Saudi and US delegates reportedly questioned scientific research by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that found limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would be safer than a 2.0-degree limit. The Saudi delegation also objected to including wording that welcomed the IPPC's findings or any mention of the scientific body's recommended emissions targets in a final text.
"Saudi Arabia is the main protagonist in this attack on science, although the US has come to its aid," Oxfam's Jan Kowalzig said. "This report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is so unambiguous in its message that any contradiction is irresponsible ignorance."
"Saudi Arabia, the US and Iran are forming an unholy alliance of science-deniers," Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace said.
The technical meetings in Bonn were to prepare for a high-level UN climate summit in Chile later this year. Delegates failed to make significant progress on "market mechanism" measures that allow countries to finance efforts to reduce emission in other countries while doing less themselves. High-emission countries also clashed with others over how to compensate countries that are likely to experience the worst effects of global warming. The meeting ended with no agreement on how to raise the billions needed for a compensation fund.
At the Glastonbury music festival, Extinction Rebellion staged a protest. Waving flags bearing the extinction symbol, the crowd marched for about an hour around the festival site.
Dr Gail Bradbrook from Extinction Rebellion, said: “Extinction Rebellion]is not a protest. It is not a campaign. It is a rebellion. We are in active rebellion against our government. The social contract is broken, the governments aren’t protecting us and it’s down to us now. This is not a slow movement of change. It’s a shift in the consciousness of each of us. It is a collective shift. It involves facing grief and trauma and undoing our numbness and our narcissism and our indulgence that we have in this privileged western society.”
Rosie Rogers, from Greenpeace, told the audience, “I feel hopeful that all of us in all of our different movements and identities can come together and truly unite for what is the fight of our life to defend this planet,” she said. “And I also feel truly grateful for the brothers and sisters all over the world, especially those in the global south, the Amazon and other places, who have given so much to protect this planet.”
Firefighters battled wildfires at a scale not seen for 20 years in Spain and southern France was placed on unprecedented red alert. With temperatures in northern Spain and southern France set to exceed 44C, governments urged their citizens to take the utmost precaution, warning that in some areas the worst was yet to come. The conditions led officials to raise the French extreme heat alert to red. The alert, signifying a “dangerous weather phenomenon”, was the first since the system was introduced in 2004 following a 2003 heatwave that led to 15,000 premature deaths. Parts of northern France were also put on drought alert, with water supplies to businesses, farmers and ordinary residents restricted. The agriculture minister, Didier Guillaume, banned the transportation of all animals until the heatwave has ended.
“We’re facing a serious fire on a scale not seen for 20 years,” the region’s interior minister, Miquel Buch said . “It could burn through 20,000 hectares. Let’s be very aware that any carelessness could lead to a catastrophe.”
Germany also broke its June temperature record, which dated back to 1947, with a 38.6C reading in Coschen near the Polish border. Scientists have said Europe’s 2019 heatwave, like last year’s, is closely linked to the climate emergency and that such extreme weather events will be many times more likely over the coming decades.
What
can be done about climate change
Environmental
destruction is the consequence of capitalism. Capitalism damages not
only particular nations but the whole planet itself. Global
warming threatens humanity, but fighting it requires more than
individual lifestyle action or reliance on government. Scarcely
a day goes by without some media article features it. Politicians and
governments of all hues now declare their commitment to do something.
Businesses also desire to tackle climate
change but in doing so they jeopardise the stability of global
capitalism. They cannot end capital accumulation and the accompanying
commercial competition, the very basis of their system. Everything
else has to be subordinated to the profit-system. The interests of
the capitalist class as a whole lay in legislation and regulation yet
individual capitalists place their own interests foremost and lobby
against such measures. The dilemma of the climate change strategies of
corporations and nation-states involve an attempt to square two
conflicting imperatives. To avoid instability and maintain the
conditions necessary to capitalism’s reproduction, climate chaos
must be mitigated, but, for countries and corporations alike, this
must not affect the bottom line of maximising profitability and
out-competing rivals. The interests of capitalism in protecting the
environment and in protecting their profits inevitably clash, with
the latter consistently takes precedence over the former.
Protests
and campaigns focused purely on climate change are not the answer to
the problem. It cannot be a single issue. Too often the anger about
global warming is safely channelled into business friendly agendas at
the expense of any serious confrontations with capitalist power. It
bestows confidence and faith in the forces which socialists work so
hard to expose. The blame and the burden is lifted for the capitalist
culprit and shifted on to the individual.
The
only sure solution to climate change is the replacement of a society
based on accumulation for profit with one based on production for
need. There is only one way and it is to put an end to the system
that creates climate change. Through our presence at all these
demonstrations we endeavour to transform them into a protest against
capitalism as a whole. It requires a willingness to pose a
revolutionary challenge to the system if we are to win and avert
climate disaster.
All
of our futures – our children’s and our grandchildren’s futures
– are in the hands of a small privileged minority.
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