France, Alternative Libertaire AL #247 - Climate talks:
Twenty-two, 21 Blowin Cop (fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
The annual conference of the UN climate took place in early December 2014 in Lima, Peru.
This "Cop 20" was the dress rehearsal for the Cop 21 to be held in Paris in December 2015,
during which governments around the world are expected to sign a big climate deal. ----
The Cop 20 suffered the same course as the previous: difficult negotiations that lead to a
minimum agreement just good to maintain a framework for negotiations. Main points of
contention binding targets for developing countries that have less responsibility for
climate change than developed countries; how to fund and use the "green environmental
funds," or what methodology adopted to assess emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs)? These
questions that trouble the negotiations for years reveal the structural impossibility of
states to tackle the climate crisis. For behind the international nature of this crisis
are many states that are negotiating and defending their economic interests above all.
Lima also confirmed the omnipresence of multinationals in negotiations. With pavilions in
the formal setting of the summit and parallel mini-summits, multinationals, including the
energy sector, are the main actors of the negotiations and beneficiaries of the measures
taken by governments: support for green growth, research technology solutions
privatization nature, absolute faith in market mechanisms and voluntary commitments by
multinational companies to solve environmental problems.
Warming of 4° C
Meanwhile, China is building a vengeance coal plants, the United States flock to shale
gas, Canada's boreal forest destroyed to access the oil sands, and France built
unnecessary airports. We remain a "pessimistic" scenario GHG emissions continue to rise,
which would lead to a warming of more than 4 ° C by the end of the century, according to
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And still, some phenomena are not
taken into account. Example: global warming causes the melting permafrost, vast expanse of
frozen earth that is in Canada and Russia. This font, which has already begun and is
expected to accelerate in the coming decades, releases CO2 and methane in the soil, which
in turn contributes to global warming. This type of "positive feedbacks" in the climate
jargon, could result in a warming still much higher than expected.
International negotiations and capitalism have long shown that they are not allowed to
avoid the ecological crisis in the making. Instead, they feed it.
Jocelyn (AL Gard)
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Negociations-climatiques-Vingt
