Another futile Earth Summit (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The findings of a survey carried out by YouGov in the wake of the recent Earth Summit and published in the Observer (8 September) revealed that seven out of ten people think that the Johannesburg Earth Summit has made almost no difference to the future of the planet. And only one in 500 believes that the controversial £40 million meeting attended by leaders from more than 100 countries, with 60,000 participants, will make the world ‘a lot better’. This, of course, came as no surprise. In the run-up to the Summit, activists the world over had expressed little or no confidence that it would be noted for achieving anything tangible. And if developments since the 1992 Rio Summit were anything to go by, few were holding out for anything worth celebrating.

As the Summit closed, the UN, the British government and many world-wide delegations articulated their surprise that non-governmental groups had come away from the Summit feeling angered and cheated. Oxfam, for instance, had commented that the Summit had been a triumph for greed and a tragedy for people. Friends of the Earth remarked: Do not believe government spin doctors who claim success for this Summit. It is by any objective test a failure. And Christian Aid said: The overall winner of this Summit has been big business. It has triumphed in its bid to avoid any legally-binding regulation on its behaviour.

Yet more empty promises

The final text of the Programme of Implementation agreed upon at Johannesburg after nine days of deliberations contained but two new and explicit targets. The summit agreed to halve the number of people without sanitation (about 1.2 billion) by 2015 and agreed to plans to provide clean water for half of those without it. In other words, even by 2015 there will still be millions of people without sanitation or clean water.

With growing concern now about the destruction wrought on of the Earth’s life-support system, the bumbling negotiations were billed as being to map out a plan for reducing poverty and protecting bio-diversity. All they could agree on was to aim to reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010 and to increase funding and technical resources to developing countries as well as to strengthen forest law and to merely reduce not stop illegal logging. The Summit acknowledged that poverty and environmental degradation are linked and further adopted the aim of halving the 1.2 billion who exist on less that $1 per day. Another paragraph considered over-fishing, and thus the depletion of a main protein source for many living in coastal areas. Here the Summit only agreed to restore, where possible, the world’s fish stocks by 2015 and merely to urge attention on marine pollution and the establishment of protected areas by 2010.

Back in 1992 at the Rio Summit, the world’s wealthier countries pledged to greatly increase their development aid to poorer countries to 0.7 percent of GNP. This was never achieved. Indeed, prior to the Summit, across the industrialised world it stood at 0.22 percent. What did the Johannesburg Summit do? It promised to urge the developed countries . . . to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of GNP as official development assistance. This would appear a step back – a promise is suddenly demoted to a promise to urge – and is perhaps an admission by the promise-makers, and the urgers, that promises are there to be broken. The US delegation, in particular, blocked all proposals involving regulating multinational corporations or dedicating significant new funds to so-called sustainable development.

The only outcome of the negotiations on sustainable consumption – the Holy Grail of the summit – was agreement to develop an action programme within 10 years, to publish indicators that evaluate progress and to give shoppers instructive eco-labels. The Summit failed in its proclaimed mission of setting definite targets and a timetable for increasing the use of renewable energies. Paragraph 19(e) watered down the Kyoto Protocol to combat climatic change by promoting clean fossil fuels. This said, the Kyoto Protocol was given a little more legitimacy with Russia and Canada promising to ratify it.

So, there was little or nothing to applaud at this Summit. The world’s leaders – and there were many on show – simply recommitted themselves to agreements they had already committed themselves to elsewhere. It was an affirmation by the global executive of capitalism that the Programme of Implementation should have carried the subtitle: Sorry, but there’s profits to be had.

Big corporate interests

In the past ten years, the real change has been the even more prominent role in negotiations given to business, predominantly multinational corporations. As never before, corporations are centre stage, with governments backing their interests. It was just naïve of the NGOs to imagine that the Summit was ever going to decide on a regulatory framework to try to make that the activities of corporations serve the interests of those in greatest need.

Entirely predictably, all that happened was that, with the blessing of the UN, multi-nationals negotiated a number of partnership agreements – quite simply voluntary commitments by corporations to respect the environment and protect human rights. But in an increasingly globalised world, where there are mega-profits to be made, and wherever these profits will come into conflict with environmental and human rights issues, any directors not seen to have profits forefront in their minds will be shown the door pretty damned quick. Thus, such promises are in truth not worth the paper they are written on. Insane? Yes. But this is actually capitalism functioning efficiently.

The relevance of the meeting was perhaps best revealed by the absence of George W Bush who, despite massive international lobbying for him to attend, decided that a war with Iraq was more important. This was understandable considering the numerous oil giants and weapons manufacturers he is indebted to, and not least because his advisers were all too aware he would have been heading for the mother of all heckling bouts and would undoubtedly have proved an embarrassment to the US delegation. Moreover, as US Capitalism plc was aware, they were going to get their way anyway at Johannesburg, so why send Dubya who was more valuable at home beating the war drum?

