November 23, 2022
- COP27: Greenwashing the road to disaster
- Scientist Rebellion and 1,000 academics declare "continuing to say publicly 1.5°C is still alive is no longer defensible"
COP27: Greenwashing the road to disaster
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers’ Voice
Excerpts:
The UN climate conference, COP27, has come to an end. It has taken place during a year which has seen climate disasters that have affected entire regions, such as the Pakistan floods that affected over 30 million people. It is taking place when many climate scientists are saying that considerable permanent damage is almost certainly inevitable, no matter what we do. The goal of the Paris Agreement of 2015 (COP21) of restricting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (almost 3 degrees Fahrenheit) is not going to be met.
Yet COP27 took it for granted that the world will proceed along the same path of market-oriented measures, a path that has gotten us to the present disastrous position. This path has proved incapable of making changes sufficiently fast. The path of voluntary national pledges, public-private partnerships, and market incentives has failed. The pledges are insufficient, and they weren’t met anyway. But COP27 closed its eyes to this.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The present environmental disaster is the result of the failure of market fundamentalism and of the increasingly market-oriented state-capitalist regimes. By the time of the first major world environmental treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the world bourgeoisie had moved to replace strict environmental rules with market measures such as carbon trading. This went along with the move to privatize government functions, rely on corporate self-reporting, work through public-private partnerships, and allow the big polluters to capture the agencies supposedly regulating them.
The only way to have the needed rapid cuts in carbon emissions is to have direct regulation of the entire economy. The total amount of emissions must be regulated, and the changes in production needed to cut those emissions must be mandated. This requires regulating the production of energy, but also the outlines of the rest of the economy. It requires looking not just at the carbon emissions from a product, but of how much carbon emissions were required to produce the product, as well as to dispose of used-up products. This requires that major economic decisions over how land is utilized, how cities are designed, how water is used, and so forth cannot be left to individual capitalists to decide on the basis of how profitable it is for them. And it means the livelihood of the working masses must be provided too, rather than hoping that sufficient jobs will trickle-down to them as the agricultural and industrial economy is transformed to be sustainable and non-polluting.
- A different type of planning
- The belief that money solves everything
- For a working class environmental movement
- Notes
is no longer defensible
Below is the text of an open letter being circulated by Scientist Rebellion for signatures from the academic community. SR states that “Over one thousand academics from more than 40 countries have now signed, including prominent scholars and IPCC contributors.
Excerpts:
Dear Reader,
Forty years after the first climate summit in Geneva in 1979, 11,000 scientists published a manifesto in 2019 to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to "tell it like it is”.
Almost three years later, and in a global context highly unfavorable to emergency climate action, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has proclaimed that humanity is facing “collective suicide”.
The response of scientists the world over must be decisive. How do we honor the public's growing trust in our expert community in the face of looming catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown? It is simple: academics must share with the public what they share with each other about the world's response to climate change and biodiversity loss.
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .
Continuing to say publicly 1.5°C is still alive is no longer defensible, yet politicians, leading academics and the environmental movement persist in doing so. In response, polluting industries and policymakers are inadvertently being encouraged to resist rapid decarbonization.
And so we academics must act. As signees to this letter, we compassionately call upon the community of scientists working across all aspects of climate change to make a clear public statement ahead of COP27 in November, consisting of the following:
First, make clear the inevitability of missing the 1.5°C goal as laid out by the IPCC in its latest assessment.
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .
Our first responsibility has not changed: tell the truth - as far as we can discern it. Academics cannot fix decades of delay, but we can help societies take the radical action now needed to limit even worse outcomes. In remembering our humanity, we can act to restore it.
Sincerely,
Featured signees:
(A list of “featured signers” can be found at https://signon.scientistrebellion.com/, where it says that “Over one thousand academics from more than 40 countries have now signed, including prominent scholars and IPCC contributors.”
See full text of the article and the open letter at https://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-221123.html.