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The agreement on climate change reached at Heiligendamm
by the G8 leaders merely sets the stage for the real debate to come:
how will we divide up the diminishing capacity of the atmosphere to
absorb our greenhouse gases?
The G8 leaders agreed to seek
“substantial” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and to give
“serious consideration” to the goal of halving such emissions by
2050—an outcome hailed as a triumph by German Chancellor Angela
Merkel and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Yet the agreement
commits no one to any specific targets, least of all the United
States, whose president, George W. Bush, who will no longer be in
office in 2009, when the tough decisions have to be made.
One could reasonably ask why
anyone thinks such a vague agreement is any kind of advance at all.
At the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 189 countries, including the US, China,
India and all the European nations, signed the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, thereby agreeing to stabilize
greenhouse gases “at a low enough level to prevent dangerous
anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
Fifteen years later, no country
has done that. US per-capita greenhouse gas emissions, already the
highest of any major nation when Bush took office, have continued to
rise. In March, a leaked Bush administration report showed that US
emissions were expected to rise almost as fast over the next decade
as they did during the previous decade. Now we have yet another
agreement to do what these same nations said they would do 15 years
ago. That’s a triumph?
If Bush or his successor wants to
ensure that the next round of talks fails, that will be easy enough.
In justifying his refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, Bush has
always referred to the fact that it did not commit China and India
to mandatory emission limits. Now, in response to suggestions by
Bush and other G8 leaders that the larger developing nations must be
part of the solution to climate change, Ma Kai, the head of
China’s National Development and Reform Commission, has said that
China will not commit to any quantified emissions reduction targets.
Likewise, India’s foreign minister, Navtej Sarna, has said that
his country would reject such mandatory restrictions.
Are China and India being
unreasonable? Their leaders have consistently pointed out that our
current problems are the result of the gases emitted by the
industrialized nations over the past century. That is true: most of
those gases are still in the atmosphere, and without them the
problem would not be nearly as urgent as it now is. China and India
claim the right to proceed with industrialization and development as
the developed nations did, unhampered by limits on their greenhouse
gas emissions.
China, India and other developing
nations, have a point—or rather, three points. First, if we apply
the principle “You broke it, you fix it,” then the developed
nations have to take responsibility for our “broken” atmosphere,
which can no longer absorb more greenhouse gases without the
world’s climate changing. Second, even if we wipe the slate clean
and forget about who caused the problem, it remains true that the
typical US resident is responsible for about six times more
greenhouse gas emissions than the typical Chinese, and as much as 18
times more than the average Indian. Third, the richer nations are
better able than less well-off nations to absorb the costs of fixing
the problem without causing serious harm to their populations.
But it is also true that if China
and India continue to increase their output of greenhouse gases,
they will eventually undo all the good that would be achieved by
deep emissions cuts in the industrialized nations. This year or
next, China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest greenhouse
gas emitter—on a national, rather than a per capita basis, of
course. In 25 years, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at
the International Energy Agency, China’s emissions could be double
those of the US, Europe and Japan combined.
But there is a solution that
is both fair and practical:
Establish the total amount of
greenhouse gases that we can allow to be emitted without causing the
earth’s average temperature to rise more than two degrees Celsius
(3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the point beyond which climate change
could become extremely dangerous.
Divide that total by the
world’s population, thus calculating what each person’s share of
the total is.
Allocate to each country a
greenhouse gas emissions quota equal to the country’s population,
multiplied by the per person share.
Finally, allow countries that
need a higher quota to buy it from those that emit less than their
quota.
The fairness of giving every
person on earth an equal share of the atmosphere’s capacity to
absorb our greenhouse gas emissions is difficult to deny. Why should
anyone have a greater entitlement than others to use the earth’s
atmosphere?
But, in addition to being fair,
this scheme also has practical benefits. It would give developing
nations a strong incentive to accept mandatory quotas, because if
they can keep their per capita emissions low, they will have excess
emissions rights to sell to the industrialized nations. The rich
countries will benefit, too, because they will be able to choose
their preferred mix of reducing emissions and buying up emissions
rights from developing nations.
[Peter Singer is professor of
Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the
University of Melbourne. His books include How Are We to Live? and
Writings on an Ethical Life. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2007. www.project-syndicate.org]
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