The debating aside, this was a meeting at which US Secretary of State Colin Powell was booed and jeered by US environmental campaigners and by many delegates and at which Tony Blair was lambasted from the speaker’s platform by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Namibian president Sam Nujoma as an interfering colonialist.

Were he not such an arrogant, murderous, hypocritical and corrupt agent of capital, Mugabe’s five minute bluster could have been applauded as sound socialist criticism. Apart from his much publicised anti-Blair broadside he angrily declared:

“The programme of action we set for ourselves at Rio has not only been unfulfilled but it has also been ignored, sidelined and replaced by a half-baked unilateral agenda of globalisation in the service of big corporate interests. The focus here is profit, not the poor; the process is globalisation, not sustainable development, while the objective is exploitation, not liberation.”

Mugabe was, for once, right.

Bearing in mind that previous world summits – and there have been several in recent years, all analysed in this journal – have been subordinated to the interests of big business and have consequently proved to be a waste of time in so far as addressing the problems of the planet was concerned, is it any wonder that not only NGOs, but the wider public have little faith in them? You would have to be very naïve to imagine that profit-driven corporations in a world subject to intense world market competitive pressures would, or could, be forced by the UN, take care of the planet in a responsible manner.

We can perhaps salvage one thing from Johannesburg that will serve the interests of humanity, and that is the fact – reinforced by this Summit – that capitalism cannot be trusted to run the world in the interests of humanity; that governments, including the UN which is made up of governments, serve the interests of profit first and that, if we are ever to take control of this planet and run it in the real interests of its inhabitants, then we must do so ourselves, without leaders and with a view to establishing a global system of society in which production is freed from the constraints of profit and in which each person will have free access to the benefits of civilisation.

John Bissett

Earth Summits – a record of failure (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The record of Earth summits prior to Johannesburg can be summed up in four words: high hopes, poor results. The first such summit took place in Stockholm in 1972, following the first Earth Day centred in New York in 1970. The 1970s became known by optimistic environmental reformers as the Decade of the Environment. In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was set up to co-ordinate and manage federal pollution control programmes. Much legislation was passed setting out standards for the reduction of air and water pollution, but the industrial polluters did not disappear.

When President Carter introduced tougher dumping regulations there was a big increase in illegal midnight dumpings, and exporting toxic waste to the Third World became a sudden growth industry. The Earth Day celebrated the modest and mostly temporary environmental gains that had been made. The following year the incoming Reagan administration packed the EPA with environmental lobbyists and lawyers whose chief function was to dismantle environmental legislation or to make it ineffective.

In 1987 delegates from twenty-three industrialised countries met in Montreal and agreed to phase out the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by 1999. The US was keenest because it had a virtual monopoly on the production of substitutes. The other countries wanted time to catch up on the technology. But many of them refused to sign, on the grounds that they couldn’t afford the substitutes (estimated to be at least three times as expensive).

It was the same story with carbon dioxide emissions. Those countries with above average dependence on coal and oil-fired power stations, led by the US, dragged their feet. Paying for filters or building other types of power stations would have raised their costs and put them at a disadvantage in competing with other countries on world markets. So any treaty on global warming that might have emerged would have been an inadequate compromise between rival capitalist states, full of loopholes and get-out clauses to protect vested interests.

Rio

The second Earth summit was held in Rio in 1992. Here a blueprint was drawn up for reversing the growing environmental damage to the planet and for narrowing the gap between richer and poorer nations and people in the twenty-first century. The leaders solemnly pledged themselves to implement Agenda 21, a document that had much to say about how environmental protection and economic development had to go hand in hand, but, as Fred Pearce recently remarked in the Independent (31 August), said next to nothing about combating the real impediments of money and politics.

The optimism generated by the Rio Summit soon faded as the problems, far from being solved, went on growing. Global warming continued to increase (eight of the hottest ten years recorded have been since 1992), topsoil continued to be lost (nearly a third of the world’s land area is degraded and at risk of becoming desert), forests continued to be felled and species to become extinct.

Richer countries failed to fulfil their promise to provide aid to help poorer ones change course and develop in a more sustainable manner. Wealth owners in the richer countries have enjoyed a bonanza since Rio, with the world economy growing by more than a third to $42 trillion (£27,600 billion). But aid to poorer countries did not just fail to rise – it fell like a stone. Between the Rio Summit and the millennium, aid dropped by more than a quarter in real terms. Every developed country except Denmark cut it. Instead it was Third World debt that rose – by a third to $2.5 trillion (£1,600 billion).

Five years ago there was another Earth summit, this time in New York. It was only ever going to be a re-enactment of the Rio Summit. The delegates from the world’s leading nations failed to agree on new targets for carbon dioxide emissions. The Rio delegates had agreed to return to pre-1990 CO2 levels by the end of the decade. But between 1992 and 1997 such emissions had in fact spiralled and went on doing so. The industrialised countries were as usual the worst perpetrators.

