Number 99: You Can Help Build C&C
More on Ottawa’s Fraudulent Global Warming Plan
Pamphlet: Fidel Castro on Global Warming, Biofuels and World Hunger
NASA: Earth’s Climate Is Approaching Dangerous Point
Australian Socialists Demand Radical GHG Limits
Alliance adopts radical greenhouse gas emissions reduction target
May 26, 2007: The Socialist Alliance has adopted radical greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets—95% of stationary power emissions and 60% of overall emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2020, and 90% of overall emissions by 2030.
The targets are minima and provisional. In adopting them at its May meeting the Alliance’s National Executive recognised that many Alliance members support even tougher emission reduction targets—including a zero emissions goal by 2020—and decided to actively invite amendments to the policy from members and branches.
These amendments will be considered at the June meeting of the National Executive and a final set of targets endorsed.
The targets are the most radical yet adopted by a registered political party in Australia. Alliance National Coordinator Dick Nichols commented: “These targets are dictated by the global warming crisis. The science is telling us that we have to arrest the growth in greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible. Otherwise we risk crossing the crisis threshold of a two degree increase in average global temperatures—with unimaginable consequences.”
The Alliance National Executive also set up an editing group with the job of producing the party’s draft Climate Change Charter—a popular explanation of its diagnosis of global warming and policy proposals for fighting it.
“The environment, especially climate change, will be at the centre of this year’s federal election”, Nichols said. “The Alliance will be campaigning vigorously for a radical switch to renewables, a massive expansion of public transport and a radical reduction in energy waste, especially in industry.
“We shall also champion the polluter pays principle, so that the cost of fighting climate change doesn’t fall on the shoulders of working people but on the corporate polluters and energy guzzlers.”
Nichols also stressed that the Alliance would also be explaining that the various carbon trading schemes presently under consideration could not reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough—the energy corporations and corporate energy users would never accept the level of carbon price needed to force the rapid elimination of their greenhouse gas generating investments.
The Alliance National Executive also voted to establish the position of climate change coordinator, and elected long-term environmental activist Dr Kamala Emanuel to the position. For further information. Kamala Emanuel 0417 319 662 Dick Nichols 0425 221 565.
The Socialist Alliance´s special dossier on climate change is available at: www.socialist-alliance.org/resources/idb/AV%20Vol%207%20No%201.pdf.
Paraguayan Campesinos Protest Biofuel Production Urgent Call for Solidarity and Support
Paraguayan Activists Demand an End to Agro-Fuel Monoculture
Climate Justice Now! The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Are Worse Than the IPCC’s Worst Case
Emissions Trading and ‘Clean Development’ — Climate Policies That Don’t Work
Ottawa’s Global Warming Plan: ‘A complete and total fraud designed to mislead the Canadian people’
UN Climate Report Says Corporate Polluters Can Save Us
Canada in Bonn: a Trojan horse for anti-Kyoto countries
Worth Framing
Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed
George Monbiot Interview: "If We Don’t Deal with Climate Change We Condemn Hundreds of Millions of People to Death"
Biofuel Production in Brazil: Working Conditions Worse Than Slavery
Fidel Castro: The Biofuels Debate Heats Up
The Debate Heats Up
by Fidel Castro Ruz, May 9, 2007
Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), wrote an article for the 6th Hemispheric Meeting of Struggle against the FTAs and for the Integration of Peoples which just wrapped up in Havana; he was kind enough to send it to me along with a letter.
The gist of what he wrote I have summarized using exact quotes of paragraphs and phrases in his article; it reads as follows:
Pre-capitalist societies already knew about oil which surfaced in shallow deposits and they used for non-commercial purposes, such as waterproofing the wooden hulls of ships or in textile products, or for torches. Its original name was ‘petroleum’ or stone-oil.
By the end of the 19th century –after the discovery of large oilfields in Pennsylvania, United States, and the technological developments propelled by the massive use of the internal combustion engine– oil became the energy paradigm of the 20th century.
Energy is conceived of as just merchandise. Like Marx warned us, this is not due to the perversity or callousness of some individual capitalist or another, but rather the consequence of the logic of the accumulation process, which is prone to the ceaseless “mercantilism” that touches on all components of social life, both material and symbolic. The mercantilist process did not stop with the human being, but simultaneously extended to nature. The land and its products, the rivers and the mountains, the jungles and the forests became the target of its irrepressible pillage. Foodstuffs, of course, could not escape this hellish dynamic. Capitalism turns everything that crosses its path into merchandise.
