Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 3 Apr 08;
IN BANGKOK - PENANG-BASED Meenakshi Raman has been talking about global warming since the run-up to the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992.
Once regarded as the alarmist concerns of a few offbeat scientists and unwashed greenies, global warming is now accepted as a civilisation-scale challenge.
But that is often cold comfort for environmental activists such as Ms Raman, honorary secretary of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Friends of the Earth Malaysia.
This is because accepting the reality of global warming is about the only thing common to the vast array of characters on and around the stage of negotiating forums like this week's in Bangkok.
The five-day United Nations (UN) conference on climate change in Bangkok is supposed to take forward a road map agreed upon at last December's often acrimonious Bali meeting.
The eventual aim is an accord on cutting emissions beyond the Kyoto Protocol on reduction of greenhouse gases, which runs out in 2012.
The Bangkok meeting, with more than 1,000 delegates from 163 countries, is essentially a discussion on what to discuss - and in what order.
Bigger battles are in store at later meetings this year, and in Copenhagen next year when post-Kyoto commitments are supposed to be agreed.
'We have just 11/2 years to complete negotiations on what will probably be one of the most complex international agreements history has ever seen,' Mr Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said on the eve of the Bangkok meeting.
At the bottom of the complexity lies the pain - and politics - of change.
Environmental activists, who are largely limited to lobbying government delegates at the meeting, by and large advocate embracing change.
In this they are supported by developing countries which cite the fact that it is the world's richest nations that have contributed the most so far to carbon dioxide - CO2, the main driver of global warming - in the atmosphere.
But others, like some industry lobbies and the United States, want to avoid pain. Hence attempts to get around the problem instead of tackling its roots.
The defence of the status quo is not unique to rich countries, however. Society remains locked in a production- and consumption-centred economic model, which relies on cheap energy.
Take cars, for example. Rather than reduce the critical role of cars in our society, governments and the private sector have, in effect, put the car industry and current lifestyles on life support by developing biofuels to 'feed' cars.
But experts say the switch from growing food crops to biofuel crops is now one of the drivers of a rise in the price of grains and cereals.
At one end of the debate are people like Ms Raman, who argue that the climate crisis is a symptom of a larger disorder characterised by, among other things, over-consumption and the excessive use of fossil fuels.
In a discussion on Monday at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand, she said: 'I am afraid many people still don't get it. We can't carry on with business as usual; we need to change.'
At the other end of the spectrum are the likes of Melbourne-based Alan Oxley, a former Australian ambassador who champions market solutions and chairs an NGO called World Growth.
He denies his reputation as a climate change sceptic, yet spent much of a meeting with the media in Bangkok on Tuesday belittling the logic of British economist Nicholas Stern's 2006 report on the potential economic impact of climate change.
The Stern report is regarded as a seminal piece of work, as it was the first time a mainstream economist took the issue on board.
The irony is that both Ms Raman and Mr Oxley agree that growth is necessary.
It is in the growth pathway that their positions are fundamentally miles apart, reflecting a polarisation in the larger debate which threatens to delay changes that are required to avert worst-case global warming.
Mr Oxley recommends gradual change, with broad goals allowing each country to take its own decisions.
That would allow developing countries to keep growing so that they can lift the poor 'bottom billion' of the world out of poverty.
His critics would call it a clever tactic to cite the politically correct goal of Third World poverty alleviation as a cover for business as usual.
But he maintains that unrealistic goals would doom Kyoto and its successor to failure.
NGO Third World Network's Martin Khor, also Penang-based, speaking at the same forum as Ms Raman, took a position that acknowledged the extremes.
'We want to have growth continuing, but in a different way,' he said.
'For that to happen, we have to change many things - technology, energy systems, transportation, industry. We need a financial, technological, macro-economic and development-planning revolution that the world has never seen before, in a very short period of time.'
Many tough decisions are needed, by both developed northern countries and the developing south.
Mr Khor said: 'Countries like Germany and the US have the technology to be able to turn around the way they do things with minimal suffering, but developing countries don't.
'We have to cut our emissions but we face a major development crisis in how to manage this, and a crisis in relations between North and South, as to who is going to bear the cost.'
