“The President of Venezuela, gave an animated speech at the UN Climate Change Conference in which he criticized US President Obama’s “laughable” promise to help climate change. December 18, 2009.”
UPDATE: Chavez’s entire speech at COP15 is here.
To President Obama’s credit, he did what he could in Copenhagen, given the constraints on his time, power and ambition on climate change. He should be defended for attending the climate talks, and it wasn’t right for some countries to shut him out of their meetings while lying about where they were (telling the U.S. they were at the airport, according to one report). They should have given Obama a chance to negotiate and they should have been honest with him. Obama was able to sit down with them later — reportedly bursting into their “secret meeting” to reach a “political” agreement. (according to MSNBC):
An important moment that led up to the deal took place when Obama walked uninvited into the second meeting, which was already under way. Later, a senior Obama administration official said that “the only surprise we had, in all honesty, was … that in that room wasn’t just the Chinese having a meeting … but in fact all four countries that we had been trying to arrange meetings with were indeed all in the same room. … The president’s viewpoint is, I wanted to see them all and now is our chance.”
The end result: Nothing about Copenhagen was good enough, but the fact that it didn’t collapse was a relief. We can work on climate change next year and in 2011, and definitely will do that. If you want to read a very interesting live blog of the final day of the climate summit, see The Guardian.
But for stirring up trouble in a very blunt way, it’s hard to beat Hugo Chavez. Here is Chavez at his best as discussed by the LATimes.
Hugo Chavez parties at Copenhagen like it’s 1959
The Venezuelan president is becoming the world-stage equivalent of the drunk uncle you hope doesn’t show up for Christmas. First there was his complaint to the United Nations General Assembly that the speaker’s podium reeked of sulfur following a speech by devil-incarnate George W. Bush, and now there’s his pitchfork-rattling rant Wednesday at the climate conference in Copenhagen:
Then President Chavez brought the house down.
When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really an imperial dictatorship … down with imperial dictatorships,” he got a rousing round of applause.
When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.
But then he wound up to his grand conclusion — 20 minutes after his 5-minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ — “our revolution seeks to help all people … socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell. … Let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation”
Being the main spokesperson against super-capitalism is when Chavez shines. And he’s right, capitalism has brought us to this brink of self-destruction.
But there are times when he seems too much like a guy looking for someone to punch.
His remark about “Obama, Nobel Prize of War” was very much appreciated, but “I still smell sulfer” is too harsh a thing to say at a world summit by another world leader. Chavez is very manipulative with the press in that regard. Yes, he makes accurate points in this speech, despite his animosity towards certain countries. Copenhagen was the beginning, not the end. But there are better ways to make these points than to pointedly and purposely alienate other countries. In that regard, Chavez has very poor diplomatic skills.
America is certainly “the great emitter, the great polluter”. But a world climate summit is not the place to talk about the other subjects he needs to constantly point out, and complain yet again (for the hundredth time) about the U.S. government. He would be taken more seriously if he would stop misusing the world stage for his private soapbox to bitch about the U.S.
In general, Chavez is more effective when he discusses capitalism in a more general way and stops making it so personal. America is certainly not the only “capitalist” country.
For him to threaten leaving at the end before the agreement was done was very bad form and showed an unwillingness to negotiate. To announce that he, Chavez, rejects a climate deal before he even knows what’s in it is just Chavez being a jerk.
At some point Chavez’s anti-U.S. rhetoric became more annoying than agreeable. We’d like socialism a lot better if it wasn’t advocated by someone who constantly acts like he wants to pick a fight. Like Evo Morales, for example, who’s more even-tempered and seems a bit less obsessed with the U.S.
If Obama is going to be criticized, it should be by Americans, who know him best. We voted for him, we are stuck with him, let us critique him. But don’t shut him out of negotiations because of a bias against the U.S., which is what some countries actually tried to do in Copenhagen.
China is another country that plays the victim, and it’s getting old. China is the richest Asian country on earth, and harbors several billionaires. That’s not “developing country” material. Portions of China are very poor and fit the “developing” definition, but you could probably say that of any geographically large country. Alaska is still very un-developed, for example. Does that mean the U.S. qualifies for “undeveloped” country status?
To leave China out of the “developed countries” list is just not accurate. They are one of the most developed countries on earth. We have to stop feeling sorry for them and start insisting they reduce their emissions and get on board with the rest of the world. It’s getting awfully tiresome hearing China and other countries whining on China’s behalf that they should be allowed to “develop”. They are already developed. They are richer than the U.S. Their military is larger, their assets are larger, and they are a “world leader” in many ways that the U.S. no longer is — including in emissions. China’s technology rivals anyone else’s in the world. And they should be stopped, at this point, from developing Tibet any further. They are fencing off portions of Tibet, environmentally destroying the Tibetan plateau and soon, will have no more water for development. Then what? Then China might want money from the U.S. to help them “adapt” to climate change.
