After much anticipation and discussion, the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is now less than one week away. World leaders and ministers – including US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minster Gordon Brown and Energy Minister Ed Miliband, and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh – have spoken of the ‘do or die’ nature of the talks.
But many environmentalists and greens are now beginning to speak out on what they see as a fundamental failure on the part of politicians to understand the nature of the problems that they face.
James Hansen, speaking to the Guardian Newspaper, has suggested that a deal at Copenhagen would be a disaster: he argues that the policies that leaders are touting, borne out of a lack of understanding, will create further and graver problems, and will be legislatively guaranteed.
Others have further argued that the system of carbon trading that was so prevalent in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 should be scrapped in its entirety at Copenhagen: carbon trading, they claim, is a system that has little effect on genuine carbon emissions reductions worldwide. It creates a system, so the argument goes, that rewards nations and organisations for a reduction that has little practical effect, and still more worryingly allows for an override of environmental commitments with financial power.
Interestingly, then, many environmental greens are arguing that the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference is designed for failure: politicians are calling for more ambitious deals, a great collective responsibility, and binding targets, but critics claim that the foundation for these principles is badly researched and will lead to disaster in any case.
It is a statement of futility that will not encourage politicians and those who are watching the talks with hope and anticipation.With the deal at Copenhagen expected to bind nations to its terms for at least a decade, any wrong steps could prove costly: it is the politicians themselves that are claiming that the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference represents the last great opportunity for an emissions reduction deal, and any fundamental mistakes could be dangerous indeed.
Nonetheless, people across the world will look to the 7th of December with great expectation.