The Rio guidelines to protect the world’s forests were not adhered to, with about 10m hectares of forest vanishing every year, accompanied by the loss of about 130,000 species of life. At Rio the industrialised countries had agreed to increase their proportion of overseas aid to 0.7 percent of GDP. What happened was that aid fell by 20 percent between 1992 and 1995. In that period global poverty had increased, with the poorest 20 percent of the world’s people sharing less than 1.1 percent of global income, compared with 2.3 percent in 1960.

The Rio Summit had pledged $125 billion a year in aid initiatives for projects aimed at helping the environment. Few have been carried out and some have resulted in human misery. In Uganda, for instance, 35,000 inhabitants of the Kabale forest region were forcibly ejected from their homes in order that tourism could be encouraged and the forests protected. Those who resisted were either shot or burned alive in their homes.

In the five years between the Rio and New York summits the world’s fishing grounds were further depleted. The whole ecosystem faced, and still faces, an increased threat from oil and gas companies who are now exploiting the deeper oceans in their endless pursuit of profit. The day after the New York Summit closed the Guardian reported that it had ended in a shambles with no clear agreement on its main goals of new aid for developing countries or protecting forests.

Kyoto

Then later in 1997 came the Climatic Change Conference in Kyoto, Japan. A protocol was adopted which set specific targets for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. The targets varied from country to country. In March 2001, to the dismay of the international community, the US administration announced that it would not implement the protocol on the grounds that it is not the right tool to deal with the challenge of climate change at a global level.

As an alternative the Bush administration proposed a cap and trade system that would set limits for emissions of three major air pollutants – but not carbon dioxide. Whereas Kyoto set out mandatory reductions, under the Bush plan permits would be assigned for each ton of pollution. By cutting emissions, firms would be able to trade these permits with other businesses. The European Union estimated that the Bush plan would allow the US to actually increase emissions by up to 33 percent.

World condemnation of the US proposal followed and was unanimous. No one has the right to declare Kyoto dead, declared Sweden’s Environment Minister. President Bush was unrepentant: I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it’s right for America. Right for America should in fact be interpreted as right for American business interests. America, however, is not the only culprit in the process of environmental degradation – just the currently most powerful and with the greatest corporate interests to protect.

The idea of a world meeting to discuss world problems is not in itself wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is a recognition that problems such as environmental degradation, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, world hunger, poverty, ill-health and ignorance are global problems that can only be tackled by action on a world-scale. The problem is that under capitalism, with its built-in competitive struggle for profits, the necessary unity of purpose and co-operative action is impossible to achieve. Under capitalism the most that can possibly emerge from such meetings are trade-offs between competing sectional interests.

Only when capitalism has gone and the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all humanity can a meeting of representatives from all parts of the world be a success in terms both of being able to decide the urgent action needed and of being to implement it quickly and effectively.

Stan Parker

“A lame duck” (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the date for the World Summit on Sustainable Development drew nearer, the UN advised participants not to be seen to be extravagant during the Summit since about 13 million people were facing starvation in the immediate environment of the venue. Kofi Annan’s plea was unnecessary, not just because those millions would still starve (they have always starved) but also because the conferees would not see their normal lifestyles as extravagant and so would not heed the advice. On the other hand, it was important because it reveals the hypocrisy of Annan, the UN and their masters in the big business community. So even before delegates started arriving the whole world was told, in the warning Annan gave, that the summit was just another forum to disseminate lies and lip service.

Like any other phenomenon, the money-based system is not static. It has to continue to change its rules and methods of operation. The world summit in Johannesburg was one such example of the ongoing trend in the development of capitalism. On the face of it, however, it was a conference designed to bridge the widening chasm between the North and the South, a conference aimed at seeking solutions to environmental pollution. But in reality the Summit was nothing other than a business breakfast meeting; a market place where the owners of the means of living and their cronies met and discussed how to enhance their business in the form of loans and investments. It was organized by the world class business executives through their main agent – the UN – with the sole aim of increasing the scope and area of trade and commerce. The capitalists would then enhance their objective of concentrating capital.

Victor Menotti of International Forum on Globalisation wrote the following in his book Exporting Enron Environmentalism: The Bush Vision for Johannesburg:

“The Bush vision for Johannesburg shows more strategic foresight than almost anything the unilateralist, free trader has proposed in any international arena to date. What has been revealed on the road to Johannesburg is a grand plan to permanently incapacitate the United Nations as an institution to meaningfully address the twin crises of global poverty and ecological decline.”

It is not surprising therefore, that at the end of the party on 4 September the Heinrich Boll Foundation summed up the summit thus:

“The Johannesburg World Summit has ended. Governments deliberated on their declarations and the Johannesburg Action Plan; developing countries fought for market access and increased foreign aid; the United States blocked meaningful targets and timetables; and NGOs feared that not even the achievements of the Rio Summit ten years ago would be reaffirmed” (http://www.worldsummit2002.org/start.htm).

