It was a familiar scene to anyone who's watched the Occupy movement do their thing over the past few months: a group of kids holding signs and mic checking each other, chanting, "The people united will never be defeated!" as a well-armed police force forms a circle around them.
But here at the International Convention Centre in Durban, South Africa on December 9, the officers were United Nations police, and as there were hundreds of well-dressed international delegates milling about in the lobby, the pepper spray option was out of the question.
This was the last day of the United Nations Climate Change Summit, and activists were taking one last stand to save the planet from overheating.
"They tried. The fact that world leaders blew it again was not the fault of the protesters. Every year for the past 17, negotiators from just about every country on the planet have assembled in early December to talk about how to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists say are causing the earth's climate to change rapidly and will eventually lead to a massive global environmental disaster. Each year, these climate delegates fly to exotic locales and discuss the dilemma at something called a 'Conference of Parties' (or COP, hence the nickname for this year's conference: COP 17). They make impassioned speeches and sign papers and shake hands.
And every year the problem gets a little worse.
Last year was the hottest year on record. According to a World Meteorological Organization report issued earlier this month, 13 of the last 15 years had the warmest average global temperatures ever recorded. Incidentally, since the climate talks began, greenhouse gas emissions have gone up by 50 percent; according to a Global Carbon Project analysis, they rose almost 6 percent last year alone.
If things continue like this, scientists say global warming will devastate the planet and cause massive suffering for millions. This was not lost on the pissed-off activists attending the climate conference, members of NGOs like Greenpeace and 350.org who are part of the growing international climate justice movement. They came to Durban to say enough with the bullshit; it's time to act now before it's too late. Midway through the two-week conference, on December 3, their cause was joined by more than 5,000 protesters from South Africa and around the world in a Day of Action, marching from downtown Durban to the convention center.
But their efforts fell on deaf ears. The activists who staged the last-ditch protest in the ICC lobby were ejected, and the conference yielded only a pitiful deal called the "Durban Platform for Enhanced Action," which commits the nations of the world to keep talking about the issue. The Durban Platform says 2020 would be the earliest a global agreement could be signed into law. How far and how fast countries will cut their emissions is still to be determined. "It's an empty shell of a plan," said Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth. "It leaves the planet hurling towards catastrophic climate change."
Climate change has become one of the most divisive and politically charged issues in international politics. As the scientific consensus continues to solidify (indeed, despite propaganda to the contrary, over 97 percent of scientists studying the climate believe that climate change is caused by people burning fossil fuels), it has driven an enormous wedge between rich and poor countries who come together to discuss the issue every year. From the Bolivians in the Andes who are losing the glaciers they depend on for water to the islanders in the South Pacific who see their lands disappearing at an alarming rate, the developing countries of the world that have done the least to harm the environment are shouldering the worst effects of global warming. They, along with a growing list of NGOs and climate justice activists, increasingly view the lack of international action on climate change as class warfare. They are demanding that industrialized nations acknowledge their enormous debt to the planet by drastically reducing their carbon emissions, and then by helping the countries who are suffering the effects. Climate reparations, if you will.
These ideas haven't gone over too well here in the U.S., the world's largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases. Throughout the years of climate talks, the U.S. has shown smug indifference to global consensus. Since the UN adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the world's only legally binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions, the U.S. was the one country that refused to ratify it. Many hoped Obama's election would change all that, but after his disastrous intervention at COP 15 that resulted in the do-nothing Copenhagen Accord, expectations have significantly dwindled.
Shortly before he was thrown out with the rest of the protesters on the final day of COP 17, Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo said the reason for U.S. inaction on climate change is quite simple: "For every one U.S. congressperson, there are three full-time fossil fuel lobbyists that make sure that national climate legislation won't pass and that the U.S. can't do a thing when they get to these conferences." A Greenpeace report issued during the Durban talks entitled "Who's Holding Us Back?" lists the corporations and trade groups that spend around $3.5 billion annually to derail any chance of climate change legislation passing in the U.S. It should come as no surprise that the list is topped by the carbon-spewing corporations who stand the most to lose by laws regulating the dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Companies like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Koch Industries have been pulling politicians' strings for years to ensure they keep the right to pollute.