China does not and will not need more money from the U.S. and they are using the “developing” tag to get sympathy.
Going it alone is not how climate change will be solved.
Bottom line, Chavez needs to stop blaming the U.S. for everything. Man up, Chavez. The whining act is getting old.
Join me at 
I hope you will remember that there was the coup in 2002 to overthrow Chavez. The documentary ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ is highly recommended. Everything you say about Chavez may or may not be true. I’m not here to play devil’s advocate (smell the sulfur). Chavez faced certain overthrow like whoever (????) was behind the coup in Honduras. As fate would have it, Chavez was returned to power and that resulted in a lot of gnashing of teeth far to the north of Venezuela. Chavez has steadily maintained that the US was behind or had a strong hand in that coup. It doesn’t seem that anyone in the media or government has extended that much of an olive branch. Conversely, Ahmadinejad has said that Iran and the US can (potentially) be the best of friends. Like Barry supporters, I’d like to take Ahmadinejad at his word. Until he has shown that he is treacherous, why not give him a chance to have as good a relationship as with subservient Blair? The British lied about being taken prisoner because they trespassed in Iran’s water. They spoke of all these things that happened to them and there was video showing the Brits having a casual time watching TV and just passing the time while their future was being negotiated between relevant parties in their cases. They looked casual and pleasantly disposed enough on the video. When they left the country, Ahmadinejad saw them off and it was amiable enough, at least on the tape. Tell me if I dreamt this, because it seems that I saw all of this and the attempt to demonize him didn’t quite work since the prisoners were shown to have invaded sovereign waters as well as being shown having an unorthodox holiday of sorts. Chavez is guilty of teaching those peasants how to read and forcing kids to go to school. If anyone tried to do me in, I’d be bitter about it, too. From whence has an apology come for trying to take him out? Venezuela has oil, the greatest nation in the world wants it and Chavez wants to sell it for a fair price and not let the oil companies get 82% while Venezuela gets 18%. He is building buildings for the poor and there’s nothing wrong with that. The businesspeople will say that he is aiding idlers in their indolence, but I find that difficult to believe. Most anyone would get up and do what they had to do to make their belly full if they had anything going. These people might not even have shoes. The reason Chavez gets a lot of bad press is because he wants to actually serve his people, unlike the US leaders who are sworn to protect and defend Wall Street. The rose-colored glasses need to come off. Holder hasn’t done anything to start a real investigation into Nine Eleven and millions of missing e-mails are not available for public scrutiny until sometime after the 12th of Never. Maybe Chavez isn’t the most diplomatic person in the world, but neither was duh by, but the press fawned all over him, especially after he completely failed to even cut short his vacation in spite of direct warnings. He’d gripe about a reporter who dared to ask questions in France while speaking French, calling him ‘intercontinental’. The media fawned all over him and made excuses for this ridiculous behavior. The same people who complain about Chavez because he is a friend to the people instead of Wall Street. I don’t have any problem with Chavez speaking his mind when the media seeks to control ours’. So many dummies call Nine Eleven the greatest intelligence failure ever. It wasn’t an intelligence failure. They warned such a thing might happen and it was the failure from on high to prevent it, which makes one wonder why didn’t they do anything and why did people get mad at Clinton for it? At least when somebody did something wrong as they did in ‘93, they were found in a hurry and will be in prison forevermore. Duh did nothing and people blamed Clinton for it and gave Reagan the credit for the economic boost that occurred during the 90s. I don’t know yet where 41 fits in all this. I’m sure he did no wrong, either.
Morales has a lot of reasons also to be bitter. Besides the exploitation that lasted about 500 years until recently, if I remember, his father spent a few years in prison in the US for doing a naughty thing that had something to do with controlled substances.
I’m sure there are problems in Venezuela and it might not even be a desireable place to live. It might be full of crime and if that’s so, I certainly hope those living there of any economic status can live safely. That’s a human right, although kkkonservative$$ will disagree unless the human is a CEO or one of their chosen idols. Whatever it is, millions of people live there who will never be able to leave it and they might not want to, nor should they have to leave it. Their leader is obliged to look out for their best interests and if he can make it a better place, we should all be glad for them and be thankful that at least some thoughtful leaders can gain power somewhere and not be taken down for refusing to bow to those who wish to continue exploiting them. At least these people deserve a fair shake at feeding themselves enough and to be able to have reasonable health so long as they shall live. Those horrible Chaveznistas have been offering free medical care, too. How dare they!
