea in just over a month. The BAS study also expects that the Antarctic ozone hole, which had had a cooling effect on the continent, will disappear over the next 20 years, leading to further temperature rises of 5°-6°C.
The IPCC’s excuse is that Turner’s study was published after the cut-off date for consideration. However, as the world’s most comprehensive review of the current knowledge of global warming, in which 2500 experts examined thousands of scientific articles, the report’s conclusions will underpin the negotiations for phase two of the Kyoto Protocol process, due to take effect in 2012. The omission of the Antarctic findings could have serious ramifications for how the world deals with global warming.
Davos talkshop
Meanwhile, the annual $60 million World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering of top corporate executives, Western political leaders, and selected intellectuals and journalists, held in Davos, Switzerland, wound up on January 28. While much of the corporate media praised the forum for finally putting global warming at the “front and centre” of its discussions, “solutions” promoted at the WEF were more concerned with greenwashing corporate capitalism than rapidly cutting greenhouse emissions.
Nuclear power and “clean coal” technology were touted as the way forward, despite the fact that there is still no solution to safely storing nuclear power’s radioactive wastes, and ‘clean coal” is an undeveloped technology that even its promoters admit will not be ready to be used for at least another decade.
These two “solutions”, however, guarantee profits for key sections of the corporate elite, providing new contracts for the previously floundering nuclear power companies and continuing investment in coal-powered electricity generation.
The creation of a global carbon trading market was also one of the key goals of WEF. However, this certainly isn’t because of carbon trading’s effectiveness at curbing CO2 emissions, which it has so far failed to do, but rather the growing realisation that carbon trading is highly profitable.
On January 22, Reuters reported that a Citigroup study released that day noted that “even ‘dirty’ power companies can profit from carbon markets, citing the example of [Germany’s] RWE AG, one of Europe’s biggest power-producing companies.
“Under the EU carbon trading program — the bloc’s main climate change strategy — power companies get a certain quota of greenhouse gas emission permits for free, but still pass on the price at which they trade to consumers, bagging a profit.”
“Despite emitting about 90 million tons of carbon dioxide (in 2005), or about 10 percent of Germany’s total, this ’dirty’ utility has been enjoying windfall profits.”
Even business leaders in the US, who were previously dead-set against carbon trading, have begun to formally lobby the Bush administration to adopt this approach for fear that they will lose out on securing their slice of profits from the global carbon market. Duke Energy, the third largest US coal-fuelled power generator and fourth largest US nuclear-power generator, will be a part of the WEF initiative to speed up the creation of a global carbon trading regime.
Blair covers for Bush
At the WEF, British PM Tony Blair emphasised the need for a “more radical” post-2012 Kyoto agreement that commits the US, China and India to binding emission-reduction targets.
However, the almost equal pressure being applied to these countries obscures the vastly unequal contribution that have made to the global warming problem or their capacities to fund solutions to it.
The US is the world’s largest single CO2 emitter, accounting for a quarter of world-wide emissions. It also shares a far greater proportion of responsibility for past emissions. The US’s unmitigated use of fossil fuels has allowed it to develop into the wealthiest nation on Earth.
Blair also spoke of a “quantum shift” in the mood in the US, referring to President George Bush’s January 23 State of the Union speech in which he called for a 20% cut in US petroleum usage over the next 10 years. However, the US has been attempting to steer the IPCC away from advocating binding emission-reduction targets and to include comments in its report about the “benefits” of voluntary reductions as well as other criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol.
Washington has also lobbied for alternatives to cutting emissions to be included in the IPCC’s report, arguing for Bush’s smoke-and-mirrors scheme of “modifying solar radiance” as an alternative solution “if mitigation of emissions fails”. The January 27 Johannesburg Mail & Guardian reported that US representatives on the IPCC proposed “putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption.”
From Green Left Weekly #697, February 7, 2007
Addendum to: Climate Change Doesn’t Scare the Financial Post
Climate Change Doesn’t Scare the Financial Post
Listen Gore: Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis
By Mitchel Cohen
Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking. The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence, exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases, and rising ocean levels.
But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party fare. You’d never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran this country for 8 years and that their policies — as much as those of the Bush regime — helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.
Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.Even there, Gore and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. — a topic which Gore talks about in the movie without any hint that he’d once actually been in a position to do something about it. The question Gore poses is, Who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans? For Gore, it’s sort of “trust US, not THEM, to deal with this situation because they are liars and we’re not.” Well, should we trust him?
As Joshua Frank writes, during the campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that the Clinton-Gore EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. “Only three months into Clinton’s tenure,” Frank writes, “the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton-Gore’s top campaign contributors.”(1)
But failing to shut down toxic incinerators is just the tip of their great betrayal. In the film, Gore references the Kyoto Accords and states that he personally went to Kyoto during the negotiations, giving the impression that he was a key figure in fighting to reduce air pollution emissions that destroy the ozone layer. What he omits is that his mission in going to Kyoto was to scuttle the Accords, to block them from moving forward. And he succeeded.
The Clinton-Gore years were anything but environment-friendly. Under Clinton-Gore, more old growth forests were cut down than under any other recent U.S. administration. “Wise Use” committees — set up by the lumber industry — were permitted to clearcut whole mountain ranges, while Clinton-Gore helped to “greenwash” their activities for public consumption.
Under Clinton-Gore, the biotech industry was given carte blanche to write the US government’s regulations (paltry as they are) on genetic engineering of agriculture, and to move full speed ahead with implementing the private patenting of genetic sequences with nary a qualm passing Gore’s lips.
You’d think watching this film that Gore is just some concerned professor who never had access to power or held hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Occidental Petroleum (driving the U’wa off their lands in Colombia), let alone was the Number Two man actually running the U.S. government!
“Gore, like Clinton who quipped that ‘the invisible hand has a green thumb,’ extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues,” writes Frank, who goes on to quote Jeffrey St. Clair: “Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment. He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia.”(2)
Before Kyoto, before the Clinton-Gore massive depleted uranium bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq, before their missile “deconstruction” of the only existing pharmaceutical production facility in northern Africa in the Sudan (which exacerbated the very serious problems there, as we’re seeing in Darfur today), there was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The task of Clinton-Gore was to push through this legislation which not even strong Republican administrations under Reagan or Bush Sr. had been able to do. Since its inception, NAFTA has undermined U.S. environmental laws, chased production facilities out of the U.S. and across the borders, vastly increased pollution from Maquilladoras (enterprise zones) along the U.S./Mexico border and helped to undermine the indigenous sustainable agrarian-based communities in southern Mexico — as predicted by leftists in both countries, leading to the Zapatista uprising from those communities on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect.
Clinton-Gore also approved the destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida arranged by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, which doomed the Everglades. (In fact, Clinton was on the phone with Alfonso Fanjul, Jr., the chief of the sugar barons, while Monica Lewinsky was busy doing her thing in her famous blue dress under Clinton’s desk.)
Early in Clinton-Gore’s first administration, they pledged they would stop the plunder of the Northwest forests, writes former Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway. “They then double-crossed their environmental backers. Under Bush Sr., the courts had enjoined logging in the Northwest habitats of the spotted owl. Clinton-Gore persuaded environmentalists to join them in axing the injunction. The Clinton administration went before a Reagan-appointed judge who had a record as a stalwart environmentalist and with the eco toadies in tow, got him to remove the injunction, and with it the moratorium on existing timber sales.”(3) Then Gore and Clinton “capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish.”(4)
Gore and Clinton sent to Congress the infamous Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the “Logging without Laws” bill, “perhaps the most gruesome legislation ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health.” Like Bush’s “Healthy Forests” plan, the Clinton-Gore act “was chock full of deception and special interest pandering. ‘When [the Salvage Rider] bill was given to me, I was told that the timber industry was circulating this language among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending Bill,’ environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. ‘There is no question that representatives of the timber industry had a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret.’”(5) What the Salvage Rider did was to “temporarily exempt … salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review,” according to the Wilderness Society — long enough for multinational lumber and paper corporations to clear-cut all but a sliver of the U.S.’s remaining old growth forests.
“Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington’s Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana’s Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington’s majestic Olympic Peninsula — home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta — were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service.”(6)
The assault on nature continued with Gore’s blessing.