The Summit also provided a deep insight into the role and therefore the position of the corporate media in the class war. Paid to do the dirty public relations work, most of the journalists instead of exposing the hypocrisy of the powers-that-be merely trumpet what they’ve been fed to publicise. Of course the mention of certain obvious instances and events were unavoidable like the booing and heckling of the US delegation and the presence of anti-capitalist demonstrators. But even here only scant journalism was applied. Months before the meeting, groups with vested interest created channels through which the media would be guided as to what aspects of the deliberations should be highlighted. Websites were opened by these groups and lots of biased but very subtle information could be accessed by the media and NGOs. Through out the summit a group called Sustainable Development Issues Network (SDIN) held ‘daily NGOs strategy discussions’ in Johannesburg. Their co-ordinators worked very hard adding content, news and event links to the SDIN issue pages. In fact they encouraged and urged journalists to “use the links as a resource” (http: //www.sdissues.net/SDIN/).

But perhaps the aspect of the conference that interests us socialists most was the presence there of the ubiquitous anti-capitalists. This Summit, organised to enhance the capitalist caste’s dominion over the rest of mankind, only succeeded in drawing attention to the rising hatred of the masses against the stinking hypocrisy in the status quo. Many thousands of protesters, including victims of the Union Carbide disaster in India in 1984, converged in Johannesburg from all over the world. They made a loud noise throughout the summit. They even embarrassed the world policeman that the US has turned itself into by rudely interrupting Colin Powell’s speech. However, these anti-capitalists run the risk of being seen as agents provocateurs since their actions lack direction thus rendering their objectives truncated and meaningless. It is not enough to hate or speak against the inhuman capitalist system. It is much more important to articulate an alternative to it, an antidote to the malaise. And this is where the anti-capitalists are handicapped. They make all that noise only to appeal like the Shakespearean Shylock to the insatiable capitalists to have mercy on the masses. This is no solution.

If the anti-capitalists had pondered over the outcome of the Rio Summit a decade ago from a scientific and genuinely people-centred considerations, they would have gone further than begging our unwilling capitalist group to have pity. Ten years after the Agenda 21 was adopted, the situation of the environment has only travelled from bad to worse. Sustainable development remains an empty slogan eluding everyone. The masses continue to experience an alarming rate of marginalisation. The anti-capitalists have failed to ask themselves why the US and other powers have openly refused to accept the Kyoto Protocol on environmental pollution. If they had asked themselves, they would have realized that where money and profits are concerned people and environment are secondary, nay expendable.

Another fact that people generally failed to understand is that tackling individual issues such as environment; health; education; terrorism; wars; hunger; etc will lead no one anywhere. There is one fundamental cause that runs through all problems that face mankind – the ownership of the main resources of the world. Here we are talking about the tools with which wealth is produced: factories, land, transport and communications, etc. When only a few people control these, as is the case now, they use every vile means to maintain their stranglehold over them even if it means destroying the environment and by extension the masses. They can never listen to appeals; they only know their profits. A profit-oriented system can never be made to work otherwise; it is impossible to reform it to benefit the masses. The best bet for mankind, therefore, is to do away with such relations of minority ownership and replace it with a common ownership which will lead to a democratic way of managing these resources in the interests of mankind as a whole.

Suhuyini

“A damp squib” (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The docility of the world population has contributed greatly to keeping intact the increasingly unequal, barbaric and rapacious society that is global capitalism. Because people believe there is no alternative to capitalism, it keeps on existing while the reformists in the EU, UN, AU, World Bank and so on seek to distract us from such an alternative by pretending they can manage capitalism in the interests of everyone. In reality, capitalism can only ever be run in the interest of the tiny minority which effectively owns the world’s means of wealth production.

In a society based on the profit motive what has been achieved as a result of the efforts of these reformists? We see before us a polluted planet, war, rampant poverty and the exploitation of the majority. Such problems show no sign of abating. It is against this background of persistent failure that international representatives of the capitalist class have periodically sought to organise summits to address the issue of development. One such was the recent Earth Summit held in South Africa which attracted some 60,000 delegates from the around the world but which proved to be a huge let-down to those nations hungry for development.

Truly, this World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) ended up a damp squib. It was simply a 10-day event of misleading the world with vacuous statements of good intent while the needs of the planet and the global poor continue to play second fiddle to the interests of global capital.

The pre-summit arrangement was to focus on a global plan to tackle problems like AIDS, depleted fish stocks and so on as well as finding ways of providing help for the Third World to have clean water and to halve poverty by 2015. Considering the US position on environmental issues, it was a pity that the US president G.W. Bush didn’t bother to avail himself of this opportunity to explain his position. Instead he sent a representative, Colin Powell, who also happened to arrive late and at a time when other leaders were leaving.

America is generally acknowledged to be the world’s worst polluter. It is all too apparent that this, the richest country on the planet is quite unwilling to make a solid commitment to fight such pollution or ease the poverty of billions of people and promote environmental conservation. Instead it decided to concentrate on what it calls its “war on terrorism”, in particular its threat to launch a military attack against Baghdad. It was for reasons such as this that the summit ended up such a hopeless shambles. Whatever commitments on paper there may have been to bring about sustainable development, these were blunted and rendered ineffectual by the divergent and conflicting interests of different capitalist groupings. Not that it would have made much difference had those commitments been sincerely meant; there are other reasons why sustainable development has not been able to take off which have little to do with the lack of political will on the part of capitalist governments. After all millions of people go to bed hungry for no other reason than that it is simply not profitable to feed them.

