European Union officials once again proved themselves to be the standard-bearers for free-market capitalism by making a series of concessions to the continent’s heavy industries in the latest series of international climate change negotiations in Poznan, Poland. These industries will now only have to pay for 70% of their climate ‘credits’ on the already-flawed EU Carbon Trading Scheme, while hospitals and universities remain paying the full charge. The talks, which are designed to iron out the differences between the various national capitalist interests ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009, have been littered with obstructions that are exclusively based around state sovereignty (such as Brazil’s reluctance to allow isolation of the Amazon akin to that of Antarctica) or corporate interests from the oil, coal, aviation and automobile industries.

The concessions, which were forced by some central European representatives threatening to veto the entire agreement, were said by The Independent on 13th December to be vital in securing EU-wide unity in Copenhagen, thus enabling the EU to command a stronger bargaining position in the treaty dubbed by commentators as the ‘son of Kyoto‘. The compromise endangers the Union’s current 20% emissions-reduction target, which will rise to 30% should an agreement be reached in the Danish capital, a target already dismissed by many scientists as being woefully ineffective.

These negotiations, like all negotiations between states, have completely shut out the general population, instead allowing a number of representative politicians, often with established links to every industry that relies on pollution, decide the fate of the planet. Ordinary people who do protest are deemed to be troublemakers obstructing solutions to climate change… a rich criticism coming from those who are handing out these concessions! Regarding the concessions, Jose Manuel Barroso, the current President of the European Commission, stated that ‘We had to accept changes. That's the price to pay for unity in the end and it's a fair price.’ But there will never be a fair price under capitalism. This kind of lunacy, in which corporate behemoths and developed nations can hold the rest of the planet at ransom for the sake of their bottom lines, could only be promoted by the system that got us all into this mess in the first place.