Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [113]
In a chilly drawing room of the presidential palace, I met with Vice President Álvaro García Linera. Only forty-two years old, he had a résumé that included stints as a guerrilla fighter, prisoner, powerhouse author, and intellectual. “Transnational corporations are welcome in Bolivia,” explained the boyish VP. “But they will not dominate the economy. They should expect to pay taxes and submit to reasonable environmental and social regulations. But they will still make profits.” As García Linera explained, all that the state could do was impose equilibrium and a minimal humanity on the savageness and chaos of Bolivian capitalism and grow the economy with a progressive and greenish version of Keynesianism. Many industrialists in La Paz—the owners of construction-supply companies, potato chip factories, and small foundries, the “national bourgeoisie,” if you will—came to see the virtues of this strategy. And within the confines of this realism, Bolivia gropes toward a new model of a mixed economy.23
Act Three
By 2010 Bolivia was again in the news, this time because it was hosting the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in anticipation of the COP 16 meeting to be held in Cancún that December. The year before, Bolivia’s delegation had worked tirelessly with the G77—the main group of seventy-seven poor and developing countries from the Global South—to achieve deep emissions reductions and a robust transfer of capital and technology to the Global South as part of a binding treaty. Instead, COP 15 was marked by what John Vidal called “fantastically pompous speeches about being green” and produced a merely nonbinding, elite-negotiated “accord.” The accord recognized, as one report put it, “the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2°C” but did not mandate emissions reductions or North-to-South aid to assist with adaptation .24
As COP 16 wrapped up in Cancún, the quest for a binding agreement had collapsed. Instead, the world was now wrangling over the voluntary “accord” rather than a binding treaty. When added up, all the voluntary (thus unlikely) emissions reductions pledged by the largest economies still allowed the average global temperature to rise by 3.2°C, even though the IPCC sees a 2°C increase as the outer limit of safety. Even a 2°C increase could be too much and cause runaway climate change.
The only country that refused to go along with this charade was Bolivia. Their lead negotiator—the stern and intense Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solon—laid out his country’s position in the Guardian. In explaining his “obligation to set aside diplomacy and tell the truth,” Solon wrote:
Many commentators have called the Cancún accord a “step in the right direction.” We disagree: it is a giant step backward. The text replaces binding mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with voluntary pledges that are wholly insufficient. These pledges contradict the stated goal of capping the rise in temperature at 2°C, instead guiding us to 4°C or more. The text is full of loopholes for polluters, opportunities for expanding carbon markets and similar mechanisms. . . . We feel a deep responsibility not to sign off on any paper that threatens millions of lives.25
And so it was that in five years, protest on the streets of La Paz had become protest on the world stage. Had the democratic revolution in Bolivia translated into substantial forward movement in the international arena? No. But Bolivia’s commitment to a progressive politics of climate mitigation provides bold and vital leadership that would otherwise be lacking. Even the once plucky Maldives, having entered into secret negotiations with the United States for aid money, essentially retired from the field and endorsed the lame Cancún agreement. At the same time, the United States cut $3 million