[News] from [guardian.co.uk]
[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
A great step forward: Obama's verdict on climate change pact
President's intervention was failure, say critics
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.49 GMT Article history
Barack Obama returned to a snowbound Washington at the weekend clutching a deal that was cast as a step forward by his administration but decried as a waste of paper by critics on both sides of the climate change debate.
At the end of another of his interventions on the world stage that are becoming a hallmark of his presidency, Obama said the Copenhagen talks amounted to an "important breakthrough" and they had laid the foundation for international action "in the years to come".
But he also accepted it was a partial victory, saying the pact was "not enough", the road ahead would be hard and there was a long way still to go.
David Axelrod, his chief adviser, took to the airwaves this morning to defend the outcome of the 31-hour negotiations in similar vein: it was not perfect but it was a start. "Nobody says that this is the end of the road," Axelrod told CNN. "The end of the road would have been the complete collapse of those talks. This is a great step forward."
Politico, a Washington-based political news website, said the agreement was "more notable for what it doesn't accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged".
The last time Obama imposed himself into a gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen in October, when he lent his weight to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, it ended in humiliation. This time the outcome was not so ignominious, and the administration could and did claim credit for some, albeit non-binding, results.
Critics were quick to disparage Obama's achievement as a meaningless compromise. Friends of the Earth US dismissed the agreement as a sham. "This is not a strong deal or a just one – it isn't even a real one," said the group's president Erich Pica. He blamed the US for the absence of concrete results saying it was the main polluter behind the climate crisis yet it had failed to put enough money on the table to help poor countries cope with its consequences.
On the other side of the debate, Club for Growth, a campaign for small government and low taxes, hailed the agreement as an ironic triumph. Its head, Chris Chocola, said a binding deal would have destroyed 30 million American jobs, but he was relieved when Obama described it as a meaningful pact. "When politicians call something 'meaningful', that means it isn't," Chocola said.
The question for the White House now is how the Copenhagen agreement will affect its ambitions to present Congress with a wide ranging energy bill that would enshrine a cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions through bartering. Opponents of cap-and-trade, such as the Club for Growth, are likely to be emboldened in their efforts to frustrate the administration, pointing to the absence of a firm commitment internationally to set emissions reduction targets. Against that, the White House will argue there is enough of a global mandate to merit pressing ahead with its legislative plans.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it was time for America to move quickly to develop a unilateral strategy in which the Senate would pass an energy bill setting a long-term price on carbon "that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some UN treaty."
In an editorial, the Washington Post saw grounds for limited optimism that the Senate would act. It said that the Copenhagen agreement was weak and inadequate, but "this outcome, however imperfect, should prod the US Senate to take up climate-change legislation. Even if China hadn't moved, reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy and tacking domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill."
The Post also noted that Copenhagen had given a glimpse of a new world order in which the US and China would increasingly shape international diplomacy. This so-called G2 of the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases had the fate of any climate change treaty in its hands.
[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
We're all eco-warriors now after world leaders failed us at Copenhagen
Our political leaders failed to do the right thing: now it's up to us to push them into action or get on with it without them
James Garvey
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 12.40 GMT Article history
What did the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen achieve? Our governments failed to agree a deal which might have avoided a global catastrophe. They did nothing but take yet another "important first step". We've had nearly two decades of those.
It's likely that Copenhagen is a long-term disaster for the planet and its people, but it might have another, more immediate consequence for you right now. Your moral obligations might have just changed dramatically. In situations like the one we're in now, the demand for action shifts from our leaders to us. They missed what might have been our last chance to take to take concerted, worldwide action on climate change, so the rest of us have to do something about it. Their failure means that we're all eco-warriors now.
When things go smoothly, you do your civic duty by casting a vote, paying your taxes, and generally keeping out of trouble. It's enough to leave it to the ones in power to think things through and make certain choices for you. In rare circumstances, though, our obligations enlarge, and it's up to us to do the right thing when no one else will.
When the state perpetuates injustice and human suffering, when there's real urgency, when other avenues of protest have done no good at all, your civic duty becomes something very substantial. You have to bring change into the world, and a vote is not enough. Anything less ties you to an ongoing wrong. Civil disobedience and other direct efforts to bring about change are the only options you have.
