Despite the warm words of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Tuesday’s climate summit in New York demonstrated negotiators still have a mountain to climb if they are to hammer out a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol in time for the key Copenhagen meeting in December.
If the multinational struggle to control climate emissions is viewed as a war, then interesting new lights are thrown on some of the issues. For a start, as in so many wars, the very cause around which polluters, great and small, are supposed to be uniting is itself in dispute. There is still a body of opinion that believes it is naturally occurring climatic change that is the enemy, with man-made pollution at worst only making a marginal contribution. The dominant strategy, however, is that even if this is in any way true, nations cannot continue fouling the planet. Moreover if the gain-sayers are wrong, the atmospheric changes taking place now will be irreversible.
The allies also view each others objectives with the deepest suspicion. China and India, the emerging economic giants, believe that the West in general and the United States in particular are using the pollution control issue to prolong, for as long as possible, their own economic hegemony. They see the US Congress as the voice of US big business. If legislators vote down a Copenhagen deal the same way they did Kyoto, the tiger economies will with justice suspect treachery.
They also point out all too accurately that it was the industrial activity of the West that unleashed the first waves of pollution that are now being swelled as emerging economies also seek their own economic prosperity. Therefore although the newcomers have become entangled in the struggle against increased pollution, it was not originally a war of their own making.
It is clear, therefore, that even if real agreement is achieved at Copenhagen, the implementation of the deal will be bitty. There seems to be no single coordinated multinational advance that is going to sweep all greenhouse gas emissions before it.
But the war metaphor does not throw up an entirely negative batch of insights. There is one important exception. Modern wars have driven technological developments because governments have been prepared to throw whatever sums it takes to produce conflict-winning weaponry. China and the US are the two worst polluters together responsible for fully 40 percent of carbon emissions. China has a vast demand for growth and trillions of US dollars in reserves. America has a substantial technological base and a bruised and battered financial system.
In the single area of carbon capture, these two nations could do big business together. China provides the funding. America provides the new breakthrough carbon capture weapons and both countries buy the product to clean up their own environmental acts.
Better still, the solutions they finance and build together are available to the rest of the world — at a profit to those countries who can afford them, at cost or less to those who cannot. Such an alliance could surely be a war-winning combination.
