Once again, at the end of this month, the world’s attention will focus toward Paris, this time as site of the next round of UN climate negotiations.

Just two weeks after the unspeakably horrific massacre of 13th November, diplomats and heads of state will gather in Paris under the umbrella of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a document first put forward at the landmark 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro.

For those with long memories, yes – the very same global conference where the elder George Bush told the world that the “American way of life is not negotiable.”

The UNFCCC process has seen many disappointments, and a few nominal successes over the years, including the approval of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first international agreement to mandate specific reductions in climate-disrupting greenhouse gases.

As this year’s climate conference approaches, it is virtually certain that 2015 will be the warmest year ever recorded, with several months having surpassed previous records by a full degree or more. People around the world are suffering the consequences of some of the most extreme patterns of storms, droughts, wildfires and floods ever experienced.

Western wildfires last summer reached as far north as the Olympic rainforest, and unprecedented mudslides earlier this fall in a corner of drought-baked southern California nearly buried vehicles caught on the route from Tehachapi to Bakersfield.

Central Mexico recently experienced the most severe hurricane to ever reach landfall, and the role of persistent regional droughts in sparking the social upheaval that has brought nearly a million Middle Eastern refugees to central Europe is increasingly apparent.

While we are always cautioned that it is difficult to blame the climate for specific incidents of extreme weather, scientists in fact are increasingly able to measure the climate contribution of various events.

Rising temperatures also heighten the effects of phenomena such as the California drought, which may not have global warming as their primary underlying cause.

Remember ‘Hopenhagen’

The last time this much public attention was focused on the climate talks was in the lead-up to the Copenhagen COP15 conference in 2009. At that time, the first ‘commitment period’ of the Kyoto Protocol was about to expire shortly, and Copenhagen was seen as a make-or-break opportunity to move the process forward.

Even as close observers decried the increasing corporate influence over the preparations for the 15th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN climate convention, most observers held onto a shred of hope that something meaningful and significant would emerge from the negotiations.

There was a huge public lobbying effort by Greenpeace and other groups urging President Obama to attend, and China put forward its first public commitment to reduce the rate of increase in their greenhouse gas emissions.

While the Kyoto Protocol’s primary implementation mechanisms – tradable emissions allowances and questionable ‘carbon offset’ projects in remote areas of the world – had proven inadequate at best, the Copenhagen meeting was seen as the key to sustaining Kyoto’s legacy of legally binding emissions reductions.

Perhaps, activists hoped, the negotiators would agree on a meaningful plan to prevent increasingly uncontrollable disruptions of the climate. It soon became clear, however, that Copenhagen instead set the stage for a massive derailment of the ongoing negotiation process, and unleashed a new set of elite strategies that now render the Paris talks as virtually designed to fail.

Officials in Copenhagen were determined to spin the conference as a success, no matter what the outcome. Still, even before the conference began, they began to proclaim the advantages of a non-binding ‘political’ or ‘operational’ agreement as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions.

As described in my book, Toward Climate Justice (New Compass Press, 2014), the assembled delegates from nearly all the world’s nations failed to accomplish even that. COP 15 produced only a five-page ‘Copenhagen Accord’, with no new binding obligations on countries, corporations, or any other actors. The document was not even approved – only “taken note of” – by the conference as a whole.

The accord essentially urged countries to put forward voluntary pledges to reduce their climate-disrupting emissions, and to informally “assess” their progress after five years. Every substantive issue was hedged with loopholes and contradictions, setting the stage for most of the global North outside of Europe to simply withdraw from their countries’ obligations under Kyoto as the 2012 renewal deadline approached.

Still, all but three countries – Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua – went along with this scheme. One main reason was that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had promised skeptics that the US would raise $100 billion a year in funds to assist with climate stabilizing measures, a promise that is still to be realized in the halls of Paris.

Revealing the US strategy – divide and weaken

Just what did the US actually bring to the table in Copenhagen beside a vague pledge by President Obama to reduce emissions? An article in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs offered some important clues as to what would transpire in Copenhagen and beyond.

Readers may be aware that Foreign Affairs is the official organ of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an organization that has been seen for many decades as both a weathervane and an active arbiter of elite opinion in the US, and lists most recent US presidents and numerous other senior government officials among its members.

Lawrence Shoup, author of two books on the Council, describes it as “the world’s most powerful private organization”, specializing in networking, strategic planning and consensus-forming for US elites. In a 2009 article titled ‘Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth‘, CFR Senior Fellow Michael Levi outlined the US government’s apparent strategy for Copenhagen.

“The odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small”, Levi would have written during the summer of 2009, in preparation for the journal’s September publication. His alternative proposal was to essentially replace international emissions standards with a patchwork of voluntary, country-specific policies with the thoroughly inadequate goal of reducing world emissions of carbon dioxide by half by 2050.

Under Levi’s scenario, China would step up investments in renewable energy and “ultra-efficient conventional coal power”; India would become a pioneer in smart grid technology, and countries with emissions mainly from deforestation (especially Indonesia and Brazil) would be offered incentives to protect their forests and raise agricultural productivity. The main US contribution would be to push for a detailed agreement on “measurement, reporting and verification” – one area where US surveillance technology would clearly hold an advantage.

The Foreign Affairs article pointedly blamed developing countries for the world’s inability to agree on meaningful emission caps, echoing frequent statements by various US officials. Levi argued that the Chinese and others lacked the capacity to accurately monitor their emissions and would simply ignore any limits that they proved unable to meet.

Unfortunately, this is precisely how Northern countries had behaved since Kyoto; indeed Levi cited Canada as a key example of a country that repeatedly exceeded its Kyoto limits and faced no penalty for doing so. For these reasons, efforts to develop binding caps for developing countries are described as simply “a waste of time.”

A key challenge for the US in Copenhagen, according to Levi, was to avoid “excessive blame” if the conference were to be seen as a failure. Rather than expecting a comprehensive agreement to come out of Copenhagen, he argued, the conference should instead be seen as analogous to the beginning of a round of arms control or world trade talks, processes which invariably take many years to complete.

“This ‘Copenhagen Round'”, he argues, mirroring the typical World Trade Organization language, “would be much more like an extended trade negotiation than like a typical environmental treaty process.” Overlooking the fact that a substantive, albeit flawed, agreement was actually signed in Kyoto, the article emphasizes that it took several more years of negotiations before that treaty could be implemented.

Since 2009, watering down the language

Since Copenhagen, progress toward a meaningful climate agreement has continued to be stifled by big-power politics and diplomatic gridlock. Annual COPs have happened in Mexico, South Africa, Qatar, Poland, and Peru, with each year’s proceedings proclaimed a diplomatic success, despite the fact that the parties may be farther than ever from a legally enforceable plan to reduce emissions.

The agenda of voluntary national pledges was finally ratified – over Bolivia’s strong objections – in Cancún in 2010. In Durban, South Africa the following year, the parties agreed that no new climate treaty would come into effect until 2020, with the terms to be finalized in Paris in 2015.

National ‘pledges’ turned into ‘commitments’, and last year in Lima, Peru, they were further watered down to ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ to emissions reduction (INDCs). Contributions in some cases could be based on reductions in the carbon intensity of an economy, even if those reductions would be overwhelmed by economic growth, as in the case of China.

Further, the US and other rich countries have pushed to dilute the long-standing focus on ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ for climate mitigation that was enshrined in the original UNFCCC, and abandon the more explicit language on climate equity that was approved in Kyoto and has long been an underlying principle of the negotiations.

Still, proponents of the ‘voluntary contributions’ approach continue to spin it as the best possible outcome of the process. In a 2014 article in Yale’s environmental web journal, former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle argued that the current paradigm offers the most promising possible “bottom-up” approach, and one that “builds on national self-interest and spurs a ‘race to the top’ in low-carbon energy solutions”, while shifting the focus from “burden to opportunity” and from rhetoric to “tangible action.”

The US role – obstruct and obfuscate

Unfortunately, none of the global South delegates who staged a walk-out of the massively industry-sponsored COP in Warsaw the previous winter saw it that way at all. Without any meaningful enforcement measures, how can nation states be held accountable for honoring their voluntary ‘pledges’?

With fossil fuel interests still dominating domestic politics in many countries, can the world settle for a diplomacy based mainly on cultivating a sense of moral obligation on the part of national governments and global corporations?

Indeed an October 2013 speech by Obama’s lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, made it clear that the primary US role in the process remains one of obstruction and obfuscation (the full text is available on the State Department website).

Stern blamed poorer countries for resisting an “agreement applicable to all parties”, and celebrated the focus on “self-determined mitigation commitments” instead of legally-binding obligations to reduce emissions. He dismissed the ‘loss and damage’ debate that would come to dominate the 2013 Warsaw COP as merely an “ideological narrative of fault and blame”, and insisted that no significant public funds for international climate aid would be available beyond the meager $2.5 billion that the US has committed annually since 2010.

Further, he thoroughly rejected the long-standing principle of responsibility for historical CO₂ emissions, insisting, with unsurpassed arrogance, that “It is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system.”

Ethics aside, Stern would have us all forget that at least half of all cumulative emissions have occurred since 1980, and a much larger share since the first scientific observations of rising atmospheric CO₂ levels in the late 1950s.

Managing expectations

In recent weeks, laudatory headlines have accompanied the news that formerly reluctant countries, especially China, India and Brazil, have now announced their intended climate ‘contributions’ for the decade of the 2020s.

Unfortunately, despite some incremental progress, these quasi-pledges don’t really add up. Two independent analyses of all countries’ climate pledges to date were released in early October. The MIT-affiliated Climate Interactive projected that the existing pledges would result in 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 °F) of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, far short of the Copenhagen goal of a maximum of 2 degrees.

The Climate Action Tracker, a project of four independent research organizations with support from international environmental groups and the World Bank, among others, put forward a more optimistic estimate, projecting a global temperature rise between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees C by 2100 if current pledges are fully implemented.

These represent a significant improvement over the business-as-usual scenario of 4 to 5 degrees of average warming projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, but not a huge step beyond the modest carbon-reduction policies that various countries already have in place. The Climate Action Tracker now projects a 92% probability of exceeding 2 degrees this century.

It is important to note here that even 2 degrees C is far from a ‘safe’ level of climate disruption. Research suggests that 2 degrees is more accurately seen as the level at which there is roughly a 50 – 50 chance of avoiding insurmountable climate ‘tipping points’, a statistical coin toss.

Given that warming to date of around 0.8 degrees C has correlated with a far higher level of climate chaos than predicted, this is far from comforting. Small island nations and others in the global South have put forward a potential ‘safe’ level of 1.5 degrees warming.

The pace of reductions in CO₂ emissions also matters a great deal. The much-lauded climate agreement between the US and China last year advanced a scenario whereby China’s emissions would not begin to fall until 2030. A 2013 paper by climatologist James Hansen and over a dozen colleagues from around the world suggested that much faster reductions in carbon pollution are necessary if the world is to avoid a scenario where extreme climate disruptions will continue for hundreds of years into the future.

Time is of the essence, and the Paris negotiations appear to be rooted in the false premise that we have plenty of time.

National pledges falling well short of the climate goal

Another new study, endorsed by leading international anti-hunger groups, as well as Friends of the Earth International, WWF and 350.org, among others, offers a more direct challenge to various countries’ announced ‘contributions’ to climate mitigation.

