Secret trade talks in Geneva could outlaw subsidies for renewable energy, undermining climate discussions in Paris that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions, anti-poverty campaigners have warned.
The Geneva summit involving 22 countries including the US, Mexico, Australia and the 28 EU member states, aim to create a “level playing field”, with the possible consequence that fracking companies could dispute subsidies for solar or wind power.
Even best-case scenarios seem to point to an agreement that falls short of an action plan to keep the world under 2 C of warming, the threshold scientists overwhelmingly agree can’t be breached in order to avert catastrophic climate change. What’s more, individual countries’ emissions targets won’t be legally binding, a position pushed by the U.S., China and other big polluters, and conceded in advance of the talks by Canada’s new Liberal government.
("This is the politics of the 21st century: nudging over regulation, corporate power over public power.")
Anytime the oil barons and baronesses are smiling for the cameras with NGOs and politicians, we should at least be interested, if not outright worried. Was the release of Alberta’s newclimate change strategy just an occasion for the oil execs to ham it up for the cameras pretending all is well or do they have truly something to be smiling about?
Faced with the greatest threat to our planet, we cannot afford a bad deal, and we say, with the rest of humanity, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” And even if an acceptable deal is reached, it will provide only a temporary solution to the climate crisis. A permanent solution lies in the world’s turning away from capitalism, a mode of production that insatiably and incessantly transforms living nature into dead commodities, creates destabilizing growth, and promotes over-consumption.
The French government is trying to silence social movements, but we refuse to go quietly, says campaigner Pascoe Sabido.
In the days after the tragic events on 13 November in Paris, everything concerning the climate talks was in limbo. A state of emergency was called. Would the summit go ahead at all? What would it mean for the mass mobilizations being planned?
We can have it all; that is the promise of our age. We can own every gadget we are capable of imagining – and quite a few that we are not. We can live like monarchs without compromising the Earth’s capacity to sustain us. The promise that makes all this possible is that as economies develop, they become more efficient in their use of resources. In other words, they decouple.
