Swazi Observer Newspaper

Durban COP17: Conference of Polluters 12 November, 2011 01:21:00 with Ackel Zwane Font size: All roads lead to Durban this month for the Conference of Partners, COP 17 but not without daggers drawn. Civil society on the one hand is coming out guns blazing to face the industrial giants of the first world while the third world on the other wants its hoarse voice to be also heard. This week we reproduce an article by Patrick Bond, who directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society. The failure of Durban’s COP17 – a veritable “Conference of Polluters” – is certain, but the nuance and spin are also important. Binding emissions-cut commitments under the Kyoto Protocol are impossible given Washington’s push for an alternate architecture that is also built upon sand. The devils in the details over climate finance and technology include an extension of private-sector profit-making opportunities at public expense, plus bizarre new technologies that threaten planetary safety. Politically, the overall orientation of global climate policy managers, especially from the US State Department and World Bank, will be to eventually displace the main process to the G20. This requires distraction of our attention from any potential overall UN solution to the climate crisis – which in any case is a zero-possibility in the near future because of the terribly adverse power balance – and to ignore civil society’s varied critiques of market strategies, strategies to keep fossil fuels in the ground and plans for state-subsidised, community-controlled, transformative energy, transport, production, consumption and disposal systems. amounted Recall from last December how disappointed the progressive movement was that in the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen fiasco, the primary face-saving at the Cancun summit amounted to restoring faith in carbon markets. The Bolivian delegation was the only sensible insider team, and they summed up the summit’s eight shortcomings: Effectively kills the only binding agreement, Kyoto Protocol, in favour of a completely inadequate bottom-up voluntary approach.