It's no longer any good just hoping that the men in suits will come up with a decent solution. They messed it up. It's not enough to click a link and send a message to your representative or even go on a march. None of it is enough when the people you petition fail again and again to do the right thing. Perhaps it's now up to us to make trouble for them, to leave our governments no choice but to act, to get in the way, make business as usual impossible, and force real action against climate change. Think of all the usual examples, large and small, of human beings at their finest: the end of slavery in America, the civil rights movement, suffrage, India, the velvet revolution, the poll tax protests and on and on. When human beings see that something is wrong we almost always change for the better. Sometimes we need our noses rubbed in it, but we do the right thing in the end. The developed and developing worlds are doing something wrong – we're all causing suffering to people alive right now and to great numbers of those who will come after us. If civil disobedience was warranted to stop past injustices, isn't it warranted right now to stop what is probably the greatest amount of harm any group of human beings ever inflicted on any other?
The green movement has always suffered from the lack of a clear target. How do you protest against something that's all around us, a fossil-fuel burning world we all inhabit and depend upon? Do you chain yourself to yourself and insist on a carbon tax on the things you value most? With the failure at Copenhagen we have for the first time a clearly delineated and easily accessible object for our protests: our governments.
What about the so-called deal-breakers at Copenhagen? It's being said that what really stood in the way of a binding conclusion is China and America failing to see eye to eye. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that sanctions were warranted against South Africa because it harmed its own people. The world's biggest polluters harm not just their own people, but people all over the world. How much greater are sanctions warranted in their case, compared with South Africa?
But maybe this isn't the right way to think, and anyway we've all had enough doom and gloom. It might be wrong not because it's over the top, but because it depends on a conception of politics that no longer fits the world as it is now. Perhaps global treaties and talks and sanctions are not part of the solution to climate change. Those are the bones of something that died near the start of this awful millennium.
Maybe the solution never was a deal at Copenhagen – who really thinks that climate change has just one big answer? What we need are a billion different solutions, perhaps billions of little revolutions in thinking and acting all over the world. The good news is that such things do not depend on a handful of negotiators sitting around a table. What matters are people like you and me who see the world for what it is and do something about it. There's room for a little hope still, the hope that even though our leaders fail to do the right thing, the rest of us will either push them into action or get on with it without them.
James Garvey is secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of The Ethics of Climate Change
[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
A great step forward: Obama's verdict on climate change pact
President's intervention was failure, say critics
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.49 GMT Article history
Barack Obama returned to a snowbound Washington at the weekend clutching a deal that was cast as a step forward by his administration but decried as a waste of paper by critics on both sides of the climate change debate.
At the end of another of his interventions on the world stage that are becoming a hallmark of his presidency, Obama said the Copenhagen talks amounted to an "important breakthrough" and they had laid the foundation for international action "in the years to come".
But he also accepted it was a partial victory, saying the pact was "not enough", the road ahead would be hard and there was a long way still to go.
David Axelrod, his chief adviser, took to the airwaves this morning to defend the outcome of the 31-hour negotiations in similar vein: it was not perfect but it was a start. "Nobody says that this is the end of the road," Axelrod told CNN. "The end of the road would have been the complete collapse of those talks. This is a great step forward."
Politico, a Washington-based political news website, said the agreement was "more notable for what it doesn't accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged".
The last time Obama imposed himself into a gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen in October, when he lent his weight to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, it ended in humiliation. This time the outcome was not so ignominious, and the administration could and did claim credit for some, albeit non-binding, results.
Critics were quick to disparage Obama's achievement as a meaningless compromise. Friends of the Earth US dismissed the agreement as a sham. "This is not a strong deal or a just one – it isn't even a real one," said the group's president Erich Pica. He blamed the US for the absence of concrete results saying it was the main polluter behind the climate crisis yet it had failed to put enough money on the table to help poor countries cope with its consequences.
On the other side of the debate, Club for Growth, a campaign for small government and low taxes, hailed the agreement as an ironic triumph. Its head, Chris Chocola, said a binding deal would have destroyed 30 million American jobs, but he was relieved when Obama described it as a meaningful pact. "When politicians call something 'meaningful', that means it isn't," Chocola said.
The question for the White House now is how the Copenhagen agreement will affect its ambitions to present Congress with a wide ranging energy bill that would enshrine a cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions through bartering. Opponents of cap-and-trade, such as the Club for Growth, are likely to be emboldened in their efforts to frustrate the administration, pointing to the absence of a firm commitment internationally to set emissions reduction targets. Against that, the White House will argue there is enough of a global mandate to merit pressing ahead with its legislative plans.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it was time for America to move quickly to develop a unilateral strategy in which the Senate would pass an energy bill setting a long-term price on carbon "that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some UN treaty."
