[Rantman] * Don't be fooled by Durban - it was a failure - Gwynne Dyer

[rPauli]

Gwynne Dyer is a highly respected military historian and writer.   He is
the author of "War" and "Climate Wars"
He makes a strong, thoughtful statement that the Durban climate talks
were little more than a perfunctory negotiation having no positive
effect on climate.     - rp



  Suicide pact at Durban

BY GWYNNE DYER
 Published Dec 14, 2011

A plan to save the planet for the future of our children and
grandchildren? Don't be fooled. It was an almost total failure.


The Durban climate summit that ended on Sunday has been proclaimed a
great success. The chair, South Africa's international relations
minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, told the delegates: "We have concluded
this meeting with [a plan] to save one planet for the future of our
children and our grandchildren to come. We have made history." Don't be
fooled. It was an almost total failure.

This time, the rapidly developing country that put up the greatest
resistance to a binding global deal was India. (In 2009 and 2010, it was
China.) The chief Indian delegate, Jayanthi Natarajan, held out against
any legally enforceable treaty through three long days of non-stop,
overtime negotiations. In the end, she agreed that an eventual deal
would have "legal force"---but it would not be "legally binding."

Lawyers get rich arguing over the difference between phrases like these,
but that is for the future. The question now is: given what the Indian
government already knows, how could it possibly have taken that position?

Three years ago, while I was interviewing the director of a think tank
in New Delhi, she suddenly dropped a bomb into the conversation. Her
institute had been asked by the World Bank to figure out how much food
production India would lose when the average global temperature was two
degrees Celsius higher, she said---and the answer was 25 percent.

This study, like similar ones that the bank commissioned in other major
countries, has never been published, presumably because the governments
of those countries put huge pressure on the bank to keep the numbers
secret. But the Indian government undoubtedly knows the truth.

A 25 percent loss of food production would be an almost measureless
calamity for India. It now produces just enough food to feed its 1.1
billion people. If the population rises by the forecast quarter-billion
in the next 20 years, and meanwhile its food production falls by 25
percent due to global warming, half a billion Indians will starve.

India will not be able to buy its way out of the crisis by importing
food, because many other countries will be experiencing similar falls in
production at the same time, and the price of the limited amount of
grain still reaching the international market will be prohibitive. So
India should be moving heaven and earth to stop the average global
temperature from going up two degrees Celsius. But it isn't.

Like almost every other country, India has signed a declaration that the
warming must never exceed two degrees, but in practice the government
acts as though it had all the time in the world. Maybe it just can't
visualize a future in which those numbers become the reality. Or maybe
it is just too attached to the principle that the "old rich" countries
must pay for the damage they have done.

That's a perfectly reasonable argument in terms of historical justice,
for the old rich countries emitted around 80 percent of the greenhouse
gases of human origin that are now in the atmosphere. But if only those
countries act promptly, then the average global temperature soars
through more than two degrees Celsius and Indians start to starve.

Most developed countries do not face similar losses in food production
if the planet gets two degrees warmer, for they are farther away from
the equator. Their position is merely selfish and short-sighted; India's
is suicidal.

Over the past 15 years of climate negotiations there has been a steady
decline in the seriousness of the response. The Kyoto Protocol in 1997
committed the developed countries to stabilize their emissions and then
cut them by an average of six percent by 2012. Developing countries were
exempt from any controls, because they were not then emitting very much.
And deeper emission cuts would come in a second phase of Kyoto,
beginning in 2012.

Based on what we knew then, it was a cautious but rational response. In
the meantime, however, developing country emissions have grown so fast
that China now produces much more greenhouse gas than the United States.
Global emissions are not in decline, as they should be. Last year,
they /grew/ by six percent. So what was the response at Durban? The 1997
Kyoto targets for the developed countries will be maintained for another
five years (with no further cuts), and developing countries will still
not accept any legal restraints on their emissions. Then everyone will
sign a more ambitious deal (still to be negotiated) by 2015---and the
new targets, whatever they are, will acquire "legal force," whatever
that means, by 2020.

By that time, annual global emissions will probably be at least twice
what they were when the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997---and the
two-degree barrier will probably be visible only in the rear-view
mirror. The outcome at Durban could have been even worse---a complete
abandonment of the concept of legal obligations to restrict
emissions---but it was very, very bad.

/Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries. He writes a weekly column for the print
edition of /Embassy.



http://embassymag.ca/dailyupdate/printpage/171

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