Is carbon conference doomed before it starts ?

Posted by Roz Paterson on December 11, 2009. Filed under One World,Roz Paterson. Posted with the tags:Environment
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There’s an unseemly brawl breaking out over Planet Earth.

On a meteor hurtling towards assured destruction stand the G77, the Alliance of Small Islands and China. That is, the poor nations of the world.

And in a galaxy far away lounge the rest, including the G20. That is, the rich nations of the world.

The poor guys, including the ones whose share of the global carbon footprint stands at less than 0.1 per cent, think the carbon- spewing industrialised nations should turn the thermostat down a bit.

The rich guys think the poor guys should take all the pain. And actually, they can insist. Because they’re rich.

Thus, even before the representatives of 192 nations begin the long, carbon-intense journey to Copenhagen next month, it’s already apparent that any hope of a binding, global climate treaty is as doomed as the little mermaid herself.

There may be no Plan B, as eco-warrior Gordon Brown insists, but PlanPut-It-Off-For-As- Long-As-Possible is certainly afoot, with Western leaders all but having agreed in writing to prevaricate on figures and commitments until at least late 2010.

They have, you see, their economies to look after.

For all the world as if rising global temperatures and a future of food and water shortages, perhaps leading to world wars, certainly leading to international strife and desperate migration patterns the likes of which we have never seen, were the kinds of things only idlers like the Prince of Wales have the time to think about, while serious chaps have to count the beans and make sure inflation doesn’t get out of hand.

In fact, there are people, neither idle nor upper class, who worry about climate change too.

People in Africa, for instance, where the effects of climate change are already being disproportionately felt, in the form of killing droughts and devastating floods.

Not worrying about climate change is a luxury they cannot afford, and thus a number of African representatives were sufficiently incensed by European and American evasions to walk out of talks in Barcelona earlier this month until serious emissions reduction targets were put back on the table.

So far, the posited figures are pathetic, with an aggregate amongst the developed nations of between 11-15 per cent below 1990 levels.

Which equates to (very) approximately a 30 per cent reduction on emissions as they stand now.

Given that the SSP agreed that a reduction of 80-90 per cent by 2030 was necessary to offset the worst effects of climate change, you can see how little ground is being given here.

And they can get away with it, as a global climate treaty (in the mould of the Kyoto Protocol) requires, not the agreement of a minimum number of nations, but of nations totalling 55 per cent of the world economy, to make it binding.

The G20 comprises 90 per cent of the world economy. So there you have it.

Lumumbu Stanislaus Di-Aping of Sudan, and chair of the G77 and China, may opine that a failure to achieve a global climate pact will “condemn developing countries to a total destruction of their livelihoods, their economies. Their land, their forests will all be destroyed”.

Some sensitive world leaders may make an appropriately sad face at this, but who’s really listening to him? The governments of the developed world don’t have to care about climate change just yet, because it’s not on their doorsteps.

So they stick to the immediate stuff, recessions and who to have a war with next, while bumping tiresome old environmental Armageddon down to the bottom of the agenda.

So what difference will another year of indifference make?

Not much, in fact, if all we get is the Kyoto Protocol mark II.

And that’s not me saying that, but Nature, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world.

“(As) an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, (the Kyoto Protocol) has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth.”

Too right it hasn’t. Its aim was to cut global emissions by a mere 5.2 per cent by 2012, and even in that, it appears to have foundered. And not because the signatories flouted the agreement.

And not because the US and Australia didn’t sign up either. As it happened, it wouldn’t have mattered if they had.

Because Kyoto only apportioned emissions reduction targets to developed nations, it left a loophole enabling these same nations to outsource their dirty work to developing nations, who were not bound by emissions reduction targets.

So yeah, on paper, the UK maybe did cut down on the carbon, but only because the polluting was done somewhere else on the planet.

Somewhere poorer, less bound up in safety regulations, that kind of thing.

A recent example of this kind of British carbon-cutting wheeze came only this month, when it was revealed that in order to fuel the UK’s clean new dawn of nuclear power, uranium will be procured from ecologically sensitive regions of Namibia, where the mines will be powered using electricity created in coal-fired power stations.

Not quite so Al Gore now, are we?

Nature further criticised the Kyoto Protocol for its ‘top-down’ approach, and for the fact that it sidelined any alternative strategies to combat global warming.

This last is perhaps the most serious problem of all.

If we rely on global treaties to save us, we’ll sleepwalk into the sunset.

Instead, we should be thinking in terms of from the ground up.

In terms of, for instance, R&D investment in sustainable energy.

Governments trickle money into this stuff like recalcitrant Christians trickle money into the collection plate.

But R&D investment should be on a ‘wartime footing’, insist – amongst others – Al Gore himself, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC (a deeply conservative body that nonetheless agrees we should square up to the future), and Lord Rees, president of the British Royal Society.

On the scale, says Rees, of the Manhattan Project.

Surely a project to save the earth should command as much cash, and cachet, as one to bomb it back into the dark ages?

Should is the word. But will is lacking.

Instead of pinning our hopes on a global summit, we should be lobbying for policies such as the SSP’s Free Public Transport initiative, which would strike out the need for private vehicle use for the vast percentage of the population.

And fighting to wrest some control over the crazily globalised food market, that sees spinach rotting in fields in Kent, only for spinach to be flown in from 3000 miles away, while schoolchildren eat nutrient-free rubbish and quality, edible food is sprayed with dye and dumped in locked dustbins.

Put simply, we need to simplify, and we need to share; all of which is anathema to globalised capitalism, which is why the political will is not there.

Kyoto made no impact on our lives because it made no impact, full stop.

And that’s exactly the kind of treaty our current crop of first world leaders would like to see drawn up again.

Many things may happen in Copenhagen before Christmas, but a binding treaty for a sustainable future is not one of them.