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The world and climate change: all together now

By Tom Burke

Tighten up or all change?

No one should underestimate the bewildering difficulty of these negotiations. Some want to push forward with the current protocol, tightening the targets for the Annex 1 (industrialised) nations and trying to persuade the developing countries, especially the largest emitters like China and India, to take on binding targets of some kind.

Others want to start again with a replacement of the protocol by a completely new instrument that might or might not include the Kyoto mechanisms. The current United States administration would prefer that we went back to 1992, when the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) was established, and simply agreed to do our best voluntarily.

The political effort required for these negotiations to really succeed is on a par with that the west required to win the cold war. That victory involved creating Nato to counter the military threat and the OECD and address the economic and intellectual challenge. It also involved the willingness of western states to spend untold billions on weapons they hoped never to use.

The world is some way from making a comparable effort yet on climate change even though the inexorable threat to the prosperity and security of everyone on earth is far more certain. We are currently stuck in an increasingly futile conversation about who caused the problem, who should act first to solve it and how the pain should be shared.

There is no question about where the main responsibility lies. This is a problem primarily caused by the activities of the rich, western industrialised nations. The cumulative nature of the carbon loading on the atmosphere makes the issue of whose current emissions is largest immaterial. To point fingers at the rising level of Chinese or Indian emissions is nothing more than a pathetic and provocative piece of evasion.

But there is equally something pointless about occupying a moral high ground on which very large numbers of your citizens are simultaneously suffering violent storms, floods, fires, droughts and rising tides of salt water and migrants. If we are to arrive at a ‘global deal’ on climate change we need a much more mature political discussion than is currently occurring.

That conversation must start from the recognition that every country in the world faces the same shared dilemma. All must achieve energy security if they are to prosper. This means using more fossil-fuels. But if they are used with present technologies the climate will change rapidly. If that happens, the very prosperity that required the energy security will itself be undermined.
The “global deal” to be negotiated at Bali and beyond would be better focused on how nations can work together to make a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy than on who should carry the biggest burden for reducing emissions. As the old English phrase has it, if we do not hang together we will certainly hang separately.

A version of this article is also being published by the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) as part of their Sustainable Development Opinion series. A pdf version is attached for download.

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