Foodstuffs are transformed into fuels to make viable the irrationality of a civilization that, to sustain the wealth and privilege of a few, is brutally assaulting the environment and the ecologic conditions which made it possible for life to appear on Earth.
Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.
Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there that the greatest reserves of the earth’s biomass required to produce biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.
The main lessons taught us by FAO data on the subject of agricultural land and the consumption of fertilizers are the following:
- Agricultural land per capita in developed capitalism almost doubles that existing in the underdeveloped periphery: 3.26 acres per person in the North as opposed to 1.6 in the South; this is explained by the simple fact that close to 80 percent of the world population live in the underdeveloped periphery.
- Brazil has slightly more agricultural land per capita than the developed countries. It becomes clear that this nation will have to assign huge tracts of its enormous land surface to meet the demands of the new energy paradigm.
- China and India have 1.05 and 0.43 acres per person respectively.
- The small nations of the Antilles, with their traditional one-crop agriculture, that is sugarcane, demonstrate eloquently its erosive effects exemplified by the extraordinary rate of consumption of fertilizers per acre needed to support this production. If in the peripheral countries the average figure is 109 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare (as opposed to 84 in developed countries), in Barbados the figure is 187.5, in Dominica 600, en Guadeloupe 1,016, in St. Lucia 1,325 and in Martinique 1,609. The use of fertilizers is tantamount to intensive oil consumption, and so the much touted advantage of agrifuels to reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons seems more an illusion than a reality.
The total agricultural land of the European Union is barely sufficient to cover 30 percent of their current needs for fuel but not their future needs that will probably be greater. In the United States, the satisfaction of their current demand for fossil fuels would require the use of 121 percent of all their agricultural land for agrifuels.
Consequently, the supply of agrifuels will have to come from the South, from capitalism’s poor and neocolonial periphery. Mathematics does not lie: neither the United States nor the European Union have available land to support an increase in food production and an expansion of the production of agrifuels at the same time.
Deforestation of the planet would increase the land surface suitable for agriculture (but only for a while). Therefore this would be only for a few decades, at the most. These lands would then suffer desertification and the situation would be worse than ever, aggravating even further the dilemma pitting the production of food against that of ethanol or biodiesel.
The struggle against hunger –and there are some 2 billion people who suffer from hunger in the world– will be seriously impaired by the expansion of land taken over by agrifuel crops. Countries where hunger is a universal scourge will bear witness to the rapid transformation of agriculture that would feed the insatiable demand for fuels needed by a civilization based on their irrational use. The only result possible is an increase in the cost of food and thus, the worsening of the social situation in the South countries.
Moreover, the world population grows 76 million people every year who will obviously demand food that will be steadily more expensive and farther out of their reach.
In The Globalist Perspective, Lester Brown predicted less than a year ago that automobiles would absorb the largest part of the increase in world grain production in 2006. Of the 20 million tons added to those existing in 2005, 14 million were used in the production of fuels, and only 6 million tons were used to satisfy the needs of the hungry. This author affirms that the world appetite for automobile fuel is insatiable. Brown concluded by saying that a scenario is being prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the 800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers.
The devastating impact of increased food prices, which will inexorably happen as the land is used either for food or for fuel, was demonstrated in the work of C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, two distinguished professors from the University of Minnesota, in an article published in the English language edition of the Foreign Affairs magazine whose title says it all: “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor”. The authors claim that in the United States the growth of the agrifuel industry has given rise to increases not only in the price of corn, oleaginous seeds and other grains, but also in the prices of apparently unrelated crops and products. The use of land to grow corn which will feed the fauces of ethanol is reducing the area for other crops. The food processors using crops such as peas and young corn have been forced to pay higher prices in order to ensure their supplies. This is a cost that will eventually be passed on to the consumer. The increase in food prices is also hitting the livestock and poultry industries. The higher costs have produced an abrupt decrease in income, especially in the poultry and pork sectors. If income continues to decrease, so will production, and the prices of chicken, turkey, pork, milk and eggs will increase. They warn that the most devastating effects of increasing food prices will be felt especially in Third World countries.
