Challenging the Oiligarchy
Here we go again.
We are appalled that the long-term interests of the majority
of the world population are being sacrificed for short-term corporate
greed in the United States.
You know things are serious when this level of outrage is expressed
not by a tiny environmental group, but by the European Parliament, in
response to the Bush administrations announcement that it was
going to pull the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the international
global warming treaty. In a resolution, the European Parliament added,
It would be socially and humanly irresponsible to squander the
heritage of energy resources and a sound environment to which our descendants
will rightfully lay claim.
You also know things are serious when the U.S. Treasury Secretary criticizes
the Kyoto Protocol for being too weak and having no more than a trivial
impact on climate change and yet the Bush administration
announces its plans to withdraw from the Kyoto process on the grounds
that its energy efficiency prescriptions are too onerous.
The decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol represents the nadir
in the first hundred days of an administration that has worked very
quickly to gut a wide array of environmental, labor and public health
regulations, and to further tip the scales in favor of the rich.
To appreciate the outrageousness of the Bush action, it is worth reviewing
both how certain the problem of global warming is, and how serious the
potential consequences are.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consensus-driven
group of the worlds 2,500 leading climate scientists, tends to
issue statements in somewhat bland language. But there is no denying
its conclusion:
Global warming is happening now. An increasing body
of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and
other changes in the climate system, the IPCC says. Globally,
it is very likely [meaning a 90 to 99 percent chance] that the 1990s
was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the instrumental
record, since 1861.
Greenhouse gases are accumulating at an alarming rate. Atmospheric
CO2 levels probably exceed levels of any period in the last 20,000
years.
The warming trends are not natural. There is new and
stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last
50 years is attributable to human activities.
Major jumps in global temperatures are coming soon. Average
surface temperature is projected to increase in the range of 2.5 to
10.4 degrees Fahrenheit from 1990 to 2100.
The climate chaos induced by global warming is likely to create severe
weather conditions, with major human health and environmental impacts
with the worst consequences borne, as usual, by the poor:
Weather disasters including storms and flooding in certain
areas, and drought and wildfires in others are likely to surge.
Melting of the polar icecaps could lead to dramatic sea level
rise, overwhelming low-lying coastal areas, and submerging small-island
nations altogether.
Shifting weather patterns are likely to significantly alter
the ability of different regions to grow food, and undermine many
areas ability to grow traditional crops and maintain or achieve
food self-sufficiency.
Climate changes also seem likely to lead to new disease patterns,
including the potentially dramatic spread of tropical diseases such
as malaria, and the evolution of new diseases and strains of disease.
Any remotely rational assessment of the evidence would conclude that
immediate action is imperative to limit the damage. That the Clinton
administration was so reluctant to embrace even pitifully inadequate
measures, and that the Bush administration is willing to go even further
and reject the minimalist Kyoto Protoco, is due to the energy industrys
powerful influence, and the very special ties between the Bush administration
and Big Oil.
But the brazenness of the Bush administration also reflects the weakness
of the U.S. environmental movement and its failure to mobilize a broad
constituency around global warming.
Consider by way of contrast the issue of poor country access to HIV/AIDS
and other essential medicines. Here, AIDS activists protests forced
the Clinton administration to reverse its policy and stop applying pressure
to developing countries that were seeking to make essential medicines
affordable. The Bush administration, which is even friendlier to the
drug companies than the Clinton administration and has drug company
executives in important positions, decided to leave the revised Clinton
policy alone. Why? In large part, because of fears of renewed protests.
In the global warming context, with a few exceptions, there has been
little to rival the aggressive and strategically savvy interventions
of the AIDS activists.
That must change if the United States, by far the worlds leading
greenhouse gas emitter, is to begin to reduce its emissions. Environmentalists
must reshape the climate change issue to be one that generates passion:
They must move away from narrow debates about percentage changes in
aggregate emissions. They should join the growing consumer revolt against
utility overcharging, and push not just for cost-saving clean energy
and energy efficiency, but for public control of power generating and
distribution. (Public power would create the institutional structure
to force the shift to clean production.) The environmental movement
must also embrace the climate justice perspective, which demands analysis
and response to global warming with an eye to impacts on the poor and
minorities, both in the United States and around the world.
These are the approaches that will generate passion and build a movement,
and galvanize the social forces to offset the political power
amplified in the Bush administration of Big Oil and the rest
of the energy industry.
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