True to form, this summit lost sight of what it was meant to be about and ended up as an excuse for political grandstanding. While US Secretary of State, Colin Powell was booed and barracked after remarks about the famine in Southern Africa and Blair hit back at Mugabe for his remarks about Britain, the war of words steadily escalated. The divisions amongst the global capitalists seemed as pronounced as ever just as their system seems no less incapable of offering practical solutions to the very problems it continues to generate. In short it is a case of business as usual.

Bigboy Musemwa

(Zimbabwe)

World View: Trading loopholes at The Hague (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’ve been here before. On 28 June 1997, the Guardian announced: “EARTH SUMMIT ENDS IN FAILURE”. Six months later, on 12 December, it ran a related story: “KYOTO DEAL LEAVES U.S. FREE TO POLLUTE”. On 16 November this year, after only three days of talks at The Hague, came the headline we well could have anticipated: “CLIMATIC TALKS STALEMATE AS EU REJECTS US FOREST PLAN”.

The current round of talks in are about the reviewing progress since the December 1997 agreement which set targets for industrialised countries for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The problem now is over the issue of loopholes—well anticipated at Kyoto—which allow countries to avoid cutting back on carbon emissions.

Whilst the EU insists that countries should in the first instance cut back on fossil fuels, there is an umbrella group of countries—the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Australia—which believe in alternative methods of “reducing” carbon dioxide emissions. The latter are taking the “flexibility mechanism”, allowed under the Kyoto Protocol, to new extremes. Instead of cutting their fossil fuel (carbon) emissions they buy carbon credits from countries that are not likely to exceed their carbon emission quota as laid down at Kyoto and thus continue to pollute as before.

As the quotas are based on 1990 levels of emissions, countries, for instance of the former USSR which since 1990 have seen a drastic reduction in heavy industry, are selling their unused entitlements to the US. In this respect even ethical Britain is just as guilty of carbon trading as those countries it criticises, with the UK hoping to sell carbon dioxide it would have produced were the coal mines not closed.

George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian (16 November), pertinently observed that in July this year the UK “laid down £30 million to help private companies start bidding for each others’ reduced emissions. A research institute in the US calculates that the weather market will be worth $13 trillion by 2050.”

Whilst the EU insists the US must make at least half of its reduction from genuine energy cutbacks at home, the US is adamant that the loopholes it exploits must remain in place before it is prepared to sign up to any agreement to curb emissions. As well as the carbon trading loophole, there are indeed other loopholes and dodges the US and others are taking advantage of, such as “carbon sinks”. As forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere, the US and other countries, now plant and indeed buy forests, at home and in other countries, and count the carbon this is estimated to save against their own emissions. This is already proving a lucrative business. One Malaysian logging firm is presently replacing the forests it depletes with new plantations and selling pollution permits to the US. Another loophole is to be found with countries paying for a project in a lesser developed country, with the aim of reducing carbon and counting it against their own emissions.

You name the dodge and the profit-greedy have thought of it. This includes feeding cattle, pigs and sheep new diets that help reduce the amount of methane they emit when they pass wind and pumping carbon dioxide into the ocean to be absorbed by the seas and sprinkling iron filings across the surface of the ocean to stimulate plankton growth (then calculate how much plankton dies and sinks to the bottom of the seam, taking the carbon with them, and claim credit for it).

The perennial problem is that countries are reluctant to promote the investment in more environmentally friendly methods of production and transport because their respective governments, being the executive arm of the capitalist class, prefer to bow with suppliant knee to powerful oil, coal, iron and steel lobbies, rather than openly acknowledge that ecologically we risk approaching the point of no return.

When we consider that at Kyoto, it was announced that a global 60 percent reduction in carbon emissions was necessary to maintain a stable climate, with the US asked to reduce their emissions by 7 percent of 1990 levels (which would mean a 34 percent reduction now), and that the US, with 4 percent of the world’s population is currently responsible for 24 percent of global carbon emissions, we get some idea of the pathos of the whole issue.

In spite of all the evidence that suggests that deforestation and present production and transport methods are primary responsible for climatic warming—the disappearing polar icecaps, global flooding, rising sea levels, vegetation dieback, the loss of thousands of species of life, and that the speed and scale of global warming has no precedent—the world’s governments still insist these wasteful, though profit-generating methods must remain. And this in spite of recent evidence from the hundreds of scientists that inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change that suggests the atmosphere will warm at twice the rate predicted ten years ago.

