Resilience - Why UN Climate Conferences Will Always Fail

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The differing geographies of countries will also affect how much impact Climate Change will have on them. A country such as Bangladesh, with a substantial part of its territory close to sea level will have a very different experience than that of land-locked Switzerland. For some countries Climate Change may provide distinct advantages, an example being the nations that border the Arctic, the “New North” where “agriculture will also shift northward” and where “particular focus will be the oil, gas and other subterranean treasures to be found inside the Arctic Circle”8. The countries of the Arctic Council are actively discussing such opportunities9.

Another issue is the amount of time such an approach would take to implement the required emissions reductions to forestall dangerous levels of climate change. The inability to gain any traction over the past two decades, together with the carbon emissions intensive development of such countries as China and India driving global emissions to a new high in 201210, has removed much of the time available for global society to reach a viable solution. In the cases of the EU and the GATT/WTO efforts took many decades to reach fruition. Modern society is based upon the exploitation of fossil fuels, firstly coal and then oil and gas. The energy provided by these fuels has become central to the existence of our complex societies as evidenced by the impact of the electrical supply failure in parts of the United States and Canada in 2003, or the blockade of oil depots in the United Kingdom in 2000. These fuels are also used as inputs to chemical processes that provide the bases for an extraordinary percentage of critical products, such as fertilizers, medicines, and plastics. Thus, actions required to limit the gases produced by burning and processing these fuels are bound to have wide-ranging economic impacts. Such actions will include the replacement of a fossil fuel based energy infrastructure with one based upon renewable energy, together with carbon capture (if viable) for fossil fuel usage. The historical experience is that such large scale technological changes take decades to fully defuse throughout an economy11. As “most environmental problems are solved through relatively simple technological shifts and regulatory policies”5, Climate Change cannot be seen as a typical environmental problem. Given this, attempts to solve Climate Change using approaches previously utilized for typical environmental problems, such as atmospheric ozone depletion, are not appropriate.

Much of the proposed changes to address Climate Change also contradict the current dominant neo-liberal beliefs which permeate many global agencies and the administrative and decision making apparatus of many of the countries with large greenhouse gas emissions. Actions to reduce emissions that affect market prices (e.g. carbon pricing), taxes (e.g. carbon taxes), the decision making of market participants (e.g. lack of approval for new coal power stations), or limit trade (e.g. tariffs or other trade barriers against goods made with high emissions) are seen as unwarranted interventions into the workings of the free market and opposed by most economists, policy makers, and bodies such as the WTO and IMF. The latter body, which “has become a major site of global economic governance”12, is supported in the use of the neo-liberal paradigm by a wide range of social actors, such as “Bankers’ associations, chambers of commerce, mainstream think tanks, and the like”12. Due to this extensive support, other discursive paradigms have had very little impact upon the IMF, and “social movements have to date made only a modest overall impact”12. The impact upon the other major neo-liberal institutions, the World Bank and WTO, can be seen as superficial and tactical at best with no real change to the fundamental world-view of those institutions. The focus of the global Climate Change policy process within the confines of the UNFCCC can be seen to be extremely problematic given that it does not affect some of these major, and much more powerful, institutions.

The conceptual basis of the neo-liberal beliefs also form a significant barrier to the collective actions required to address the challenges of Climate Change, as “neo-liberal strategies of rule, found in diverse realms including workplaces, educational institutions and health and welfare agencies, encourage people to see themselves as individualized and active subjects responsible for enhancing their own well being”, and “’degovernmentalization’ of the welfare state, competition and consumer demand have supplanted the norms of ‘public service’”13. Within this neo-liberal discourse government policies designed to change individual and corporate practices with the intent of reducing greenhouse gases can be seen as defective as they “seek through government to force people to act against their own immediate <italics added by author> interests in order to promote a supposedly general interest”14. The need to modify immediate actions which may result in reduced prosperity, and/or discomfort, now for the future benefit of society as a whole and future generations is one of the core challenges of Climate Change policy. Neo-liberalism treats such actions as an unacceptable intrusion into individual freedom and the functioning of the free market. In contrast to the beliefs of mainstream economists, the aggregate result of individual’s selfish behavior will create a very negative result for humanity as a whole. As in previous emergencies, such as economic management during the two world wars, the visible hand of government and politics is required given the shortcomings of the invisible hand of the market.

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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-04/why-united-nations-climate-change-conferences-will-always-fail