The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (17 page)

After she finished her address, she moved to the side of the podium, off microphone, and in a manner familiar to anyone who has attended an Occupy protest, shouted into the vast hall of staid diplomats, “Mic check!” A crowd of young people stood up, and the call-and-response began:

Appadurai: “Equity now!”

Crowd: “Equity now!”

Appadurai: “You’ve run out of excuses!”

Crowd: “You’ve run out of excuses!”

Appadurai: “We’re running out of time!”

Crowd: “We’re running out of time!”

Appadurai: “Get it done!”

Crowd: “Get it done!”

That was Friday, at the official closing plenary session of COP 17. The negotiations were extended, virtually nonstop, through Sunday, in hopes of avoiding complete failure. At issue were arguments over words and phrases—for instance, the replacement of “legal agreement” with “an agreed outcome with legal force,” which is said to have won over India to the Durban Platform.

The countries in attendance agreed to a schedule that would lead to an agreement by 2015, which would commit all countries to reduce emissions starting no sooner than 2020, eight years into the future.

“Eight years from now is a death sentence on Africa,” Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, chairperson of Friends of the Earth International, told me. “For every one-degree Celsius change in temperature, Africa is impacted at a heightened level.” He lays out the extent of the immediate threats in his new book about Africa,
To Cook a Continent
.

Bassey is one among many concerned with the profound lack of ambition embodied in the Durban Platform, which delays actual, legally binding reductions in emissions until 2020 at the earliest, whereas scientists globally are in overwhelming agreement: The stated goal of limiting average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will soon be impossible to achieve. The International Energy Agency, in its annual World Energy Outlook released in November, predicted “cumulative CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions over the next 25 years amount to three-quarters of the total from the past 110 years, leading to a long-term average temperature rise of 3.5 [degrees] C.”

Despite optimistic pronouncements to the contrary, many believe the Kyoto Protocol died in Durban. Pablo Solón, the former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations and former chief climate negotiator for that poor country, now calls Kyoto a “zombie agreement,” staggering forward for another five or seven years, but without force or impact. On the day after the talks concluded, Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that Canada was formally withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. Expected to follow are Russia and Japan, the very nation where the 1997 meeting was held that gives the Kyoto Protocol its name.

The largest polluter in world history, the United States, never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and remains defiant. Both Bassey and Solón refer to the outcome of Durban as a form of “climate apartheid.”

Despite the pledges by President Barack Obama to restore the United States to a position of leadership on the issue of climate change, the trajectory from Copenhagen in 2009, to Cancún in 2010, and, now, to Durban reinforces the statement made by then President George H. W. Bush prior to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the forerunner to the Kyoto Protocol, when he said, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.”

The “American way of life” can be measured in per capita emissions of carbon. In the U.S., on average, about twenty metric tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere annually, one of the top ten on the planet. Hence, a popular sticker in Durban read “Stop CO2lonialism.”

By comparison, China, the country that is the largest emitter currently, has per capita emissions closer to five metric tons, ranking it about eightieth. India’s population emits a meager 1.5 tons per capita, a fraction of the U.S. level.

So it seems U.S. intransigence, its unwillingness to get off its fossil-fuel addiction, effectively killed Kyoto in Durban, a key city in South Africa’s fight against apartheid. That is why Anjali Appadurai’s closing words were imbued with a sense of hope brought by this new generation of climate activists:

“[Nelson] Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible, until it’s done.’ So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world, deep cuts now. Get it done.”

April 12, 2012

The Long, Hot March of Climate Change

The Pentagon knows it. The world’s largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first kept, with average temperatures of 8.6 degrees F above average. More than 15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events are already plaguing the country.

Across the world in the Maldives, rising sea levels continue to threaten this Indian Ocean archipelago. It is the world’s lowest-lying nation, on average only 1.3 meters above sea level. The plight of the Maldives gained global prominence when its young president, the first-ever democratically elected there, Mohamed Nasheed, became one of the world’s leading voices against climate change, especially in the lead-up to the 2009 U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Nasheed held a ministerial meeting underwater, with his cabinet in scuba gear, to illustrate the potential disaster.

In February, Nasheed was ousted from his presidency at gunpoint. The Obama administration, through State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, said of the coup d’etat, “This was handled constitutionally.” When I spoke to Nasheed last month, he told me: “It was really shocking and deeply disturbing that the United States government so instantly recognized the former dictatorship coming back again. . . . The European governments have not recognized the new regime in the Maldives.” There is a parallel between national positions on climate change and support or opposition to the Maldives coup.

