| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Captain Compassion" |
| Date: |
05 May 2007 11:49:32 AM |
| Object: |
Call the carbon bailiffs |
Call the carbon bailiffs
The world's richest countries have a additional difficulty in
alleviating climate change - global poverty.
Andrew Pendleton
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_pendleton/2007/05/call_the_carbon_bailiffs.html
Climate change is revealing a further inconvenient truth. Today's UN
report confirms the warnings of many campaigners; that only the most
stringent of programmes to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)
and other greenhouse gases in rich countries - some 80-90% reduction
by 2050 - will give us any chance of keeping any global warming
temperature increase below 2C.
Those 2C are the crucial "tipping point", beyond which the likelihood
of humankind being able to manage the impacts of climate change would
greatly diminish.
But the fact the rich world has to face is even starker than this. We
must not only drastically reduce our emissions. We must also start
paying back the carbon debt accrued during the past 150 years of
industrialisation. In other words, we must support countries like
China and India in adopting cleaner technologies as they develop. The
earth simply cannot sustain another great wave of carbon-spewing
development.
There is finite "budget" for the releasing of greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere. Rich countries have busted the bank account on route
to industrialisation, and repayment is now overdue.
Were it not for global poverty, the fact that we have borrowed
recklessly from the earth's future carbon resources to power our
economic development would not be such a problem. The world could
simply take its foot off the gas - both literally and metaphorically -
and concentrate on improving the quality of wealth creation rather
than its quantity.
But the world in which we live is horribly fractured. While people in
Europe, North America and one or two other isolated outposts enjoy
unprecedented material wealth, more than one-third of the world's
population is still grindingly poor. The new members of the consumers'
club - those in former soviet countries in Europe and the emerging
middle classes of big developing countries - have as yet only a
fragile grip on development.
It is in this reality that the truth becomes inconvenient to a
perverse degree. For if the 2.6bn people who still survive on less
than $2 per day enforce their right to a level of development akin to
ours and achieve it by the same means, we can kiss goodbye to the
climate and, in the longer term, to many of the things we currently
value and view as civilised. A world with more than three or four
degrees of global warming will be one in which order, stability and
security are hard to guarantee.
And yet people have a right to lives of dignity and opportunity and
who are we, the over-exploiters of the earth's resources, to tell them
that while we would like them to own iPods and cars and to enjoy
weekends away in Dubai, there simply isn't the environmental space? We
would like to apologise to one billion Indians, two billion Chinese
and 600m sub-Saharan Africans, but the atmosphere is now used up and
so they must wait 100 years or so for it to unburden itself of our
greenhouse gases before they can develop any further.
Christian Aid believes that, for the sake of millions of poor people
in the world's most vulnerable regions, 2C must be our aim. But this
goal is already well aired and even the most recalcitrant are taking
it seriously. The 2C target is well articulated in the G8's draft
communique and must remain so when leaders sign it off in June.
It is for this reason that Christian Aid is wholeheartedly backing the
Anglo-German initiative to win hearts and minds in Washington DC and
other capital cities in advance of the meeting. Persuading President
Bush and others to commit to a truly heroic domestic climate action
plan is a challenge of Herculean proportions.
But failure to make a big leap forward in the US and Europe is not
only unjust, but no amount of marketing gloss applied by G8 leaders
will make it sellable to a developing world hungry for change and
thirsty for the spoils of consumerism. So what, in this
carbon-constrained, resource finite world, ought we to do?
If carbon were banked in the same way as money, then rich countries
would have long since had their accounts frozen and would now be at
the mercy of debt collectors. But the world is an illogical place
where those who stand to lose most as a result of our profligacy are
those who have hitherto gained the least.
We in industrialised countries are responsible for climate change and
we are in the luxurious position of having the wealth and wherewithal
to prevent it spiralling out of control. It is along these lines -
responsibility and capability - that we must share out the burden of
reducing emissions and of reinventing development so as not to pitch
the planet into meltdown.
At risk of sounding glib, we need a deal on climate change that
describes a path to global carbon "spending" less than half the
current annual rate while guaranteeing poor people's right to
development. Perhaps we should consider, as part of the process of
tackling climate change, repaying our carbon debt. This need not only
be a monetary arrangement.
We must allow proper transfer of existing technologies - lock, stock
and intellectual property - so that poor countries set themselves on a
path towards low carbon growth. We must ensure that investment is
cleaned up, which means an end to fossil fuel subsidy and willingness
on the part of governments to intervene and cut off the supply of
money to highly polluting activities.
Perhaps most importantly, we must rethink development. Climate change
is an object lesson in what happens when we live beyond our
environmental means. So instead of foisting on poor countries the
economic policies that have got us into this mess, we should consider
how to support them to achieve human development goals and, along the
way, to share out the wealth they create more evenly.
Fifteen years ago, world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro to sign the
UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change. In doing so, they
enshrined in international law the principles of responsibility and
capability in achieving the globally shared aim of preventing
unsustainable levels of global warming. As the architects of such
treaties begin to sketch the shape of the next, at the German G8 and
at the UN's summit in Bali later in the year, these twin principles
need to be its main pillars.
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
.
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
