2050 Climate Targets Become 2350 Targets If…

By: Harold Williams on December 9th, 2008

Shocking are the revelations of some high level climate change experts, who say the time is now for key reduction targets to be set.

The former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Professor Martin Parry, says that since it issued its 2007 report the Arctic has begun melting faster. The seas have become less able to absorb carbon dioxide. Coral reefs are also diminishing in both their quantity and carbon absorption capability, because of the increasing acidification of the oceans.

All of this is happening now, and after the international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, comes to an end in 2012 is too far away to do another assessment of the situation. The assessment must be annual. But the drudgery of consensus-building needed to get a better deal from the protocol means that the longer the climate change issue is put on hold, the more difficult it will become to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

With the current increase in GHG emissions, the longer we wait, the longer it will take to clean up the mess. In Earth terms, this translates into centuries – two at least, perhaps three.

Now with America and other major GHG-producing countries feeling the pinch of a global economic crisis, there is a widespread fear that money for the GHG clean-up will not be as forthcoming.

Alan Miller of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation says private sector participation in the clean-up process may not amount to all it should, because of the global economic pinch. Finance institutions in particular, he says, are like turtles, “who withdraw when they don’t know what is happening.”

But Mr. Miller is partially assured at least that the adaptation and climate investment funds are safe from the economic squeeze; within the past six months both the World Bank and the IFC have improved their commitments to the developing world and to climate change adaptation projects. But the polluting private sector industries, he says, must be prepared to do more.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, who chairs the UN Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, says the industrialized world can do more, based on the fact that the USA and EU rapidly allocated US $4 trillion worth of financial bailouts to cope with the economic crisis. This, she says, is 45 times more than their development assistance and 313 times more than their contribution to climate change finance. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organiser of the Poznan conference, needs more of this money.

The money is apparently there, somewhere. Oil profits, perhaps, could have saved the day.

At a global oil consumption rate of 83 million barrels a day, just a $10 tax could generate the hundreds of millions needed for climate change mitigation.

But the problem goes beyond taxation and involves a change of attitude. The entire planet consumes oil, yet 3/5ths of its majority poor have little representation in how the profits are used. The irony of this becomes starkly obvious when the planet becomes afflicted by climate change effects such as the 2008 drought in Australia, whose 70% contribution to the world’s wheat market created food-price increases felt by the poorest of the poor. This is damage for which there is no fund yet available.

While some governments are investing in green technologies, some are hoarding and refusing to acknowledge their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and their moral obligations to mitigate them. Prioritizing actions makes all the difference between, say, building islands in the northern Atlantic to harness wind power, and building islands in the Persian Gulf to erect spectacular holiday resorts.

Such indiscretions will manifest themselves sooner rather than later. And who will pay? Experts say it will be the elderly, the young and the poor.