Studies made by the Belgian Office of Scientific Affairs shows that biodiesel causes more health and environmental hazards because it creates a more pulverized pollution and releases more pollutants that destroy the ozone layer.
With regards to the argument claming that the agrifuels are harmless, Victor Bronstein, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, has demonstrated that:
- It is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy source, given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight but the availability of water and suitable soil conditions. If this were not the case, we would be able to grow corn or sugarcane in the Sahara Desert. The effects of large-scale production of biofuels will be devastating.
- It is not true that they do not pollute. Even if ethanol produces less carbon emissions, the process to obtain it pollutes the surface and the water with nitrates, herbicides, pesticides and waste, and the air is polluted with aldehydes and alcohols that are carcinogens. The presumption of a “green and clean” fuel is a fallacy.
The proposal of agrifuels is unviable, and it is ethically and politically unacceptable. But it is not enough just to reject it. It is necessary to implement a new energy revolution, but one that is at the service of the people and not at the service of the monopolies and imperialism. This is, perhaps, the most important challenge of our time, concludes Atilio Borón.
As you can see, this summary took up some space. We need space and time; practically a book. It has been said that the masterpiece which made author Gabriel García Márquez famous, One Hundred Years of Solitude, required him to write fifty pages for each page that was printed. How much time would my poor pen need to refute those who for a material interest, ignorance, indifference or even for all three at the same time defend the evil idea and to spread the solid and honest arguments of those who struggle for the life of the species?
Some very important opinions and points of view were discussed at the Hemispheric Meeting in Havana. We should talk about those that brought us real-life images of cutting sugarcane by hand in a documentary film that seemed a reflection of Dante’s Inferno. A growing number of opinions are carried by the media every day and everywhere in the world, from institutions like the United Nations right up to national scientific associations. I simply perceive that the debate is heating up. The fact that the subject is being discussed is already an important step forward.
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Fidel Castro: An Immediate Energy Revolution is Essential
Stopping Climate Change? Rich Nations Aren’t Even Trying
Giving Up on Two Degrees
by George Monbiot
From www.monbiot.com. Published in the The Guardian, 1st May 2007
The rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie. You won’t find this statement in the draft of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to the Guardian last week. But as soon as you understand the numbers, the words form before your eyes. The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.
The British government, the European Union and the United Nations all claim to be trying to prevent “dangerous” climate change. Any level of climate change is dangerous for someone, but there is a broad consensus about what this word means: two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is dangerous because of its direct impacts on people and places (it could, for example, trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet [1] and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest [2]) and because it is likely to stimulate further warming, as it encourages the world’s natural systems to start releasing greenhouse gases.
The aim of preventing more than 2°C of warming has been adopted overtly by the UN [3] and the European Union [4] and implicitly by the British, German and Swedish governments. All of them say they are hoping to confine the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level which would prevent 2°C from being reached. And all of them know that they have set the wrong targets, based on outdated science. Fearful of the political implications, they have failed to adjust to the levels the new research demands.
This isn’t easy to follow, but please bear with me, as you cannot understand the world’s most important issue without grappling with some numbers. The average global temperature is affected by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This concentration is usually expressed as “carbon dioxide equivalent”. It is not an exact science – you cannot say that a certain concentration of gases will lead to a precise increase in temperature – but scientists discuss the relationship in terms of probability. A paper published last year by the climatologist Malte Meinshausen suggests that if greenhouse gases reach a concentration of 550 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent, there is a 63-99% chance (with an average value of 82%) that global warming will exceed two degrees [5]. At 475 parts the average likelihood is 64%. Only if concentrations are stabilized at 400 parts or below is there a low chance (an average of 28%) that temperatures will rise by over two degrees.
The IPCC’s draft report contains similar figures. A concentration of 510 parts per million (ppm) gives us a 33% chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming [6]. A concentration of 590ppm gives us a 10% chance [7]. You begin to understand the scale of the challenge when you discover that the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (using the IPCC’s formula) is 459ppm [8]. We have already exceeded the safe level. To give ourselves a high chance of preventing dangerous climate change, we will need a programme so drastic that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere end up below the current concentrations. The sooner this happens, the greater the chance of preventing two degrees of warming.
