If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
My friend Lumumba Stanislaus-Kaw Di-Aping made a splash at the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference, likening its final communiqué, which committed signatories (non-bindingly) to a 2.0-degree Celsius maximum rise in average global temperatures over preindustrial levels, to the Holocaust. Lumumba, Sudan’s Ambassador to the United Nations and the spokesman for the G-77 group of developing countries, said that a two-degree rise in average global temperatures would mean a three-degree-plus rise for Africa and that nothing short of a maximum increase of 1.5 degrees and a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 could be accepted. He also called the U.S. commitment to try to increase spending on climate change mitigation to $100 billion annually by 2020 a “negotiating ploy” and said that $400 billion to $500 billion a year, starting now, was a more appropriate figure.
I call Lumumba my friend because he and I worked together about 10 years ago for a start-up financial advisory shop in Johannesburg and saw each other several times in the years since that venture failed as I built my consulting practice and he became involved in other start-ups. I last saw him in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, in 2006. He had just been named one of the Government of South Sudan’s new ambassadors, who had all been summoned to Juba to learn to which countries they would be posted. Somehow, then, over the past three years Lumumba has gone from diplomatic representative of a breakaway region to the national government’s U.N. Ambassador. Sudanese politics, clearly, are more complicated than they seem. Highly educated (Oxford and McKinsey), cultured (I seem to remember he played the cello), and unafraid of controversy, talking has always been Lumumba’s strong suit.
Predictably enough, Lumumba became a minor celebrity. He was interviewed at length in Mother Jones and Naomi Klein, interviewing him for The Nation, uncritically accepted his assertion that the provisional Copenhagen deal would result in the deaths of tens of millions of Africans. “You are clearly the loudest and the strongest voice for people of the developing world,” she gushed.
Most of the diplomats I have known speak in measured tones, and the very language of diplomacy – in which a “free and frank exchange” is likely to mean that the participants were throwing furniture at one another – seeks to dampen any inflammatory or immoderate expressions. Viewed in this light, Lumumba’s pronouncements came as a breath of fresh air. Here was a diplomat unafraid to speak in plain language. Naomi Klein’s article was entitled “Ambassador Lumumba, What Do You Really Think?” and Lumumba, in clear terms, explained what he does think. But once you get beyond the novelty value, it becomes clear that Lumumba is grandstanding for a certain audience rather than trying to accomplish anything of value. A good career move for him, no doubt. With a good publicist he should be able stretch his moment in the spotlight into something more durable and start pulling down handsome fees for speaking on American college campuses and becoming a regular on CNN.
What Lumumba actually said, however, should not go unchallenged. He called the U.S.-backed deal “climate fascism…a murderous act, a calculated one, in pursuit of profit, in pursuit of economic dominance.” He derided the developed countries’ pledge of an additional $10 billion a year in climate-related assistance as “not enough to buy us coffins.” It was Ms. Klein, not Lumumba, who used the g-word (genocide) to describe the West’s approach to the climate change question, but Lumumba in turn called it “robbery,” and justified a priori any acts of terrorism its victims might perpetrate against the West. In any case, in other pronouncements he explicitly equated the deal to the Holocaust. An official representative of the Sudanese Government probably should not go around accusing others of genocide.
Intemperate language aside, does Lumumba have a point? You don’t have to be a climate change denier to question the effects on Africa of a 2.0-degree versus a 1.5-degree temperature increase or to recognize that at this level of specificity the science of climatology is woefully inexact. You don’t have to be a climate change denier to ask whether half a trillion dollars in annual aid to Africa will solve the climate problem or to wonder what might happen to all that money and how much of it will be spent for the purpose for which it is intended. You certainly don’t have to be a climate change denier to wonder if a UN conference can contribute anything at all to a real solution to global warming.
Bjørn Lomborg, writing in the Financial Times on December 22, said “For all of President Barack Obama’s talk of an unprecedented breakthrough, all the world leaders really did was try to paper over their differences with a three-page communiqué that basically asks us to cross our fingers and hope for the best…Promising to cut carbon emissions may make us feel virtuous, but that is all it does. If we actually want to cool down the planet, we need policies that are technologically smarter, politically more feasible and economically more efficient.”
There are some people, and Lumumba and Naomi Klein may be among them, who consider Bjørn Lomborg a genocidal climate fascist, but these are people who have accepted what George Orwell called “the smelly little orthodoxies that contend for our souls” rather than remain open to ideas that contradict received wisdom.
On second thought, you can’t really separate Lumumba’s language from its content. George Orwell also said that language often “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
{ 0 comments… add one now }