MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Fedyashin) - The global United Nations conference on climate change finally began in Copenhagen today. It will be held from December 7 to December 18.
It is already clear what the conference will be like. It is enough to imagine hundreds of irritated scientists unable to agree on anything, overwrought presidents, prime ministers, ministers, experts and governments. Some of these governments are convinced that their countries will be flooded in 20 years, whereas others dismiss such predictions as paranoid.
The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be attended by envoys from 192 UN countries. Heads of state and prime ministers from the world's leading countries will also come to Copenhagen for a few days.
The conference was supposed to produce an agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Nevertheless, it does not matter much when the Kyoto Protocol expires; the United States refused to abide by the signed protocol, neither China nor India assumed any commitments to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane or other pollutants, and Japan signed the protocol but did not observe it.
The main difference between the anticipated Copenhagen agreement and the Kyoto Protocol is that the former would establish a fixed ceiling for global warming and outline measures to keep warming below that ceiling. The 124 countries that signed and comply with the Kyoto Protocol have already agreed that this limit should not exceed an average of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. In principle, almost all countries share this view. However, they are still unable to agree on specific measures to bring down the temperature by limiting the emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases.
Americans maintain that they have already agreed to an unprecedented commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by 2020, and the European Union has done the same. But the devil is in the details. America has taken the year 2005 as a starting point while Europe has taken 1990, which means that in real terms the United States will bring down its emissions only by 7% as compared to Europe.
Finally, participants in the Copenhagen conference are planning to consolidate the cap-and-trade legislation system under which the governments agree on the overall limit of global carbon dioxide emissions that will be released into the atmosphere and establish quotas for each country. The worst pollutants and the cleanest countries can trade their unexhausted quotas. For instance, Tuvalu or Fiji, which will never exhaust their quotas, can sell them to Germany or Britain, thereby entitling them to the right to release more industrial waste. This does not help to make the Earth cleaner.
It goes without saying that the Earth's "lungs" are very different from their human equivalents in their ability to preserve and clean themselves. Nevertheless, the principle is the same: the Earth should be given less to smoke, and then it will be able to do much on its own. To do this, Copenhagen must produce an agreement on the ways to do this, how much "medicine" is needed, what sort of "diet" should be followed, and how the planet should be purified of its pollution. The recovery was not supposed to begin before 2020. Only preparations for it are to be made, and Copenhagen was to become what the UN called "a mandatory stage" of this process. To use a pilots' expression, it was viewed as a "point of no return" - either take off or prepare for trouble.
However, Copenhagen is not likely to achieve much. James Hansen is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and was one of the first scientists to elaborate the theory of anthropogenic climate warming in the early 1980s. He is pessimistic about the Copenhagen conference: "What's being talked about for Copenhagen is a strengthening of Kyoto [protocol] approach, a cap and trade with offsets and escape hatches which will be guaranteed to fail in terms of getting the required rapid reduction in emissions." Hansen added that "[t]his is analogous to the indulgences that the Catholic Church sold in the Middle Ages. The bishops collected lots of money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement despite its absurdity. That is exactly what's happening."
In brief, Mr. Hansen's opinion is as follows: the governments are still refusing to acknowledge the main problem, notably that fossil fuels are the main source of the trouble. Their use must be reduced, countries should switch to alternative energy sources, including nuclear energy, and carbon emissions should be subject to heavy taxes. He thinks that instead of going to Copenhagen it would be worth taking a time-out for a year to elaborate at long last truly effective measures, or it will be too late. Mr. Hansen has decided to boycott the Copenhagen conference altogether.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
