Which path will we choose?
No comments“Our forefathers prophesied this. They said that a time would come when all the nations of the world would come together to make a choice.
“One path would lead to prosperity for all and the other path… would lead to something very bad”, said Kandi Mossett, a Native American activist who spoke at a side event held in Copenhagen at the start of the 2009 UN climate change conference.
Kandi belongs to the Indigenous Environmental Network and comes from North Dakota in the US, where large oil and gas companies have wrought havoc on their tribal (reservation) lands. “Where I come from, it is not a matter of if you get cancer, it is about when you get it”, she told us.
So which path did the world choose at the end of those two exhausting weeks? Copenhagen will be remembered more for what did not happen than for what actually transpired.
What was needed was a strong, binding treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. What we got instead were some vague pledges by world leaders to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (how it will be done and who will do it has been deliberately left unanswered).
The US National Academy of Sciences says that if the planet warms beyond 2C the Greenland ice sheet may melt, ultimately raising global sea levels by around seven meters, enough to flood most small island states and coastal areas.
A seminar organized by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation on the second to last day of the conference focused on solutions to the climate crisis, while world leaders were arguing over emissions cuts in a nearby hall.
Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “If we add up the current pledges of emissions targets we have on the table here, it would result in a warming of 3.5 C.
“Time is of the essence. If we start reducing carbon emissions in 2011, the reduction rate to be achieved would be only three per cent, which is manageable.
“In 2015, it would be five per cent. And if we wait until 2020 it would be nine per cent per year, which is unimaginable (given the structure of the world economy).
“So we must peak before 2020 – that is the most crucial point to be negotiated here”.
In May 2009 more than 60 Nobel science laureates gathered at St James’s Palace in London on the invitation of Prince Charles and signed a petition calling for global carbon emissions to peak by 2015.
So far, the European Union is offering the highest emissions cuts (in the industrialized world) at around 30%. “It would be a real shame if the EU could not deliver on that. Actually they should be offering 60%”, Professor Schellnhuber said.
“Developing countries also have to adopt low carbon emission pathways as soon as they can. We need global cuts of 40% by 2020. It is an absolute necessity.”
Carbon offsetting in the south by rich countries could not be incorporated into the peak calculations, he said.
There are a number of ways in which rich countries can cut emissions without carbon offsetting or switching to nuclear power (whose waste remains a big problem) or even converting to biofuels (which take up valuable agricultural land).
These include changes in the transport sector (introduction of hybrid or electric cars), industry (electric furnaces, switching from coal to natural gas, cement industry reduction), households (new energy-efficient homes, reduction of fossil fuels in household heating) and so on.
The argument presented by the Stockholm Environment Institute was that economic growth and emissions could be decoupled. Sweden has done it successfully.
As for developing countries, the formula presented by Tariq Banuri, a Pakistani director of the UN’s Division for Sustainable Development, is to scale up renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Ninety per cent of the energy infrastructure in developing countries will be built between now and 2050. With technology advancing so fast there can now be low carbon solutions to many energy problems.
The market, however, cannot provide everything – subsidies are still necessary and renewables have to be encouraged by government policies.
The subsidies can be phased out when the new fuels are affordable. Banuri called for the establishment of a “global investment fund for renewables” and advocated a “green energy revolution”.
Unfortunately this innovative thinking was missing in the plenary taking place next door, where world leaders were quarreling over the remaining atmospheric space that scientists say is left (some think we have used up this space already with our carbon emissions).
The Chinese climate change envoy, Qing-tai Yu, said: “Our [developing countries'] emission space is under occupation and we want it back”. For a while it looked like the world would fail to agree to any sort of deal.
“I am reminded of my days as a trade union leader… I feel like I am meeting with business representatives”, complained Lula de Silva, Brazil’s president. He asked for rich countries to cut their emissions, saying it was the developing countries’ “turn to grow”.
The US, historically the world’s largest emitter, did not offer any new emission reductions targets other than the 4% (below 1990 levels) announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before President Obama even arrived for the last day of the summit.
She also announced a US contribution to a fund of US $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. Who will manage this fund is also not clear, as developing countries protested against the involvement of the World Bank.
Hopes were high that President Obama would somehow promise more and hence seal the deal, but he only reiterated what Hillary had said the day before, stating clearly that he had to ensure that “whatever we promise, we can deliver on”.
He has learnt his lesson from Al Gore, who pushed through the Kyoto Protocol only to return to the US to be defeated by the Senate. President Obama might personally believe in the notion of “climate justice”, but his hands are tied by the Senate.
A senior American journalist told me: “Basically, the US Senate is holding the entire world hostage”. The big polluting industries are very active lobbyists in the US and have the ear of senators.
In the end, the weak Copenhagen Accord salvaged by the US and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) did not offer the world anything new and deferred most of the major decisions to Mexico, where the 2010 UN climate conference will be held.
There is in fact no deadline for transforming the accord into a binding deal, although UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said it needed to be turned into a legally-binding treaty by 2010.
In the meantime, science tells us the window of opportunity is closing – so if there is no deal this year, then we will rapidly reach the point where we will no longer have the option of choosing which path to take.
