Tensions Already Developing Ahead Of Copenhagen Conference
As we saw yesterday with China’s massive preference for petrol cars over hybrids, developing countries are discovering carbon-emitting technologies right when the developed world doesn’t want them to. It’s looking like being the major sticking point at the Copenhagen climate conference, the meeting which is taken on ever more of a “point of no return”-type aspect regarding climate change.
Of course, the issue is the giant hypocrisy that has developed nations, who produce the vast majority of the world’s carbon emissions, telling developing nations that they’re not allowed to produce carbon on anything like the same scale as they are. The developing countries obviously say that they have every right to expand their industry and wealth – India prickled during the summer when put under pressure by the US to cut emissions, saying that they absolutely wouldn’t reduce emissions; they indignantly published figures that showed that in over twenty years from now, their carbon output per capita would still be a quarter of what the US’s output is.
Since then they’ve been somewhat placated by David Miliband, who said last week that he knew India “took climate change seriously”. “I think they are beginning to understand the ground realities in India. You have to talk to each other not at each other”, one Indian campaigner told the Guardian.
Africa, equally, is being fairly aggressive over the potential treatment by the west at the conference, though coming from a completely different angle. While India and China are ramping up their industry, Africa is just trying to pull in a harvest, and climate change stands to affect them the most – “rain does not come at the same time during the start of the planting season or it comes in torrential downpours, or not at all”, as one African agricultural policymaker wrote this week. India and China are trying to preserve their right to emissions; Africa is demanding that developed nations reduce their emissions by 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050.
Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi came out fighting last week, saying: “Africa will not be there to express its participation by merely warming the chairs or to make perfunctory speeches and statements… If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent”. He also said that Africa wouldn’t be palmed off with pots of money to help them cope with the effects of global warming: “We will never accept any global deal that does not limit global warming to the minimum unavoidable level, no matter what levels of compensation and assistance are promised to us”.
To satisfy all parties is therefore going to require more than just a free messenger bag and 20 complimentary minutes at the hotel spa, and the west knows it. The World Bank is already making soothing noises about the package of compensation and technology India can expect to receive to help them lower their carbon emissions and provide incentives to their people to reduce them further. Furthermore, Michael Spence, the chair of its Commission on Growth and Development, said that a heavy-handed approach towards developing nations could cause “ugly” and “terrifying” consequences: “Trying to get commitments to long-term target emissions from developed and developing countries is unwise and unlikely to result in an agreement”, he said yesterday. He advocates instead letting the developing countries expand their carbon-emitting industries towards the levels of their western chums, before getting everyone to gently reduce their emissions together through new technologies and carbon trading.
Basically, Copenhagen is going to be a diplomatic nightmare. Start bulk ordering the placatory Ferrero Rocher now.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Green Rush | September 8, 2009 11:54AM |