In an editorial, the Washington Post saw grounds for limited optimism that the Senate would act. It said that the Copenhagen agreement was weak and inadequate, but "this outcome, however imperfect, should prod the US Senate to take up climate-change legislation. Even if China hadn't moved, reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy and tacking domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill."
The Post also noted that Copenhagen had given a glimpse of a new world order in which the US and China would increasingly shape international diplomacy. This so-called G2 of the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases had the fate of any climate change treaty in its hands.
[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
We're all eco-warriors now after world leaders failed us at Copenhagen
Our political leaders failed to do the right thing: now it's up to us to push them into action or get on with it without them
James Garvey
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 12.40 GMT Article history
What did the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen achieve? Our governments failed to agree a deal which might have avoided a global catastrophe. They did nothing but take yet another "important first step". We've had nearly two decades of those.
It's likely that Copenhagen is a long-term disaster for the planet and its people, but it might have another, more immediate consequence for you right now. Your moral obligations might have just changed dramatically. In situations like the one we're in now, the demand for action shifts from our leaders to us. They missed what might have been our last chance to take to take concerted, worldwide action on climate change, so the rest of us have to do something about it. Their failure means that we're all eco-warriors now.
When things go smoothly, you do your civic duty by casting a vote, paying your taxes, and generally keeping out of trouble. It's enough to leave it to the ones in power to think things through and make certain choices for you. In rare circumstances, though, our obligations enlarge, and it's up to us to do the right thing when no one else will.
When the state perpetuates injustice and human suffering, when there's real urgency, when other avenues of protest have done no good at all, your civic duty becomes something very substantial. You have to bring change into the world, and a vote is not enough. Anything less ties you to an ongoing wrong. Civil disobedience and other direct efforts to bring about change are the only options you have.
It's no longer any good just hoping that the men in suits will come up with a decent solution. They messed it up. It's not enough to click a link and send a message to your representative or even go on a march. None of it is enough when the people you petition fail again and again to do the right thing. Perhaps it's now up to us to make trouble for them, to leave our governments no choice but to act, to get in the way, make business as usual impossible, and force real action against climate change. Think of all the usual examples, large and small, of human beings at their finest: the end of slavery in America, the civil rights movement, suffrage, India, the velvet revolution, the poll tax protests and on and on. When human beings see that something is wrong we almost always change for the better. Sometimes we need our noses rubbed in it, but we do the right thing in the end. The developed and developing worlds are doing something wrong – we're all causing suffering to people alive right now and to great numbers of those who will come after us. If civil disobedience was warranted to stop past injustices, isn't it warranted right now to stop what is probably the greatest amount of harm any group of human beings ever inflicted on any other?
The green movement has always suffered from the lack of a clear target. How do you protest against something that's all around us, a fossil-fuel burning world we all inhabit and depend upon? Do you chain yourself to yourself and insist on a carbon tax on the things you value most? With the failure at Copenhagen we have for the first time a clearly delineated and easily accessible object for our protests: our governments.
What about the so-called deal-breakers at Copenhagen? It's being said that what really stood in the way of a binding conclusion is China and America failing to see eye to eye. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that sanctions were warranted against South Africa because it harmed its own people. The world's biggest polluters harm not just their own people, but people all over the world. How much greater are sanctions warranted in their case, compared with South Africa?
But maybe this isn't the right way to think, and anyway we've all had enough doom and gloom. It might be wrong not because it's over the top, but because it depends on a conception of politics that no longer fits the world as it is now. Perhaps global treaties and talks and sanctions are not part of the solution to climate change. Those are the bones of something that died near the start of this awful millennium.
Maybe the solution never was a deal at Copenhagen – who really thinks that climate change has just one big answer? What we need are a billion different solutions, perhaps billions of little revolutions in thinking and acting all over the world. The good news is that such things do not depend on a handful of negotiators sitting around a table. What matters are people like you and me who see the world for what it is and do something about it. There's room for a little hope still, the hope that even though our leaders fail to do the right thing, the rest of us will either push them into action or get on with it without them.
James Garvey is secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of The Ethics of Climate Change
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