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Pesticide Action Network Updates Service (PANUPS)
A Weekly News Update on Pesticides, Health and Alternatives
See PANUPS archive for complete information.
December 18, 2009
- Climate chicken: PAN report from Copenhagen
- Dept. of Justice invites comments on agribusiness competition
- Monsanto’s monopoly exposed in Iowa and Copenhagen
- US urged to get house in order on persistent chemicals
- Will California let the genie out of the bottle?
- Kern County, CA, approves pesticide buffer zones
- PANUPS holiday schedule: Weds. Dec. 23 & 30
Climate chicken: PAN report from Copenhagen
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December 17, 9 pm PST: With fewer than 16 hours to go, the official climate talks in Copenhagen remain precarious, defined by what appears to be a game of chicken between the U.S. and China, distrust between rich and poor countries, and a midweek shift to undemocratic and exclusionary process. While Copenhagen’s Bella Center has been vigorously policed from the outset, thousands of accredited civil society observers were allowed access. Beginning on Monday, that access was significantly curtailed. By Wednesday, entire delegations of NGOs critical of the proceedings, like Friends of the Earth and Via Campesina, were being expelled from the talks without explanation or means of redress. The expulsions mirror anti-democratic and heavy-handed Danish police behavior outside the Bella Center at demonstrations throughout the week, where over 1,500 people have been arrested – most without cause – to be jailed and later released without charge. Likewise, the democratic legitimacy of the UN talks has been marred by last week’s leaked “Danish Text,” which revealed backroom dealings between a few powerful countries in an attempt to scuttle the Kyoto framework, and by back channel meetings between key players leading up to and throughout the talks.
Real Deal? Much appears to have transpired in the 48 hours since critical civil society observers were kicked out of the biggest climate change gathering in history. Talks had been stalled for days, with over 100 countries – led by the small island nation of Tuvalu and African delegates – demanding a “Real Deal” that seeks to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than the 2 degrees currently on the table. (A 2-degree rise will leave many small island nations underwater entirely and wreak havoc in Africa. These and other G77 delegates had thus been refusing compromise on this point despite significant pressure, collectively advancing a position that “our survival is non-negotiable.” Many of the expelled NGOs had rallied behind the Tuvalu proposal.)
Money: Another sticking point has been transition finance. Consistent with a UN needs assessment, developing countries are asking for $400bn annually by 2020 to leapfrog carbon-intensive economic development while adapting to a climate crisis that they had next to no role in creating, and are suffering disproportionately under. Until yesterday, finance figures floated by rich countries were hovering around $10bn per year. Talks were thus at an impasse on this point as well until U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a $100bn climate finance fund from rich countries, contingent upon a deal being arrived at in Copenhagen, and upon “transparency” in verifying emissions cuts. Although widely critiqued as too vague (Clinton declined to state how much the U.S. would contribute, or whether funds would be diverted from other aid streams), the offer changed the dynamic of the talk by giving China cover and impetus to soften its stance on another point of contention: transparent verification of its emission cuts.
Kyoto preserved, with cuts that miss the mark: On Thursday developing countries appeared to have won a significant negotiating point in preserving the framework of the Kyoto protocol, and with it a premise that both recognizes rich countries’ “historical responsibility” for having generated over 70% of global greenhouse gases, and assigns “common but differentiated responsibilities” for addressing the climate crisis. Less promising and in many ways more fundamental, are the emissions cuts on the table. According to a UN analysis (PDF) leaked to the press on Thursday, current emission cut pledges will not meet the agreed-upon objective of keeping global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Rather, they put the world on “an unsustainable pathway that could lead to concentrations equal or above 550 ppm [parts per million] with the related temperature raise around 3 degrees C.”