Nasheed is the subject of a new documentary,
The Island President
, in which his remarkable trajectory is traced. He was a student activist under the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and was arrested and tortured, along with many others. By 2008, when elections were finally held, Gayoom lost, and Nasheed was elected. As he told me, though: “It’s easy to beat a dictator, but it’s not so easy to get rid of a dictatorship. The networks, the intricacies, the institutions and everything that the dictatorship has established remains, even after the elections.” On the morning of February 7, 2012, under threat of death to him and his supporters from rebelling army generals, Nasheed resigned.

While no direct link has been found yet between Nasheed’s climate activism and the coup, it was clear in Copenhagen in 2009 that he was a thorn in the Obama administration’s side. Nasheed and other representatives from AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, were taking a stand to defend their nations’ very existence, and building alliances with grassroots groups like 350.org, which challenge corporate-dominated climate policy.

Back in the U.S., March delivered this year’s first weather disaster that caused more than $1 billion in damage, with tornadoes ravaging four central states and killing forty-one. Dr. Jeff Masters of the weather website Weather Underground blogged about March that “records not merely smashed, but obliterated.” On March 23, conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry renewed the state of emergency declared there last year as a result of massive droughts.

Texas lists 1,000 of the state’s 4,710 community water systems under restrictions. Spicewood, Texas, population 1,100, has run dry, and is now getting water trucked in. Residents have severe restrictions on water use. But for Perry, restricting corporations whose greenhouse-gas emissions lead to climate change is heresy.

Mitt Romney is on track to be the Republican candidate for president, with the support of former challengers like Perry. They are already attacking President Obama on climate change. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has been promoting legislation in statehouses to oppose any climate legislation, and rallying members of Congress to block federal action, especially by hampering the work of the Environmental Protection Agency. As the Center for Media and Democracy has detailed in its “ALEC Exposed” reporting, ALEC is funded by the country’s major polluters, including ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, and Koch Industries. The Koch brothers have also funded Tea Party groups like FreedomWorks, to create the appearance of grassroots activism.

This election season will likely be marked by more extreme weather events, more massive loss of life, and billions of dollars in damages.

President Nasheed is working to run again for his lost presidency, as President Obama tries to hold on to his. The climate may hang in the balance.

July 4, 2012

Climate Change: “This Is Just the Beginning”

Evidence supporting the existence of climate change is pummeling the United States this summer, from the mountain wildfires of Colorado to the recent “derecho” storm that left at least twenty-three dead and 1.4 million people without power from Illinois to Virginia. The phrase “extreme weather” flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked. If our news media, including—or especially—the meteorologists, continue to ignore the essential link between extreme weather and climate change, then we as a nation, the greatest per capita polluters on the planet, may not act in time to avert even greater catastrophe.

More than 2,000 heat records were broken last week around the United States. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency that tracks the data, reported that the spring of 2012 “marked the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record for the contiguous United States.” These record temperatures in May, NOAA says, “have been so dramatically different that they establish a new ‘neighborhood’ apart from the historical year-to-date temperatures.”

In Colorado, at least seven major wildfires are burning at the time of this writing. The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs destroyed 347 homes and killed at least two people. The High Park fire farther north burned 259 homes and killed one. While officially “contained” now, that fire won’t go out, according to Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management, until an “act of nature such as prolonged rain or snowfall.” The derecho storm system is another example. “Derecho” is Spanish for “straight ahead,” and that is what the storm did, forming near Chicago and blasting east, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and downed power lines.

Add drought to fire and violent thunderstorms. According to Dr. Jeff Masters, one of the few meteorologists who frequently makes the connection between extreme weather and climate change, “across the entire continental U.S., 72 percent of the land area was classified as being in dry or drought conditions” last week. “We’re going to be seeing a lot more weather like this, a lot more impacts like we’re seeing from this series of heat waves, fires and storms. . . . This is just the beginning.”

Fortunately, we might be seeing a lot more of Jeff Masters, too. He was a co-founder of the popular weather website Weather Underground in 1995. Just this week he announced that the site had been purchased by the Weather Channel, perhaps the largest single purveyor of extreme weather reports. Masters promises the same focus on his blog, which he hopes will reach the much larger Weather Channel audience. He and others are needed to counter the drumbeat denial of the significance of human-induced climate change, of the sort delivered by CNN’s charismatic weatherman Rob Marciano. In 2007, a British judge was considering banning Al Gore’s movie
An Inconvenient Truth
from schools in England. After the report, Marciano said on CNN, “Finally. Finally . . . you know, the Oscars, they give out awards for fictional films, as well. . . . Global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen.” Masters responded to that characteristic clip by telling me, “Our TV meteorologists are missing a big opportunity here to educate and tell the population what is likely to happen.”

Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations.

The U.S. news media have a critical role to play in educating the public about climate change. Imagine if just half the times that they flash “Extreme Weather” across our TV screens, they alternated with “Global Warming.” This Independence Day holiday week might just be the beginning of people demanding the push to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and to pursue a sane course toward sustainable energy independence.