While there is still considerable uncertainty about how specific emissions levels translate into global temperature changes, scientists broadly agree on the absolute amount of additional CO₂ that the global climate system can tolerate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other leading scientific authorities have all endorsed this concept of a total global ‘carbon budget’.

According to the new report, ‘Fair Shares: A Civil Society Equity Review of INDCs‘, countries’ total pledges to date amount to less than half of the reductions that are needed in absolute emissions levels.

When countries’ historical responsibilities for climate disruption are taken into account, as well as their capacities for action based on current incomes and living standards, it appears that the world’s wealthier countries have pledged less than a quarter of their calculated fair shares.

The methodology here has been under development for many years by the group EcoEquity, which has presented a detailed equity-based approach to emissions reduction at several recent COPs. The report suggests that current US and EU pledges amount to about a fifth of their calculated fair share, Japan’s about a tenth, and Russia’s doesn’t represent any significant contribution at all.

Meanwhile, the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s analysis of the last official working session of the UNFCCC prior to Paris, held in Bonn in late October, concluded that “the parties remain far from reaching any agreement.”

Countless issues, both large and small, are still far from resolution. ‘Procedural wrangling’ appeared to dominate the discussions in Bonn, and civil society observers were barred from the meeting rooms where various ‘spin-off’ groups were working to try to clarify the final text.

A draft text from what is described in UN-speak as the ‘Co-Chairs’ non-paper’ remains the primary focus for discussions in Paris. The more obstacles that remain to finalize a Paris agreement, the less likely there will be any meaningful progress on thorny issues such as enforcement, accountability, and how changes in the world’s energy systems will be financed.

Still, virtually any agreement that emerges from Paris is probably going to be proclaimed a ‘success’, as has occurred at the end of every climate COP since before Copenhagen. Indeed, as a report from the Global Forest Coalition explains,

“The extreme hype around the Paris deal being desperately needed to ‘save the world’ is scaremongering people into accepting a disastrously bad deal … If we are to make Paris about saving the planet, then it should be about rejecting the false deal that is on the table.”

While many international environmental groups continue to raise hopes for an adequate agreement in Paris, people on the ground there and around the world have been mapping out a more realistic response.

Civil society’s ‘defensive battle’ to block a terrible deal

For much of the past year, the main discussion among activists in Europe has not been about whether or not the Paris negotiations will succeed. Instead, the debate has largely focused on whether to give the negotiations any credence at all, or whether it’s time to view the entire UNFCCC process as thoroughly corrupted and hopelessly beholden to fossil fuel corporations and the interests of global capital.

Climate justice activists have raised analogies to the notorious World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999 where blockades by thousands of people on the outside helped spur African delegates to hold their ground and prevent a harmful new trade agreement from being advanced on the inside.

In this view, the best hopes for Paris lie with those seeking to build upon the massive demonstrations in Copenhagen, the Occupy-style disruption of the Durban COP in 2011, and the walk-out by global South delegates from the Warsaw meeting in 2013.

A widely quoted paper by Maxime Combes from the global justice network ATTAC-France proposed a middle ground, whereby activists would allow those on the inside to wage the necessary “defensive battles” needed to prevent a terrible deal, and focus more confrontational actions toward the closing days of the conference, when it will likely become clear that the meeting is heading nowhere.

Combes added that “situating the massive mobilizations during the final days leaves the possibility open for derailing the negotiations if it is deemed relevant to do so.” Actions being planned for Paris embrace the spirit of Blockadia – the worldwide opposition to new fossil fuel infrastructure – as well as Alternatiba, a French Basque term for the flowering of grassroots alternatives centered in local communities worldwide.

A campaign to highlight community-centered alternatives to the fossil fuel economy has been underway in France for much of this year, including a bicycle tour that circled the country last summer to visit several of the most visionary local projects.

The 350.org international network has called for actions around the world both at the beginning and the end of the Paris COP, November 28-29th and December 12th, and sensibly urges activists to focus on a “road through Paris”, culminating in actions aimed to directly challenge the continued extraction of fossil fuels during the spring of 2016.

The global 350 network has become far more responsive to local activists around the world in recent years, emphasizing decentralized organizing and helping support a variety of direct actions, including a dramatic march of over 1,000 people onto the site of Germany’s most polluting coal mine just last summer.

To resist is to survive

Here in the US, many groups are holding local events in late November, around the Thanksgiving holiday, and 350 affiliates in New England and North Country New York will unite for a major regional mobilization with a ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’ theme on Saturday, December 12th in Boston (see 350newengland.org, with more details available soon at jobsjusticeclimate.org).

The intersectional alliance-building effort that is at the heart of these events will help shape campaigns to further challenge fossil fuel interests and highlight alternatives throughout the coming year.

With the defeat of the notorious Keystone XL pipeline, the industry’s biggest fear is what some have termed the ‘Keystonization’ of all new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Local struggles around various pipelines and fracking sites may be relatively small puzzle pieces compared to the mounting destabilization of the earth’s climate system, but that’s not how the industry sees it.

For example, a recent report commissioned by PNC Bank found that leading financial institutions view public opposition and regulatory uncertainty (itself often shaped by public opposition) to be the most significant barriers to the continued expansion of oil and gas.

The global coal industry is in rapid decline, and wind and solar are now the fastest growing energy sources. We have a long way to go, and not much time, but if anything can help raise our hopes that it’s not too late, it is the power of social movements to intervene to change the story.

This is especially true of those movements that embrace the transformative vision of climate justice and successfully unite the grassroots forces inspired by images of Blockadia and Alternatiba.

As the world mourns the victims of the 13 November massacre in Paris, organizers have pledged to continue to focus public attention and public protests around the COP. “Despite the emotion and sadness, we refuse to give in to terror, we reject the society of fear, stigmatization and scapegoating”, ATTAC-France wrote in the English translation of its 14 November statement:

“We affirm our determination to continue to circulate, to work, to entertain us, to hold meetings and fight freely … From November 29 to December 12 in Paris on the occasion of the COP 21 and with our citizens’ mobilizations , we will show that another world is possible, necessary and urgent.”

Brian Tokar is the director of the Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org), a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont, and a board member of 350 Vermont, an autonomous statewide organization. His most recent book is ‘Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change’ (Revised edition 2014, New Compass Press), portions of which were adapted for this article.

This article is an updated version of one originally run on Common Dreams.

Once again, at the end of this month, the world’s attention will focus toward Paris, this time as site of the next round of UN climate negotiations.

Just two weeks after the unspeakably horrific massacre of 13th November, diplomats and heads of state will gather in Paris under the umbrella of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a document first put forward at the landmark 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro.

For those with long memories, yes – the very same global conference where the elder George Bush told the world that the “American way of life is not negotiable.”

The UNFCCC process has seen many disappointments, and a few nominal successes over the years, including the approval of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first international agreement to mandate specific reductions in climate-disrupting greenhouse gases.

As this year’s climate conference approaches, it is virtually certain that 2015 will be the warmest year ever recorded, with several months having surpassed previous records by a full degree or more. People around the world are suffering the consequences of some of the most extreme patterns of storms, droughts, wildfires and floods ever experienced.

Western wildfires last summer reached as far north as the Olympic rainforest, and unprecedented mudslides earlier this fall in a corner of drought-baked southern California nearly buried vehicles caught on the route from Tehachapi to Bakersfield.

Central Mexico recently experienced the most severe hurricane to ever reach landfall, and the role of persistent regional droughts in sparking the social upheaval that has brought nearly a million Middle Eastern refugees to central Europe is increasingly apparent.

While we are always cautioned that it is difficult to blame the climate for specific incidents of extreme weather, scientists in fact are increasingly able to measure the climate contribution of various events.

Rising temperatures also heighten the effects of phenomena such as the California drought, which may not have global warming as their primary underlying cause.

Remember ‘Hopenhagen’

The last time this much public attention was focused on the climate talks was in the lead-up to the Copenhagen COP15 conference in 2009. At that time, the first ‘commitment period’ of the Kyoto Protocol was about to expire shortly, and Copenhagen was seen as a make-or-break opportunity to move the process forward.

Even as close observers decried the increasing corporate influence over the preparations for the 15th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN climate convention, most observers held onto a shred of hope that something meaningful and significant would emerge from the negotiations.

There was a huge public lobbying effort by Greenpeace and other groups urging President Obama to attend, and China put forward its first public commitment to reduce the rate of increase in their greenhouse gas emissions.

While the Kyoto Protocol’s primary implementation mechanisms – tradable emissions allowances and questionable ‘carbon offset’ projects in remote areas of the world – had proven inadequate at best, the Copenhagen meeting was seen as the key to sustaining Kyoto’s legacy of legally binding emissions reductions.

Perhaps, activists hoped, the negotiators would agree on a meaningful plan to prevent increasingly uncontrollable disruptions of the climate. It soon became clear, however, that Copenhagen instead set the stage for a massive derailment of the ongoing negotiation process, and unleashed a new set of elite strategies that now render the Paris talks as virtually designed to fail.

Officials in Copenhagen were determined to spin the conference as a success, no matter what the outcome. Still, even before the conference began, they began to proclaim the advantages of a non-binding ‘political’ or ‘operational’ agreement as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions.

As described in my book, Toward Climate Justice (New Compass Press, 2014), the assembled delegates from nearly all the world’s nations failed to accomplish even that. COP 15 produced only a five-page ‘Copenhagen Accord’, with no new binding obligations on countries, corporations, or any other actors. The document was not even approved – only “taken note of” – by the conference as a whole.

The accord essentially urged countries to put forward voluntary pledges to reduce their climate-disrupting emissions, and to informally “assess” their progress after five years. Every substantive issue was hedged with loopholes and contradictions, setting the stage for most of the global North outside of Europe to simply withdraw from their countries’ obligations under Kyoto as the 2012 renewal deadline approached.

Still, all but three countries – Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua – went along with this scheme. One main reason was that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had promised skeptics that the US would raise $100 billion a year in funds to assist with climate stabilizing measures, a promise that is still to be realized in the halls of Paris.

Revealing the US strategy – divide and weaken

Just what did the US actually bring to the table in Copenhagen beside a vague pledge by President Obama to reduce emissions? An article in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs offered some important clues as to what would transpire in Copenhagen and beyond.

Readers may be aware that Foreign Affairs is the official organ of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an organization that has been seen for many decades as both a weathervane and an active arbiter of elite opinion in the US, and lists most recent US presidents and numerous other senior government officials among its members.

Lawrence Shoup, author of two books on the Council, describes it as “the world’s most powerful private organization”, specializing in networking, strategic planning and consensus-forming for US elites. In a 2009 article titled ‘Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth‘, CFR Senior Fellow Michael Levi outlined the US government’s apparent strategy for Copenhagen.

“The odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small”, Levi would have written during the summer of 2009, in preparation for the journal’s September publication. His alternative proposal was to essentially replace international emissions standards with a patchwork of voluntary, country-specific policies with the thoroughly inadequate goal of reducing world emissions of carbon dioxide by half by 2050.