C02 speculation: Current science indicates that atmospheric concentrations of 550 ppm of CO2 will be catastrophic, resulting in a sea level rise of 2 meters before the end of the century. What’s more, the analysis underpinning this correlation of 550 ppm to current emissions cut pledges takes those pledges at their word without considering the high likelihood that offsetting and flexibility mechanisms like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) and CDM (Clean Development Mechanisms) will undermine the environmental integrity of emissions reductions by setting up an elaborate and ungovernable global carbon market. Critics of “cap and trade” and the emerging carbon market contend that these mechanisms are ill-equipped to reduce emissions, both because their price signals are delinked from polluting behavior on the ground, and because carbon markets will, like other recent commodities markets, become quickly financialized into derivative instruments, thus setting the stage for yet another speculative bubble.
Climate justice silenced: As PANUPS goes to press late on Thursday, it isn’t clear what the final day of Copenhagen talks will hold. Neither is the democratic mandate of these UN proceedings assured, since NGOs and G77 countries demanding climate justice and more aggressive emissions reductions appear to have been largely silenced or sidelined. China and the U.S. together account for 42% of global greenhouse gas emissions; keeping both parties seriously engaged in the talks is thus a precondition of any meaningful framework for climate change mitigation. Whether or not their game of climate chicken will yield an agreement that saves face at the ultimate expense of undermining the legitimacy of the talks and failing to meet the crisis at hand remains to be seen.
Subscribers to PAN Alerts will receive a Dec. 22 post-Copenhagen update on climate justice and the role of agriculture in the talks.
shareMORE PAN’s calls for ‘Climate Justice’ | Digg This
Dept. of Justice invites comments on agribusiness competition
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shareMORE Submit your comments to DOJ by Dec. 31 |
Monsanto’s monopoly exposed in Iowa and Copenhagen
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As more of the company’s confidential licensing agreements have come to light, revealing harsh anti-competitive business practices, investigations have been launched by the U.S. Department of Justice (see story above) and at least two states’ attorneys general. The contracts give smaller companies the right to use Monsanto’s patented genes, but prohibit stacking them with genes from any of its competitors. Since 95% of U.S. soy and 80% of corn contain Monsanto’s traits, the contracts effectively lock any competitors out of the vast majority of the country’s seed market. Contract restrictions include use of research done by public institutions with taxpayer dollars. “We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of [seed genetics],” said Neil Harl, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades. “This level of control is almost unbelievable.” In addition to choking out competitive research, the contracts give deep discounts to smaller seed sellers if Monsanto seeds make up at least 70% of their inventory. They also specify that any of these companies who change ownership have to destroy their inventory, effectively preventing anyone besides Monsanto from buying them out. In the last few years, Monsanto purchased over 200 companies, including a Brazilian sugarcane ethanol company, and continues to report record profits.<>
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In Copenhagen on Tuesday, Monsanto won the “Angry Mermaid Award” for promoting its genetically engineered (GE) crops as the solution to climate change. People from around the world voted for the prize that activists bestow upon one corporation to highlight its role in either undermining the climate negotiations, or using them for corporate gain. Apparently unperturbed by the fact that GE soy plantations have been a major driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions in Latin America, Monsanto continues to lobby for the eligibility of large-scale, plantation-style agrofuels as carbon credits to be funded under the climate agreement’s Clean Development Mechanisms.
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shareMORE PAN’s ‘Monsanto at a glance’ |
US urged to get house in order on persistent chemicals
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of Environmental Health Sciences to investigate the impacts of EDCs on the human hormone system, with a particular focus on children.
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shareMORE PANNA POPs Treaty resource page |
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Will California let the genie out of the bottle?
Regulation their way. California’s decision is expected by the end of January. Tell CA governor to say no to methyl iodide.
shareMORE ‘Choose Safer Strawberries’ from MomsRising |
Kern County, CA, approves pesticide buffer zones
shareMORE 2008 Tulare buffer zone victory |
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PANUPS holiday schedule: Weds. Dec. 23 & 30
Just two weeks after we moved PANUPS to Fridays, we have another schedule change for our dear readers: for the next two weeks we’ll be publishing on Wednesdays to avoid holiday email. Thanks for staying with us. We wish you a peaceful season.
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