No deal

Senator Loren Legarda issued a direct challenge to US President Barack Obama: walk the talk.

That, more or less, sums up the sentiments of developing countries on the issue of climate change. For years, the rest of the world watched in dismay as American politicians talked extensively about the perils posed by global warming — but failed to throw in the weight of US government policy behind the international effort to drastically reduce carbon emissions.

The US has stayed out of the Kyoto Protocol, the pioneering global agreement that establishes a cap-and-trade mechanism that penalizes countries that overshoot their carbon emission headroom while rewarding developing countries who make headway in developing renewable energy sources. In the US, climate change is still a contested issue, with powerful lobbies arguing against the science that claims that carbon emissions are causing the globe to warm.

In her speech before the parliamentary session of the Copenhagen global summit on climate change, Legarda introduced the concept of “climate justice” to describe the preferred social dynamic in the face of changing atmospheric conditions. Climate change harms the island economies more than the mainland ones, the poor countries more than the richer ones, the more marginalized social sectors more than those in the mainstream and women more than men.

Any effort to address the challenges of climate change, she says, ought to address the inequality in the distribution of the costs. Developed countries ought to pay the bigger price than developing countries. The poor must be protected and the effort to reduce poverty must not be impaired in addressing climate change.

What Loren calls “climate justice” is a tough sell, however.

The US and China account for fully 40% of the world’s carbon emissions. On a per capita basis, the US far exceeds China as the world’s most intensive polluter country. But it has been tough to pass carbon emission control legislation in Washington.

China, for its part, describes itself as a “developing country” and the continued expansion of her economy (with the equivalent increase in carbon emissions) is indispensable to addressing its own fight against poverty. She would not agree to be part of any international arrangement that would enforce caps on her carbon emissions.

Poor countries with vast tropical forests such as Brazil or mainland Southeast Asia expect to be compensated for maintaining their oxygen-generating woodlands. On the other hand, rich countries such as those in the European Union are offering, within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol, to pay for keeping their present volume of carbon emissions. The net consequence is the maintenance of existing carbon emission levels that could hit tipping points very soon, precipitating grave ecological consequences.

Under great pressure to come up with something workable, even as his own legislature has been hesitant to back up emission control policies, President Obama organized a smaller meeting with China, South Africa, India and Brazil. The four populous countries have also been posting significant economic growth rates that imply substantial increases in carbon emissions.

That smaller group of countries arrived at an agreement to voluntarily control emission levels. That agreement was subsequently adopted by the larger conference, with the understanding that there would be a follow-up meeting in 2010.

More militant ecological activists have voiced disappointment over the outcome of the Copenhagen meeting. They wanted reductions in carbon emissions supervised by an international mechanism that enforces compliance among all countries. Such a mechanism is, at the moment, diplomatically impossible.

The non-deal emanating from the Copenhagen summit disappointed most people expecting an agreement to actually reduce global emission pushing us inexorably towards the potentially disastrous warming of the earth’s atmosphere. However, anything more than an unenforceable communiqué simply could not be achieved.

Even if an enforcement mechanism to curtail carbon emissions was achieved at the Copenhagen summit, it might ultimately mean very little. The track taken by the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen communiqué will not likely cap global carbon emissions. That track will, at best, slow the increase in carbon emissions in the face of the rapid development of heavily populated emerging economies.

I was impressed by the highly skeptical ideas of Nathan Myhrvold which he outlined in Fareed Zakaria’s most intelligent talk show in CNN. Myhrvold, we all know, is one of the brightest minds in modern science, a prodigy who entered college at age 14, completed a doctorate at age 22 and studied with Stephen Hawkins.

Myhrvold tells us that much of the carbon dioxide already emitted will stay in the upper atmosphere for thousands of years. Nothing we do in our lifetime will reverse that. The rise of billions of human beings from poverty in the next few years will inevitably add to the carbon already in the stratosphere.

Myhrvold is not impressed by the neo-Puritan discourse characterizing present carbon mitigation efforts: that we live more simply, use less and control our wastes. That is well and good, he says, but will amount to nothing to reverse global warming.

Instead, the scientist proposes a bold effort at “geo-engineering” — the large-scale manipulation of the earth’s environment. He proposes to counteract the greenhouse effects of an irreversibly polluted atmosphere by injecting a large amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This will diffuse heat from the sun and mitigate the greenhouse effect.

That might sound like a crazy project to undertake, although Myhrvold insists it will cost only a fraction of the expense we anticipate using the Kyoto approach. Crazy as that idea might sound to some, it is also testimony to the extreme desperation we find ourselves in given the unalterable facts of global warming.