The international meeting of world leaders at Copenhagen was hailed as a hopeful opportunity to bring the industrialized countries of the world to the table to discuss ways of limiting emissions that are contributing to Global Warming.
Yet it appears that Copenhagen will not be remembered as a success.
Copenhagen can not be considered a success when the most important element of legislation was missing: the concern for human rights and the plight of Environmental Refugees.
Copenhagen's legislation was not an agreement but a 'deal' that was not a consensus decision but another industry backroom deal to keep the status quo. But there is more to global action than just one meeting, it comes down to all of us staying active and raising our voices together.
First let's look at who made the 'deal' in Copenhagen.
It seems Copenhagen did not include everyone in the process...
About 115 national leaders attended the Copenhagen climate talks but the final 'agreement' announced by the US, India, China and South Africa, was drafted far outside the consensus process of the United Nations and amounted to only aspirational targets and promises, falling far short of an ambitous, fair and binding treaty demanded by civil society.
Aspirational targets? And no binding requirementsfor the world's biggest polluters? The dirty energy lobby, particularly coal, have been given another free ride.
So why did the leading industrialized countries engage in a backroom agreement?
It would appear they caved to the pressure of the global fossil fuel industry's effort to
lobby against reform.
Johan Hari puts it plainly in the description of the evisceration of real reform:
Discarded Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts proposed at Copenhagen were purely voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. After all, Canada signed up to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 percent - and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred Canadas.
Discarded Idea Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey and the environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say they want to drastically cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other.
Discarded Idea Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 percent of the warming gases pumped into the atmosphere - yet 70 percent of the effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter doesn't pay.
So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it, they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins."
It seems the big money is going to stay in the hands of the polluters, while disregarding what will happen to the vulnerable, such as the islanders, not to mention the millions of other Environmental Refugees who will be displaced due to lack of water, resources, land or food.
As I have written and spoken this past year about Environmental Refugees, I have met numerous activists like Brent Newell who is fighting the good fight on behalf of the Kivalina islanders
and have learned about some of the best ideas for helping the victims of global warming, such as the reparations model proposed by Professor Maxine Burkett and have even heard of some new types of international litigation that may hold promise.
It has been my hope as well as many others, that this human rights issue would wake people up about pollution if they knew the people whose islands are actually starting to vanish under the waves, taking with them centuries of their culture and tradition.
It is the greatest of all ironies. Our industrial sins are paid for by the meekest of the world, and they will continue to pay the first and most expensive costs of global warming and pollution with their lands and lives for the profit of dirty energy.
The Prime Minister of Tuvalu said it best
"We have nowhere to run to because our islands are tiny, we just have to prepare ourselves individually, family wise so that they know what to do when a cyclone comes in or a hurricane blows because there is nothing else we can do. There is no mountain we can climb up, there is no other inland where we can run to like in your big countries.
We are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our children. Our future is not for sale."
How can we say that Copenhagen's 'deal' operates in good faith when the non-binding 'aspirational' goals are still setting minimal target dates for 2050? What will this place look like in 10 years, much less 2050?
If you lived on low lying island, or vulnerable savanna, or in the arctic and heard this? (hattip to Rebecca Solnit)
The so-called agreement acknowledges that we should limit warming to two degrees Celsius, but the actual commitments, if honored, would bring the world to 3.9 degrees Celsius (seven degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Even two degrees, African negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping had said, "would condemn Africa to death." Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed pointed out that three degrees would "spell death for the Maldives and a billion people in low-lying areas." Three degrees, said Joss Garman of the British branch of Greenpeace, "would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, droughts across South America and Australia, and the depletion of ocean habitats."
All that was achieved was consensus that there's a problem and clarity about what that problem is: the refusal of the wealthy corporations and nations to do what benefits humanity and all other species. Money won. Life lost. Copenhagen is over, a battle lost despite valiant efforts, but the war continues.
That last part about the 'war continues' is where my hope now rests.
I had not hoped for a miracle from Copenhagen, but I expected more from our President and from the other world leaders.
Yet, the millions of people who now have gotten in touch and activated through Copenhagen are not going to just fade away.
I was very glad to hear about several new groups and organizations that have started up to fight for this issue - such as tct tck tck or the new page at Refugees International, that now is exclusively devoted to Environmental Refugees, as well as Towards Recognition, which is also taking up the cause of Environmental Refugees.
I was also glad to see my simple petition has gotten read and signed by people from some of the places that are being affected.
Environmental Refugees should have been one of the central parts of what Copenhagen was about, saving our humanity and the planet. I am sad to see that it was forgotten by the few powerful leaders who smiled for the cameras, but I am glad to see that the people who are going to be the future faces of the Environmental Refugees stood up and were counted and heard and became part of a greater collective conscious.
My hat is off to David Kroodsma, who won the Huffington Post 'Hopenhagen' Contest and who also reported commendably about the failure of Copenhagen, yet still encourages us to stay active. I wholeheartedly agree.
We are all in this together and we must all stand united.
Take this pledge with me:
I promise I will stay active and will not despair, for the sake of those who depend on us to act, both here now, and in the future.
Stay Active...
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