Olly Zanetti: Deal or no deal
The agreement at the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference needs to be the right one.
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Will there be a deal at Copenhagen or won't there? Within days, the Obama administration has wavered from an expectation-dampening call for “one agreement, two steps” (the first step being a general agreement on the substantive issues which would be taken at Copenhagen, the second being the signing into law of a definitive accord which might not be for another year) to a co-statement with the Chinese President Hu Jintao calling for an immediate agreement.
Whether we like it or not, it’s essential that the Americans are onboard. If that means the world must run at America's pace then, unfortunately, so be it. Their political machine is, at least, caught up discussing something hopeful – the widening of healthcare access. Although China might have knocked America off the top spot in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions, the States' per person emissions are still amongst the highest in the world. In that context alone, it's hard to justify ploughing ahead without their involvement.
The idea that a bad deal is no better than no deal withstands the test of science too. While atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide can be recorded on an incremental scale, the effects of climate change will be far from incremental. A better analogy would be an inflating balloon – it's best when it's just full enough, a bit too much air is a strain but it can manage, any more and it'll burst. Once warming hits a tipping point, the effects will be irreversible.
As the world's first attempt to deal with the problems of climate change, the Kyoto Protocol was revolutionary for its time. Adopted in 1997, it came into force in 2005. But it was blighted by its lax requirements, lack of participation and a reluctance to enforce its rules. Ultimately, in the time during which it has been operational, emissions globally have risen by around 15%.
That's not to say it was a bad treaty. A number of countries have met and even exceeded their reduction targets under Kyoto. Also, Kyoto served to redirect discussion. In a post-Kyoto world, from the upper echelons of government to the punter on the street, the notion of an international agreement to battle climate change no longer seems that far fetched.
But, globally, we're in a different place than we were in 1997. Though exact answers are always hard to come by, the weight of scientific opinion is in agreement that climate change is happening and that it's induced by human activity. We've also got an additional 12 years worth of emissions floating around in our atmosphere. The need for serious effort to cut back our greenhouse gas output is more pressing than it's ever been.
Which is why a deal at Copenhagen is no good unless it's the right one. A mismatched bodge of half-promises and vague aspirations is not enough. Rather than generating a false sense of security, we need a global accord that leads to substantial and legally binding cuts in greenhouse gasses and which sets regular incremental targets to ensure carbon output is reduced as quickly as possible. And if, for whatever reason, a deal like that can't be signed at Copenhagen, we're better off signing nothing.
The only condition being, of course, that a date for another round of talks is put in the diary pretty sharpish.
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Deal or no deal (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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