I still smell sulfur is possibly a prompt to do something or to shame him into taking action or seem to approve by not doing anything like actually stopping the war of choice and a few days ago it was announced that there would be an escalation in Afghanistan. That wasn’t duh by, you know.
I never heard of Truman or Roosevelt making excuses for Hitler. If these people today were placed in late 1945, they would have refused to have any trials as were conducted in Nuremberg. There would be no accounting for the killing caused by the so-called Axis Powers. It was Barry who defended duh by in his inauguration address when all the people jeering 43 were told how 43 had done such a good job. Please. Defending the indefensible tends to make one look as an accessory after the fact. I don’t like to see anyone get hurt, but when you’re responsible for killing 1.3 million people, that’s a little extreme and we can at least acknowledge a mass murderer. If we don’t, then expect ridicule from at least a few quarters.
China is a developing country and there are many rich. Bear in mind that while it is developing rapidly, the wealth is anything but proportionately distributed. Things are much worse in Vietnam, Cambodia and especially Laos. 80% of the Chinese live in rural areas. Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are hardly representative of the country. There are stupid people who buy cars and can’t afford to pay for the fuel while others don’t have heat or air conditioning. When the factories close due to lack of orders or bad management, things can get very ugly, violent and worse very quickly. These people have to eat and sometimes they find themselves in very dire positions. Some places have had killings when they were told they were being thrown out of work.
It’s fair to say stop blaming the US for everything. If he would start blaming the partners in crime from Blair, Aznar, Howard for their help (and don’t forget Poland!! as Mr. Danger said) in the war in Iraq which was pretty bad in itself, never mind the environmental degradation, that would be a good start.
President Hugo Chavez definitely is the “drunk uncle you hope doesn’t show up”, sort of like the Venezuelan version of our own Jim Traficant (“Ohio’s last son of freedom). With all the staid speechifying made by more “respectable” leaders, however, I find his blowhard pronouncements refreshingly honest. If he were a tin-plated despot doing nothing for his country, think Qadafi, then I’d probably have a bigger beef with the guy, but at least he has made inroads with improving the lot of Venezuela’s poor and doesn’t shamelessly kowtow to vested corporate interests.
@wngl: Traficant was literally a drunk uncle, and a criminal. I used to like Chavez until he started being more about promoting Chavez than about what he believes in.
@Bugga: The U.S. government that tried to overthrow Chavez was not Obama’s adminitration, but it’s true Bush tried to get rid of him. So Chavez needs to blame Bush. Bush is gone. Obama and his administration talk about Chavez in a non-diplomatic way (they should probably just stop talking about him) but Chavez also needs to stop being all about himself.
Here is his entire speech:
http://tinyurl.com/y8ujoyv
I’ll update the post with that link because it was a good speech. I wish it had been given by someone else.
The useful things he does have to say get overshadowed by his other complaints and cheap shots. He needs to move on and concentrate on being a better leader for his own people. He has not solved poverty, he has not created any kind of great system in Venezuela. But he is right about a lot of things.
He is a bit flamboyant, but anyone in a position of power might have that type of personality. That doesn’t mean it’s right or good, it just goes with the territory. That also doesn’t mean I would like it or want to be exposed to such behavior. Big names in politics, sports and entertainment sometimes go that way. Again, I don’t want to be around that kind of thing, but it’s there and I hope we can look at the bigger picture. The man has pledged to be the best socialist that he can be. That will make the heads of a lot of people spin and implode, because of that horrible “s” word. True, he hasn’t solved poverty and he has not created a great system in Venezuela. Poverty still exists and crime is still there. These people are climbing out of an abyss. Whether they make it out and scale unprecedented heights remains to be seen. These things take time and if and when the oil runs out, at this time it would be very bad for them under the present state of affairs. If he can come up with some sort of sustainable system for later, such as investing in relatively self-sustaining projects like photovoltaics and wind and tidal energy as well as sustainable agriculture, it might not give them first-world standards of living, but it might at least help give them a life. I wouldn’t be able to say whether or not he is concentrating on being a better leader for his people. He might spend lots of time doing that and likely has subordinates acting on this very thing, too. I don’t know, but it would be a good common sense idea to do that because one day the oil will run out and if you don’t have anything to trade, then you need to be able to at least be able to provide food and fiber for the people. It’s true that those who sponsored the coup are no longer in power, but where is the apology? I think most of us would hold a grudge if we had been facing death and had been removed from power when we had been elected by a majority of the people, unlike here in 2000. Can anyone honestly say they’d be ready to forget it and to move on when all that had happened to them? One of the main reasons for the coup was greed, making it even more painful if you were a direct or auxiliary victim. Kidnapping, getting marched out of your work and flown away to an island and being cut off from everything and everyone might scramble your brains just a little. It would be an event to remember. Finally: Where is the apology from the War Prize winner for this particular event? By silence, one could be, rightly or wrongly, considered to approve the action. If an overzealous cop and professor can be invited to drink beer and speak with Barry and Buyed-in because of a needless arrest, why can’t there be a reconciliation between a real leader who almost went the way of Allende, Trujillo, et al? Republikkkan$$ are invited to have a beer party while being petted and rubbed to try to support health care reform (but, never, ever single-payer) and to no effect. Apologies and beer flow freely, but what about those who really have been put upon? Where is the apology there? If Dems can try to make friends with LIEberman (R – Israel), why not with someone who has something to offer? Oil at a fair price and it would be valuable and in everyone’s best interests to try and have some friends in that region.
