September 4 amid a chorus of denunciation by anti-neoliberal globalisation activists and NGOs. They lambasted the final agreement for its subordination of environmental issues to the diktats of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The agreement, the Programme of Implementation, with its 54 pages of dense, repetitive bureaucratese, incants the term 'sustainable development' 225 times. However, according to Friends of the Earth, it contains only two concrete new targets. One is to halve the proportion of people who have no access to sanitation by the year 2015 (currently 2.4 billion people. 40 per cent of the world's population). The other is to establish some marine protected areas by 2012.
Other targets were watered down. The Kyoto protocol on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is now sometion on changing unsustainable patterns of consumption and production. In fact the principal measure proposed is to label products with their energy efficiency - not much of a challenge to the hugely wasteful practices of the capitalist system.
A major dispute at the summit was over a clause that required environmental agreements to be consistent with the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This was removed from the final document after objections by anti-globalisation activists. It was later found that 'multilateral environmental agreements must be in support of the work programme agreed through the WTO'.
According to Victor Menotti of the International Forum on Globalisation, this means that the WTO will have last word on whether measures to protect the environment constitute a restriction on
Reportedly, some Saharan delegates to the summit were eagerly discussing lucrative public-private partnerships to pipe water thousands of kilometres to that region from the Congo River. There was no critique of dam projects for electricity and irrigation, despite another the Commission on Dams, criticising the projects' effects on human rights, the environment and political stability. The other issue given much press coverage was renewable energy. The US delegation secured the removal of targets on this issue. But in fact the EU aim was only to increase use of renewable energ) from the current 14 percent to 15 per cent by 2010. About 75per percent of world renewable energy use is wood and either under pressure, or on powdered nickel.
Rifkin ignores all the safety and environmental issues raised by these schemes and the fact that they will be entirely under the control of multinationals.
This is a scheme predicated on the need to protect the car and energy industries, rather than to provide for the human need for far more equitable transport while cutting greenhouse gas emissions
It is likely that the main contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be energy conservation, which will require a change in living, working, production and consumption patterns (that is, the end of the capitalist system), not some
It is no accident that Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, BMW and the other major car manuafcturers are among the main proponents of the hydrogen economy. sions and methods for exploiting genetic resources in poor countries
Similarly, after Johannesburg, private water companies, engineering and construction firms and oil companies attempting to diversify, or anticipating major rises in oil prices, have an interest in furthering renewable energy and water management projects.
Agribusiness will be pleased to see large water management projects, which will help turn even more expanses of the Third World into monocultures serving western markets. Insurance companies have an interest in schemes to reduce the speed and effects of climate change because of the destruction (of property!) that changed weather patterns can cause.
•nvironmental and development • organisations could get drawn into
-partnerships to implement such schemes. ('Partnerships' are another theme of the Johannesburg implementation programme.) The motive of the most powerful forces in these partnerships will still be profit and the framework the WTO programme of privatisation and imperialist domination. This is shown by current struggles over water resources and supply in India, Bolivia and elsewhere and those over waste incineration to provide hot water and electricity in the West.
Socialists have to clarify their response to many issues raised at Johannesburg and pay more attention to how we debate with activists from different environmentalist currents.
In particular we have to emphasise the centrality of popular ownership and control of resourses. We should refute the idea that big business can be made 'green.
We have to take on the issue of whether large-scale environmental projects are necessarily damaging. And while backing the rights of access of poor coun tries to markets in the advanced countries, we have to explain why the solution of export-led development and more investment by multinationals advocated by the WTO and at the summit is a dead end for the Third World.