Pollution politics and colonialism

The Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa which concluded on December 11 managed to work out a compromise which, seemingly, did not satisfy any of the participants.

The 17th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 17), to give the confab its official name, brought together representatives from the world's governments, international organizations and the ‘civil society’ sector.

The conference decided, after intense argument, to extend the Kyoto Protocol, giving time to First World countries until COP 18 in Qatar next year to submit their emissions reduction targets within its framework. It also set up a working group to negotiate a binding agreement - to be effective by 2020 - covering all countries by 2015.

Environmentalists and Third World countries were upset that there was no binding agreement reached immediately. The activist organization Greenpeace said in a statement that:

‘Our atmosphere has been loaded with a carbon debt and the bill, carrying a Durban postmark, has been posted to the world's poorest countries especially here in Africa. The chance of averting catastrophic climate change is slipping through our hands with every passing year that nations fail to agree on a rescue plan for the planet.’

Global warming

The unhappiest at the result will be our neighbours Maldives and Bangladesh, which are potentially the worst affected by global warming - much of their land is within easy reach of an encroaching sea and their very existence is threatened by rising sea levels.

On the other hand, First World governments were not happy even with the voluntary restrictions now in place. Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that his country was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol. Canada is one of the biggest polluters, following Australia and the USA in per-capita Greenhouse Gas emissions.

UN Climate chief Christiana Figueres expressed surprise at the timing of the move, but reiterated that, whether Canada withdrew or not, it would still have a legal obligation to reduce its emissions, as well as a moral one.

Of a demonstrator against Canada’s decision to pull out of Kyoto, a comment in the ‘Montreal Gazette’ read, inter alia: ‘Where would the Durban protester like to live? Canada or China?’ This illustrates the visceral idiocy which informs much anti-greenhouse argument in the First World.

For example, the ‘Toronto Sun’ referred to the ‘spellbinding hypocrisy’ of Durban's ‘Bashing Canada for producing 2 percent of global carbon dioxide while pandering to China which produces a quarter of the world's emissions’.

In fact Canada, with a mere 0.5 percent of the world's population, emits 1.8 percent of its greenhouse gases, whereas China, with 19 percent of the population, is responsible for 23.3 percent. Also, about 33 percent of China’s emissions are due to its exports, more than half of which are to the USA, Canada and the European Union.

China and India are regularly referred to in the Western media as ‘the World's biggest polluters’. China did overtake the USA about 2006 (around the time India overtook Japan), but its per-capita carbon emissions remains low at less than five tonnes, about one quarter of Canada’s.

The rich industrialized countries contribute about 48 percent of the world's pollution, with only 17.5 percent of the population (less, if countries like South Korea, which are defined as ‘developing’ by Kyoto, are removed); India, with an equivalent population, is only responsible for 5.8 percent (as an aside, Sri Lankans are 0.3 percent of the world population, but they only emit 0.4 percent of the carbon).

Western media

A large part of the pollution in Third World countries has been due to First world countries exporting their own pollutants to the Third World. For example, some 80 percent of North American (including Canadian) recyclers export toxic electronic waste to countries in Africa and Asia. Ghana is reportedly swamped with old cathode-ray tubes.

The total contribution made by the industrialized countries to global warming is much higher. The USA has been consuming resources and emitting pollutants on a grand scale for the past half-century, per-capita emissions having hovered around the 20-tonne mark for about that period. The imbalance between population and emission, combined by the disregard shown by First World countries for the development needs of Third World populations, is known as ‘Carbon-dioxide Colonialism’ or ‘CO2lonialism’ (CO2 being the chemical formula for Carbon-dioxide, the biggest cause of the greenhouse effect).

Like the jingoists of the old imperialism, the Western media lauds its own governments for their unacceptable actions. They complain about the ocean girt islands under threat trying to ‘extract guilt money’ (shorthand for compensation for environmental harm) using the ‘global warming hoax’.

Canada is a fairly bad example of ‘CO2lonialism'. The ‘Economist’ magazine pointed out that the country has actually increased its emissions by 20 percent since 1990, when it had, under the Kyoto Protocol, promised to reduce them by 6 percent.

What makes it so much worse is the ‘holier than thou’ attitude adopted by Canada in relation to Third World countries. A striking example of this was revealed at the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) held in Perth.

Canada not only opposed holding the next CHOGM (due to take place in 2013) in Hambantota, but gave moral support to attempts to get Sri Lanka expelled from the Commonwealth, ostensibly on the grounds of alleged war crimes and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

Canada is today forcing devout Muslim women to remove their scarves against their will. It's armed forces participated in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003; it has been implicated in cases of torture in Afghanistan; it has been involved in illegal ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights; and the head of its intelligence service has admitted its inability to operate effectively in the absence of information obtained by torture.

These all qualify as war crimes or human rights abuses. Yet it is the same glass house from which Canada is throwing stones. It should look to the beam in its own eye: ‘spellbinding hypocrisy’ would by any other name smell as putrid.