@Bugga: Venezuela has reportedly reached peak oil and when that is gone, so is most of the socialist promise for that country. I’m not aware that he has any fall-back scheme for what happens when the oil dries up or is no longer wanted. As an oil exporter Venezuela is also going to be paying money under a world-wide plan to tax polluters and exporters of fossil fuels and he’ll have to be making lots of offset deals. Lucky for him a binding agreement didn’t pass in Copenhagen yesterday or he’d have to reduce the pollution his oil is causing and pay for it too. Besides regular oil, Venezuela is full of the “tar sands” type of oil, the dirtiest and most polluting on the planet, and I have no doubt that Chavez will want to sell every last sludgey drop of it. From that perspective, he is an environmental nightmare. Anyone hoping to run any economy based on the exportation and sale of oil or fossil fuels is a polluter who doesn’t deserve sympathy. He’s a big part of the world’s CO2 problem.
“Venezuela holds 90% of the world’s super-heavy tar oil reserves – an estimated total of 1,360,000,000,000 (1.36 trillion) barrels. Let me repeat that – 1.36 trillion barrels. That alone is more oil than Hubbert believed 50 years ago lay under the entire planet.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2500
Chavez intends to exploit all of the “heavy oil” or tar sands oil in Venezuela, which will eventually make him the planet’s largest polluter.
“. . . . western companies apparently have become Hugo’s friends again.
Next month, as they also prepare for a new round of bidding in Iraq, such major oil companies as BP (NYSE: BP), Chevron (NYSE: CVX), and France’s Total (NYSE: TOT) will bid for blocks of heavy oil in the eastern Orinoco area. Winning bidders will walk away with 40% of a given project, with the remaining majority going to the state oil company, PdVSA.
The objective will be to stem the country’s declining oil output by adding about 1.2 million barrels per day during the next few years. Venezuela currently claims to produce about 3.1 million barrels each day. However, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration says that amount has declined to just above 2.6 million daily barrels as recently as last year.”
http://www.fool.com/investing/dividends-income/2009/12/07/hugo-chavezs-new-friends-in-big-oil.aspx
The country of Venezuela is going to make its money for its socialist experiment by selling all its tar sands, making climate change much worse, and probably adding to the demise of all those island nations that he acts so concerned about. If he cared about them, he’d find a way to fight for the environment instead of contributing so much to destroying the climate.
More about the Venezuelan tar sands, the worst, most dirtiest energy on earth, besides the Canadian tarsands here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aTaDo1oAlN1g&refer=latin_america-redirectoldpage
If Chavez is going to develop technology to fight climate change he better hurry up, and I hope he does.
This is part of his speech:
I am reconsidering whether he even believes in climate change. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s just a big windbag who wants the world to buy his oil.
Back in September I had this to say about the then upcoming Copenhagen conference:
“As we get near crunch time at Copenhagen, it has become obvious that the United States is not poised to deliver the kind of leadership that other countries would like to see. … As unfair as it might seem, the job of being the grown-ups may fall on the shoulders of other countries such as China and India. … China and India have a choice. They can use this situation to protect their own interests or they can kick it up a notch and become the true world leaders they say they want to be. It will be interesting to see if either or both rises to the challenge.”
I guess we have our answer. Offered a chance to take the lead in mitigating climate change, the Chinese reverted to their traditional closed society view of the world.
What they and so many other countries apparently still don’t get is that the U.S. is no longer in a position to lead. It is time for other countries to pick up the slack. China had its chance and blew it. Maybe Europe and India will be the ones to show the world that serious actions is still possible.
Meanwhile, where does that leave us? For now, pretty much on our own. What’s in your Plan B?
Plan B is the EPA regulating emissions, now that they are legally obligated to do so — they can now start doing it. I hope they start soon. Most people think they won’t and will be used only as a threat to hold above the Congtress’s heads to get them to pass some legislation, but I don’t think that is EPA’s plan, I believe they intend to regulate CO2 and other pollutants soon.
Plan “C” is Maria Cantwell’s senate cap and dividend bill…