{"id":16425,"date":"2011-12-19T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-12-19T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=16425"},"modified":"2011-12-18T22:16:59","modified_gmt":"2011-12-18T22:16:59","slug":"no-bail-out-for-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/12\/no-bail-out-for-the-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"No Bail-Out for the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why is it so easy to save the banks, but so hard to save the biosphere?<\/em><\/p>\n

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.<\/p>\n

Lord Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn<\/a>. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed<\/a>, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government\u2019s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises by several more multiples.<\/p>\n

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tn available \u2013 more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.<\/p>\n

Much of this was done both unconditionally and secretly: it took journalists two years to winkle out the detail. The banks shouted \u201chelp\u201d and the government just opened its wallet. This all took place, remember, under George W Bush, whose administration claimed to be fiscally conservative.<\/p>\n

But getting the US government to commit to any form of bailout for the planet \u2013 even a couple of billion \u2013 is like pulling teeth. \u201cUnaffordable!\u201d the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) shriek. It will wreck the economy! We\u2019ll go back to living in caves!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m often struck by the wildly inflated rhetoric of those who accuse environmentalists of scaremongering. \u201cIf those scaremongers have their way they\u2019ll destroy the entire economy\u201d is the kind of claim uttered almost daily, without any apparent irony.<\/p>\n

No legislator, as far as I know, has yet been able to explain why making $7.7tn available to the banks is affordable, while investing far smaller sums in new technologies and energy saving is not.<\/p>\n

The US and other nations began talking seriously about tackling climate change in 1988. Yet we still don\u2019t have a legally-binding global agreement, and we are unlikely to get one until 2020, if at all. Agreements to help the banks are struck at economic summits without breaking sweat, yet making progress at climate summits looks like using a donkey to tow a 44-tonne truck.<\/p>\n

So saying, the outcome at Durban, after some superhuman feats of traction, was better than most environmentalists feared. After Copenhagen and Cancun, it seemed implausible that rich and poor nations would ever agree that they would one day strike a legally-binding treaty, but they have. That doesn\u2019t mean that the outcome was good: even if everything happens as planned, we are still likely to end up with more than two degrees of warming, which threatens great harm to many of the world\u2019s people and places.<\/p>\n

The clearest account of the negotiations and the outcome of the Durban meeting that I have read so far has been written by Mark Lynas<\/a>, who attended as an adviser to the president of the Maldives. The Byzantine complexity he documents is the result of twenty years of foot-dragging and obstruction. When powerful countries want to do something, they do it swiftly and simply. When they don\u2019t, their agreements with other nations turn into a cat\u2019s cradle.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the key points:<\/p>\n

– The most important negotiations boiled down to a battle between two groups: the European Union, least developed countries and small island states on one side, which pressed for steeper, faster cuts, and the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China on the other side, seeking to resist that pressure.<\/p>\n

– The first group (EU + LDCs) succeeded in one respect: the other nations agreed to work towards a legally binding deal \u201capplicable to all parties\u201d. In other words, unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which governs only the greenhouse gas emissions of a group of rich nations, this will apply to everyone. (It doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that all nations will have to reduce their emissions however).<\/p>\n

– The first group failed in its attempt to get this done quickly. The poorest nations wanted a legally binding outcome by the end of next year. But the US-China group held out for 2020, and got it. Unless this changes, it makes limiting the global temperature rise to two degrees or less much harder \u2013 perhaps impossible.<\/p>\n

– The Kyoto Protocol, though it will remain in force until either 2017 or 2020, is now a dead letter. In fact, Lynas suggests, unless the loopholes it contains are closed it could be worse than useless, as they could undermine the voluntary commitments that its signatory nations have made.<\/p>\n

– The countries agreed to create a Green Climate Fund<\/a> to help developing nations limit their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming. But, with three exceptions \u2013 South Korea, Germany and Denmark \u2013 they didn\u2019t agree to put any money into it. The fund is supposed to receive $100bn a year: a lot of money, until you compare it to what the banks got.<\/p>\n

– Between now and 2020, all we have to rely on are countries\u2019 voluntary commitments. According to a UN study<\/a>, these fall short of the cuts required to prevent more than 2 degrees of global warming \u2013 by some 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n

– But as the Durban agreement conceded, two degrees is still too high. It raised the possibility of pledging to keep the rise to no more than 1.5 degrees. This would require a much faster programme of cuts than it envisages.<\/p>\n

So why is it so easy to save the banks and so hard to save biosphere? If ever you needed evidence that our governments operate in the interests of the elite, rather than the world as a whole, here it is.<\/p>\n

Published on the Guardian\u2019s website<\/a> 16th December 2011.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 monbiot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why is it so easy to save the banks, but so hard to save the biosphere? They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades. No legislator, as far as I know, has yet been able to explain why making $7.7tn available to the banks is affordable, while investing far smaller sums in new technologies and energy saving is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}