Around the same time, Clinton-Gore appointee Carol Browner, head of the EPA, was quoted in the NY Times as having said that the administration would be “relaxing” the Delaney Clause (named after its author, Congressman James Delaney, D-NY). Congress had inserted this clause into section 409 of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958. It prohibited FDA approval of any food additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals. Alone among all food-related directives, this legislation put the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate that their products were safe before they were allowed to become commercially available. (7) A federal appeals court in July 1992 expanded the jurisdiction of the Delaney Clause, ruling that it was applicable to cancer-causing pesticides in processed food. Browner retracted her comment, claiming she’d never said it, but the proof was in the pudding. The ban on cancer-causing additives (the “Precautionary Principle”) that had held through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations was finally removed, not by the Republicans but by the Clinton-Gore administration. Instead of expanding the Delaney clause to protect produce and other unprocessed foods, the new Food Quality Protection Act legislation permitted “safe” amounts of carcinogenic chemicals (as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency) to be added to all food. (According to Peter Montague, editor of Rachel’s Weekly, “no one knows how ’safe amounts’ of carcinogens can be established, especially when several carcinogens and other poisons are added simultaneously to the food of tens of millions of people.) Nevertheless, the Clinton-Gore administration spun this as “progress.”
The Clinton administration, with guidance from Gore’s office, also cut numerous deals over the pesticide Methyl Bromide despite its reported effects of contributing to Ozone depletion and its devastating health consequences on farm workers picking strawberries.
Much is being made these days about the need to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But Clinton-Gore opened the National Petroleum Reserve ” 24 million untouched acres adjacent to the refuge, home to a large caribou herd and numerous arctic species ” to oil drilling. The chief beneficiaary of this was Arco, a major ($1.4 million) contributor to the Democratic Party. At the same time, writes James Ridgeway, “Clinton dropped the ban on selling Alaskan oil abroad. This also benefits Arco, which is opening refineries in China. So although the oil companies won the right to exploit Alaskan oil on grounds that to do so would benefit national development, Clinton-Gore unilaterally changed the agreement so that it benefits China’s industrial growth.”(8)
Not once in the entire film does Gore criticize this awful environmental record or raise the critical questions we need to answer if we are to effectively reverse global warming: Is it really the case that the vast destruction of our environment that went on under his watch and, continuing today, is simply a result of poor consumer choices and ineffective government policies? Is the global environmental devastation we are facing today rectifiable with some simple tuning-up, as Gore proposes?
Neither he — as point man for the Clinton administration on environmental issues — nor Clinton-Gore’s Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (with major ties to Occidental Petroleum), nor the Democratic Party in general offer anything more than putting a tiny Band-Aid on the earth’s gaping wounds, which they themselves helped to gash open.
Clearly, the vast destruction of the global ecology is a consequence not just of poor governmental policies but of the capitalist system’s fundamental drive towards Growth and what passes for Development — Grow or Die. Environmental activists won’t find in Gore the kind of systemic analysis that is needed to stop global warming. Instead, we need to look elsewhere for that sort of deep systemic critique.
NOTES
1. Joshua Frank, Counterpunch, May 31, 2006, Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and edits www.BrickBurner.org2. Jeffrey St. Clair, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, Common Courage Press, 2004.
3. James Ridgeway, “Eco Spaniel Kennedy: Nipping at Nader’s Heels,” Village Voice, Aug. 16-22, 2000.
4,5,6 Joshua Frank.
7. The battle over the Delaney Clause has been ably documented by Rachel’s Weekly, at www.rachel.org8. Ridgeway, op cit.
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of “G”, the newspaper of the New York State Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com. This article originally appeared in Counterpunch, February 2, 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Fidel Castro on Ecology and Climate Change
The Greening of Stephen Harper
by John Allemang
Ignore the Arctic’s melting caps
The warnings on the weather maps,
The ozone layer’s gaping holes,
But Stephen, don’t ignore the polls.
When worried voters all go green,
A nation’s leader must be seen
To turn his platform on a dime
And shift convictions just in time
To save, if not the polar bear,
At least his party’s market share.
Your climate’s changed, if not your views.
Where once it pleased you to abuse
All those who dumped on CO2
As socialism’s wrecking crew,
Now, you pretend to see the light
And fight Stéphane Dion’s good fight.
With born-again believer’s zeal,
Just swear that global warming’s real –
Adapt, unlike the polar bears,
And you’ll survive the pollster’s scares.
From The Globe and Mail, February 3, 2007.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author