Under Levi’s scenario, China would step up investments in renewable energy and “ultra-efficient conventional coal power”; India would become a pioneer in smart grid technology, and countries with emissions mainly from deforestation (especially Indonesia and Brazil) would be offered incentives to protect their forests and raise agricultural productivity. The main US contribution would be to push for a detailed agreement on “measurement, reporting and verification” – one area where US surveillance technology would clearly hold an advantage.

The Foreign Affairs article pointedly blamed developing countries for the world’s inability to agree on meaningful emission caps, echoing frequent statements by various US officials. Levi argued that the Chinese and others lacked the capacity to accurately monitor their emissions and would simply ignore any limits that they proved unable to meet.

Unfortunately, this is precisely how Northern countries had behaved since Kyoto; indeed Levi cited Canada as a key example of a country that repeatedly exceeded its Kyoto limits and faced no penalty for doing so. For these reasons, efforts to develop binding caps for developing countries are described as simply “a waste of time.”

A key challenge for the US in Copenhagen, according to Levi, was to avoid “excessive blame” if the conference were to be seen as a failure. Rather than expecting a comprehensive agreement to come out of Copenhagen, he argued, the conference should instead be seen as analogous to the beginning of a round of arms control or world trade talks, processes which invariably take many years to complete.

“This ‘Copenhagen Round'”, he argues, mirroring the typical World Trade Organization language, “would be much more like an extended trade negotiation than like a typical environmental treaty process.” Overlooking the fact that a substantive, albeit flawed, agreement was actually signed in Kyoto, the article emphasizes that it took several more years of negotiations before that treaty could be implemented.

Since 2009, watering down the language

Since Copenhagen, progress toward a meaningful climate agreement has continued to be stifled by big-power politics and diplomatic gridlock. Annual COPs have happened in Mexico, South Africa, Qatar, Poland, and Peru, with each year’s proceedings proclaimed a diplomatic success, despite the fact that the parties may be farther than ever from a legally enforceable plan to reduce emissions.

The agenda of voluntary national pledges was finally ratified – over Bolivia’s strong objections – in Cancún in 2010. In Durban, South Africa the following year, the parties agreed that no new climate treaty would come into effect until 2020, with the terms to be finalized in Paris in 2015.

National ‘pledges’ turned into ‘commitments’, and last year in Lima, Peru, they were further watered down to ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ to emissions reduction (INDCs). Contributions in some cases could be based on reductions in the carbon intensity of an economy, even if those reductions would be overwhelmed by economic growth, as in the case of China.

Further, the US and other rich countries have pushed to dilute the long-standing focus on ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ for climate mitigation that was enshrined in the original UNFCCC, and abandon the more explicit language on climate equity that was approved in Kyoto and has long been an underlying principle of the negotiations.

Still, proponents of the ‘voluntary contributions’ approach continue to spin it as the best possible outcome of the process. In a 2014 article in Yale’s environmental web journal, former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle argued that the current paradigm offers the most promising possible “bottom-up” approach, and one that “builds on national self-interest and spurs a ‘race to the top’ in low-carbon energy solutions”, while shifting the focus from “burden to opportunity” and from rhetoric to “tangible action.”

The US role – obstruct and obfuscate

Unfortunately, none of the global South delegates who staged a walk-out of the massively industry-sponsored COP in Warsaw the previous winter saw it that way at all. Without any meaningful enforcement measures, how can nation states be held accountable for honoring their voluntary ‘pledges’?

With fossil fuel interests still dominating domestic politics in many countries, can the world settle for a diplomacy based mainly on cultivating a sense of moral obligation on the part of national governments and global corporations?

Indeed an October 2013 speech by Obama’s lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, made it clear that the primary US role in the process remains one of obstruction and obfuscation (the full text is available on the State Department website).

Stern blamed poorer countries for resisting an “agreement applicable to all parties”, and celebrated the focus on “self-determined mitigation commitments” instead of legally-binding obligations to reduce emissions. He dismissed the ‘loss and damage’ debate that would come to dominate the 2013 Warsaw COP as merely an “ideological narrative of fault and blame”, and insisted that no significant public funds for international climate aid would be available beyond the meager $2.5 billion that the US has committed annually since 2010.

Further, he thoroughly rejected the long-standing principle of responsibility for historical CO₂ emissions, insisting, with unsurpassed arrogance, that “It is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system.”

Ethics aside, Stern would have us all forget that at least half of all cumulative emissions have occurred since 1980, and a much larger share since the first scientific observations of rising atmospheric CO₂ levels in the late 1950s.

Managing expectations

In recent weeks, laudatory headlines have accompanied the news that formerly reluctant countries, especially China, India and Brazil, have now announced their intended climate ‘contributions’ for the decade of the 2020s.

Unfortunately, despite some incremental progress, these quasi-pledges don’t really add up. Two independent analyses of all countries’ climate pledges to date were released in early October. The MIT-affiliated Climate Interactive projected that the existing pledges would result in 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 °F) of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, far short of the Copenhagen goal of a maximum of 2 degrees.

The Climate Action Tracker, a project of four independent research organizations with support from international environmental groups and the World Bank, among others, put forward a more optimistic estimate, projecting a global temperature rise between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees C by 2100 if current pledges are fully implemented.

These represent a significant improvement over the business-as-usual scenario of 4 to 5 degrees of average warming projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, but not a huge step beyond the modest carbon-reduction policies that various countries already have in place. The Climate Action Tracker now projects a 92% probability of exceeding 2 degrees this century.

It is important to note here that even 2 degrees C is far from a ‘safe’ level of climate disruption. Research suggests that 2 degrees is more accurately seen as the level at which there is roughly a 50 – 50 chance of avoiding insurmountable climate ‘tipping points’, a statistical coin toss.

Given that warming to date of around 0.8 degrees C has correlated with a far higher level of climate chaos than predicted, this is far from comforting. Small island nations and others in the global South have put forward a potential ‘safe’ level of 1.5 degrees warming.

The pace of reductions in CO₂ emissions also matters a great deal. The much-lauded climate agreement between the US and China last year advanced a scenario whereby China’s emissions would not begin to fall until 2030. A 2013 paper by climatologist James Hansen and over a dozen colleagues from around the world suggested that much faster reductions in carbon pollution are necessary if the world is to avoid a scenario where extreme climate disruptions will continue for hundreds of years into the future.

Time is of the essence, and the Paris negotiations appear to be rooted in the false premise that we have plenty of time.

National pledges falling well short of the climate goal

Another new study, endorsed by leading international anti-hunger groups, as well as Friends of the Earth International, WWF and 350.org, among others, offers a more direct challenge to various countries’ announced ‘contributions’ to climate mitigation.

While there is still considerable uncertainty about how specific emissions levels translate into global temperature changes, scientists broadly agree on the absolute amount of additional CO₂ that the global climate system can tolerate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other leading scientific authorities have all endorsed this concept of a total global ‘carbon budget’.

According to the new report, ‘Fair Shares: A Civil Society Equity Review of INDCs‘, countries’ total pledges to date amount to less than half of the reductions that are needed in absolute emissions levels.

When countries’ historical responsibilities for climate disruption are taken into account, as well as their capacities for action based on current incomes and living standards, it appears that the world’s wealthier countries have pledged less than a quarter of their calculated fair shares.

The methodology here has been under development for many years by the group EcoEquity, which has presented a detailed equity-based approach to emissions reduction at several recent COPs. The report suggests that current US and EU pledges amount to about a fifth of their calculated fair share, Japan’s about a tenth, and Russia’s doesn’t represent any significant contribution at all.

Meanwhile, the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s analysis of the last official working session of the UNFCCC prior to Paris, held in Bonn in late October, concluded that “the parties remain far from reaching any agreement.”

Countless issues, both large and small, are still far from resolution. ‘Procedural wrangling’ appeared to dominate the discussions in Bonn, and civil society observers were barred from the meeting rooms where various ‘spin-off’ groups were working to try to clarify the final text.

A draft text from what is described in UN-speak as the ‘Co-Chairs’ non-paper’ remains the primary focus for discussions in Paris. The more obstacles that remain to finalize a Paris agreement, the less likely there will be any meaningful progress on thorny issues such as enforcement, accountability, and how changes in the world’s energy systems will be financed.

Still, virtually any agreement that emerges from Paris is probably going to be proclaimed a ‘success’, as has occurred at the end of every climate COP since before Copenhagen. Indeed, as a report from the Global Forest Coalition explains,

“The extreme hype around the Paris deal being desperately needed to ‘save the world’ is scaremongering people into accepting a disastrously bad deal … If we are to make Paris about saving the planet, then it should be about rejecting the false deal that is on the table.”

While many international environmental groups continue to raise hopes for an adequate agreement in Paris, people on the ground there and around the world have been mapping out a more realistic response.

Civil society’s ‘defensive battle’ to block a terrible deal

For much of the past year, the main discussion among activists in Europe has not been about whether or not the Paris negotiations will succeed. Instead, the debate has largely focused on whether to give the negotiations any credence at all, or whether it’s time to view the entire UNFCCC process as thoroughly corrupted and hopelessly beholden to fossil fuel corporations and the interests of global capital.

Climate justice activists have raised analogies to the notorious World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999 where blockades by thousands of people on the outside helped spur African delegates to hold their ground and prevent a harmful new trade agreement from being advanced on the inside.

In this view, the best hopes for Paris lie with those seeking to build upon the massive demonstrations in Copenhagen, the Occupy-style disruption of the Durban COP in 2011, and the walk-out by global South delegates from the Warsaw meeting in 2013.

A widely quoted paper by Maxime Combes from the global justice network ATTAC-France proposed a middle ground, whereby activists would allow those on the inside to wage the necessary “defensive battles” needed to prevent a terrible deal, and focus more confrontational actions toward the closing days of the conference, when it will likely become clear that the meeting is heading nowhere.

Combes added that “situating the massive mobilizations during the final days leaves the possibility open for derailing the negotiations if it is deemed relevant to do so.” Actions being planned for Paris embrace the spirit of Blockadia – the worldwide opposition to new fossil fuel infrastructure – as well as Alternatiba, a French Basque term for the flowering of grassroots alternatives centered in local communities worldwide.

A campaign to highlight community-centered alternatives to the fossil fuel economy has been underway in France for much of this year, including a bicycle tour that circled the country last summer to visit several of the most visionary local projects.

The 350.org international network has called for actions around the world both at the beginning and the end of the Paris COP, November 28-29th and December 12th, and sensibly urges activists to focus on a “road through Paris”, culminating in actions aimed to directly challenge the continued extraction of fossil fuels during the spring of 2016.

The global 350 network has become far more responsive to local activists around the world in recent years, emphasizing decentralized organizing and helping support a variety of direct actions, including a dramatic march of over 1,000 people onto the site of Germany’s most polluting coal mine just last summer.

To resist is to survive

Here in the US, many groups are holding local events in late November, around the Thanksgiving holiday, and 350 affiliates in New England and North Country New York will unite for a major regional mobilization with a ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’ theme on Saturday, December 12th in Boston (see 350newengland.org, with more details available soon at jobsjusticeclimate.org).

The intersectional alliance-building effort that is at the heart of these events will help shape campaigns to further challenge fossil fuel interests and highlight alternatives throughout the coming year.

