COMMENTARY:
The business of climate change

Almost 40 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions in California comes from passenger vehicles. � US Environmental Protection Agency

It has fallen on the shoulders of Australia�s Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, to make this controversial announcement, which was officially followed up by Robert Zoellick, US Deputy Secretary of State. While Bush has rightly been pilloried throughout the world earlier for his ostrich-like stance that the science of climate change was by no means proven, and later for calling for an agreement outside the Kyoto Protocol, Australia has toed this line. It has vast reserves of coal and any restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide, the biggest global polluter, would affect its economy badly. It has therefore chosen to remain under the US administration�s umbrella, but because of its small population and lack of engagement with the rest of the world, Australia�s role in this arena has gone unnoticed.

The big feet

Queensland’s koala: at risk from climate change. Credit: Australian Tourist Comission

Needless to add, an American had a global �footprint� of nearly 10 hectares, only slightly less than the most profligate consumer of natural resources on the globe � the United Arab Emirates. Every Chinese occupied exactly the global limit of 1.8 hectares. It is this accounting that gives the most realistic picture of who is responsible for destroying the world�s environment and, in the process, for depriving not just future generations of access to resources but also making the world�s present-day poor pay for polluters� actions in the past. Even if the world was to stop, as if by magic, producing greenhouse gases overnight, there are accumulations in the atmosphere which will take hundreds of years to dissipate. As bodies like the Centre for Science & Environment in New Delhi have consistently pointed out, any global greenhouse gas treaty must take into account the historical emissions of countries which have been industrializing for up to 250 years. The other G8 countries are all in this same boat, though Japan is a late-comer (with 4.3 hectares per head).

With a grain of salt

The latest emphasis on a regional pact ought to raise eyebrows. In climate change, we are obviously talking about a global catastrophe. Admittedly, there could be severe localized impacts like, for instance, volcanic eruptions in East Asia or the burning of oilfields by Iraq in Kuwait. However these are, by their very nature, temporary and limited and cannot, by any reckoning, be put on par with the prolonged emissions of industrialized countries over centuries. Allegations of such regional disturbances have to be treated with utmost skepticism. This is precisely what happened just prior to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, which marked 20 years since the historic Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro � where George Bush Sr. paved the way for his notorious son by refusing to sign the climate change treaty.

The UN Environment Programme, which is the only major UN agency along with UN Habitat to be located in a developing country (in Nairobi, Kenya), put out a controversial preliminary report on an Asian brown cloud which consisted of haze (or suspended particulate matter, to employ the scientific term) and was responsible for heating the atmosphere over this area. There is hardly any doubt that with increasing deforestation, along with urbanization and industrialization, Asia�s load of such pollutants is on the rise. However, it should not be treated as the major cause of global warming, since it is only a few decades old. For that matter, Asia, which is the most populous continent in the world, has major areas to its south which are still not industrialized or urbanized for the most part and therefore can hardly be blamed for upsetting the globe�s natural balance. At the time, the Indian government protested vigorously against such scientific sleight-of-hand and the report appears to have been given a premature burial.

A pact with the devil?

At the time of writing this column, details of this pact (with the devils?!) are not available, but the broad outline is quite clear. It will be called the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate and apart from the two Asian giants, the US and Australia, South Korea will come on board. South Korea is another major coal producer and exporter and thus, like Australia, has a major stake in the way the world moves ahead on reducing fossil fuel consumption, or at least restricting its emissions. According to Campbell, the objective is to �expand the energy the world consumes and reduce the emissions�.

This sounds suspiciously like a (global) Faustian bargain: if the rest of the industrialized world believes that it can continue to consume energy at current rates � the US alone accounts for a quarter of greenhouse gases and thus is the most prodigal consumer on this planet � even if emissions per head are reduced globally, the load on the atmosphere will put intolerable limits on climate as populations increase, with consequences that are already alarmingly apparent. How much more evidence does President Bush and others of his ilk need to remind them that the cost, in economic, social and environmental terms, of changes in weather patterns is playing havoc by the month, in one place on the earth or another? If nothing else, the insurance industry is going to step in and refuse to honor its commitments to compensate people for losses on account of damage due to droughts and floods, not to mention the fluctuations in crop production.