At the Rio Summit in 1992, at the Earth Summit in New York in June 1997 and at the Earth II Summit in Kyoto, Japan, six months later—all at which carbon emissions were the core issue—the delegates fought and bickered over deals that would best suit their respective paymasters, their countries reneging on the agreements they signed up to. If the 16 November Guardian headline above is anything to go by, then we can well expect this current round of talks to be another waste of time whilst providing us with further evidence that capitalism has long outlived its usefulness and that it is time to hand over control of the world to those who could best decide its future—a global socialist majority. That companies can get exited about the profits to be made from trading in pollution credits—whilst the planet we inhabit faces environmental catastrophe from pollution—says much about the insanity of the system we live in and very much raises the question: are you with us or against us?

John Bissett

Profit or the environment? (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1992 sixteen hundred scientists warned that humanity was on course for a collision with nature. They predicted an environmental crisis by the year 2020 unless humankind could achieve a change in the nature of its “stewardship” of the environment. While there is much uncertainty about the extent to which humans are “irretrievably mutilating” the Earth, as these scientists claimed, it is clear that radical change is needed.

At present “stewardship” over the Earth is in the hands of a small minority of the world population. Their interests often prove to be irreconcilable with the need to protect the environment from pollution and degradation. Awareness of the damage being done has increased markedly over the last two decades. A growth of pressure groups, non-governmental organisations and international conferences, reports and legislation have at least provided us with ever more information, if little else. Indeed, ever since the first international conference on the environment in Stockholm 1971, there has been no shortage of well-intentioned statements of principle from governments. For example, the Stockholm Declaration stated that:

“Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.”

In 1987 the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, called for the development of productive activities to become “‘sustainable’, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It goes without saying that most of us would favour these goals of protecting the Earth’s resources for future generations and preserving the quality of our environment. The question is whether they have any chance of being achieved within a social system where profits come first.

Documents such as the 1987 Brundtland Report and 1992 Agenda 21 which followed the highly publicised Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro do not acknowledge that there is any necessary conflict between making profit and protecting the environment. The goal of “sustainable development” is seen as achievable within the market system. There is no acknowledgement of any conflict between the two supposedly complementary goals.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation have stated that: “The objective is to create an economic environment in which it is more profitable to conserve resources than destroy them” (Long Term Strategy for the Food and Agricultural Sector, FAO Publications).

Again, conservation and profitability are seen as being compatible. Yet experience has shown time and again that these two gaols are incompatible. Only by replacing the profit system with truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves.

Dan Greenwood

They Said It . . . (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

• I've never known her pay for anything— Friend of Jimmy Goldsmith’s daughter Isabel.
• A child dies every 2.4 seconds for one simple reason: poverty—Oxfam Appeal.
• What this summit is all about is money— ITN report on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
• When I first met him, he gave me a big kiss and told me I had a job for life—Ivy Needham, redundant ex-employee of one of Robert Maxwell’s firms, on Maxwell.
• No-one likes seeing details of their private life brought into the open— Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times.

Earth Summit II—Another UN Failure (1997)

From the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earth Summit ends in failure, ran a Guardian headline on 28 June this year—a headline any socialist could have written with prophetic accuracy weeks earlier.

Indeed, the failure of Earth Summit II which opened in New York on 23 June was only ever going to be a reenactment of a similar summit held in Rio five years previously.This much we could glean from the G7 gathering days earlier which closed with the heads of the world's leading nations failing to agree on new targets for carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide emissions have been a core problem at both Earth Summits. Back in 1992, the 125 delegates at Rio agreed to return to pre-1990 C02 levels by the end of the decade. But in the past five years such emissions have in fact spiralled and are forecast to increase, with the industrialised nations—making up 15 percent of the world population, yet responsible for 50 percent of emissions—being the worst perpetrator. And China’s C02 emissions are expected to exceed those of the US within eight years.

Similarly, the Rio guidelines to protect the world’s forests have not been adhered to, with about 10 million hectares of forest vanishing every year—an area equivalent to the size of South Korea—with the loss of an estimated 130.000 species of life.

You name it and the delegates at Rio have reneged on it—climate, deserts, bio-diversity, even aid for the developing world.

At Rio it was agreed that the industrialised world should increase their portion of overseas aid to 0.7 percent of GDR. What happened was that aid fell by 20 percent between 1992 and 1995 (from 0.33 percent to 0.27 percent).And in that period global poverty has increased with the poorest 20 percent of the world's people sharing less than 1.1 percent of global income (compared with 2.3 percent in I960) with the richest 20 percent sharing over 85 percent.

Principle I of the Rio summit had been a pledge of $125 billion a year in aid initiatives and projects aimed at helping the environment. Few have been observed and many have resulted in misery. In Uganda, for instance. 35.000 inhabitants of the Kabale forest region were forcibly ejected from their homes in order that tourism could be encouraged and the forests protected. Those who resisted were either shot or burnt alive in their homes. In Kenya, a huge road project spewed up so much dust that thousands were left with irreparable lung damage.

Fishing around for profit
Were this not bad enough, in the past five years the world’s fishing grounds have become further depleted and whole eco-system faces an increased threat from oil and gas companies who are now exploiting the deeper oceans in their endless pursuit of profit.

