When Prince William, David Cameron and David Beckham turned up in Zurich to push the UK?s Fifa 2018 bid, only to embarrassedly fail, critics said this would not have happened if only they had paid heed to the press. Well, Cameron heeded the press over Canc?n. As did Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Hu Jintao, Manmohan Singh, Naoto Kan, Nicholas Sarkozy et al. None of these august leaders bothered to turn up at a forum that had been forecast to be an even bigger failure than Copenhagen. Indeed, the omens had been rightly read.
The EU?s top climate negotiator Connie Hedegaard warned, ?If we do not get things done here in Canc?n, …I think multilateralism has a problem.? Well, this is no longer conjecture but certainty, with a really long tail. Think the 1992 Kyoto Protocol. What kept the Americans from climbing abroad back then was their resistance to the idea of a treaty that imposed strict emissions cutbacks on the rich but let developing countries go scot-free. Even when riding an economic boom in the following years, the US refused to compromise. George Bush took a lot of flak for that but even Barack Obama (admittedly under electoral constraints) hasn?t been able to shift a stance that Ronald Reagan took back in 1981, which was actually already in place at the 1972 UN environment conference in Stockholm.
In 1992, the US was the unequivocal bad boy as it was the world?s biggest polluter by a wide margin. The developed bloc was emitting up to three-quarters of the world?s CO2. By contrast, today, developing countries? emissions look set to shoot ahead by 2030. Those of China, Russia and India are already growing faster than those of the US. It?s this changed reality that Jairam Ramesh has been rightly referencing. Historically differentiated responsibilities sound fair, but untrammelled emissions by Indians and Chinese don?t. Ramesh, therefore, made a constructive contribution to getting a Canc?n Accord through. This document promises to keep talks of extending the Kyoto Protocol alive instead of unceremoniously shelving it. Given that countries like Bolivia (one of the few whose leaders have bothered to turn up at Canc?n) are still insisting on developed countries going the extra mile, this is an appreciable accomplishment.
Yet, no one claim that the Canc?n Accord is a global game-changer. While die-hard optimists may have hoped otherwise, the world now appears to have been resolutely abandoned to the mercies of bilateral and case-by-case pacts. Think about the home of Absolute Vodka. In Kristianstad, Sweden, people have managed to completely reverse how they get their heat. With a lot of energy now being generated from potato peels, manure et al, the city?s CO2 emissions have been reduced by one-quarter in the last decade. In another notable instance, the Nissan Leaf has come forward with almost non-existent tailpipe emissions as well as the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon mileage. The ?can be done? universe on mitigating climate change is expanding on an almost daily basis.
Still, there is little to counteract the allegations that Canc?n has been anything other than a ?zombie conference?. By contrast, consider the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. The US led from the front in that instance, a position that no country can claim today. The goals were limited but realisable. Compensations and technologies given over to developing countries more than made the grade. Similar success looks remote today, which is not to say that the world will not end up paying a cost for its obdurateness.
Between the Ice Age and pre-industrial times, global mean temperature rose by about 6?C. By contrast, the world warmed by about 0.7?C in the 20th century alone. The new millennium?s climate negotiations have popularised the goal of keeping the world within a 2?C radius of pre-industrial times. Without binding commitments to this goal, it is predicted (by IEA among others) that the world will warm by 3.5?C by 2100. While Canc?n has predictably failed to deliver such commitments, 2010 is on pace to become the warmest year on record. WMO says the Saharan/Arabian, East African, Central Asian and Greenland/Arctic Canada sub-regions have all had 2001-10 temperatures 0.7?C to 0.9?C warmer than in any previous decade (thus exceeding a century’s worth of average global rise). This year alone, global warming has been linked to extreme weather events ranging from the Pakistan floods that displaced around 20m people and the record-breaking heatwave that destroyed 26% of Russia?s wheat crop. So, while policymakers stay too stuck in their national camps to really move any global agreement forward, the climate change spiral keeps gaining strength, keeping pace with man?s actions rather than collective inactions.
renuka.bisht@expressindia.com