With the defeat of the notorious Keystone XL pipeline, the industry’s biggest fear is what some have termed the ‘Keystonization’ of all new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Local struggles around various pipelines and fracking sites may be relatively small puzzle pieces compared to the mounting destabilization of the earth’s climate system, but that’s not how the industry sees it.

For example, a recent report commissioned by PNC Bank found that leading financial institutions view public opposition and regulatory uncertainty (itself often shaped by public opposition) to be the most significant barriers to the continued expansion of oil and gas.

The global coal industry is in rapid decline, and wind and solar are now the fastest growing energy sources. We have a long way to go, and not much time, but if anything can help raise our hopes that it’s not too late, it is the power of social movements to intervene to change the story.

This is especially true of those movements that embrace the transformative vision of climate justice and successfully unite the grassroots forces inspired by images of Blockadia and Alternatiba.

As the world mourns the victims of the 13 November massacre in Paris, organizers have pledged to continue to focus public attention and public protests around the COP. “Despite the emotion and sadness, we refuse to give in to terror, we reject the society of fear, stigmatization and scapegoating”, ATTAC-France wrote in the English translation of its 14 November statement:

“We affirm our determination to continue to circulate, to work, to entertain us, to hold meetings and fight freely … From November 29 to December 12 in Paris on the occasion of the COP 21 and with our citizens’ mobilizations , we will show that another world is possible, necessary and urgent.”

Brian Tokar is the director of the Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org), a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont, and a board member of 350 Vermont, an autonomous statewide organization. His most recent book is ‘Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change’ (Revised edition 2014, New Compass Press), portions of which were adapted for this article.

This article is an updated version of one originally run on Common Dreams.

New research from Greece, Italy, and Spain has shown renewable energy has huge potential in the Mediterranean region – and could also boost economies and create thousands of jobs.

The studies look at a raft of possibilities to decarbonise while making savings on carbon credits or fuel imports.

Even the most infamously economically embattled country in Europe, Greece, would benefit hugely from moving to clean power.

In Italy and Spain, island regions can provide good examples of utilising wind, wave, solar and geothermal capacity without compromising on power generation for tourism or desalination.

Greece: solar power for thousands of jobs and free electricity

Greece could tackle pollution and energy poverty by increasing investments in solar parks and rooftop solar – providing clean energy across a million households and businesses.

The cost savings would be made by cutting spending on ‘carbon credits’ and by divesting from lignite – the dirtiest-burning type of coal – on which Greece depends for much of its power generation.

The research, commissioned by Greenpeace Greece, takes the country’s current financial situation into account, recommending a stepped approach to 2025 to modernise energy provision for a million buildings. This includes providing free electricity for the poorest 300,000 households.

The first option could be funded 80% by Greece’s Public Power Corporation which currently has to buy carbon credits to offset its emissions. The reduced spending on carbon credits would finance 80% of the cost. The other 20% would come from the new ‘Juncker Plan’, which is mobilising €315 billion of private investment in infrastructure across Europe.

California already spends funds from carbon credit auctions on rooftop solar for low-income housing – and the scheme is so successful it is being rolled out across the US as part of the Clean Power Plan.

The second option involves lignite divestment, shifting funds to investment in solar parks totalling 1,900MWp. The investments would create 9,500 jobs annually between 2017 and 2015, and the economic benefits would total €729m.

When taking into account the savings from not having to buy carbon credits to burn lignite, the benefits hit €3 billion between 2021 and 2045.

The report’s summary for policymakers notes that the Greek prime minister, although travelling to Paris at the end of the year for the climate summit, has no concrete policies to offer – and the country is still planning new fossil fuel investments.

Canary Islands – wind, solar, geothermal, pumped storage

The Spanish research claims that Spain’s Canary Islands can save around €42 billion in energy costs up to 2050 – without any need for gas during the transition. This is significant because gas is often considered a ‘bridging fuel’ for the transition from oil to renewables.

Conducted by the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics’ Department of Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment, from the German Aerospace Center (DLR, by its initials in German), the research assesses demand changes over time from efficiency savings and electrification of transport systems. It also considers 100% growth in tourism to the area.

Currently, the islands get 98% of their energy from oil. The transition would cost €20 billion (under half the eventual savings) and would see much higher instances of electric connections between the islands.

Emissions savings would be made by increasing wind potential, starting with planned projects under the Canary Islands Energy Plan. As with the Greek example both rooftop and park solar could be deployed – along with solar thermal and geothermal. Major efficiencies would come from decarbonising the energy-hungry desalination projects which are essential for agriculture on the islands.

Spain is already considered a leader in renewable energy in Europe due to its successful wind turbine manufacturers Gamesa and Iberdrola.

A new Rocky Mountain Institute study that looked at 10 remote and island communities successes in decarbonising reports that the remote El Hierro in the Canary Islands has already made the transition to 100% renewables, thanks to the combination of wind energy and pumped hydro storage. Islands often make greater savings going renewable due to the high prices paid for electricity.

Italy: Small islands could go 100% renewable on wind, sun, wave and geothermal

Research shows that Italy’s small islands could also benefit from plans to decarbonise – diverting their expensive oil-based diesel generator systems away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy. Exalto Energy & Innovation’s plan also involves electrification of transport – for 100% renewable islands.

Concentrating on three of the bigger small islands, Favignana, Lampedusa and Pantelleria, the research takes the electricity demand of each and creates scenarios that show how renewable potential can be divided.

The models assume that household demand – that is already falling through efficiency savings – will continue to do so, but they also account for electrification of transport. In the examples solar, wind, wave, biogas, geothermal and storage systems are variously deployed where maximum gains can be made, depending on potential.

Pantelleria has the largest population at almost 8,000. It also has particularly good geothermal potential, which apart from providing energy also helps reduce the need for storage. A third of demand could be covered by wind power, 18% by solar power and 5% by wave power.

Lampedusa too has wind potential that could cover two thirds of demand. Solar would support 28% and wave power 7%. Smaller Favignana would be able to get to 100% renewable with 54% wind, 40% solar and 6% wave power.

Hundreds of jobs are created in this scenario and the schemes would provide pathways towards decarbonisation for the mainland, which – through the groundbreaking actions of its biggest energy company Enel – is already taking shape.

Naturally a lot has to happen politically to encourage these transitions to take place. What the research shows is that leaders meeting in Paris at the UN climate summit have a raft of options for each of their countries to move towards 100% renewable – even those still mired in economic problems.

Helle Abelvik-Lawson writes for the Greenpeace Energy Desk.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

Turkish civil society and climate groups from across Turkey and the world have responded to today’s G20 Leaders Communiqué with a mix of shock and disappointment.

The text, released today just weeks before the COP21 climate talks in Paris, is feeble on all environmental issues and lacks clear commitments on boosting renewable energy, climate change or ending fossil fuel subsidies.

It does initially appear robust on climate change – affirming the goal to limit temperature rise to 2C; calling for “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all Parties”, and committing “to work together for a successful outcome of the COP21.”

But this does little to advance the climate negotiations to a successful conclusion. In particular it proposes no way forward on how to raise the hundreds of billions of dollars a year required for the Green Climate Fund – created by COP15 in 2009 as a means to provide climate finance to developing countries.

Even the commitment to an “agreed outcome with legal force” leaves space for a legally-binding ‘shell’ treaty with all the key action points and national commitments to reduce or constrain emissions set aside into non-binding appendices.

“We can see some reference on ambition but no foresight about plans to decarbonise our economies, as we know we must”, said Ümit Şahin from İklim İçin (For the Climate Campaign).

“We must hope that these Leaders display the leadership in Paris that they failed to deliver here in Turkey. The world is depending on it and the world is most certainly watching.”

Weasel words on £452 billion a year of fossil fuel subsidies

Of course there is one obvious way to raise the finance required for the Green Climate Fund: to re-apply the $452 billion per year the G20 spend on subsidising fossil fuels – despite a 2009 commitment at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh to phase out the subsidies altogether.

The figure was published last week in a report by Bankwatch and Oil Change International, ‘Empty Promises: G20 subsidies to oil, gas and coal production‘, and represents the sum of national subsidies through direct spending and tax breaks; investment by state-owned enterprises; and public finance from government-owned banks and financial institutions. 

“G20 members are currently spending 789 times more on fossil fuel subsidies than they are on the Green Climate Fund”, said Ethemcan Turhan from Turkey’s Ecology Collective. “And yet they say in the communiqué how critical this Fund is. This is patently obscene.”

The G20 statement only says: “We reaffirm our commitment to rationalise and phase-out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption, over the medium term, recognising the need to support the poor. We will endeavour to make enhanced progress in moving forward this commitment.”

This statement gives G20 governments so much wiggle-room as to be meaningless. Moreover it is largely a repetition of the 2009 Pittsburgh commitment – only weaker.

The time scale remains exactly the same: “medium term” – despite the passage of six years. The 2009 statement referred to a date of 2020, though without committing to it. That date has now gone altogether.

Another cop-out is the phrase “recognising the need to support the poor” with fuel subsidies. However if that’s the aim, it’s far more efficient to stop the subsidies and give the money directly to the poor. This was recognised in the 2009 text which allowed for “the use of targeted cash transfers and other appropriate mechanisms”. In fact this never took place and the words do not re-appear.

As for “endeavour to make enhanced progress in moving forward this commitment”, these are weasel words that make the text weaker than if it wasn’t there at all.

Renewable energy out in the cold as coal spending surges

The new G20 text is also markedly weaker than the 2009 Pittsburgh declaration on renewable energy and energy efficiency. The 2009 text promised:

“Increasing clean and renewable energy supplies, improving energy efficiency, and promoting conservation are critical steps to protect our environment, promote sustainable growth and address the threat of climate change … We commit to:

• “Stimulate investment in clean energy, renewables, and energy efficiency and provide financial and technical support for such projects in developing countries.
• “Take steps to facilitate the diffusion or transfer of clean energy technology including by conducting joint research and building capacity …”

The G20’s 2015 text lacks any commitment to renewable energy. The nearest it comes to one is to “recognize that actions on energy, including improving energy efficiency, increasing investments in clean energy technologies and supporting related research and development activities will be important in tackling climate change and its effects”, and “endorse the G20 Toolkit of Voluntary Options for Renewable Energy Deployment.”

The 2009 concluding statement of ‘Core Values’ also included the words: “We have a responsibility to secure our future through sustainable consumption, production and use of resources that conserve our environment and address the challenge of climate change.”

However the 2015 communiqué’s corresponding ‘Issues for Further Action’ contains no mention of energy, environment or climate.

The message the G20 are sending is clear: climate change, renewable energy and ending fossil fuel subsidies are all much less important now than they were in 2009 – and will be pursued with even less urgency.

“Heads of State could have provided a clear and powerful signal ahead of the Climate Summit by putting a date for the end of fossil fuel subsidies, and agreeing to stop funding fossil fuel projects around the world”, said Ümit Şahin from İklim için (For The Climate). “Instead they have rehashed worn positions and in doing so risk being on the wrong side of history.”

Efe Baysal from Yuva Association added that recent terror attacks only intensified the need to take climate change seriously: “We have been deeply affected by the dreadful events that have taken place in Paris and Beirut and stand in solidarity with the victims and the people caught up in the violence …


“As people who live in Turkey we are no strangers to such dreadful and senseless violence. Climate change will only increase conflict, increase violence and play a role in even greater geopolitical conflicts and mass migration of desperate refugees.”

