The United Nations will host dozens of governments, corporations and non-governmental organisations during a one-day Climate Summit in New York on September 23, but according to groups that will be protesting outside, the meeting will deal seriously with only one limited way of fighting climate change.
In recent years, the UN has proven incapable of playing an important role in slowing world climate change in any meaningful way, and is now strongly influenced by a powerful lobby.
“On the climate issue, the world’s biggest corporate polluters and pushers of unsustainable rates of consumption are hell bent on maintaining ‘business as usual’ and are working alone and in groups [and at the UN] to ensure that climate policies will not interfere with the profitability of their operations,” says a research paper by Canada’s highly-respected Polaris Institute.
Because the UN is not making much progress, as many as 200,000 environment supporters from all over North America are expected to take part in four days of protest in New York leading up to the UN Summit. More than 800 groups are backing the protests, hoping to advance the climate crisis cause in the eyes of the public and with governments.
Powerful corporations
While the summit and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will denounce global warming in general ways, it’s clear that, behind the scenes, corporations will play the leading role. The most powerful so-called climate-saving committee associated with the UN committee is loaded with representatives from the most powerful corporations from around the globe.
One of the few moments of real compassion during the summit will come when a 25-year-old poet, journalist and climate change activist from the Marshall Islands delivers the keynote opening address. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner will say she became inspired to fight climate change when she witnessed the raging ocean destroy her city’s main graveyard on her island.
“I was inspired by the concept that the ocean is almost eating, or swallowing our dead in a sense,” she said in an interview with a US donor. “There is profound sadness and a profound helplessness about that. It is so sad, we have no control over it; it is the ocean that is taking it over. That is what inspired me; that is what moved me deeply.”
The summit will, among other things, hold brief discussions on themes such as climate, health and jobs; a climate change photo contest the UN says may be the largest ever; and a week of climate conscious-building at events around New York.
Carbon pricing
However, what the corporations want most is to have the summit boost their preferred action against climate change: carbon pricing.
If corporations have to pay what amounts to a fine to pollute beyond certain set levels, they are inclined to cut pollution and to create new technologies that will reduce emissions.
“Carbon pricing is a critical tool to address climate change, and momentum is building to put in place carbon pricing schemes,” says one UN document. “Nearly 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and provinces use carbon pricing mechanisms such as emissions trading systems and carbon taxes or are preparing to implement them.”
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