But along with throwing boatloads of money at Washington politicians, these fossil fuel corporations have succeeded in one of the most deadly public relations campaigns in history. Through the use of shrewd propaganda and a number of bogus "scientific" studies, they have convinced a large portion of the American public that the scientific consensus on climate change is some sort of liberal hoax meant to usher in a eco-socialist one-world government ruled by the United Nations.
"It is in fact the climate denier disinformation campaign that is responsible for a failure of the U.S. to act at these talks," said Donald Brown, professor of environmental ethics, science, and law at Penn State University. Brown was in Durban to present his study, "An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign," in which he lashes out at climate denialists for making "preposterous" statements and "morally irresponsible behavior that attempts to undermine political action needed in response to very threatening human activities."
Preposterous or not, the climate denier movement has been astonishingly successful. According to a Harris Poll conducted in 2007 (shortly after the release of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth), 71 percent of the population believed that burning fossil fuels was causing the planet to heat up. Two years later, the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In July of this year, the number sank to only 44 percent of Americans that believe that climate change is man-made.
This rapid shift is reflected in the platforms of the Republican candidates for president: Every one of them save John Huntsman denies the science — and even Huntsman recently caved to pressure from the right, telling the Heartland Institute early this month, "There's not enough information right now to be able to formulate policies." Quite a flip from his August tweet: "To be clear: I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."
In a recent article in The Nation magazine, Naomi Klein offers some insight into why climate change skepticism has become a central component to right-wing Republican ideology. "They took a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands," she writes, "and concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their 'free market' belief system." Instead of questioning a belief system central to the American identity, the far right invented a conspiracy, sold it to the Tea Party, and broadcast it out to millions of American households via outlets like Fox News.
The culture war around climate change has been devastating not only to international progress, but also on the state level — as in Florida, where 95 percent of the population live at sea level, within 35 miles of the coast. Back in 2007, newly elected Republican Governor Charlie Crist told an audience at his "Serve to Preserve Summit" that climate change was "one of the most important issues that we will face this century." Crist vowed to "place our state at the forefront of a growing worldwide movement to reduce greenhouse gases." He made some progress, creating the Florida Energy and Climate Commission and effectively halting the construction of several planned coal-fired power plants. Three years later, Floridians elected Rick Scott, a man who does not believe that climate change is real. Last spring, Florida's legislature abolished the Energy and Climate Commission.
With little hope of addressing climate change on a state or national level, some Florida municipalities are coming up with solutions on their own. The City of Miami, faced with an expected 3- to 5-foot sea level rise by end of century, already has a Climate Change Action Plan in place. Sarasota has created several innovative local climate change initiatives. How about Tampa? "We're not quite there yet," says Tampa City Council member Mary Mulhern. "Our regional planning council participated in a resiliency study and we passed the Green Building Code, but we still have a long way to go." According to a recent Tampa Tribune analysis, Tampa's carbon footprint is one of the largest in the nation, competing with cities like Boston and Baltimore that have twice the population.
Yet, there are some signs that things could begin to turn around locally. Last year, the National Science Foundation funded a new organization with the goal of educating people in coastal areas about the science and impacts of climate change. The Coastal Areas Climate Change Education Partnership (CACCE) recently held a climate change education workshop for Hillsborough County teachers at Blake High School. While tiptoeing around the partisan nature of the climate change debate, CACCE hopes to develop a comprehensive educational plan specific for coastal areas in Florida and the Caribbean that are the most vulnerable to climate impacts. "We don't have the resources to counteract the propaganda that climate change is not anthropogenic," says Alan Feldman, director of CACCE and professor of science education at USF. "We are more interested in educating people about what we can do about these events."
Education on the scientific facts of this complex and divisive issue is essential to challenge the mountains of propaganda. But the root of this unique human dilemma has everything to do with the governing values our species has chosen over the past century — as if nature is limitless and we can do whatever we please with it in pursuit of profit. Unless we begin to address this fundamental premise head on, as those in the small but vocal climate justice movement are doing now in the lobbies of power brokers around the world, we won't stand a chance against the billions the deniers spend to ensure we keep our heads in the sand.
Kelly Benjamin is a fellow with Earth Journalism News and former candidate for the Tampa City Council. He reported from the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa for WMNF and Mediastrike.info
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2011.