 

---

 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

• G20 Leaders Communique from Antalya, Turkey, 2015.
• G20 Leaders Statement from Pittsburgh, USA, 2009.

 

The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership can now be viewed by the public, thanks to the New Zealand government, and it is every bit as bad as activists have been warning.

The TPP, if enacted, promises a race to the bottom: An acceleration of jobs to the countries with the lowest wages, the right of multi-national corporations to veto any law or regulation their executives do not like, the end of your right to know what is in your food, higher prices for medicines, and the subordination of Internet privacy to corporate interests.

There is a reason it has been negotiated in secret, with only corporate executives and industry lobbyists consulted and allowed to see the text as it took shape.

The threat from the TPP extends beyond the 12 negotiating countries, however – the TPP is intended to be a ‘docking’ agreement whereby other countries can join at any time, provided they accept the text as it has been previously negotiated.

Eliminating protections worldwide

Moreover, the TPP is a model for two other deals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, and the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA), an even more secret ‘free trade’ deal being negotiated among 50 countries that would eliminate any controls on the financial industry.

The elimination of protections is precisely what US multi-national corporations intend for Europe by replicating the terms of the TPP in the TTIP, a process made easier by the anti-democratic nature of the European Commission, which is negotiating for European governments.

Already, higher Canadian standards in health, the environment and consumer protections are under sustained assault under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The TPP is an unprecedented corporate giveaway, going well beyond even NAFTA, which has hurt working people and farmers in Canada, the US and Mexico.

More than 300,000 jobs in the US alone may be eliminated by the passage of the TPP.The Wall Street Journal, in an article celebrating victory for multi-national capital, nonetheless reported that 330,000 manufacturing jobs would be lost, basing this estimate on an estimated US$56 billion increase in the national trade deficit.

That forecast is based on a US Department of Commerce estimate that 6,000 jobs are lost for every $1 billion of added trade deficit.

Bad news on both sides of the Pacific

The Canadian union Unifor estimates that 20,000 Canadian jobs in auto manufacturing alone are at risk from TPP. Canada will also be forced to open its dairy and poultry industries. There is fear that Canadian dairy farming may collapse and the outgoing Harper régime promised $4.3 billion to compensate farmers from expected losses.

The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, while acknowledging that community pressure forced governments to resist some of the most extreme measures, worries that the US concession to Australia that the extension of monopolies on biological medications will be five years rather than eight will prove ephemeral.

The group reports that the text “refers to eight years and to ‘other measures’ which would ‘deliver a comparable market outcome,’ and to a future review. It is not clear how this will be applied in Australia.” The US will retain its 12-year exclusivity period, while other countries can choose five or eight years, so there will likely be continued pressure from pharmaceutical companies for all to adopt a longer period.

A product would not have to be produced locally to qualify as a locally made product. As much as two-thirds of an automobile’s components could be manufactured in China, for example, and it would still qualify for preferential treatment if one-third is made in any TPP signatory country. But ‘buy local’ rules would become illegal, including for government procurement.

Health and environment ‘protections’ unenforceable

There are no enforceable provisions for environmental, health, safety or labor protection. Public Citizen, in its analysis of the TPP text, reports:

“The language touted as an ‘exception’ to defend countries’ health, environmental and other public-interest safeguards from TPP challenges is nothing more than a carbon copy of past US free trade language that ‘reads in’ to the TPP several World Trade Organization (WTO) provisions that have already been proven ineffective in more than 97 percent of its attempted uses in the past 20 years to defend policies challenged at the WTO.

“In two decades of WTO rulings, [the articles purporting to protect laws necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health] have only been successfully employed to actually defend a challenged measure in one of 44 attempts.”

The ratio under TPP is likely to be even lower as the TPP promises the most extreme rules in favor of corporations of any ‘free trade’ deal. Even the extremely weak ‘exception’ does not apply to the entire investment chapter of the TPP.

Precedent here is bad – as the secret tribunals that decide cases brought by corporations against governments hand down their one-sided agreements, these decisions become a floor for the next decision, pushing the interpretation further in favor of corporate domination.

Democracy canceled by corporate power

Under the TPP, corporations are elevated to the level of national governments and, in practice, could be said to be elevated above governments. The TPP text mandates that “customary international law” be applied for the benefit of an “investor” – that law is not found in any statutes, but rather has been established by previous decisions of secret tribunals interpreting NAFTA and other ‘free trade’ deals.

Worse, the TPP places essentially no limits on who qualifies as an ‘investor’ eligible to be compensated for potential profits that may not materialize due to a regulation or safety rule.

Although the rules codifying benefits for multi-national capital are written in firm language, there is no such language for protections. The Sierra Club reports that the TPP mandates that only one of the seven environmental agreements found in previous ‘free trade’ deals be fulfilled, an alarming development as previous environmental requirements have been routinely ignored. Among the many deficiencies in the TPP, the Sierra Club said:

“Rather than prohibiting trade in illegally taken timber and wildlife – major issues in TPP countries like Peru and Vietnam – the TPP only asks countries ‘to combat’ such trade. To comply, the text only requires weak measures, such as ‘exchanging information and experiences’, while stronger measures like sanctions are listed as options …

“Rather than obligating countries to abide by [rules to] prevent illegally caught fish from entering international trade, the TPP merely calls on countries to ‘endeavor not to undermine’ [fisheries-management protocols] – a non-binding provision.”

Forbidding action on climate change

The TPP fails to even mention the words ‘climate change’! More than 9,000 corporations would be newly empowered to sue governments because a law or regulation hurt their profits. Worse, the TPP would mandate that the US Department of Energy automatically approve all exports of liquified natural gas to all TPP countries.

This would guarantee more fracking. Already under NAFTA the province of Québec has been sued in an effort to overturn its fracking moratorium. That may only be the beginning, according to 350.org:

“The agreement would give fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground. If a province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them.

“In short, these rules undermine countries’ ability to do what scientists say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

You’ll have no right know what you eat

Food safety would fare no better. The TPP’s race to the bottom would require that the lowest inspection standards of any country be applied, forcing a lowering of other countries’ standards, and end protections against untested genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in your food. Food & Water Watch reports:

“The TPP includes a new provision designed to second-guess the government inspectors who monitor food imports … The food and agribusiness industry demanded – and received – stronger [rules] that make it harder to defend domestic food safety standards from international trade disputes …

“Agribusiness and biotech seed companies can now more easily use trade rules to challenge countries that ban GMO imports, test for GMO contamination, do not promptly approve new GMO crops or even require GMO labeling.

“The TPP gives the food industry a powerful new weapon to wield against the nationwide movement to label GMO foods. The language in the TPP is more powerful and expansive than other trade deals that have already been used to weaken or eliminate dolphin safe tuna and country of origin labels.”

Forcing the corporate takeover of health

Health care will also come under direct assault, forcing other countries more toward the US system, under which health care is a privilege for those who can afford it rather than a human right. Government programs to hold down the cost of medications are targeted for elimination in the TPP. Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which has been sounding the alarm for years, said:

“TPP countries have agreed to United States government and multinational drug company demands that will raise the price of medicines for millions by unnecessarily extending monopolies and further delaying price-lowering generic competition … the TPP will still go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries, which will be forced to change their laws to incorporate abusive intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical companies.

“For example, the additional monopoly protection provided for biologic drugs will be a new regime for all TPP developing countries. These countries will pay a heavy price in the decades to come that will be measured in the impact it has on patients.”

We still have time to stop it!

The text of the TPP is subject to approval by legislative bodies in various countries, and while time is limited and the approval process is streamlined to facilitate approval in several of them, the Trans-Pacific Partnership can be defeated. This is not a national issue.

Working people will be hurt everywhere, with jobs disappearing in developed countries and sweatshop misery for other countries – this is why multi-national capital, where ever it is based, is pushing for the TPP.

If it is to be stopped, it will be through the combined activity of activists on both sides of the Pacific. We have no time to lose.

Petition: ‘Say no to corporate power grabs – reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership‘ (350.org).

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment’, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, will be published by Zero Books in late 2015.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Also by Pete Dolack: ‘There is still time to defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership‘.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of a private meeting last week with Barack Obama – their first in 13 months – to raise the possibility of dismembering Syria.

According to Israeli officials, Netanyahu indicated that Washington should give its belated blessing to Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during the 1967 war.

Sources close to the talks told the Haaretz newspaper that Netanyahu claimed Syria was no longer a functioning state, allowing for “different thinking”. Since 2011 the government of Bashar al-Assad has faced off against rebel factions that include al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and the Islamic State (IS).

On Wednesday an unnamed White House official confirmed that Netanyahu had raised the matter. The official said: “I think the president didn’t think it warranted an answer. It wasn’t clear how serious he [Netanyahu] was about it.”

However, it appears Netanyahu’s comments to Obama are part of a coordinated effort by Israeli officials over several months to shift thinking in Washington.

The day before Netanyahu’s meeting at the White House, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, published a commentary on CNN’s website urging Obama to consider Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.

Had Israel handed back the area to Syria in earlier peace talks, he wrote, it “would today have placed [the Lebanese militia] Hezbollah directly above Israeli cities and villages in northern Galilee” and Islamic State (ISIS) “would be dug in on the Sea of Galilee’s eastern shore.”

‘Billions of barrels’ of oil

Neither Oren nor presumably Netanyahu highlighted another reason why Israel might be anxious to gain US approval of its effective annexation of the Golan in 1981, when it passed the Golan Heights Law extending Israeli law and administration throughout the territory, in violation of international law.

Last month Afek, an Israeli subsidiary of Genie Energy, a US oil company, announced that it had found considerable reserves of oil under the Golan. Genie’s chief geologist in Israel, Yuval Bartov, said the company believed the reservoir had the “potential of billions of barrels”. International law experts say any proceeds from such a find in the Golan should revert to Syria, but Israel has so far indicated it will ignore its legal obligations.

The Israeli energy and water ministry has licensed Afek to drill 10 experimental wells over three years in a 400-square kilometre area, about a third of the Golan’s total territory. Afek claims that the discoveries it has identified in its first year could make Israel energy independent, satisfying Israel’s consumption of 100 million barrels a year for the foreseeable future.

That would be on top of Israel’s recent finds of huge quantities of natural gas off its Mediterranean coast, offering it the chance to become a gas exporter.

Were the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan, it would likely clear the way for Israel to plunder any economically viable reserves located there.

Netanyahu appears to have long harboured an interest in tapping the Golan’s potential for oil. In 1996, in his first term as prime minister, he granted approval for drilling in the Golan by the Israeli National Oil Company. International pressure meant the permit had to be withdrawn soon afterwards.

Resources plundered

Today, 22,000 Syrian Druze live in five villages, alongside a similar number of Jews in 30 illegal settlements.

A 2010 investigation by Haaretz revealed that Israel had carried out systematic expulsions of some 130,000 Syrians in 1967 and destroyed 200 villages. The Druze alone were allowed to stay so as not to upset Israel’s own Druze citizens.

Nizar Ayoub, director of Marsad, a Druze human rights centre based in the Golan, told Middle East Eye that Israel had long taken resources from the Golan: “Israel has always treated the Golan as a territory to be exploited and plundered, from its water to farming and tourism. Israel has simply ignored its obligations under international law.”