This, then, had been the result of Rio in 1992, a summit that had taken 20 years and 30 million pieces of paper to get off the ground.

What added insult to injury at this year’s summit was that G7 scapegoating of the industrial world dominated so much of the meeting that constructive debate on saving the environment was precluded. Little wonder that the day after the summit closed the Guardian (28 June) could report of the summit ending "in a shambles with no clear agreements on its main goals of new aid for developing countries or protecting forests".

Talks on climate collapsed and have effectively been deferred until the Climatic Change Conference in Kyoto. Japan, this December. A text which highlighted targets to reduce C02 emissions had been agreed by a working group one evening, but came to nought when the group fell out over lunch some 12 hours later.

We may well ask that if the Rio summit resulted in a score of promises that were eventually broken, and if the latest summit ended in failure, then what future for planet Earth?

Commentators have tended to cite a growing governmental awareness of environmental issues as one positive spin-off of such summits.They point to the likes of Tony Blair, who believes C02 emissions should be reduced to below 15 percent of 1990 levels by 2010, as proof that governments are really beginning to care.

Like true apologists for capitalism, they continue to fail to locate global problems in a wider social and economic context, in capitalism itself, as if the profit motive was incidental to environmental concerns.

Profit is in fact the biggest stumbling block encountered by delegates at Earth summits and this journal has wasted no time in exposing similar summits in the past as the farces they are (see, for instance, our issues for June 1992 and July 1996). At Rio, evidence could be found during discussions on bio-diversity, with the US refusing to back an agreement to safeguard animal and plant diversity for no other reason than this would have curbed the excesses of the mainly US transnational corporations.

At the recent Earth Summit, a hoped-for agreement on a global tax on aviation fuel, aimed at improving engine efficiency and consequently reducing pollution, failed to materialise, with the US opposing new taxes. OPEC fearing a loss of revenue and developing nations fearful that increased prices would result in a drop in tourism.

You do not need a vivid imagination to envisage the environment and development report that will be prepared for the next Earth Summit in 2002. or indeed the outcome of the Conference on Climatic Change to be held later this year. If the past is anything to go on the delegates would be better advised to stay at home and plant saplings.

Their ideas of a world compatible with a profit-driven market economy are illusory and their prospects for reform in the interests of humans and the environment a fallacy.

Were they to take the idea of socialism with them to future summits, however, the world would stand a far better chance of survival in the 21st century.

John Bissett

The Recovery Position (2017)

Book Review from the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist'. By Paul Kingsnorth, (Faber & Faber £14.99)

This consists of a series of essays written between 2009 and 2016, most previously published in newspapers and magazines or online, which trace the author’s disenchantment with environmental activism. He originally wanted to save nature from people, but he gradually came to see the problems inherent in what he was doing. For one thing, the movements he was involved in were increasingly unsuccessful: every environmental problem identified at the 1992 Earth Summit had got worse in the years since. Ineffective action, he concludes, leads only to despair, and false hope is worse than no hope.

In addition, the green movement had changed. It was once eco-centric but shifted to become more about people, about social justice and equality for humans, having been taken over by the left: ‘green politics was fast becoming a refuge for disillusioned socialists, Trots, Marxists and a ragbag of fellow travellers’. Unfortunately this kind of vague and unsupported generalising is typical of much of the book. This is a pity, as there are some interesting claims here, for instance that many greens still see a motorway across a downland as bad but would be quite keen on a wind farm in the same location.

Moreover, his depiction of green politics is at best a half-truth. The Green Party do speak of ‘a political system that puts the public first’ but also of ‘a planet protected from the threat of climate change’. Friends of the Earth talk about protecting the bee population (partly because humans need them, admittedly) and also about preserving nature, advocating approaches such as agroecology and permaculture. Greenpeace oppose deadly air pollution, but also aim to defend the oceans and protect forests.

Kingsnorth is particularly scathing about sustainability, which he views as meaning ‘sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level that the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right’. Clearly he has no idea who the world’s truly rich people are. He also objects to the alleged single-minded obsession with climate change, and to seeing it as a challenge to be overcome by technological solutions. Capitalism, he claims, ‘has absorbed the greens’, but there is in fact no reason to think they were ever anti-capitalist. He never seems to ask why green movements have failed, let alone raise the possibility that their lack of success might be due to capitalism and its emphasis on profit.

The book closes with a couple of pieces on ‘uncivilisation’, a supposed alternative described only in very general terms as rejecting theories and ideologies and political or social ‘solutions’. Don’t come up with big plans for a better world, Kingsnorth says, but take responsibility for a specific something: he currently lives with his family on a two-and-a-half acre site in Ireland in an attempt to escape from ‘the urban consumer machine’. Rather than becoming involved in environmental or political causes, he proposes withdrawal and contemplation. He accepts that he does not have useful answers but it is not clear that he even has any worthwhile questions.  

