Obama’s bad influence at the Copenhagen climate change summit leads the world to what will be hailed as an international success in the fight against global warming, far from it. Because the US, UK, and friends have gone ahead and drafted their own climate change agenda which “...hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank [and would] abandon the Kyoto protocol” Read Naomi Klein’s interpretation below.
“AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein…The issue of the Kyoto Protocol, and the United States is always talking about, it sunsets, it ends in 2012…But that’s not true.
NAOMI KLEIN: It’s one of the great misconceptions…there is no expiration date on the Kyoto Protocol. What it had was, a first period of emissions cuts that ends in 2012. And the idea was that countries would come back together and increase their emission cuts and develop the agreement. But the idea that it just needs to be scrapped completely and replaced with a wholly new deal and that in addition to this there isn’t time to come up with a whole new deal, which is the position of the US negotiators here, is based on this faulty premise that the Kyoto Protocol expires.
But I think, you know, the real issue here is what they want to replace the Kyoto Protocol with is much weaker than the Kyoto Protocol. …the Kyoto Protocol comes up with a goal for all the countries that they have to reach in terms of emissions cuts, and it’s legally binding. Here, what they want to replace it to is, all countries go off, come up with their own goals, and then it’s sort of mashed together into an agreement that really isn’t a multilateral agreement, because the whole idea of multilateralism is that countries agree on the same set of rules and they agree to a common monitoring mechanism.
So the great irony of what’s happening here in Copenhagen is that it takes place in this context of this huge global celebration of the US embrace—re-embrace of multilateralism. In fact, Obama is getting the Nobel Prize specifically for this. In the citation for the Nobel Prize, they talk about the reengagement with the climate talks, the embrace of multilateralism. He’s getting the Nobel Prize for it. But what’s actually happening here is that they’re using the tools of multilateralism, the infrastructure of multilateralism, to destroy multilateralism, to kill multilateralism. ”
See the full interview here
PS – I love you Naomi