Rainwater from the Golan feeds into the Jordan River, supplying a third of Israel’s needs. The fertile volcanic soil allows Israel to cultivate vineyards and orchards, and graze cattle. And the mountain terrain has also made it a magnet for holidaying, including skiing on Mount Hermon. In recent years Israel has also approved the construction of a series of large wind farms (see photo).

Ayoub said Israel had taken advantage of the conflict in Syria to advance oil exploration in the Golan, but such a move was rejected by the local Druze population: “Even if Netanyahu could persuade the Americans to agree [about recognition], it is not their decision to make. The only people who can decide to change the sovereignty of the Golan are the Syrian people.”

Quadrupling Jewish settlers to 100,000

Officials close to Netanyahu have been promoting a change of status in the Golan’s since the early summer.

In June Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settler party Jewish Home and the education minster in Netanyahu’s current coalition, raised the question of the Golan’s future at the Herzliya conference, an annual meeting of Israel’s political, academic and security elites. The conference is also attended by senior US officials.

Bennett urged the international community “to demonstrate their ethics” by recognising Israeli sovereignty in the Golan. He added: “To this day, no state in the world has recognised the Golan as part of Israel, including our friend, the United States of America. It is time the world stand by the right side – Israel’s side.” Israel would try to quadruple the Golan’s settler population to 100,000 using financial incentives, he said.

A month later Zvi Hauser, Netanyahu’s former cabinet secretary, wrote a commentary in Haaretz arguing that Israel should seize its first chance since 1967 “to conduct a constructive dialogue with the international community over a change in Middle Eastern borders.” Recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Heights could, he said, be presented as serving a “global interest in stabilising the region.”

Hauser added that Israel should demand the Golan as “compensation” for Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran. Such a claim could be based, he said, on a 1975 “pledge” from US President Gerald Ford recognising Israel’s “need to remain on the Golan Heights, even in peacetime”.

In his CNN piece last Sunday, Oren, a widely respected figure in Washington, asserted that, without Israeli sovereignty over Golan, Iran and Hezbollah would become a base from which to launch armed attacks on Israel. “For the first time in more than 40 years, the Golan could again become a catalyst for war”, he wrote.

He added that Israel had “transformed this once-barren war zone into a hub of high-tech agriculture, world-class wineries and pristine nature reserves.” He did not mention the recent oil find.

Israel’s ‘solidified grip’

Before fighting took hold in Syria, polls showed between 60% and 70% of Israelis rejected returning the Golan to Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus. The percentages are likely to be higher now.

The White House official told Haaretz that recognition of Israel’s annexation would disrupt US policy by suggesting that Syrian opposition forces supported by the US were “allies with people who want to give up the Golan”.

However, a recent commentary by Frederic Hof, a Syria expert in the State Department under Hillary Clinton, hinted that US officials might yet change their view. He said US efforts before 2011 and the outbreak of fighting to pressure Israel to give up the Golan, as part of talks over a peace treaty with Assad, had been proven “so wrong”. Instead, the war in Syria had “solidified Israel’s grip” on the Golan.

On its website, Genie’s subsidiary Afek claims that its drilling in the occupied Golan Heights will extract “Israeli oil”. The two companies include figures who have close personal ties to Netanyahu and high-level influence in Washington.

Genie’s founder, Howard Jonas, an American Jewish millionaire, made political contributions to Netanyahu’s recent campaign for the Likud party’s primaries. Its ‘strategic advisory board’ includes Dick Cheney, the US vice-president under George Bush and widely regarded as the architect of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is also an adviser. He controls large sections of the rightwing English-language media, including his most influential outlet, the US TV news station Fox News. In September, Genie added Larry Summers, a senior official under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, and James Woolsey, a former CIA director who became a neo-conservative cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.

The chairman of Afek, Genie’s Israeli subsidiary, is Effi Eitam, a far-right former general and cabinet minister who lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan. His far-right views include demands to expel both Palestinians from the occupied territories and the large minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel.

After Eitam exited the Israeli parliament in 2009, Netanyahu sent him as a “special emissary“ to US campuses as part of a “caravan for democracy”.

International law violated

Hala Khoury Bisharat, an international law professor at Carmel Academic College, near Haifa, said it would be hard to persuade the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan. “International law is clear that it is never admissable to acquire territory through war”, she told MEE. “It would be very problematic for the US to do this.”

She added that Israel, as an occupier, was obliged by the 1907 Hague regulations to “safeguard the capital” of the occupied party’s natural resources and was not entitled to exploit any oil in the Golan for its own benefit.

The prime minister’s office was unavailable to comment about Netanyahu’s discussions with Obama, or respond to accusations that the operations in the Golan were violating international law.

Since its establishment, Israel has drilled some 530 exploratory wells, but none has produced commercially viable quantities of oil. Israel briefly had access to significant quantities of oil after the 1967 war, when fields it occupied in the Sinai supplied two-thirds of domestic needs. Israel was eventually forced to hand the wells back to Egypt.

Meanwhile, Israel has discovered large natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, stoking tensions with neighbouring countries, especially Lebanon, which has claimed that Israel is drilling in areas where maritime borders are disputed.

The Israeli courts are unlikely to place any obstacles in the way of drilling operations in the Golan. In a ruling in late 2011, Israel’s supreme court created a new principle of “prolonged occupation” to justify the theft of Palestinian resources, such as quarried stone, in the West Bank. The precedent could be extended to the Golan.

The only opposition so far has come from Israeli environmental groups. They have expressed concern that extraction of the oil, especially if fracking is used, could pollute aquifers or trigger earthquakes in a seismically unstable region.

Yuval Arbel, a ground water expert with EcoPeace Middle East
(formerly Friends of the Earth Middle East), said the Golan’s deposits were likely to be in the form of ‘tight oil’, making it difficult to extract. Israel would probably have to set up a grid of drills every half kilometre.

He told MEE that would increase the chances of oil spillages that could leak into the nearby Sea of Galilee, threatening Israel’s main source of drinking water.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. A former Guardian reporter, he now writes for Middle East Eye, CounterPunch and other media. In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

This article was originally published on Middle East Eye (MEE) and on Jonathan Cook’s website.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of a private meeting last week with Barack Obama – their first in 13 months – to raise the possibility of dismembering Syria.

According to Israeli officials, Netanyahu indicated that Washington should give its belated blessing to Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during the 1967 war.

Sources close to the talks told the Haaretz newspaper that Netanyahu claimed Syria was no longer a functioning state, allowing for “different thinking”. Since 2011 the government of Bashar al-Assad has faced off against rebel factions that include al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and the Islamic State (IS).

On Wednesday an unnamed White House official confirmed that Netanyahu had raised the matter. The official said: “I think the president didn’t think it warranted an answer. It wasn’t clear how serious he [Netanyahu] was about it.”

However, it appears Netanyahu’s comments to Obama are part of a coordinated effort by Israeli officials over several months to shift thinking in Washington.

The day before Netanyahu’s meeting at the White House, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, published a commentary on CNN’s website urging Obama to consider Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.

Had Israel handed back the area to Syria in earlier peace talks, he wrote, it “would today have placed [the Lebanese militia] Hezbollah directly above Israeli cities and villages in northern Galilee” and Islamic State (ISIS) “would be dug in on the Sea of Galilee’s eastern shore.”

‘Billions of barrels’ of oil

Neither Oren nor presumably Netanyahu highlighted another reason why Israel might be anxious to gain US approval of its effective annexation of the Golan in 1981, when it passed the Golan Heights Law extending Israeli law and administration throughout the territory, in violation of international law.

Last month Afek, an Israeli subsidiary of Genie Energy, a US oil company, announced that it had found considerable reserves of oil under the Golan. Genie’s chief geologist in Israel, Yuval Bartov, said the company believed the reservoir had the “potential of billions of barrels”. International law experts say any proceeds from such a find in the Golan should revert to Syria, but Israel has so far indicated it will ignore its legal obligations.

The Israeli energy and water ministry has licensed Afek to drill 10 experimental wells over three years in a 400-square kilometre area, about a third of the Golan’s total territory. Afek claims that the discoveries it has identified in its first year could make Israel energy independent, satisfying Israel’s consumption of 100 million barrels a year for the foreseeable future.

That would be on top of Israel’s recent finds of huge quantities of natural gas off its Mediterranean coast, offering it the chance to become a gas exporter.

Were the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan, it would likely clear the way for Israel to plunder any economically viable reserves located there.

Netanyahu appears to have long harboured an interest in tapping the Golan’s potential for oil. In 1996, in his first term as prime minister, he granted approval for drilling in the Golan by the Israeli National Oil Company. International pressure meant the permit had to be withdrawn soon afterwards.

Resources plundered

Today, 22,000 Syrian Druze live in five villages, alongside a similar number of Jews in 30 illegal settlements.

A 2010 investigation by Haaretz revealed that Israel had carried out systematic expulsions of some 130,000 Syrians in 1967 and destroyed 200 villages. The Druze alone were allowed to stay so as not to upset Israel’s own Druze citizens.

Nizar Ayoub, director of Marsad, a Druze human rights centre based in the Golan, told Middle East Eye that Israel had long taken resources from the Golan: “Israel has always treated the Golan as a territory to be exploited and plundered, from its water to farming and tourism. Israel has simply ignored its obligations under international law.”

Rainwater from the Golan feeds into the Jordan River, supplying a third of Israel’s needs. The fertile volcanic soil allows Israel to cultivate vineyards and orchards, and graze cattle. And the mountain terrain has also made it a magnet for holidaying, including skiing on Mount Hermon. In recent years Israel has also approved the construction of a series of large wind farms (see photo).

Ayoub said Israel had taken advantage of the conflict in Syria to advance oil exploration in the Golan, but such a move was rejected by the local Druze population: “Even if Netanyahu could persuade the Americans to agree [about recognition], it is not their decision to make. The only people who can decide to change the sovereignty of the Golan are the Syrian people.”

Quadrupling Jewish settlers to 100,000

Officials close to Netanyahu have been promoting a change of status in the Golan’s since the early summer.

In June Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settler party Jewish Home and the education minster in Netanyahu’s current coalition, raised the question of the Golan’s future at the Herzliya conference, an annual meeting of Israel’s political, academic and security elites. The conference is also attended by senior US officials.

Bennett urged the international community “to demonstrate their ethics” by recognising Israeli sovereignty in the Golan. He added: “To this day, no state in the world has recognised the Golan as part of Israel, including our friend, the United States of America. It is time the world stand by the right side – Israel’s side.” Israel would try to quadruple the Golan’s settler population to 100,000 using financial incentives, he said.

A month later Zvi Hauser, Netanyahu’s former cabinet secretary, wrote a commentary in Haaretz arguing that Israel should seize its first chance since 1967 “to conduct a constructive dialogue with the international community over a change in Middle Eastern borders.” Recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Heights could, he said, be presented as serving a “global interest in stabilising the region.”

Hauser added that Israel should demand the Golan as “compensation” for Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran. Such a claim could be based, he said, on a 1975 “pledge” from US President Gerald Ford recognising Israel’s “need to remain on the Golan Heights, even in peacetime”.

