Tumbling towards Copenhagen

In December of last year I posted about the efforts at the Poznan Conference (here)  to prepare the way for a successor to the Kyoto Treaty. This was scheduled to be agreed at Copenhagen this December. I suggested that at a time of economic crisis, politicians and activists would find it very difficult to carry public opinion with them on this issue. But in an address to the 11,000 delegates at Poznan, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said:

The economic crisis is serious, yet when it comes to climate change, the stakes are even far [sic] higher. The climate crisis affects our potential prosperity and our people’s lives both now and in the future.

Un Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the Poznan Conference, Dec 2008

At that time, the developing nations main objection to signing up at Copenhagen was that they wanted to see the US committed to reducing greenhouse gases, through legally binding regulation, before they would do the same. The inauguration of President Obama in the following month unleashed a wave of optimism in the climate alarmism camp, but this was short lived.

Legislation to introduce cap-and-trade (significantly called the Energy Security Bill; no mention of the climate) was swiftly introduced, and as swiftly ran into trouble. Democrats from industrial regions took fright when they realised that jobs would be threatened. Others voiced concern that the US’s energy intensive industries would move overseas to avoid increased overheads. There was also concern that cheap imports would flood in from nations that had no carbon legislation, jeopardising even more jobs and, in order to prevent this, a new age of protectionism and trade wars would unfold with catastrophic consequences for the global economy. At the same time, the legislature settled down to emasculating the cap-and-trade bill to an extent that its scope for reducing Co₂ emissions would be very greatly reduced. Even the environmentalists were talking disparagingly about greenwash.

What was heralded as legislation that would allow the US to attend the Copenhagen summit as the world leader in the cause of Co₂ reduction failed to attract the support of the American public. First it was presented as the means of not only saving the planet, but also restoring the US’s tarnished reputation on the world stage after the Bush years. Then the administration tried to sell it as a way of creating millions of new jobs developing alternative energy and thereby aiding recovery form the recession. Neither strategy was successful in winning public support, and subsequent attempts to invoke concerns about energy security – and now even national security – were equally unsuccessful.

In the meantime, the rest of the world was beginning to take the politics of climate change very seriously, but not quite in the way that those in the industrialised world, who had initiated concern for the future of the planet had anticipated.

The developing economies in China, India, Africa, South America and elsewhere were being asked to sign up to a treaty that would impose restrictions on their use of polluting technologies that had made the developed world rich and which they hoped would eventually make them rich too. First there were dark mutterings about the West attempting to stifle their competitor’s economic growth with the new regulations , and then there were demands that the rich nations should actually pay for whatever new technology was needed. Latterly there has been talk of reparations, along the lines of, ‘You wrecked the climate during the last century getting rich, and you say that we will suffer most from the consequences, what with droughts, floods, desertification, sea level rise, mass migration and any other catastrophe that climate scientists can think of. We want compensation for problems that you have caused and we haven’t contributed to.’

It has taken twenty years for the Western World to get the notion of anthropogenic global warming well and truly embedded in the global psyche. We cannot complain if the developing nations now use the catastrophic scenarios and myths that have been peddled to them in negotiations over future energy policy. And if the predictions are reliable, then their case is a very a difficult one to argue against.

So where have the negotiations got to now? According to the China Daily:

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Yvo De Boer ruled out the possibility that a “comprehensive” international climate treaty will be ratified at Copenhagen in December.

De Boer, speaking at a press conference during the ongoing Summer Davos in Dalian, Northeast China said it is “impossible to craft and draft” a detailed climate treaty in “the time that remains” to address climate change.

“That is not possible. But it is also not necessary,” he said, “I think what Copenhagen has to achieve is a basic political understanding” on the essential issues of climate change.

<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2009-09/11/content_8683944.htm>

It seems possible that the legacy of a failed Copenhagen Summit may be a new – and very damaging, – rift between the rich nations and the developing world, with the demands for reparations of compensation souring relations for decades to come.

The amounts of money that the industrialised nations would now have to find in order to buy universal acceptance of a new emissions reduction treaty are staggering. These are estimates published by the World Bank recently.

Cash costs

The full financing package that the bank believes is likely to be needed annually by 2030 includes:

• $75bn to help poorer nations adapt to, or protect themselves against, climate impacts
• $400bn for mitigation – reducing emissions – in the developing world
• hundreds of billions for energy research and development

And the vast majority, it concludes, must come from nations that have already industrialised through intensive fossil fuel use.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8256961.stm

While I was writing this post, I picked up a magazine and a leaflet fell out. It was an appeal from Water Aid, a charity that does a very obvious thing very well. Millions of people are still without clean reliable water supplies and Water Aid helps to provide these. I came across this organisation some years ago when I was involved in allocating charitable giving from an organisation for which I was treasurer. Water Aid were different from most charities in that they gave excellent feedback to donors and provided regular accounts which showed that their administration costs were very low.[1]

Here is what the leaflet had to say:

Every 17 seconds, a child in the developing world dies as a result of water-related diseases …… Your gift can help provide the necessary know-how, tools and pipework for a whole family to gain access to a vital supply of water ….. We have helped over 12 million people gain access to clean water in Africa and Asia.

£2 a month over a year is as little as it costs to help give a person safe, clean water for life.

£5 a month over a year could pay for enough cement to protect a spring benefiting 300 people in Uganda .

£10 a month over a year could pay for the cement and provide a trained mason to work with the community to line a well and fit a hand pump in Malawi.

Now look back at the World Bank’s estimated costs for getting a climate deal at Copenhagen and ask yourself whether we are getting our priorities right. Most of the alarm about global warming depends on the dubious predictions of computer models. These children are not victims in a virtual world conjured up on-screen by climate scientists.  Each death is tragic, avoidable, and very, very real.

---

[1]   There were two other things I noticed about this leaflet. It does not mention climate change, although the availability of water is obviously relevant to Water Aid’s activities, so you might expect them to have climbed on that particular bandwagon. And their president is listed as HRH The Prince of Wales, a particularly vocal advocate of a replacement for the Kyoto Treaty being agreed in Copenhagen.