Obama’s third war—on the developing world

BY JANET CONTURSI

The lesson from the Copenhagen climate talks is clear: Obama is not only negotiating in bad faith, but is pursuing a destructive war of the worlds: the developed world against the developing world. Copenhagen, by any standard of fairness and decency, was a failure of industrial nations to own their pollution, and a nightmare for poorer countries who expected more accountability from the rich. Instead, they got a concerted effort, led by the United States, to undermine the Kyoto protocol’s legal distinction between developed and developing nations and their respective responsibilities for global warming.

We’re now hearing the administration’s spin about the conference and the Copenhagen Accord that Obama and friends drafted at the eleventh hour. It goes something like this: Obama saved the day in Copenhagen by brokering a deal, the Copenhagen Accord, that represents a breakthrough in climate talks and “lays the foundation for international action in the years to come.”
Don’t believe it. Not a word of it.

The Copenhagen Accord was a back-room deal among five countries: the United States, China, Brazil, India and South Africa. Conspicuously absent from these talks were the voices and concerns of poorer African, Asian and South American nations—countries that make up the majority of the United Nations. The 12-paragraph Copenhagen Accord is non-binding, contains no commitments to reducing carbon emissions enough to hold down global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius, has no time frame for emissions reduction other than “as soon as possible,” contains no emissions targets, contains no language about the freshwater crisis, and puts off until 2020 the establishment of a $100 billion per year fund to help developing nations, which are bearing the brunt of the developed world’s pollution today.

While the accord impressed some Republicans (a staffer for Senator Lugar called it a “home run,” and Senator Murkowski called it “progress”), it triggered outrage from representatives of developing countries. Lydia Baker of Save the Children called it a “death warrant”;

… It’s a solution based on values that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces.” Di-Aping also noted that, with this deal, “Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.”

Di-Aping may be on to something here: Obama has no more trust in the United Nations than Bush had. The United Nations is a level playing field, and U.S. politicians, embedded as they are with big corporations, cannot allow the needs of developing nations to cut into corporate profits.

The administration says its frustration with the United Nations has to do with its cumbersome process of debate and consensus. This is political code for: Why should everyone get to participate in international decision-making when there are profits to be made if the United States controls things and forces others to do it ur way? Does that sound like the Bushies? Wait, it gets better.

The Obama folks, according to U.S. climate change envoy Todd Stern, came to office with doubts about giving the United Nations control over climate change negotiations. The administration much preferred to whittle down the inner circle to a few countries it could manipulate, rather than playing ball with the larger group of U.N. nations. That inner circle eventually became the five nations who drafted the Copenhagen Accord. Stern was clear: “We came in with quite a strong view hat we needed to set up a stronger group of countries as well as operating in the larger multilateral arena. For that reason we took the set of countries that resident Bush had initiated, rechristened it and gave it a different mission.”
But that mission—to keep profits high for U.S. corporations—is not at all different from Bush’s. And if the United Nations and developing countries get in the way, then, like Bush, Obama will bypass them.

At Copenhagen, to the dismay of many, Obama offered a lame 4 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by 2020. The administration spin is that it proposed a 17 percent reduction, but that number is based on using 2005 emissions levels, rather than the 1990 levels that all other countries use. When we use the more accurate 1990 levels, the sad truth is that Obama only proposed a 4 percent cut in emissions. By comparison, the Europeans are pledging a 20 percent cut (from 1990 levels) by 2020.

Obama’s Copenhagen Accord will have to be blended with the energy bills coming out of Congress. That should be easy. The House energy bill was so corporate-friendly that Representative Dennis Kucinich refused to sign it, and the bill the Senate is currently debating is—well, let’s just say that it’s like the pro-industry Senate health care bill, only on steroids. As in the House, the Senate won’t demand significant carbon reduction if it will require any sacrifice of profits by the major energy industry players. Given that, Obama’s Copenhagen Accord should blend well with whatever pro-polluter bill Congress proposes.

Meanwhile, back at the United Nations, a mere 30 nations (out of 192 who were part of the U.N. group that organized Copenhagen) have indicated they will formally adopt the Copenhagen Accord. It seems that Obama’s third war—the war of the developed world against the developing world—is in full swing.
The next energy policy of the United States will be a muddle of pollution allowances, cheap government loans for polluters.