Sabotaged Climate Talks

It is saddening to think that the Copenhagen climate summit should have failed so miserably mainly as a consequence of the avarice and intransigence of the wealthiest industrial nations of the world. It is even more saddening to think that there should be such callous lack of concern for the extent of greenhouse gas and carbon emissions threatening the future of the only habitable planet that we have. In the final analysis, the most advanced industrial nations of the world, the worst culprits in polluting the world, ganged up at the Copenhagen climate summit to bully the developing countries into rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and the 2007 Bali Action Plan and permitting the rich industrial countries to go on polluting the planet according to their will, while the developing countries had to accept impossible emission reduction targets to ensure that they would never become developed countries. The comity of nations had countenanced this bizarre double standard for far too long. But at the Copenhagen climate summit they all put down their collective foot down to tell the advanced nations that enough was enough. And perhaps the coming together of India and China and the support that the G77 received from China was the deciding factor in frustrating the attempts of the developed countries to jettison the Kyoto Protocol. The spirited resistance of the G77 and China brought out the worst in the coterie of developed countries. The draft Copenhagen Accord unveiled by Denmark, the host of the summit, on Thursday night was (as expected) full of landmines for developing countries and became a major obstacle when the Danes initiated talks among a select group of countries to cobble some kind of an agreement on the draft political agreement that the heads of states were expected to adopt.

The failure of the Copenhagen summit can be traced to three facts of singular injustice. The first is that the rich industrialized countries presume some kind of a divine right to pollute the world as much as they please while expecting the rest of the developing countries to exercise restraint and accept cuts in the extent of their greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, they refuse to compensate the world in any way for their grossly unjust acts of pollution. Thirdly, and most importantly perhaps, they are determined to junk earlier agreements to which they were parties merely because they have failed to honour their past commitments and because they have no desire to honour commitments that would even marginally affect their lifestyles or call for the very minimum in sacrifices. It does not seem to matter to these countries that in deciding to pursue such a perverse course of action, they are also guilty of contravening even the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Bali Action Plan, thereby forcing commitments that they themselves will not honour as well as scrutiny provisions on countries like India. For all the friendship that US President Barack Obama professes for India, he stuck to the target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from the 2005 levels. This works out to three to four per cent against 1990, compared to a European Union target of 20 per cent.

The bottom line is that the Copenhagen climate summit did not fail. It was sabotaged by the rich industrial nations that seem to believe that their standard of living (and not the quality of life of all mankind) takes precedence over everything else and that they have been given some divine right to destroy this planet if they so desire. THE SENTINEL