The End of Copenhagen is a New Beginning

Copenhagen is almost certainly not going to produce an agreement that results in the action necessary to combat climate change. There are too many vested interests working very hard to derail the talks, including the ‘leaders’ of my own country, Canada.

The real question is, what next?

Copenhagen will mark the end of an era. It may not be seen at the time as a radical shift, but over the next few years it will become obvious that the developing world is moving away from the developed world. They will have seen us for what we are (predators), and will realize we cannot be trusted on basic moral issues. Our morality is based on worship of the Almighty Dollar; we are willingly led by market fundamentalists.*

What will the developing countries do? Alone, many of them are powerless. The Maldives, for example, has vowed not to “die quietly,” but what can a tiny island nation do? (I strongly encourage you to show your support for the Maldives here. It ain’t much, but it’s something.) We will still be talking long after their country has vanished beneath the waves, the Maldivians dead or destitute refugees in some other country. They have moral authority, but we have no morals.

However, some much larger countries are also on the front lines:

• Bangladesh: pop. 150M
• India: pop. 1.2M, has nuclear weapons
• Pakistan: pop. 201M, has nuclear weapons, is already verging on a failed state/military dictatorship
• China: pop. 1.3B, has nuclear weapons and a massive military
• Vietnam: pop. 86M
• Indonesia: pop. 230M

That’s almost half the world’s population, and there are many more developing countries facing dire consequences in the near future. Some of those consequences are already here, others are coming soon. For example, sea level rise is now projected to be 1.1m this century, which will drive over 100 million people inland. The countries listed above will each have to relocate millions of people inland – people who will have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their land. These people will become internal climate refugees, forced into already crowded areas.

I have only mentioned sea level rise, but the Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly and provide water to billions of people in these and other countries. Deserts will spread, crops will fail, people will starve.

The results will be interesting, in the sense of the Chinese curse. In the past, we in the West looked on with a smug sense of superiority at starving African babies, largely blaming them for their own demise. That will not happen with climate change, for which the West is largely responsible – not only for creating but also for concealing and obstructing action to combat it.

The consequences of global warming are well-known at this point; the Pentagon regards it as a far greater threat than terrorism, for example. It is very likely that some countries will collapse and dictatorships will flourish. Others will become overtly hostile to the US, will reject American-style capitalism and “free” trade, and may nationalise foreign companies. Given that our primary concern is our own wealth, we should be worried about the end of globalization; I cannot see how it will survive the changes coming.

Countries like Canada and the United States enjoy very high standards of living partly due to cheap imports of just about everything, including food. If China and these other countries will not or cannot continue to export as they have, we will have to go back to making things ourselves. This latter is a good thing, but it is going to be a very painful transition and our standard of living is going to decline. It’s simple economics; if all the stuff that is currently made where manufacturing costs are much lower must now be made where costs are much higher, the price of everything is going to go up.

As a result, there will be much less stuff purchased, the union movement may be revived, pollution here will go up, and so on. Libertarian economics, currently so dominant in countries like Canada and the United States, will be exposed as the rubbish it is.

The consequences of a failure at Copenhagen will be far-reaching in many ways. The most significant may well be that the developing countries band together against the denier countries: United States and Canada. And we are far from self-reliant.

* They are actually phony free marketers, as in reality they continue to dole out taxpayer dollars to their favourites while cutting funding to things like health care – in order to force privatisation of those areas so their friends can make money there, too. Most believe in Libertarianism for the masses and welfare for the wealthy.