Climate Justice on the Road from Durban: A report from the front lines at the 2011 UN COP 17 Climate Conference

 

John Foran, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Richard Widick, Sociology & Orfalea Center, University of California, Santa Barbara

–  working paper presented at  –

CRISIS – A Global Studies Conference at UCSB February 24, 2012

THE CENTRAL PROBLEM of the 21st century will be the problem of climate change.  We pay homage to W.E.B Dubois here not to set up an invidious hierarchy of suffering and oppression, but to focus in on the one crisis that binds all the others and is already affecting every person on the planet, of whatever nationality, class, ethnicity, gender, or age, and whose impact will only grow as each year passes.^[1]

We take climate change to represent what John Bellamy Foster calls “the ecological rift” that the history of capitalism has opened up between humanity and nature; but in addition to the climate rift,  he points out, the program of uninterrupted, infinite capitalist accumulation is also producing oceanic acidification; stratospheric ozone depletion; disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles; destruction of fresh water, land, and biodiversity, as well as atmospheric aerosol loading and chemical pollution. Each of these systemic ecological crises will, at some point, command the same form of international cooperative attention as the climate rift does now. That means that our analysis of the international climate negotiations and the climate justice movement has implications that go far beyond climate change – what we are analyzing here is the ability of emergent global civil society and global governance to deal with the ecological contradictions of unfettered capitalist expansion.

If climate change is in fact bearing down on everyone – it is doing so differentially, and that is why it is linked to every other aspect of the complex crisis of humanity – the disasters of capitalist globalization, of militarism, of poverty and inequality – in a complex web that allows one to start anywhere and arrive everywhere else.  Christian Parenti, in his wonderful new book Tropic of Chaos:  Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York:  Nation Books, 2011), observes, you can “read the world in a loaf of bread.”

It is a problem largely created and perpetuated in the rich world, by the power holders in industry, finance, government, the media and culture – the 1 percent who continue to benefit from a world in crisis.  But it is not a problem they can easily solve.  Climate science tells us that we have only a very short window – possibly no longer than the rest of this decade – to avert the worst.  And the worst will be unimaginably bad, exponentially worse than things are right now.

If this is so – and we can’t see it any other way – then hope lies mainly in global civil society – all of us in this room, together with the 99 percent beyond it, and the possibility perhaps (not very large) that we can become part of the greatest social movement the world has ever seen.

This, then, is the problem of the 21st century:  the fact of climate change, the ecological rift, and the possibility of resistance to the forces of capitalist globalization that are responsible for this manifold crisis.

One part of that emergent global civil society is what we call the global climate justice movement, or better movements.  Richard and I have come to the realization that this is the movement to watch, to study and to contribute to by that study.

We are drawing on everything we have learned and lived in our time on the planet – our life histories, intellectual journeys, methodological and theoretical skills, and activist imaginations (some might say, our over-active imaginations…).  We are trying to produce a global ethnography of the climate justice movement, and we have recently created an entity called the International Institute of Climate Action Theory, which publishes a website that is now about three months old and with which we envision an increasingly direct engagement with and participation in the movement itself.  The International Institute, by the way, consists of the two of us – but you have to start somewhere!

We are here today to report back from our attendance at the recently completed UN COP 17 –the seventeenth Conference of the Parties — climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa held between November 28 and December 11, 2011 (they went one and a half days longer than anticipated).

Judging the “outcome” of the COP 17 depends on your vantage point.  For the UNFCCC (the 195-member state body that presides over and organizes the annual COP meetings and that delivered the Kyoto Protocol at COP 3 in 1997), it was an unequivocal success.

For example, the South African presiding President of COP17,  Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said: “What we have achieved in Durban will play a central role in saving tomorrow, today’.” (http://unfccc.int/2860.php).

And at the end of the meetings, chief U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern declared his satisfaction:  “This is a breakthrough in climate negotiations….  as we begin to grapple with what a new legal instrument, genuinely applying to all parties, should look like. We’re in a much better place right now than most people thought possible two weeks ago [at the start of the meetings]”  (#[2]3).

Business leaders are also heralding the agreement – for example Joanne Yawitch, CEO of the National Business Initiative, who said recently that, with the Durban Platform : “the big emitters took responsibility” and saved Kyoto… etc. etc. (source #03),

Thus have the powerful declared victory, and taken credit for it.  But this is an empty gesture – because the official document produced, the so-called “Durban platform,” seems to forestall any effective treaty taking place before 2020.  Climate science, on the other hand, generally holds that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak as early as 2017, and decline significantly thereafter, to keep the planet from heating up beyond 1.5-2 degrees Celsius by the end of the twenty-first century (and by the way, let’s start calling this 4 degrees here in the U.S. because that’s what Americans need to understand).

Meanwhile, the global climate justice movements are declaring Durban worse than a failure:

For example:

La Via Campesina concluded that the Durban Platform has : “no commitments for real emission Cuts … the only thing that was saved are the market mechanisms of the Protocol.” #(04).

