A sudden whiff of optimism amid the CO2 in the air

Charles Clover

The circus is coming. Seventy days to go and already all the hotel rooms in Copenhagen are taken for December’s climate change conference. People are even planning to stay in Malmo, Sweden, and travel in by train. The conference organisers are wondering how they can handle a record 540 applications for side events. Meanwhile, the world’s airlines’ fuel use is about to revert to pre-recession levels to get thousands of delegates to the festivities — which are, ironically, all about cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
It seems an apt time to consider what progress the human race is making towards safeguarding its habitat from dangerous changes brought on by its own activities. Between the signing of the United Nations climate treaty by George Bush Sr in 1992 and Copenhagen, many lungfuls of hot air have been expended on the need to tackle climate change. The reality is, as Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, put it last week: “The world’s glaciers are melting faster than human progress to protect them — or us.”
If you were a cynic, you would conclude that the best efforts of politicians to date have been far too little to avert degradation of the planet. Although rivers, nationally, can improve, as we saw from an Environment Agency report last week, when it comes to the global commons — the air, the seas and often the forests, which aren’t really owned by anyone — there always seems to be a reason to back the vested interests while claiming to be doing the green thing.
Last week’s most galling example of green cynicism was offered by Nicolas Sarkozy, who told us in July he could not stand by and allow Europe’s most endangered fish, the bluefin tuna, to become extinct. Yet last Monday France sided with the European Union’s Mediterranean nations and blocked a ban on the tuna trade. Sarkozy’s volte-face seems uniquely snake-like because it happened so soon after the president had promised the opposite. But one should not forget other brazen examples of duplicity. A prime one is our own government’s admission that it could not meet its manifesto commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2010, because the steps it would have to take might damage its chances of re-election.
Cynicism in politics is contagious and has haunted climate politics since the United States repudiated the Kyoto climate treaty in 2001. But optimism can be contagious, too, and this looks like the best time for optimism for at least a decade. The statement by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, that China will curb the growth in its emissions could be the first sign that the tectonic plates of the post-Kyoto political world are shifting.
Because China is a developing country, Hu only has to promise to curb the rate of growth of carbon emissions, rather than cut the existing total, to be seen as a player in these negotiations. Those are the rules and that is what he has done. The United States has always tied its participation in a climate treaty to parallel action by its competitors, the Chinese. The good news is that now, at last, the conditions under which America could sign a post-Kyoto treaty are being met.
Other encouraging signs are the number of senior people who are going to Copenhagen. Tony Blair stayed at home and sent John Prescott to Kyoto. Bill Clinton did the same, dispatching Al Gore. But this December Gordon Brown is booked to go to Copenhagen and while Barack Obama hasn’t yet mentioned attendance, at least that means there is a chance he will be there. Even more encouragingly, Obama’s negotiators are up to speed with a complex plot, when many feared they would not be.
Another reason for hoping there might be a sensible outcome at Copenhagen is that an astonishing level of consensus exists across the world on the structure of a long-overdue agreement to avert the destruction of the tropical forests. If the United States enters the global carbon trading system in Copenhagen, there will be massive sums of money available to buy up areas of forest to prevent deforestation. Just imagine what would happen if every company in the US economy had to buy carbon credits on a global market as a matter of course. That’s some pot of money.
Could the world be slouching towards a time when its politicians will no longer be cynics over saving the environment? Certainly there is still a way to go. The proposed cuts in emissions thought possible in Copenhagen are way below the levels needed to prevent a “dangerous” 2C rise in global temperature.
If a global deal was done, who knows what might happen? All sorts of breakthroughs, technological and financial, would ensue. What matters most at Copenhagen is the inclusion once again of the United States in a global effort to tackle climate change — and it is there to be grasped. If that were to happen, we could all afford to be a little more optimistic.