The Copenhagen Fraud

The year 2009 seems to have ended with one of the greatest frauds that the comity of nations has wrought on Planet Earth. Never before had the world come across a gathering of its nations that applauded itself for having been able to dodge a legally binding covenant in order to cobble an agreement that frees everyone from being legally bound to any commitment on the ecology. In other words, the United Nations Climate Change Conference of Copenhagen held at the end of the year 2009 was an international conference that legitimized a collective fraud on Planet Earth neatly cloaked in pious sentiments. In the ultimate analysis, we have two ‘noteworthy’ achievements of the Copenhagen summit on climate change. One is the ability of the advanced industrial nations to go on living as they have done, to go on polluting the world and to hasten the process of global warming and yet to wriggle out of any legally binding commitments like the Kyoto Protocol that could put a damper on such pleasant activities. The other is to pretend that they got together because they were concerned with what is happening to the world and also to ensure that the Copenhagen summit did not end in what could be seen as failure.

And yet, what is it that is clearly visible through the smokescreen that the industrially developed nations sought to create? First, that the industrially developed nations actually regret now that they were signatories to something like the Kyoto Protocol that was a legally binding treaty to take concrete steps to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). But the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Action Plan are all legally binding covenants. The industrialized nations were nowhere near fulfilling the targets of their commitments under these three instruments with time fast running out. Therefore, something that was not legally binding, something that was entirely toothless was needed to wriggle out of the three earlier commitments. And what does this Copenhagen accord commit the industrialized nations to do? It merely commits them to inform the UNFCCC secretariat by January 31 the extent to which they will cut their GHG emissions by the year 2012! This might, in fact, be quite less than what was committed under the Kyoto Protocol or the Bali Action Plan. And that is precisely the advantage of having the toothless Copenhagen agreement. It lets them wriggle out of what is being considered as hasty earlier commitments. Secondly, the Copenhagen accord permits the culpable industrialized nations to preach sermons to rapidly developing nations that their future GHG emissions are going to be just too bad (even though they are less than the present emissions of countries like the United States and several European countries). In other words, the industrially developed countries are far more concerned today with what future GHG emission levels of developing countries are going to be rather than being concerned about the existing levels of emission. This enables a country like the United States (consuming 25 per cent of the world’s fossil fuels even though it has only five per cent of the world’s population) to find fault with what India’s emission levels will be after 2025 rather than worrying about what its own GHG emissions are at present. Thirdly, the industrially developed countries refused to take note of the fact that the increased GHG emissions are giving rise to a three-per cent rise in world temperature when a consortium of over 2,500 scientists all over the world have said that any rise above two per cent would have “unforeseen and catastrophic” consequences. Nobody in the First World seems to be in the mood for any kind of sacrifice in creature comforts and consumerism even if our planet becomes an unlivable place in the next 50 or 100 years. According to them, all sacrifices must come from the developing countries. And this is the kind of accord over which there has been such a lot of back-slapping merely because the developed countries have managed to keep the developing countries in their places while maintaining their own style of living that is criminally ostentatious and wasteful for a planet that they have pushed to terminal illness. The Copenhagen accord merely seeks to legitimize all that is perverse in ecology management and is no more than a fraud designed to perpetuate the hegemony of North America and Europe. THE SENTINEL