Campbell has spelt out that the new pact will require the �development of new technologies and deployment of them within developing countries.� Here lies the rub. Instead of falling in line with the Kyoto Protocol and reducing emissions, this �Gang of Five� wants to take a business-as-usual approach and solve the global warming crisis through technology, rather than global law. George Bush Jr�s proximity to the oil lobby, both in his state of Texas and the rest of America, as well as to the Saudi Arabian oligarchs, is too well known to bear repetition. South Korea has presumably also been roped in because as an Asian country (more ethnically than Australia), it is better placed than others in the region to contribute its technology in making thermal power generation more efficient.

Bush has gone on record as stating that �US lifestyles are not negotiable,� implying not only that Americans are accustomed to profligate consumption of energy, particularly with their gas-guzzling automobiles, but that he is not prepared to cut jobs by investing to make industry more energy-efficient. Instead, he has announced his own plan to reduce the intensity of greenhouse gases (the proportion of energy in a unit of output) � not overall emissions � by 18 per cent over the next decade. However, since the US economy will grow by 30 per cent over this period, it is evident that it will contaminate the atmosphere more, rather than less, in the future. The demand for electricity has risen by 45 per cent over the last two decades in the US.

All the worlds� technology cannot cleanse the pollutants if energy consumption continues to rise inexorably: the only solution is to impose some form of global order and ask every earthizen to consume up to a certain limit, after which he or she pays a very steep price. Indeed, the neo-liberal economies of the world never tire of reminding recalcitrant nations like India that they ought to adopt market principles as a sine qua non of growth. If this was so, every true free marketeer would call for the enforcement of the �polluter pays� principle. Even if historical emissions are put aside, a carbon tax of say US$50 per ton imposed on industrialized countries first, and then on developing countries after a suitable lag would, according to the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, not only rid the globe of greenhouse gases but provide sufficient resources to rid it of poverty.

True intentions

Poverty, of course, was furthest from the minds of G8 leaders, their concern for Africa notwithstanding (according to perceptive observers, Britain in particular is championing the cause of this continent to establish its foothold as its benefactor � and, in the process, become the seller of technology to these impoverished nations, with the US having established its hegemony with much of the rest of the world, and India apparently only too eager to come under its sway of late). The prospect of having China and India as virtually unlimited markets to sell environmental goods and services, albeit at very attractive terms at least initially, is too tempting for the US. Zoellick has admitted as much in declaring that the new pact focused on �practical efforts to create new investment opportunities and remove barriers to help each country meet nationally designed strategies and address the long-term challenge of climate change.� In all likelihood, there may even be a system of credits, such as has already been ushered in with the Kyoto Protocol and propagated by the World Bank and others. Under these �carbon credits� and �emissions trading� arrangements, the US for instance can pay India or China to install electrostatic precipitators and other devices in its thermal power stations but get the credit for the reduction in global emissions that this would yield.

China has already fallen for such sops; Indian officials and business interests are anxious to follow suit. However, the earth�s environment does not observe such free market principles. The load on the atmosphere is already too heavy to bear and nothing less than a reduction in this burden will suffice. If India and China, with the active connivance of the US, Australia, and South Korea, believe that they can take advantage of the global crisis by getting other countries to pay for their clean-up, they are making a grave mistake. The other climate treaty, which is wrongly touted as a huge success, is the Montreal Protocol on another greenhouse gas, chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. It will soon apply to developing countries, but who will pay the bill for the switch-over to non-CFC technologies for refrigeration, air-conditioning and the like? In 1990, when there was a major meeting in London to work out details of this treaty, China and India accounted for only 2 per cent of the CFC consumption. However, they need refrigeration for health and well-being and are now buying technologies from the very companies like DuPont which punctured the earth�s ozone layer by selling CFC-based appliances.

The Clean Development Mechanism is actually a short-sighted policy, because it now costs an average of only around US$ 3 per ton of carbon saved � for instance by planting trees in the South to absorb excess carbon dioxide emissions. However, as developing countries� energy consumption rises, they will eventually be forced to cut emissions too and the cost of doing so will rise several times. Where will these countries obtain the funds to do this without cutting down on the use of energy? The great danger is that these countries will sell out cheap in the near future, but pay a high price later on. Under the Montreal Protocol, a fund was created to pay developing countries to switch to CFC-free technologies but it was voluntary and will fall far short of the needs of these countries. A decade ago, India alone was estimated to require something of the order of $3 billion for such a switch-over.

Darryl d�Monte is the founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists. He is also the Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India (FEJI) and a columnist and freelance writer. He has published two books: Temples or Tombs? Industry versus Environment: Three Controversies (Center for Science & Environment, New Delhi, 1985), and Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002).

Source: This article first appeared on Islam Online (7 August, 2005).

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