What happened in Copenhagen?
Read this: How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
I wasn’t “in the room”, but I was in the building and can very strongly confirm this statement by Lynas:
… this further strengthened China’s negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity (”equal rights to the atmosphere”) in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.
This is a huge problem! Virtually all civil society movements and activists are so eager to be perceived as pro equity and pro the rights of developing countries that they sometimes fail to see the issues soberly. The global climate negotiations is not all a neo-colonialist game, western leaders aren’t totally failing to take responsibility for historical emissions and China isn’t trumping the developed world in leadership on climate change. The sooner we realize this and start to be less ideologically colored by the history of our movements the better. Rich countries have a tremendous responsibility to chair, but so do others and the rich people in eastern China and urban India has no right to use poor people on the countryside as alibis for not taking action to stop climate change.
When the negotiations boils down to a situation where U.S. politicians refuse to take action that they perceive will deteriorate an already weakening competitiveness against Chinese (and other developing countries) industries, and where the Chinese elite refuse to take any action that they fear will weaken their grip on power and limit the growth that deliver social stability - social movements have to realize that the solution can’t be to lay the blame only on governments in the developed world. Of course many countries aren’t doing nearly good enough and especially so the U.S., but we have to put pressure on all governments and not least so in countries lacking free social movements of their own!
This is another good read on the topic
January 4th, 2010 at 11:06 am
Right so. The responsability for colonialism has to stop somewhere.If not for anything else so for practical reasons.