Any summit billed as a meeting to determine the future of the planet and humanity is certain to deliver the single inevitable result of hyperbole: disappointment. The deflation of expectations of what will come out of Copenhagen next month started early and scepticism about whether it would all be a waste of time has crept in.
That the planet needs saving – and fast – is incontrovertible. Even on the most optimistic targets, the New Scientist reports, we have only a 75 per cent chance of limiting global warming to the critical 2oC threshold before the doomsday tipping point of no return is reached. This will only be achieved in time that we do not have through international agreement, most importantly between the rich countries and the developing nations.
The rich countries responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions which are causing current global warming must find a way to assist the developing countries, whose emission levels are fast catching up, to green their burgeoning industries. If only it were that simple. Even with the best of political intentions from countries such as Brazil and Malaysia, it is going to be difficult to nail down an agreement on deforestation. The Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which tried to scupper the Kyoto protocol, fear a Copenhagen treaty would threaten their massive industrialisation plans. On the positive side, and unlike Kyoto, the United States is fully engaged in Copenhagen, at a government level at least. The Senate’s reluctance to pass President Barack Obama’s climate change bill may tie his hands in the Danish capital.
Yet international agreements, while necessary, are not ultimately what will determine whether we bake and flood the planet to oblivion. Political will, driving forward policy which has a direct effect on reducing carbon emissions within individual countries is critical to any solution. Copenhagen will “fail” because too many leaders will go there with good intentions and passionate exhortations but with too little to show that their countries’ own policies match the rhetoric.
Climate change begins at home. In Britain the headline figures on reduction in greenhouse gas emissions look historically impressive. Emissions have fallen by 15 per cent since 1990, inside the Kyoto targets. But this has been due mostly to the end of coal mining rather than a policy-drive to meet those targets. The decline has now almost stopped and the Government has admitted it will fail to meet its own target of a 20 per cent reduction by next year. Policy, therefore, is not keeping up with ambition.
The Government-created Committee on Climate Change was set up to fill that vacuum and last month reported with a range of recommendations for cutting carbon emissions: carbon pricing, greater efficiency in energy use and subsidies for renewable energy among them. Some of these policies will be politically uncomfortable. But a government which fails to grasp the domestic nettle cannot justly set itself at the front of a campaign to save the world and expect an international agreement too.
