Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The key item on the agenda for discussion at the recent European Council summit was climate change. Unfortunately, EU leaders, including the Taoiseach, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French President, François Hollande, do a good impression of fiddling while the world burns. We are hurtling towards an absolute catastrophe. In 30 years the Artic could be ice-free and those who would pay the price would overwhelmingly be those in lesser developed countries and poor people.

A recent report by DARA International suggests 100 million people could die by 2030 as a result of climate change. Another recent report from the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confirms what we already know, namely, that the world faces severe, pervasive and irreversible damage caused by global warming, that human activity is the cause and that drastic action is needed to deal with it. According to the chairman of the IPCC, “To keep a good chance of staying below 2 degrees, and at manageable costs, our emissions should drop by 40% to 70% globally between 2010 and 2050, falling to zero or below by 2100.”

We need radical action to tackle this issue. The European Union loves to pose as the leading force across the world on climate change. Its ambition and commitment are, however, 1 million miles away from the rhetoric it uses. Accordingly, there was a huge row at the recent Council meeting over haggling as to whether 27% or 30% should be a target for energy efficiency. What we need are binding targets and regulations to ensure a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 80% in 2050.

When one reads the Council conclusions, they are entirely focused on the emissions trading scheme, ETS. The ETS is a failure and it is not just those on the left who are saying this. One can read articles in The Economistand the Financial Timesstating the same. The ETS saw a massive windfall for some of the largest polluters in Europe because they received carbon credits and were able to sell them on. Electricity and other utility companies earned between €23 billion and €71 billion in windfall profits in phase 2 of the scheme alone. As a consequence, the European Union uses more coal today than it did in 2007, the highest coal consumption levels since the 1960s.

The ETS is not an answer to global warming. It is rooted in the nature of that mechanism which is about the commodification of pollution and nature. It is about the offering of profit opportunities to traders, with no protections for the environment. Major polluting corporations measure their own pollution only nominally and through estimates. They fiddle the figures and there is massive fraud under the ETS in order that the polluting companies make even more money.

A recent report in the journal Climatic Changestated a mere 90 companies had produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 and 2010. They include oil firms such as BP, Chevron, Exxon and Shell, as well as the range of obvious polluters. What we have is profit-driven global warming. If we are serious about tackling climate change, we need system change.

There is an attack on democratic rights for the next European Council meeting with the extension of QMV, qualified majority voting, to over 30 policy areas. This is about a concentration of power in Europe within the hands of a small number of countries in the centre. One could now have a majority of member state governments on the periphery opposing certain measures, but they could be overruled by a strong core of right-wing governments pushing in an authoritarian, neoliberal direction for the European Union. Some of these areas are the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy. One only needs to look to eastern Europe and Ukraine where one sees the reality of an expansionist imperialist vision for the European Union driven by its leaders.

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