All together to save the planet

21/11/1998

Scientists agree that global warming produced by pollution threatens the earth?s future. Last year at Kyoto and now at Buenos Aires, international conferences have hammered out agreements on the action to be taken. The former British environment secretary believes we need nothing less than a new world order. AT Buenos Aires last week we contemplated a small planet threatened by increasingly severe climate change. The basic plot is simple. Industrialisation and the internal combustion engine have conspired to release into the atmosphere of the Earth a collection of gases which scientists seem overwhelmingly convinced change the way the climate operates. These emissions have to be reduced. At the Kyoto conference the rich countries signed up to do that, and the Buenos Aires conference has now given us a timetable and a workplan to carry through that mould-breaking agreement.

Infuriatingly, the scientists have called it global warming, which for the British suggests a rather pleasant improvement in the weather. In fact the change is fundamentally more disruptive. The overall higher temperatures and reduced moisture are accompanied by much greater extremes in weather patterns. The kind of devastation we have seen this month in Central America can be expected to recur much more often than has been recorded before. Storms and temperatures which might be experienced once in 50 years will be seen twice or more in a decade. One monsoon in three may fail, while sea levels will rise significantly all over the world. So the issue is fundamental and global. If climate change is allowed to proceed without any attempt to contain it, the resulting weather patterns may well make life on the planet impossible. If we take effective action now, then we can keep the change within limits we can cope with.

All this makes demands upon us which are very hard to accept. We have to take action now to prevent a situation which we shall not live to see. This generation has to pay the cost of protecting the opportunities of our grandchildren?s children. Even though in our own lifetimes we are beginning to see the results of climate change, it will not be till well after we are dead that they become intolerable. There is therefore a degree of selflessness in what is demanded, which human beings have so far rarely displayed.

It is also true that effective action demands universality. No nation or group of nations can do it alone. This is a global problem which must have a global solution. It is here that the real crunch comes. We are very new at the business of international co-operation. With the end of empires, the rich nations assumed that the world would fall into a universal pattern of nation states. Over time, it was thought that those states would develop economically and politically with a certain amount of help and encouragement from their friends. Moral obligation combined with trading and political self-interest to produce international institutions, channelling aid and investment to emerging countries. Slowly, absolute poverty has begun to diminish, population growth to moderate, and some notable examples of development have been produced.

Yet in all this there has been no real change in the relationship between rich and poor. It is the rich who have decided the terms of aid, just as they decide the terms of trade. We who are the lenders fix the borrowing arrangements and the rates of interest. It is our institutions which insist upon client countries taking the economic and fiscal measures which we think will be good for them. Inevitably this is another kind of imperialism.

At Buenos Aires this week, the rich world caught a glimpse, perhaps its first glimpse, of a different world order. Here we were seeking a global solution in which every participant has something essential to offer, without doing favours to anyone. We are all in it together. As each subgroup of the conference met to debate individual parts of the agenda, they faced the same realisation. The industrialised nations may have caused the problem, and so should solve it, but they cannot solve anything on their own. Very soon China will produce more emissions than the United States. Without Chinese co-operation, even the most strenuous American action will be to no avail. Already India?s emissions are growing hugely faster than could possibly be countervailed by Britain?s commendably extensive programme of reductions. The rich are no longer in charge. They have to become the partners of the poor. That is a role we did not expect and do not relish.

Indeed, the week in Buenos Aires saw the signs of a real backlash. We have seen the Global Climate Coalition very much in evidence ? an American-based pressure group for industry which is neither global, nor interested in the climate, nor a coalition. These lobbyists reiterate their view that the science is as yet unproved and the solutions proposed will destroy the American economy. Their arguments do not stand up, of course, which may explain why two different spokesmen have now refused to continue broadcast discussions once I pointed to the real implication of this case. This view, and others like it, suggest that the whole system is unfairly weighted against the rich countries because the poor have yet to take on their commitments. Until they do, these apostles of laissez-faire say, the rich should do nothing. After all, it may never happen, technology will find a way, and in any case we will all be dead before it?s too awful. Theirs is the modern equivalent of Louis XV?s apr?s moi le d?luge. In their hearts they know it?s true but they can?t pay the price a solution demands. Le d?luge, as we have seen to our horror during the floods in Nicaragua and Honduras, is no longer the figurative term that it was for the French king.

The Government of the United States has not gone all the way to such perdition. It is increasingly worried about the economic effect of the global warming which American scientists first revealed. It has begun to understand that the degree of climate change will become intolerable unless it is prepared for a global system which will stabilise and then reduce the burden placed upon the atmosphere by the emissions of greenhouse gases. That is why the Americans have finally signed the Kyoto protocol, albeit with reservations which are untenable. They are right that the system has to be flexible if it is to work and that we therefore need a kind of market where the right to emit can be traded: those whose emissions fell below the level allowed would then be able to sell these rights to those who would exceed their quota. The trouble is that such a system cannot be open-ended, as the Americans would like. The total emissions for the world must be fixed and each individual nation must have a ceiling for its share. Only then can we stop fraud and only then can we ensure that total emissions will begin to reduce. The United States does not want to be forced to take action at home; it would like to buy its way out of the whole problem by taking up the rights of others and paying for the privilege.

There?s the rub. If emission rights are to be shared out, then there must be a degree of justice in the sharing. The United States cannot expect for ever to take a quarter of the world?s emission capacity when it has but 4 per cent of its people. As a beginning it can supplement domestic measures to improve its efficiency by buying the rights (or credits) to emit gas from nations which are not using up their allocation. It cannot, however, refuse to make at least the majority of savings at home, as demanded by the treaty. In any case over time it will no longer be possible to buy emission rights in the same way, because the nations which have previously been ready to sell them will develop and want to use their allocation for themselves. The increasing price at which these rights are traded will force the rich nations to find ways both to reduce their own emissions and to help poorer countries to reduce theirs. For the first time, the rich will have to see the poor as equals. The common battle demands partnership, not domination.

It is this dawning realisation which has been at the heart of the difficulties encountered by the Buenos Aires conference. For a long time liberal opinion has paid lip-service to the philosophic concept of the brotherhood of man. Suddenly it is no longer merely a concept but an objective necessity. The economic basis upon which the rich have assumed their right to rule is threatened. The threat can only be lifted if the poor are truly made inheritors of the earth. That is very hard for the rich to stomach, indeed it is perhaps easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle; but after Buenos Aires we are committed to negotiate that difficult route.