Who speaks for you in Bali?

Walking into the Bali International Conference Center, the official venue of the UN climate change negotiations, you enter an exhibition hall filled with booths of all the organizations hoping to get their say on climate change policy. All of the big environmental groups are there, as well as some development agencies and a few human rights organizations. Ensconced among the dozens of civil society booths are a few that make you do a double-take. The World Coal Institute, for instance, and the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (bet you didn't even know they had one of those!). Representatives of the industries that brought you global warming are not just tabling in the lobby. Unlike most of the Indigenous Peoples' and human rights organizations present, these guys are in the negotiations themselves.

It's not surprising, then, that there is an eerie contrast between the sense of urgency about climate change felt in places where MADRE works, such as Nicaragua and Sudan, and the bent of the official negotiations, where governments are mostly talking about setting up talks instead of putting in place the emergency measures that MADRE and many other groups are calling for.

Part of the problem is the starting point for the negotiations themselves. Instead asking how climate change can best be controlled while promoting human rights, many corporate-sponsored government delegations are busy trying to figure out how global warming can be turned into an economic opportunity. Enter carbon trading, the dominant "solution" being put forward in Bali. The emerging trade in carbon credits is so profitable that Bloomberg Markets recently referred to climate change as a "growth industry."

That doesn't mean that there are not government delegates acting in good faith. In particular, representatives of countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change (like the small island states of the Pacific that are literally disappearing as sea levels rise), are giving it their all. But the revolving door between government and industry—particularly in the richer countries—means that some of the most powerful delegations are effectively surrogates for carbon-polluting corporations.

Take the US, the largest economy in the world and the last holdout on Kyoto now that Australia has committed to sign on. Have those of you in the US checked out who is representing you in Bali? Meet James Connaughton, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, as described by Jim Hightower:

"A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters, Connaughton, represented the likes of General Electric and ARCO in their effort to escape responsibility for cleaning up toxic Superfund sites. Now he heads up pollution-policy development for the administration and coordinates its implementation. He has led the charge to weaken the standards of getting arsenic out of our drinking water, and he has steadily advised Bush to ignore, divert, stall, dismiss, and otherwise block out all calls for action against the industrial causes of global warming."

Those of us working to infuse a human rights and gender perspective into these negotiations have our work cut out for us. The good news is that we are here in Bali; and while we may not have as much of a voice inside the official talks as we should, we are building the political momentum to sustain a global climate movement that can force the change we need. We just hope we can do it before Tuvalu is completely underwater.


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