In the second of our debates around the COP15, Richard explains why he believes the politicians in Copenhagen cannot (and will not) sign an equitable deal and why the climate crisis is just a symptom of the larger crisis in capitalism.
In swanky rooms in the Danish city of Copenhagen, powerful people are deciding the world's future. They're thrashing out a deal which, they say, will prevent climate change from destroying our way of life. They talk of global equity; of the West helping the South to develop sustainably; of pulling together against a common climatological foe. They talk, and we should listen, right, because they're all so very, very important.
These people - our elected representatives - are liars and thieves and their solution, a complex web of carbon trading, offsetting and battening down the hatches, is not about solving climate change. It is a naked attempt to exploit a clear and present danger to cement their power at our expense.
We saw this on day two of the COP15 conference, when a secret agreement between "the circle of commitment" leaked into the open. It sought to bind the world's inhabitants into a two-tier emissions framework, with privileged Westerners getting double the carbon ration of the majority of the world's population.
This attempt to embed carbon imperialism and divide the world permanently into emits and emit-nots is just the latest in a long line of reasons to reject the COP15 outright. Another, more congenital problem is that those at the summit cannot solve climate change because they are the ones who caused it.
The conference-goers are committed to going only so far as is compatible with economic growth; entrenching the root cause of climate change and global inequity: free-market globalised capitalism. Their solutions rest on an economic and political system built on the exploitation of the planet and the people who inhabit it.
They'd have you believe that everything will be ok if we just internalise the climate costs: place a price on air and so it can be traded like a cheap bauble in a bazaar. But this just validates their pollution: they bought it, they can break it. While the Maldives and Tuvalu sink beneath the waves and millions of Bangladeshis are displaced by flooding, the global elite is opening up a new market for financiers to gamble with for short-term gain. Just as money is no use to an indigenous tribe forced from their land by illegal logging, what will we buy once they've rendered the world uninhabitable?
Look around you. The rush to create wealth for the very few at the expense of the rest of us has poisoned our seas, polluted our air, chopped down our forests and forced millions off their land and into indentured slavery at the hands of faceless global corporations. The politicians putting pen to paper slaughtered hundreds of thousands overseas in their quest for oil; support the cruellest of dictators if it smoothes the way for business; lecture us on 'doing our bit' while our taxes pay their mortgages; fiddled their expenses while the gap between rich and poor grew ever wider.
Throughout history people in power have taken every opportunity to put themselves first and to exploit every situation to their advantage. What makes you think they've suddenly changed?
