HONG KONG - The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali
last December generated extraordinary enthusiasm about global warning and put
environmentalism at the top of the mainstream agenda for the first time in
years. The Bali meeting brought worldwide consensus - albeit loose, broad and
unspecific - that something needed to be done about climate change.
Within days of the Bali breakthrough, activists from environmental group
Greenpeace were speeding toward Antarctica, ground zero for global warming,
with an embedded BBC reporter aboard. The polar ice caps are melting at
accelerating rates, and some islands, nestled thousands of kilometers north in
the tropical Pacific Ocean are already at risk due to rising sea levels. The
environmental activists it seemed could reinforce and extend the message of the
Bali conference, with testimony from this critical
climate battleground.
Except that the Greenpeace activists aboard MV Esperanza weren't there to talk
about global warming. They were there to stop Japan - a critical player in
climate change on several fronts - from conducting its annual whale hunt.
Greenpeace planned to tail the Japanese whaling boats, hoping to harass and
shame them into stop killing whales. Global warming was not on their agenda.
Environmental activists from Australia-based Sea Shepherd were also pursuing
the Japanese fleet, promising "direct action" to stop the hunt. A Sea Shepherd
craft collided with a Japanese spotter vessel during the 2007 whaling season,
both parties blaming the other for the incident. This year, Sea Shepherd's
leader Paul Watson, formerly of Greenpeace, took a "no-ramming" pledge. Yet on
January 15, a pair of giddy Sea Shepherd protesters boarded a Japanese ship,
Yushin Maru No 2, saying that they wanted to deliver a protest letter.
Given Sea Shepherd's violent history, it's hard to blame Yushin Maru's
commander for chaining his uninvited guests to a deck rail and calling them
"terrorists". Terrorist was the right word, but for the wrong reasons. The
dedicated activists had crafted a reminder of all that's wrong with the
environmental movement. Their adolescent grandstanding on the culturally loaded
fringe issue of whaling harpooned the reservoir of global goodwill on climate
change generated in Bali.
Most critics of the environmental movement oppose its goals; they say global
warming is "junk science" (Nobel Prize notwithstanding), extinction is a
natural part of evolution, and that markets and science, supported by the
wealth that would be destroyed if environmentalists had their way, will find
solutions to today's seemingly insoluble problems.
Global warming updates the 1960s question of balancing economic progress with
resource depletion. Today we are still debating what to do about the internal
combustion engine; how to preserve species, their habitats, and other areas of
exceptional merit in the face of competing human needs. As we mark another
Earth Day on Tuesday, it's time to ask, paraphrasing a line from four decades
ago, whether well-meaning, but often inept and misguided environmental
activists, are part of the solution or part of the problem.
The Bali meeting and that Southern Ocean whaling sequel highlight several
reasons environmentalism keeps extending its record of failure. More than 100
different environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were at the Bali
climate change meeting. While the government representatives and other official
delegates met in various working groups, there apparently wasn't a single
meeting during those two weeks (or during these past four decades) that brought
together the all of environmental NGOs to craft a common message or strategy.
Occasionally a handful of NGOs would hold a joint press conference on some
issue. But largely, the groups competed with each other for media attention to
their messages that differed mainly in form and nuance rather than substance.
No, not a tuxedo ...
I'm the last guy who wants to deny anyone the opportunity to wear a penguin
suit in the tropical heat - a Bali stunt by Greenpeace, one of several NGOs
that didn't answer questions for this article. But imagine if these
environmental groups had used the occasion to pool their seemingly boundless
energy and map out a common strategy.
One reason that there are so many environmental groups is that they find it so
hard to agree, or, rather, they find it so easy to disagree. Groups' narrow
focus and unwillingness to compromise hinder progress on core issues. A little
flexibility could go a long way toward creating more practical approaches that
are more likely to generate greater public support and better results for
Mother Earth.
The environmental movement rarely offers ordinary developed world citizens a
reasonable road map to join the battle. More often it demonizes them as dupes
of the pollution industry, who to make right must don organically grown, fair
trade sackcloth and ashes and give environmental groups money as penance. A
more accommodating movement would stop using the word "corporation" as an
accusation, yet wouldn't see cooperation with business or government as an end
in itself. Such a movement could be far more effective; at least, it couldn't
be much less effective.
Before and after Bali, the environmental movement had hundreds of groups moving
in hundreds of different directions - virtually none of them seeking grassroots
support. In the battle against global warming, environmental groups don't
really seem interested in grassroots support. Rather, they have something far
more powerful on their side: the United Nations.
Another lost cause
Environmental groups have been given a place at the table - though mainly as
jesters - in the UN climate change process. The groups have brought not just
their plates and cups, but their laptops and sleeping bags. Aside from field
projects, environmental groups seem to have completely aligned their climate
change efforts with the UN process.
There's nothing wrong with that as long as the UN process works. But the only
precedent in the field is the Kyoto Protocol and that's been a failure in two
major respects. First, Kyoto has failed to reduce emissions. That may be
because the top four greenhouse gas emitters - the US, China, Indonesia and
Brazil - aren't covered. China recently surpassed the US as the world's largest
greenhouse gas emitter.
"Concrete action in the United States is the key to getting the next
international deal," The Nature Conservancy's director of international
institutions and agreements Andrew Deutz said. "The history of international
environmental politics since the 1970s shows that when the US acts first at
home, it can lead abroad, as was the case with endangered species and marine
pollution; when the US tries to negotiate internationally and then bring the
results home for domestic action, it fails, as was the case with the Kyoto
Protocol and the Biodiversity Convention."
Justice for all, sacrifice for few
Yet environmental groups that have largely focused on pulling the US into the
global regime are the same ones that won't accept key US concerns. NGOs make
"climate justice" a key plank: the US and other developed countries consumed
and polluted at will for centuries, so developing countries deserve their
chance for the sake of economic development and poverty alleviation. The US, on
the other hand, says that all big emitters must share the burden, particularly
when it comes to mandatory targets.
The next US administration is expected to be far more friendly to the climate
change cause than the George W Bush administration but unlikely to concede this
point may package it as "climate equity" or "shared sacrifice". The UN process
will likely produce an agreement without restrictions on developing countries
and proposes standards well beyond what US voters will be ready to accept. If
the US rejects that agreement, environmental groups will have a convenient
enemy, but Mother Earth will face the inconvenient truth of the top four
emitters still outside the global climate change regime.
The other major drawback to relying on the UN process is its lengthy timetable.
Despite the drumbeat of warnings about the urgency of the issue, the current
negotiations are scheduled to run until the end of 2009. Asked about progress
since Bali - including a week-long follow-up meeting in Bangkok earlier this
month - the head of climate change for London-based International Institute for
Environment and Development Saleem Huq replied, "Not much. But that is to be
expected as this is a slow negotiating process and no country will give ground
so early in the process; all concessions and invariably made at the last minute
and not before. That is the very nature of international negotiations."
Any agreement will not take effect until 2012. The UN and the NGOs don't seem
to be in any rush. The past four decades have shown that environmental groups
pay little price for their failures, but the planet does. This Earth Day - as
heroic NGOs craft high-level agreements and statements that will extend their
record of futility and evil corporations build hybrid vehicles and wind
turbines - consider who now are really the friends of the Earth.
Former US diplomat Muhammad Cohen co-wrote Lonely Planet's forthcoming
guide to Borneo and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
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