In his CNN piece last Sunday, Oren, a widely respected figure in Washington, asserted that, without Israeli sovereignty over Golan, Iran and Hezbollah would become a base from which to launch armed attacks on Israel. “For the first time in more than 40 years, the Golan could again become a catalyst for war”, he wrote.

He added that Israel had “transformed this once-barren war zone into a hub of high-tech agriculture, world-class wineries and pristine nature reserves.” He did not mention the recent oil find.

Israel’s ‘solidified grip’

Before fighting took hold in Syria, polls showed between 60% and 70% of Israelis rejected returning the Golan to Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus. The percentages are likely to be higher now.

The White House official told Haaretz that recognition of Israel’s annexation would disrupt US policy by suggesting that Syrian opposition forces supported by the US were “allies with people who want to give up the Golan”.

However, a recent commentary by Frederic Hof, a Syria expert in the State Department under Hillary Clinton, hinted that US officials might yet change their view. He said US efforts before 2011 and the outbreak of fighting to pressure Israel to give up the Golan, as part of talks over a peace treaty with Assad, had been proven “so wrong”. Instead, the war in Syria had “solidified Israel’s grip” on the Golan.

On its website, Genie’s subsidiary Afek claims that its drilling in the occupied Golan Heights will extract “Israeli oil”. The two companies include figures who have close personal ties to Netanyahu and high-level influence in Washington.

Genie’s founder, Howard Jonas, an American Jewish millionaire, made political contributions to Netanyahu’s recent campaign for the Likud party’s primaries. Its ‘strategic advisory board’ includes Dick Cheney, the US vice-president under George Bush and widely regarded as the architect of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is also an adviser. He controls large sections of the rightwing English-language media, including his most influential outlet, the US TV news station Fox News. In September, Genie added Larry Summers, a senior official under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, and James Woolsey, a former CIA director who became a neo-conservative cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.

The chairman of Afek, Genie’s Israeli subsidiary, is Effi Eitam, a far-right former general and cabinet minister who lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan. His far-right views include demands to expel both Palestinians from the occupied territories and the large minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel.

After Eitam exited the Israeli parliament in 2009, Netanyahu sent him as a “special emissary“ to US campuses as part of a “caravan for democracy”.

International law violated

Hala Khoury Bisharat, an international law professor at Carmel Academic College, near Haifa, said it would be hard to persuade the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan. “International law is clear that it is never admissable to acquire territory through war”, she told MEE. “It would be very problematic for the US to do this.”

She added that Israel, as an occupier, was obliged by the 1907 Hague regulations to “safeguard the capital” of the occupied party’s natural resources and was not entitled to exploit any oil in the Golan for its own benefit.

The prime minister’s office was unavailable to comment about Netanyahu’s discussions with Obama, or respond to accusations that the operations in the Golan were violating international law.

Since its establishment, Israel has drilled some 530 exploratory wells, but none has produced commercially viable quantities of oil. Israel briefly had access to significant quantities of oil after the 1967 war, when fields it occupied in the Sinai supplied two-thirds of domestic needs. Israel was eventually forced to hand the wells back to Egypt.

Meanwhile, Israel has discovered large natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, stoking tensions with neighbouring countries, especially Lebanon, which has claimed that Israel is drilling in areas where maritime borders are disputed.

The Israeli courts are unlikely to place any obstacles in the way of drilling operations in the Golan. In a ruling in late 2011, Israel’s supreme court created a new principle of “prolonged occupation” to justify the theft of Palestinian resources, such as quarried stone, in the West Bank. The precedent could be extended to the Golan.

The only opposition so far has come from Israeli environmental groups. They have expressed concern that extraction of the oil, especially if fracking is used, could pollute aquifers or trigger earthquakes in a seismically unstable region.

Yuval Arbel, a ground water expert with Friends of the Earth Israel, said the Golan’s deposits were likely to be in the form of ‘tight oil’, making it difficult to extract. Israel would probably have to set up a grid of drills every half kilometre. He told MEE that would increase the chances of oil spillages that could leak into the nearby Sea of Galilee, threatening Israel’s main source of drinking water.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. A former Guardian reporter, he now writes for Middle East Eye, CounterPunch and other media. In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

This article was originally published on Middle East Eye (MEE) and on Jonathan Cook’s website.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of a private meeting last week with Barack Obama – their first in 13 months – to raise the possibility of dismembering Syria.

According to Israeli officials, Netanyahu indicated that Washington should give its belated blessing to Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during the 1967 war.

Sources close to the talks told the Haaretz newspaper that Netanyahu claimed Syria was no longer a functioning state, allowing for “different thinking”. Since 2011 the government of Bashar al-Assad has faced off against rebel factions that include al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and the Islamic State (IS).

On Wednesday an unnamed White House official confirmed that Netanyahu had raised the matter. The official said: “I think the president didn’t think it warranted an answer. It wasn’t clear how serious he [Netanyahu] was about it.”

However, it appears Netanyahu’s comments to Obama are part of a coordinated effort by Israeli officials over several months to shift thinking in Washington.

The day before Netanyahu’s meeting at the White House, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, published a commentary on CNN’s website urging Obama to consider Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.

Had Israel handed back the area to Syria in earlier peace talks, he wrote, it “would today have placed [the Lebanese militia] Hezbollah directly above Israeli cities and villages in northern Galilee” and Islamic State (ISIS) “would be dug in on the Sea of Galilee’s eastern shore.”

‘Billions of barrels’ of oil

Neither Oren nor presumably Netanyahu highlighted another reason why Israel might be anxious to gain US approval of its annexation of the Golan, which it imposed in violation of international law in 1981.

Last month Afek, an Israeli subsidiary of Genie Energy, a US oil company, announced that it had found considerable reserves of oil under the Golan. Genie’s chief geologist in Israel, Yuval Bartov, said the company believed the reservoir had the “potential of billions of barrels”. International law experts say any proceeds from such a find in the Golan should revert to Syria, but Israel has so far indicated it will ignore its legal obligations.

The Israeli energy and water ministry has licensed Afek to drill 10 experimental wells over three years in a 400-square kilometre area, about a third of the Golan’s total territory. Afek claims that the discoveries it has identified in its first year could make Israel energy independent, satisfying Israel’s consumption of 100 million barrels a year for the foreseeable future.

That would be on top of Israel’s recent finds of huge quantities of natural gas off its Mediterranean coast, offering it the chance to become a gas exporter.

Were the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan, it would likely clear the way for Israel to plunder any economically viable reserves located there.

Netanyahu appears to have long harboured an interest in tapping the Golan’s potential for oil. In 1996, in his first term as prime minister, he granted approval for drilling in the Golan by the Israeli National Oil Company. International pressure meant the permit had to be withdrawn soon afterwards.

Resources plundered

Today, 22,000 Syrian Druze live in five villages, alongside a similar number of Jews in 30 illegal settlements.

A 2010 investigation by Haaretz revealed that Israel had carried out systematic expulsions of some 130,000 Syrians in 1967 and destroyed 200 villages. The Druze alone were allowed to stay so as not to upset Israel’s own Druze citizens.

Nizar Ayoub, director of Marsad, a Druze human rights centre based in the Golan, told Middle East Eye that Israel had long taken resources from the Golan: “Israel has always treated the Golan as a territory to be exploited and plundered, from its water to farming and tourism. Israel has simply ignored its obligations under international law.”

Rainwater from the Golan feeds into the Jordan River, supplying a third of Israel’s needs. The fertile volcanic soil allows Israel to cultivate vineyards and orchards, and graze cattle. And the mountain terrain has also made it a magnet for holidaying, including skiing on Mount Hermon. In recent years Israel has also approved the construction of a series of large wind farms (see photo).

Ayoub said Israel had taken advantage of the conflict in Syria to advance oil exploration in the Golan, but such a move was rejected by the local Druze population: “Even if Netanyahu could persuade the Americans to agree [about recognition], it is not their decision to make. The only people who can decide to change the sovereignty of the Golan are the Syrian people.”

Quadrupling Jewish settlers to 100,000

Officials close to Netanyahu have been promoting a change of status in the Golan’s since the early summer.

In June Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settler party Jewish Home and the education minster in Netanyahu’s current coalition, raised the question of the Golan’s future at the Herzliya conference, an annual meeting of Israel’s political, academic and security elites. The conference is also attended by senior US officials.

Bennett urged the international community “to demonstrate their ethics” by recognising Israeli sovereignty in the Golan. He added: “To this day, no state in the world has recognised the Golan as part of Israel, including our friend, the United States of America. It is time the world stand by the right side – Israel’s side.” Israel would try to quadruple the Golan’s settler population to 100,000 using financial incentives, he said.

A month later Zvi Hauser, Netanyahu’s former cabinet secretary, wrote a commentary in Haaretz arguing that Israel should seize its first chance since 1967 “to conduct a constructive dialogue with the international community over a change in Middle Eastern borders.” Recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Heights could, he said, be presented as serving a “global interest in stabilising the region.”

Hauser added that Israel should demand the Golan as “compensation” for Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran. Such a claim could be based, he said, on a 1975 “pledge” from US President Gerald Ford recognising Israel’s “need to remain on the Golan Heights, even in peacetime”.

In his CNN piece last Sunday, Oren, a widely respected figure in Washington, asserted that, without Israeli sovereignty over Golan, Iran and Hezbollah would become a base from which to launch armed attacks on Israel. “For the first time in more than 40 years, the Golan could again become a catalyst for war”, he wrote.

He added that Israel had “transformed this once-barren war zone into a hub of high-tech agriculture, world-class wineries and pristine nature reserves.” He did not mention the recent oil find.

Israel’s ‘solidified grip’

Before fighting took hold in Syria, polls showed between 60% and 70% of Israelis rejected returning the Golan to Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus. The percentages are likely to be higher now.

The White House official told Haaretz that recognition of Israel’s annexation would disrupt US policy by suggesting that Syrian opposition forces supported by the US were “allies with people who want to give up the Golan”.

However, a recent commentary by Frederic Hof, a Syria expert in the State Department under Hillary Clinton, hinted that US officials might yet change their view. He said US efforts before 2011 and the outbreak of fighting to pressure Israel to give up the Golan, as part of talks over a peace treaty with Assad, had been proven “so wrong”. Instead, the war in Syria had “solidified Israel’s grip” on the Golan.

On its website, Genie’s subsidiary Afek claims that its drilling in the occupied Golan Heights will extract “Israeli oil”. The two companies include figures who have close personal ties to Netanyahu and high-level influence in Washington.

Genie’s founder, Howard Jonas, an American Jewish millionaire, made political contributions to Netanyahu’s recent campaign for the Likud party’s primaries. Its ‘strategic advisory board’ includes Dick Cheney, the US vice-president under George Bush and widely regarded as the architect of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is also an adviser. He controls large sections of the rightwing English-language media, including his most influential outlet, the US TV news station Fox News. In September, Genie added Larry Summers, a senior official under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, and James Woolsey, a former CIA director who became a neo-conservative cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.

The chairman of Afek, Genie’s Israeli subsidiary, is Effi Eitam, a far-right former general and cabinet minister who lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan. His far-right views include demands to expel both Palestinians from the occupied territories and the large minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel.

After Eitam exited the Israeli parliament in 2009, Netanyahu sent him as a “special emissary“ to US campuses as part of a “caravan for democracy”.