Global Exchange’s Shannon Biggs observed that “On the final scheduled day of negotiations in Durban, the UNFCCC stunned even seasoned observers with a plan tantamount to genocide” (#07).

Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth International observed that : “Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions. An increase in global temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, Small Island States, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1% of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99%”   (#07)

Patrick Bond, Director of the Durban Center for Civil Society and a host of the Peoples Space counter-summit at COP17, wrote: “It is so sad that The UNFCCC is pretty much like the WTO, illegitimate, failed 16 times and now a 17th it very much appears.”

These social movers and organizations and networks also report that they themselves are failing to make progress toward the real needs of the planet, as a number of activists told us and said publically.  The leadership of these organizations saw their efforts to shape the negotiations for the better on the inside, and to build the movement on the outside, as falling short, and failing to generate the momentum needed to derail a future that is no future.

From our perspective as politically interested academic observers who attended the negotiations as last-minute NGO delegates for the University of California, as well as attending the movement’s People’s Space events held three miles away at the Center for Civil Society of the University of KwaZulu Natal, the outcome, while complex, was in the end a step forward in the long struggle for global climate justice.  There are three reasons for this.

First, the two-week negotiations saw a large coalition of countries committed to a just and binding treaty, finding each other and making stronger alliances than they have in the past.  The 39-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), on the front lines of the ocean waters that are already rising, stood together in their demand that global emissions be cut deep and fast enough to limit warming within a range of 1-1.5 degrees, and kept this ambitious but necessary goal in sight.  An equally radical affirmation came from the set of progressive Latin American ALBA nations, led by Bolivia, including Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, and others.

The G77 nations (sometimes called the G77 plus China, and including many of the so-called Least Developed Countries), while not united — disappointing exceptions being South Africa, India, and at times, China — tended to agree with this position.[3]  These three groups, totaling well over 100 nations, exerted pressure on the European Union, the only bloc of Rich World countries that has taken a serious and principled stand on the priority of the wealthy industrial nations to make the deepest cuts and pay a massive climate debt to the Majority World that would make it possible for them to both develop and reduce the carbon intensity of their development.

The second major impetus for change was provided by the youthful activists who came from everywhere to Durban, as parts of various organizations, networks, and national groupings.  This group inspired us with their words, actions, and visions, some of which we gathered in interviews with them.  Six young Canadians stood up at a press conference of their Minister of the Environment, Peter Hent, and turned their backs on him, wearing t-shirts that proclaimed “Turn your backs on Canada!”  Their country had brazenly announced on the first day of negotiations that it was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, whatever the outcome of the conference, and that it was pouring massive financial and political resources into realizing the profits to be made from the vast tar-sand oil fields of Alberta.[4]  The six young activists were promptly “de-badged” and escorted out of the conference.

Two days after the six Canadians stood up, on Thursday, December 8, a Middlebury College student, Abigail Borah, shouted down chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern at his press briefing, :

I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot.  The obstructionist Congress has shackled justice and delayed ambition for far too long.  I am scared for my future. We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty.  You must take responsibility to act now, or you will threaten the lives of youth and the world’s most vulnerable. You must set aside partisan politics and let science dictate decisions. You must pledge ambitious targets to lower emissions, not expectations.  2020 is too late to wait (#26).

On the very last day in which civil society was allowed into the halls of the national negotiators, Anjuli Appadurai, another U.S. college student, delivered the final statement of the whole proceedings, a passionate and blistering call on the delegates to heed the voices of the world’s youth, and to act responsibly.  She brought down the house.

Third: Occupy Wall Street, in its broadest incarnations of Occupy Everything and Occupy Planet Earth, also provided form and strategy to the local and international activists, young and old, who established an Occupy COP 17 encampment just outside the convention center, in view of the Hilton Hotel where many of the delegations stayed, inside the zone open only to delegates.

On the last official day of negotiations, Friday, December 9, the Occupy movement very dramatically staked out political space in a direct action inside the convention center, when several hundred people occupied the corridors just outside the final plenary of the conference, and staged a boisterous show of support for the progressive nations inside and on behalf of global civil society on the outside.

*     *     *

These three elements– progressive nations, youthful activists, and a prefigurative occupation by civil society – worked together to deliver a different outcome than the triumphalist official one or the pessimistic verdict of movement leaders.

We believe that a new dynamic within the international climate negotiations is being set in motion here, involving on the inside a large part of the Majority World and much of the European Union, and on the outside the global climate justice movement – especially considering the way that people in their 20s or even younger have stepped up their ability to be heard and taken seriously.  This dynamic is furthered in the actions and communication processes established between the inside and the outside, making use of a variety of networks and technologies.

Here is one thing we can say for sure: This struggle will be continued…

And what is the message? It’s complex, but it amounts to a demand for Climate Justice Now!  Global Justice Now!  Social Justice Now!

This struggle will be continued in Qatar, this fall at COP18…  but that is another story…

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