http://counterpunch.org/bond06212011.htmlJudging by what transpired at last week’s global climate negotiations in the former West German capital, Bonn, it appears certain that in just over five months time, the South African port city of Durban will host a conference of procrastinators, the ‘COP 17’ (Conference of Parties), dooming the earth to the frying pan. Further inaction on climate change will leave our city’s name as infamous for elite incompetence and political betrayal as is Oslo’s in the Middle East.
It appears certain that Pretoria’s alliance with Washington, Beijing, New Delhi and Brasilia, witnessed in the shameful 2009 Copenhagen Accord, will be extended to other saboteurs of the Kyoto Protocol, especially from Ottawa, Tokyo and Moscow, along with Brussels and London carbon traders.
What everyone now predicts is a conference of paralysis. Not only will the Kyoto Protocol be allowed to expire at the end of its first commitment period (2012). Far worse, Durban will primarily be a conference of profiteers, as carbon trading – the privatization of the air, giving rich states and companies the property-right to pollute – is cemented as the foundation of the next decade’s global climate malgovernance.
Indeed, a telling diplomatic move in Bonn was when Pretoria negotiators, weighed down by team members from maxi-polluters Eskom, Sasol and the National Business Initiative, tried to break African solidarity against European Union plans for opening up new carbon markets (in exchange for Europe emitting much more GreenHouse Gas pollution) – instead of doing the honorable thing by paying the EU’s vast climate debt to Africa straight up.
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