International law violated

Hala Khoury Bisharat, an international law professor at Carmel Academic College, near Haifa, said it would be hard to persuade the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan. “International law is clear that it is never admissable to acquire territory through war”, she told MEE. “It would be very problematic for the US to do this.”

She added that Israel, as an occupier, was obliged by the 1907 Hague regulations to “safeguard the capital” of the occupied party’s natural resources and was not entitled to exploit any oil in the Golan for its own benefit.

The prime minister’s office was unavailable to comment about Netanyahu’s discussions with Obama, or respond to accusations that the operations in the Golan were violating international law.

Since its establishment, Israel has drilled some 530 exploratory wells, but none has produced commercially viable quantities of oil. Israel briefly had access to significant quantities of oil after the 1967 war, when fields it occupied in the Sinai supplied two-thirds of domestic needs. Israel was eventually forced to hand the wells back to Egypt.

Meanwhile, Israel has discovered large natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, stoking tensions with neighbouring countries, especially Lebanon, which has claimed that Israel is drilling in areas where maritime borders are disputed.

The Israeli courts are unlikely to place any obstacles in the way of drilling operations in the Golan. In a ruling in late 2011, Israel’s supreme court created a new principle of “prolonged occupation” to justify the theft of Palestinian resources, such as quarried stone, in the West Bank. The precedent could be extended to the Golan.

The only opposition so far has come from Israeli environmental groups. They have expressed concern that extraction of the oil, especially if fracking is used, could pollute aquifers or trigger earthquakes in a seismically unstable region.

Yuval Arbel, a ground water expert with Friends of the Earth Israel, said the Golan’s deposits were likely to be in the form of ‘tight oil’, making it difficult to extract. Israel would probably have to set up a grid of drills every half kilometre. He told MEE that would increase the chances of oil spillages that could leak into the nearby Sea of Galilee, threatening Israel’s main source of drinking water.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. A former Guardian reporter, he now writes for Middle East Eye, CounterPunch and other media. In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

This article was originally published on Middle East Eye (MEE) and on Jonathan Cook’s website.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of a private meeting last week with Barack Obama – their first in 13 months – to raise the possibility of dismembering Syria.

According to Israeli officials, Netanyahu indicated that Washington should give its belated blessing to Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during the 1967 war.

Sources close to the talks told the Haaretz newspaper that Netanyahu claimed Syria was no longer a functioning state, allowing for “different thinking”. Since 2011 the government of Bashar al-Assad has faced off against rebel factions that include al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and the Islamic State (IS).

On Wednesday an unnamed White House official confirmed that Netanyahu had raised the matter. The official said: “I think the president didn’t think it warranted an answer. It wasn’t clear how serious he [Netanyahu] was about it.”

However, it appears Netanyahu’s comments to Obama are part of a coordinated effort by Israeli officials over several months to shift thinking in Washington.

The day before Netanyahu’s meeting at the White House, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, published a commentary on CNN’s website urging Obama to consider Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.

Had Israel handed back the area to Syria in earlier peace talks, he wrote, it “would today have placed [the Lebanese militia] Hezbollah directly above Israeli cities and villages in northern Galilee” and Islamic State (ISIS) “would be dug in on the Sea of Galilee’s eastern shore.”

‘Billions of barrels’ of oil

Neither Oren nor presumably Netanyahu highlighted another reason why Israel might be anxious to gain US approval of its annexation of the Golan, which it imposed in violation of international law in 1981.

Last month Afek, an Israeli subsidiary of Genie Energy, a US oil company, announced that it had found considerable reserves of oil under the Golan. Genie’s chief geologist in Israel, Yuval Bartov, said the company believed the reservoir had the “potential of billions of barrels”. International law experts say any proceeds from such a find in the Golan should revert to Syria, but Israel has so far indicated it will ignore its legal obligations.

The Israeli energy and water ministry has licensed Afek to drill 10 experimental wells over three years in a 400-square kilometre area, about a third of the Golan’s total territory. Afek claims that the discoveries it has identified in its first year could make Israel energy independent, satisfying Israel’s consumption of 100 million barrels a year for the foreseeable future.

That would be on top of Israel’s recent finds of huge quantities of natural gas off its Mediterranean coast, offering it the chance to become a gas exporter.

Were the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan, it would likely clear the way for Israel to plunder any economically viable reserves located there.

Netanyahu appears to have long harboured an interest in tapping the Golan’s potential for oil. In 1996, in his first term as prime minister, he granted approval for drilling in the Golan by the Israeli National Oil Company. International pressure meant the permit had to be withdrawn soon afterwards.

Resources plundered

Today, 22,000 Syrian Druze live in five villages, alongside a similar number of Jews in 30 illegal settlements.

A 2010 investigation by Haaretz revealed that Israel had carried out systematic expulsions of some 130,000 Syrians in 1967 and destroyed 200 villages. The Druze alone were allowed to stay so as not to upset Israel’s own Druze citizens.

Nizar Ayoub, director of Marsad, a Druze human rights centre based in the Golan, told Middle East Eye that Israel had long taken resources from the Golan: “Israel has always treated the Golan as a territory to be exploited and plundered, from its water to farming and tourism. Israel has simply ignored its obligations under international law.”

Rainwater from the Golan feeds into the Jordan River, supplying a third of Israel’s needs. The fertile volcanic soil allows Israel to cultivate vineyards and orchards, and graze cattle. And the mountain terrain has also made it a magnet for holidaying, including skiing on Mount Hermon. In recent years Israel has also approved the construction of a series of large wind farms (see photo).

Ayoub said Israel had taken advantage of the conflict in Syria to advance oil exploration in the Golan, but such a move was rejected by the local Druze population: “Even if Netanyahu could persuade the Americans to agree [about recognition], it is not their decision to make. The only people who can decide to change the sovereignty of the Golan are the Syrian people.”

Quadrupling Jewish settlers to 100,000

Officials close to Netanyahu have been promoting a change of status in the Golan’s since the early summer.

In June Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settler party Jewish Home and the education minster in Netanyahu’s current coalition, raised the question of the Golan’s future at the Herzliya conference, an annual meeting of Israel’s political, academic and security elites. The conference is also attended by senior US officials.

Bennett urged the international community “to demonstrate their ethics” by recognising Israeli sovereignty in the Golan. He added: “To this day, no state in the world has recognised the Golan as part of Israel, including our friend, the United States of America. It is time the world stand by the right side – Israel’s side.” Israel would try to quadruple the Golan’s settler population to 100,000 using financial incentives, he said.

A month later Zvi Hauser, Netanyahu’s former cabinet secretary, wrote a commentary in Haaretz arguing that Israel should seize its first chance since 1967 “to conduct a constructive dialogue with the international community over a change in Middle Eastern borders.” Recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Heights could, he said, be presented as serving a “global interest in stabilising the region.”

Hauser added that Israel should demand the Golan as “compensation” for Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran. Such a claim could be based, he said, on a 1975 “pledge” from US President Gerald Ford recognising Israel’s “need to remain on the Golan Heights, even in peacetime”.

In his CNN piece last Sunday, Oren, a widely respected figure in Washington, asserted that, without Israeli sovereignty over Golan, Iran and Hezbollah would become a base from which to launch armed attacks on Israel. “For the first time in more than 40 years, the Golan could again become a catalyst for war”, he wrote.

He added that Israel had “transformed this once-barren war zone into a hub of high-tech agriculture, world-class wineries and pristine nature reserves.” He did not mention the recent oil find.

Israel’s ‘solidified grip’

Before fighting took hold in Syria, polls showed between 60% and 70% of Israelis rejected returning the Golan to Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus. The percentages are likely to be higher now.

The White House official told Haaretz that recognition of Israel’s annexation would disrupt US policy by suggesting that Syrian opposition forces supported by the US were “allies with people who want to give up the Golan”.

However, a recent commentary by Frederic Hof, a Syria expert in the State Department under Hillary Clinton, hinted that US officials might yet change their view. He said US efforts before 2011 and the outbreak of fighting to pressure Israel to give up the Golan, as part of talks over a peace treaty with Assad, had been proven “so wrong”. Instead, the war in Syria had “solidified Israel’s grip” on the Golan.

On its website, Genie’s subsidiary Afek claims that its drilling in the occupied Golan Heights will extract “Israeli oil”. The two companies include figures who have close personal ties to Netanyahu and high-level influence in Washington.

Genie’s founder, Howard Jonas, an American Jewish millionaire, made political contributions to Netanyahu’s recent campaign for the Likud party’s primaries. Its ‘strategic advisory board’ includes Dick Cheney, the US vice-president under George Bush and widely regarded as the architect of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is also an adviser. He controls large sections of the rightwing English-language media, including his most influential outlet, the US TV news station Fox News. In September, Genie added Larry Summers, a senior official under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, and James Woolsey, a former CIA director who became a neo-conservative cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.

The chairman of Afek, Genie’s Israeli subsidiary, is Effi Eitam, a far-right former general and cabinet minister who lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan. His far-right views include demands to expel both Palestinians from the occupied territories and the large minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel.

After Eitam exited the Israeli parliament in 2009, Netanyahu sent him as a “special emissary“ to US campuses as part of a “caravan for democracy”.

International law violated

Hala Khoury Bisharat, an international law professor at Carmel Academic College, near Haifa, said it would be hard to persuade the US to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan. “International law is clear that it is never admissable to acquire territory through war”, she told MEE. “It would be very problematic for the US to do this.”

She added that Israel, as an occupier, was obliged by the 1907 Hague regulations to “safeguard the capital” of the occupied party’s natural resources and was not entitled to exploit any oil in the Golan for its own benefit.

The prime minister’s office was unavailable to comment about Netanyahu’s discussions with Obama, or respond to accusations that the operations in the Golan were violating international law.

Since its establishment, Israel has drilled some 530 exploratory wells, but none has produced commercially viable quantities of oil. Israel briefly had access to significant quantities of oil after the 1967 war, when fields it occupied in the Sinai supplied two-thirds of domestic needs. Israel was eventually forced to hand the wells back to Egypt.

Meanwhile, Israel has discovered large natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, stoking tensions with neighbouring countries, especially Lebanon, which has claimed that Israel is drilling in areas where maritime borders are disputed.

The Israeli courts are unlikely to place any obstacles in the way of drilling operations in the Golan. In a ruling in late 2011, Israel’s supreme court created a new principle of “prolonged occupation” to justify the theft of Palestinian resources, such as quarried stone, in the West Bank. The precedent could be extended to the Golan.

The only opposition so far has come from Israeli environmental groups. They have expressed concern that extraction of the oil, especially if fracking is used, could pollute aquifers or trigger earthquakes in a seismically unstable region.

Yuval Arbel, a ground water expert with Friends of the Earth Israel, said the Golan’s deposits were likely to be in the form of ‘tight oil’, making it difficult to extract. Israel would probably have to set up a grid of drills every half kilometre. He told MEE that would increase the chances of oil spillages that could leak into the nearby Sea of Galilee, threatening Israel’s main source of drinking water.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. A former Guardian reporter, he now writes for Middle East Eye, CounterPunch and other media. In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

This article was originally published on Middle East Eye (MEE) and on Jonathan Cook’s website.