No Bravo for Rio

 Rio+20 has now begun with UN head Ban Ki-moon announcing "We are now in sight of a historic agreement - the world is waiting to see if words will translate into action, as we know they must."

In almost every part of world popular expectations for peace and prosperity are declining. Pessimism is pervasive, optimism, a rarity. As the world economy deteriorates, global problems remain unresolved and escalate: poverty, inequality, climate change and pollution. The doomsday scenario for global warming is as fearful as ever. Gloom grows. Rio+20 is billed as yet another chance for world leaders to put the planet on a sustainable path to survival.

"The Rio+20 conference is an opportunity for the world to get serious about the need for development to be made sustainable," said David Nussbaum, CEO of WWF-UK. "We need to elevate the sense of urgency, and I think this is ultimately not only about our lives but the legacy we leave for future generations."

The director of the Zoological Society of London's  Institute of Zoology, Professor Tim Blackburn explained "Nature is more important than money. Humanity can live without money, but we can't live without nature and the essential services it provides." Finally, a true statement but just how many will heed those words and how many will act upon them?

The World Socialist Movement holds out little hope that Rio+20 will be any different from any of the other previous conferences. Ever since the first international conference on the environment in Stockholm 1971, there has never been any shortage of well-intentioned statements and well-meaning declarations. And they are also never short of prescriptions for others on how to cope. There has been a yawning gap between promises and performances and between pledges and deliveries. According to the UN Environment Programme we now have "treaty congestion". World leaders have signed up to an impressive 500 internationally recognised agreements in the past 50 years, including 61 atmosphere-related; 155 biodiversity-related; 179 related to chemicals, hazardous substances and waste; 46 land conventions; and 196 conventions that are broadly related to issues dealing with water.

In 1987 delegates from the industrialised countries met in Montreal and agreed to phase out the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by 1999. The US was keenest because it had a virtual monopoly on the production of substitutes. The other countries wanted time to catch up on the technology. But many of them refused to sign, on the grounds that they couldn’t afford the substitutes. It was the same story with CO2 emissions. Those countries with above average dependence on coal and oil-fired power stations, led by the US, drag their feet. Paying for filters or building other types of power stations would raise their costs and put them at a disadvantage in competing with other countries on world markets. So any treaty on the environment and climate change global warming would have to be an inadequate compromise between rival capitalist states, full of loopholes and get-out clauses to protect vested interests.

In 1992, scientists in Rio warned that humanity was on course for a collision with nature. They predicted an environmental crisis by the year 2020 unless humankind can achieve a change in the nature of its "stewardship" of nature. We see little reason to contradict that conclusion. What has followed the Earth summit at Rio has failed to acknowledge that there is any  conflict between making profit and protecting the environment.The goal of sustainable development is seen as achievable within the market system. Conservation and profitability are seen to be compatible.

 In 1997 at New York delegates from the world’s leading nations failed to agree on new targets for CO2 emissions. The Kyoto accord of 1997 was an agreement amongst the developed nations to cut the release of greenhouse gases that would allow countries innovative, flexible approaches. In practice, being "innovative" and "flexible" appear to be more designed avoid commitments rather then fulfil them. The US administration announced that it would not implement the protocol or in President George HW Bush's words "The American way of life is not negotiable". The 2001 international conference on global warming held at The Hague broke down. Predictably, there was no agreement and again the crucial arguments about what can or what cannot be done were all about money and costs.

All the various conferences and summits have failed to make any significant progress and it could be said that they are all mere empty rhetoric, intended to put a public relations gloss on government actions which in reality are making the problems worse. It would be difficult to argue against this. On the face of it the problems of pollution, global warming and climate change may appear to be technical problems. But this is mistaken. Even where the science may not be complete, a precautionary principle should apply. It is reckless to gamble with an existing balance of natural systems on which all life depends. The basic cause of pollution is the capitalist system. The problem is out of control because the economic constraints of the system prevent the problems being solved. A sane society would simply consider the technical options available. Then, following democratic decisions on the actions to be taken would do what was necessary to achieve the solutions. This rational procedure is impossible in the mad world of capitalism. Only by replacing the profit system with truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves. To be cruelly unkind to those many well-intentioned scientists and sincere environmental activists; they are little better than King Canutes trying to hold back the tide  as long as they fail to challenge capitalism. "Environmentalism has failed" is a statement that comes from famed environmentalist David Suzuki. The primary cause of this failure has been corporate power and dominance.

The important question is this: how do we establish a society in which all people are able to co-operate to provide a good life for each other whilst looking after our planetary home? Every person has the ability to co-operate with others and every person has a vital interest in creating the new world in which co-operation can flourish. The idea of world meetings to discuss world problems is not in itself wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is a recognition that problems such as environmental degradation, global warming, world hunger, poverty and disease are vast problems that can only be tackled by action on a world-scale. The problem is that under capitalism, with its built-in competitive struggle for profits beteen corporations and countries, the necessary unity of purpose and co-operative action is impossible to achieve. Under capitalism the most that can possibly emerge from such meetings are trade-offs between competing sectional interests. At Copenhagen 2010 there was much jockeying and manouvering, many fine diplomatic distracting words. But we also heard the same ifs and buts uttered by world leaders as they travelled along the ever-more polluted and climate change-affected road  - another abject failure

Johannesburg's Programme of Implementation reinforced the simple fact that capitalism cannot be trusted to run the world in the interests of humanity and that governments serve the interests of profit first and fore-most and with the blessing of the UN, multi-nationals negotiated a number of partnership agreements - quite simply voluntary commitments by corporations to respect the environment and protect human rights. Any CEO who does not have profits at fore-front in the business plan will be shown the door pretty damned quickly. Thus, such promises are in truth not worth the paper they are written on. Lord Oxburgh, then chairman of Shell UK, speaking at the Greenpeace Business Lecture in January 2005, pointed out: “Whether you like it or not, we live in a capitalist society. If we at Shell ceased to find and extract and market fossil fuel products while there was a demand for them, we should fail as a company. Shell would disappear as any kind of economic force”

A truly sustainable and ecologically sound society, will need to have certain basic characteristics. It will need to stop economic growth after basic human needs are satisfied. It will also need to promote, encourage, and reward the positive human traits of cooperation, sharing, empathy, and reciprocity. And it must operate with respect for, and care of, the environment—locally, regionally, and globally. An economic system that is designed to satisfy basic human material and nonmaterial needs for everyone will require a democratic decision-making process that is based in communities and the cooperation between many communities and regions. Socialists don't make the mistake of appealing to the governments or corporations of the world to stop polluting our world, because we know that is futile. Instead we call on our fellow workers to join us in the struggle to rid the world for ever of the cause of these problems, world capitalism. In the period from 1970 to 2008, the eco-system has lost 30 percent of its biodiversity. In tropical areas, the loss has even been as high as 60 percent. This is not happening by accident. This is the result of an economic system that treats nature as a thing, as just a source of resources. For capitalists, nature is mainly an object to posses, exploit, transform and most specially profit out of it.

In The German Ideology, Marx writes of the working class that they had the historical task of bringing their “‘existence’ into harmony with their ‘essence’ in a practical way, by means of a revolution” and spelled it out in even more ecological terms ".. The ‘essence’ of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the ‘essence’ of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products..."