Liang Dingzi, Today Online 9 Nov 07;
Will it be all talk and no action when leaders meet in Dec to discuss a new agreement?
CONCERNS about climate change run like a bullet train without a destination — the only known certainty being the world's destruction if its denizens do not do something soon to substantially curb carbon emissions.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said a breakthrough was needed. It is an understatement of the failure so far to hammer out a framework for action.
Mr Ban exhorted: "The time for doubt has passed. What we do not have is time. The time for action is now."
Offering a way forward is the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which posits that the growth in greenhouse gas emissions can be curbed at reasonable cost. Its recommendations include boosting renewable energy, reducing deforestation and improving energy efficiency.
Mr Martin Parry, who co-chairs the working group, said: "The real secret is that governments buy in. Otherwise, it would be just another report."
Unfortunately, the movement to sustain a collective global effort to save the Earth continues to languish in limbo.
Political leaders meet frequently across the globe — from Hamburg to Bali and from Sydney to New York — to discuss the issue. Some of these dialogues have been hailed as successes, only because the leaders have agreed to disagree, condescended to accept in principle non-binding aspirational targets of reducing energy intensity and would meet again.
The problem of climate change presents inconvenient truths — to borrow former United States Vice-President Al Gore's catchphrase — that the world must first recognise and overcome.
The first inconvenient truth lies in our remoteness, in time and geography, from an impending problem. Take, for example, the discovery by scientists last year of an enormous ice shelf that had broken off an island in the Canadian Arctic — yet another sign of global warming.
The warning was of potential disaster should it continue to drift into oil-drilling regions and shipping lanes, yet it remains a subject of remote interest to the vast majority of humankind.
Any potential disaster arising from the Arctic sea ice shrinking is too far off in time to be of concern to most. The last significant ice-drift of the same scale occurred 25 years ago.
Perhaps, there is more immediacy in the constant threats of tropical storms and the havoc wreaked by floods in every habitable continent. But the marvel of the human psyche is the capacity to accommodate adversities and live with the inevitable. And that's the second inconvenient truth.
The third is that nobody owns the Earth, nor is anybody his brother's keeper. Rich nations do not see why they should commit to targets that are not as binding on poorer and emerging economies, particularly when the latter are said to be the major culprits of global pollution.
Clearly, it is an insurmountable equity problem, simply because the world's resources are never equally distributed and every nation's economic progress differs vastly. Indeed, it has become a matter of expedience for rich nations to blame their poorer cousins for not accepting matching efforts.
Ironically, a proposal by a senior UN official to address this problem — whereby rich nations should be absolved from the need to cut carbon emissions if they pay developing countries to do it on their behalf — will only heighten, if not promote, this inequitable state of affairs.
This means rich nations would be able to buy their way out of their responsibilities. Naturally, this controversial suggestion by Mr Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has angered environmental groups.
Mr de Boer may be right that the atmosphere does not care where emissions are reduced as long as they are reduced, but it only affirms yet another inconvenient truth: That, in the end, money is muscle.
So it is with the many carbon-offsetting programmes that are beginning to gain popularity. For example, if you enjoy a jet-setting lifestyle, contribute towards growing a tree somewhere.
All this culminates in the ultimate inconvenient truth that we live in an imperfect world.
Environmental groups have argued that climate change will not be solved unless both rich and poor nations together cut emissions of carbon and other hazardous gases. Yes, but if it must be by equal doses for all, as the rich nations insist, the ideal would be a nigh impossible one.
Omission is a greater sin. Rich nations can help poorer ones reduce their carbon footprints, instead of waiting for them to match their efforts. Unless we recognise that some self-interest may have to be sacrificed for the global good, the world will continue to ride the bullet train to disaster.
We remain hopeful that when world leaders meet in Bali in December — to work out a new international agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol — it will not be another haggling session without the commitment to act.
The writer is a management consultant with over 25 years' experience driving customer service programmes.