But no government has set itself this task. The European Union and the Swedish government have established the world’s most stringent target. It is 550ppm, which gives us a near certainty of an extra 2°C. The British government makes use of a clever conjuring trick. Its target is also “550 parts per million”, but 550 parts of carbon dioxide alone. When you include the other greenhouse gases, this translates into 666ppm carbon dioxide equivalent (a fitting figure) [9]. According to the Stern Report, at 650ppm there is a 60 – 95% chance of 3°C of warming [10]. The government’s target, in other words, commits us to a very dangerous level of climate change.
The British government has been aware that it has set the wrong target for at least four years. In 2003 the environment department found that “with an atmospheric CO2 stabilization concentration of 550ppm, temperatures are expected to rise by between 2°C and 5°C” [11]. In March last year it admitted that “a limit closer to 450ppm or even lower, might be more appropriate to meet a 2°C stabilization limit.” [12] Yet the target has not changed. Last October I challenged the environment secretary, David Miliband, over this issue on Channel 4 News. He responded as if he had never come across it before.
The European Union is also aware that it is using the wrong figures. In 2005 it found that “to have a reasonable chance to limit global warming to no more than 2°C, stabilization of concentrations well below 550 ppm CO2 equivalent may be needed.” [13] But its target hasn’t changed either.
Embarrassingly for the government and for left-wingers like me, the only large political entity which seems able to confront this is the British Conservative Party. In a paper published a fortnight ago, it called for an atmospheric stabilization target of 400-450ppm carbon dioxide equivalent [14]. Will this become policy? Does Cameron have the guts to do what his advisers say he should?
In my book Heat I estimate that to avoid two degrees of warming we require a global emissions cut of 60% per capita between now and 2030 [15]. This translates into an 87% cut in the United Kingdom. This is a much stiffer target than the British government’s – which requires a 60% cut in the UK’s emissions by 2050. But my figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper in the journal Climatic Change emphasizes that the sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2°C of warming requires a global cut of 80% by 2050 [16].
This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If the population were to rise from 6 to 9 billion between now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations like us. The UK’s emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%.
But our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, they condemn millions to death. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to start treating it as an international emergency.
We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens to become the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by November this year [17], partly because it manufactures many of the products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to decarbonize its growing economy, and help to pay. We need a major diplomatic offensive – far more pressing than it has been so far – to persuade the United States to do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands.
References:1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, February 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Summary for Policymakers.
2. Rachel Warren, 2006. “Impacts of Global Climate Change at Different Annual Mean Global Temperature Increases.” In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
3. F.R. Rijsberman and R.J. Swart (Eds), 1990. Targets and indicators of climate change: Report of Working Group II of the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases. Stockholm Environment Institute.
4. Council of the European Union, 11th March 2005. Information note 7242/05.
5. Malte Meinshausen, 2006. “What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates.” In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
6. The IPCC uses the words “Unlikely” and “Very Unlikely”. These have precise definitions in the IPCC process: a 33% likelihood and a 10% likelihood. For the full set of definitions, see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, February 2007, ibid.
7. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Mitigation of Climate Change. Unpublished draft report, version 3.0. Table SPM 1.
8. The figures the IPCC uses in Table SPM 1 suggest that the other greenhouse gases account for 21% of the climate change due to carbon dioxide alone. This is a high estimate – other authors (eg Sir Nicholas Stern, the UK Department for Environment), suggest 10 or 15%.
9. Again, I use the IPCC’s formula here. Other estimates would produce a slightly lower figure.
10. Sir Nicholas Stern, October 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury. Part 3, p194.
11. DEFRA, 2003. The Scientific Case for Setting a Long-Term Emission Reduction Target.
12. HM Government, March 2006. Climate Change: The UK Programme 2006.
13. Council of the European Union, ibid.
14. Nick Hurd MP and Clare Kerr, April 2007. Don’t give up on 2°C. Conservative Party’s Quality of Life Commission.
15. This is on the basis of a metric developed by Colin Forrest. He is not a professional climate scientist but his calculations can be replicated by any numerate person. For details, see Chapter 1 of Heat.
16. Nathan Rive et al, 10th March 2007. “To what extent can a long-term temperature target guide near-term climate change commitments?” Table 1. Climatic Change 82:373-391. DOI 10.1007/s10584-006-9193-4
17. John Vidal, 25th April 2007. “China could overtake US as biggest emissions culprit by November.” The Guardian.