By VIJAY PRASHAD
Climate change, financial turbulence and Iran – nothing was left off the table in what was a blistering September for Barack Obama.
GERALD HERBERT/AP
President Barack Obama, followed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, arrives to make a statement on Iran’s nuclear facility, on September 25 at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh.
IN September, the world’s crises came together on American shores. Climate change, financial turbulence and Iran – nothing was left off the table. Then, to top it off, in early October, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace. It has been a blistering, bewildering month. The prize came the day after the eighth anniversary of the United States’ war in Afghanistan, whose future was being debated in the White House. It is unlikely that the President will reduce troop levels or find a way to end this conflict.
The United Nations General Assembly gathered at its magisterial home, where the issue of climate change made its way to the centre of things. All this was preparation for the U.N. Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. The G-8 countries wanted to put down a marker, demanding that India, China and Brazil make significant concessions as a prelude to what will be the 15th U.N. “Conference of the Parties” on climate change (the first was in Berlin in 1995).
Fander Falconi, Ecuador’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, put the case of the developing nations quite plainly: the “rich nations and over-consuming elite” have done the most to destroy the climate, “for that reason they must assume the costs of carbon emission reduction”. He went further, into territory that neither India nor China nor Brazil ventured, that the G-8 should pay “reparations that recognise the ecological debt, the historic responsibility for excess of emissions during several decades even when the warming effect was already detected”.
India’s External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna, was more measured at a round table discussion, but he too pointed out: “We cannot get away from the fundamental fact that unsustainable lifestyles and patterns of production and consumption in the developed world have caused climate change. This cannot continue.” He did not use the term reparations, which is a red flag. But he did point out that “developing countries must be supported financially, technologically, and with capacity-building resources so that they can cope with the immense challenges of adaption”.
In the back rooms of the U.N. and in the salons of New York, the “locomotives of the South” (India, China, Brazil, South Africa) acknowledged that they would have to make some concessions or else the U.S. Senate would simply refuse to go along with whatever comes out of Copenhagen. Already the Indian government has agreed to quantify its efforts to mitigate climate change, a position that it was not willing to take as recently as June 2009.