\u201cYou\u2019ve been negotiating all my life,\u201d Anjali Appadurai told the plenary session of the U.N.\u2018s 17th \u201cConference of Parties,\u201d or COP 17, the official title of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. Appadurai, a student at the ecologically focused College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, addressed the plenary as part of the youth delegation. She continued: \u201cIn that time, you\u2019ve failed to meet pledges, you\u2019ve missed targets, and you\u2019ve broken promises. But you\u2019ve heard this all before.\u201d<\/p>\n
After she finished her address, she moved to the side of the podium, off microphone, and in a manner familiar to anyone who has attended an Occupy protest, shouted into the vast hall of staid diplomats, \u201cMic check!\u201d A crowd of young people stood up, and the call-and-response began:<\/p>\n
Appadurai: \u201cEquity now!\u201d<\/p>\n
Crowd: \u201cEquity now!\u201d<\/p>\n
Appadurai: \u201cYou\u2019ve run out of excuses!\u201d<\/p>\n
Crowd: \u201cYou\u2019ve run out of excuses!\u201d<\/p>\n
Appadurai: \u201cWe\u2019re running out of time!\u201d<\/p>\n
Crowd: \u201cWe\u2019re running out of time!\u201d<\/p>\n
Appadurai: \u201cGet it done!\u201d<\/p>\n
Crowd: \u201cGet it done!\u201d<\/p>\n
That was Friday [9 Dec 2011], at the official closing plenary session of COP 17. The negotiations were extended, virtually nonstop, through Sunday, in hopes of avoiding complete failure. At issue were arguments over words and phrases\u2014for instance, the replacement of \u201clegal agreement\u201d with \u201can agreed outcome with legal force,\u201d which is said to have won over India to the Durban Platform.<\/p>\n
The countries in attendance agreed to a schedule that would lead to an agreement by 2015, which would commit all countries to reduce emissions starting no sooner than 2020, eight years into the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cEight years from now is a death sentence on Africa,\u201d Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, chairperson of Friends of the Earth International, told me. \u201cFor every one-degree Celsius change in temperature, Africa is impacted at a heightened level.\u201d He lays out the extent of the immediate threats in his new book about Africa, \u201cTo Cook a Continent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bassey is one among many concerned with the profound lack of ambition embodied in the Durban Platform, which delays actual, legally binding reductions in emissions until 2020 at the earliest, whereas scientists globally are in overwhelming agreement: The stated goal of limiting average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will soon be impossible to achieve. The International Energy Agency, in its annual World Energy Outlook released in November, predicted \u201ccumulative CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions over the next 25 years amount to three-quarters of the total from the past 110 years, leading to a long-term average temperature rise of 3.5 [degrees] C.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite optimistic pronouncements to the contrary, many believe the Kyoto Protocol died in Durban. Pablo Solon, the former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations and former chief climate negotiator for that poor country, now calls Kyoto a \u201czombie agreement,\u201d staggering forward for another five or seven years, but without force or impact. On the day after the talks concluded, Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that Canada was formally withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. Expected to follow are Russia and Japan, the very nation where the 1997 meeting was held that gives the Kyoto Protocol its name.<\/p>\n
The largest polluter in world history, the United States, never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and remains defiant. Both Bassey and Solon refer to the outcome of Durban as a form of \u201cclimate apartheid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the pledges by President Barack Obama to restore the United States to a position of leadership on the issue of climate change, the trajectory from Copenhagen in 2009, to Cancun in 2010, and, now, to Durban reinforces the statement made by then-President George H.W. Bush prior to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the forerunner to the Kyoto Protocol, when he said, \u201cThe American way of life is not up for negotiation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cAmerican way of life\u201d can be measured in per capita emissions of carbon. In the U.S., on average, about 20 metric tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere annually, one of the top 10 on the planet. Hence, a popular sticker in Durban read \u201cStop CO2lonialism.\u201d<\/p>\n
By comparison, China, the country that is the largest emitter currently, has per capita emissions closer to 5 metric tons, ranking it about 80th.\u00a0 India\u2019s population emits a meager 1.5 tons per capita, a fraction of the U.S. level.<\/p>\n
So it seems U.S. intransigence, its unwillingness to get off its fossil-fuel addiction, effectively killed Kyoto in Durban, a key city in South Africa\u2019s fight against apartheid. That is why Anjali Appadurai\u2019s closing words were imbued with a sense of hope brought by this new generation of climate activists:<\/p>\n
\u201c[Nelson] Mandela said, \u2018It always seems impossible, until it\u2019s done.\u2019 So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world, deep cuts now. Get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n
__________________<\/p>\n
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.<\/em><\/p>\n Amy Goodman is the host of \u201cDemocracy Now!,\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of \u201cBreaking the Sound Barrier,\u201d recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n