What about the United Nations and global warming? The United Nations is anything but united. As an international organisation, representing hundreds of national governments with competing interests, trying to tackle this global problem, the United Nations has been a dismal failure. Resolving the climate crisis requires the world’s leading industrial nations to collectively agree to legally binding cuts in their emissions and to forego the short-term benefits to their economies of continuing to burn more fossil fuels. In a world of divided and competitive nation states this cannot be done.
The origins of the UN climate talks date back to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At that gathering, 154 nations including the United States, signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) treaty. Further treaties have taken place since then. The last treaty, the Paris Accord, dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance, was signed in 2016.
Over forty years after the first UN meeting, global warming is still a major global problem. Four countries, China, the US, India and Russia produce half of all carbon emissions. According to the scientists, three quarters of Paris Climate pledges agreed in 2016 are totally inadequate (Guardian Wednesday 6 November 2019).
At the UN climate talks (COP25) held in Madrid in December 2019, major emitting countries did all they could to block progress. The final text was a watered-down compromise. There was no collective action nor could there be between competitive capitalist countries with conflicting interests. Poorer countries at risk of flooding are just so much collateral damage.
Worse still at COP 29 held in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, where the opening speech given by President Ilhaam Aliyev said that oil and gas were” gift from God” and his government had no intention of stopping their use. The countries most effected by Global Warming wanted trillions of dollars from the rich nations but were only promised a pitiful donation.
All very disappointing to the environmental reform pressure groups like Greenpeace. Like all reform groups Greenpeace want capitalism without the effects of capitalism.
If the United Nations cannot do anything substantial about the climate crisis it at least produces statistics to show how serious the problem is. The UN report said that one million species face extinction (BBC News 7 May 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that climate change is responsible for at least 150,000 deaths per year, a number that is expected to double by 2030. The effects of global warming will cause dire health consequences such as death from malnutrition, insect-borne disease and heat stress.
Extreme weather events, like the recent fires in the Brazilian rain forest, in Australia and in California and the drought in Africa in 2015 and 2016, will increase in destructive frequency. About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters. According to the UN’s climate science panel, the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed.
Indonesia, for example, is moving its capital from the climate-threatened city of Jakarta to the sparsely populated island of Borneo, which is home to some of the world’s greatest tropical rainforests. These forests now face felling to make way for a new city – another contribution to global warming. As well as dire problems of pollution and traffic congestion, Jakarta suffers from severe subsidence, which makes the coastal city extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, also caused by global warming (Guardian 26 August 2019).
Not all capitalists will be losers. Those constructing the new city for the Indonesian government will make a profit. Elsewhere, some capitalists will benefit in winning contracts for the building of flood defences, from demanding higher insurance premiums from policy holders, and by producing renewable energy systems like solar panels and wind turbines. Nevertheless, climate warming remains a systemic threat to capitalism and commodity production for exchange and profit. There have always been capitalists who profit from the misery of other people.
And some countries face a contradiction. They recognise that burning coal contributes to global warming and adverse weather conditions but carry on regardless. The government of Bangladesh, for example, plans to burn more coal for power even though it will worsen global warming in a nation already battered by climate crises from floods to cyclones. About 3% of the country’s power comes from coal, but it plans to build 29 coal-based power plants in the next two decades to increase this to 35%.
The United Nations says that nearly one in three children in Bangladesh is at risk from disasters linked to climate change. Floods in 2019 have killed at least 60 people and displaced nearly 800,000 in Bangladesh, which in the low-lying delta region of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and is vulnerable to the impacts of rising global temperatures, including more extreme weather and rising sea levels. Its traditional sea-defence of the mangrove swamps has been impacted by capitalism’s profit-seeking shrimp farming.
http://news.trust.org/item/20191106152850-nleno/
The capitalists and politicians are split about how to protect their class interests. Some even blame capitalism itself. The former boss of Unilever, Paul Polman, has warned that capitalism is a “damaged ideology” that must “reinvent itself”. He said that “to survive” capitalism must do more “to combat the climate emergency” (Guardian 30th October 2019). But how can capitalism change into something it isn’t? He did not say. Capitalism is not a person but a social system. Capitalism is all about exploiting the working class and making profit. The profit system cannot reinvent itself. Capitalism can only be abolished. Ironically, his firm Unilever makes a lot of money from soya and coconut oil plantations, using land where once there used to be tropical rainforests. As such, it has made a major contribution to the problems that Mr Polman is so concerned about.
The capitalists and their political representatives are like the mice in Aesop’s fable, “The Mice in Council” who try to put an alarm bell on the cat that is killing them. They know that not to put the bell around the cat’s neck will lead to decimation but no one will be brave enough to come forward and to put the bell on.
