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July 11, 2009
The G8, which is being held in L'Aquila, Italy, has addressed the neo-liberal growth machine economy by saying that they have agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 2C, to cut world emissions 50% by 2050, and for the G8 to reduce its own pollution 80% by that date. Sounds good doesn't it.
Unfortunately India or China were not present. The developed rich countries no longer have the lion's share of emissions, and that any action they take is pointless without the co-operation of developing nations such as China and India. The G-8 summit was a funeral ceremony. The G-8 is dead, at least as a global leadership forum. It has now been reduced to a mere talking shop for certain heads of state and government. The important decisions are made elsewhere -- at the G-20, for example.
Peter Brookes
The developing countries want the G8 nations to sign up to a 40% cut by 2020, but that figure is off the radar of the EU and, given the unwieldy legislation laboriously passing through the senate, not a possibility for the US. Australia is talking in terms of a 5% cut to its greenhouse emissions resulting from stoking the global carbon economy with cheap, dirty coal. Developing countries will commit once they have certainty that developed countries are committing themselves.
Update
What we can infer from the above is that all the signs indicate that the cut to emissions from cap and trade schemes, renewable energy and d energy efficiency will not be enough to prevent a 2% increase in temperature. Global heating is a reality. What happens then? What is going to be done after we have awoken from the neo-liberal dream of an eternal economic boom?
In a talk at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas entitled Climate Change is a crisis of overproduction not overconsumption Brendan Gleeson, the Director of the Urban Research programme at Griffith University, argued that the state will need to intervene big time.
The speed of climate change is interpreted by natural scientists in terms of them saying that that we have the next ten years to avoid a terrible tipping point, after which we face the unthinkable prospect of runaway climate change.
Gleeson's argument was that since capitalism is not able to fix its market failure of global heating so the state needs to step in to protect society from the consequences of global heating. As in World War 2 capitalism is suspended in order to deal with the crisis. 'Deal' means adapting to the negative effects of increased temperatures: a blast furnace of drought, heat and hurricanes. The 10 year drought, which may or may not be over, is a postcard from our future.
Hopefully this suspension of capitalism would result in an ecological modernisation that would decouple economic growth from environmental damage through careful institutional and technical transformation.
It was unclear from Gleeson'ss lecture how this decoupling would be achieved by the state.
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not even Kevin Rudd reckons world leaders' have much chance of hammering out critical climate change limits in Copenhagen.