Paul Bennett

The wasted years (2002)

From the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ten years ago at the Rio Earth Summit a 12-year old schoolgirl from Vancouver, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, made a speech to delegates that astonished them. It is worth repeating part of that address :

“I am only a child, yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be. In school you teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, to make your actions reflect your words.”

That speech had such an impact that she became a frequent invitee to UN conferences. She is now 22, with a BSc in biology from Yale University and she attended the recent conference in Johannesburg as a member of Kofi Annan's World Summit advisory panel. So what does she make of the progress in the last 10 years?

“I spoke for six minutes and received a standing ovation. Some of the delegates even cried. I thought that maybe I had reached some of them, that my speech might actually spur action. Now, a decade from Rio, after I've sat through many more conferences, I'm not sure what has been accomplished. My confidence in the people in power and the power of an individual's voice to reach them has been deeply shaken” (Time, 2 September).

Cullis-Suzuki's pessimism is well founded when you compare some of the figures over the last 10 years:

• Then 17 million refugees, now 20 million refugees.
• Then 5,000 species threatened, now 11,000 species.
• Then rainforests being depleted at 17,000 sq.km a year,now speeding up to 1 percent depletion per year.
• Then carbon dioxide omissions 356 parts per million in the atmosphere, now 370 parts per million.

The list is long and horrifying, for instance the Antarctic ozone hole is now three times the size of the United States. Cullis-Suzuki has now retreated from her schoolgirl world view into organising locally to get people to cut down on household garbage, consuming less and using their car less frequently. What a dreadful commentary on this awful society of capitalism that it turns youthful zeal and enthusiasm into pathetic and petty reformism.

Socialists don't make the mistake of appealing to the governments of the world to stop polluting our world, because we know that is futile. Instead we call on our fellow workers to join us in the struggle to rid the world for ever of the cause of these problems, world capitalism. Only then will we be able to attain that 12 year old's beautiful vision . “What a wonderful place this would be”.

Richard Donnelly

Saving the Earth (1992)

Editorial from the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will capitalism bring the world to the brink of ecological disaster? It is certainly having a good try. Its pursuit of profits and its competitive pressures to keep costs down have led to all sorts of inappropriate methods and materials being used in production.

Two of these in particular are threatening the stability of the biosphere as the environment that sustains life on Earth. One is the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which are known to have caused holes in the ozone layer. The other is the burning of fossil fuels which releases abnormal amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and which could cause a global over-warming.

The ozone layer is vital to life on Earth since it protects the life-forms that have evolved here from ultra-violet rays from the Sun. So the appearance of holes in the ozone layer is a serious matter. It is in the vital interests of us all that everything be done to stop them growing and then to close them. In concrete terms, this means immediately stopping the production of all CFCs.

A rise in the world's average temperature would have disastrous consequences on the present patterns of human life. The sea level would rise, flooding areas which now supply much of the world's food would no longer be able to do so. Once again, what must be done is known. Steps must be taken to reduce current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. First, by dramatically cutting back on the burning of fossil fuels in power stations and in cars, trains, ships and planes. Second, by stopping further deforestation as trees absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide.

So will capitalism step back from the brink? Will it be able to prevent its drive for profit from destroying the environment? At least the two problems are recognised. At least a world conference has been called. But recognising a problem and calling a conference is one thing; agreeing on and implementing effective measures to remedy the situation is another.

The Conference that is taking place in Brazil this month has been hyped by the media as "the Earth Summit" but is nothing of the sort. It is merely a conference of the leaders of the various capitalist states into which the world is artificially divided. All those present are supporters—indeed administrators—of the capitalist system which caused the problems in the first place. Each of them is there to defend their own particular sectional, national capitalist interests. In these circumstances whatever is decided will be totally inadequate.

Look at the record so far. In 1987 twenty-three industrialized countries met in Montreal and agreed to phase out the production of CFCs by 1999. The United States was the keenest—because it had a virtual monopoly on the production of substitutes. The other countries wanted time to catch up with this technology. Hence the delay to 1999. But many countries, particularly in the co-called Third World, refused to sign, on the grounds that they couldn't afford the substitutes (estimated to be at least three times more expensive). Some of these states can be expected to eventually begin production of CFCs themselves.

It's the same story with the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Here it is those countries with above average dependence on coal- and oil- fired power stations who, led by the United States, have been dragging their feet. Paying for filters or building other types of power stations would raise their industrial costs and put them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their competitors on world markets. So any treaty on global warming that might emerge from Brazil will be an inadequate compromise between rival capitalist states full of loopholes and get-out clauses to protect vested interests.

Before anything constructive can be done, capitalism must go and, with it, the artificial division of the world into separate, competing states. The Earth, and all its natural and industrial resources, must become the common heritage of all humanity. A democratic structure for making decisions at world as well as at local levels must come into being. 

When such a united world has been established (or is about to be established) a real Earth Conference can be called to decide how to repair the damage capitalism has done to the biosphere. Then what scientists already know should be done can be done, and humanity can begin to organise its relationship with the rest of nature in a genuinely sustainable way.