Copenhagen is the world’s hot spot on climate change today as top politicians gather to draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto accord, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve drafted two top minds, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, and Sun Media’s Lorrie Goldstein, to debate the issue.
Elizabeth May: Greenhouse gas growth must stop by 2016
Today the 15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will open in Copenhagen. By Dec. 18 (or if it runs late, Dec. 19), we will know the outcome.
There is always a certain amount of last minute media coverage about such events, but very little context setting. The fact is Canada and virtually every other nation on Earth signed and ratified the Framework Convention in 1992.
It committed the world to reductions in greenhouse gases such that their build up in the atmosphere would be halted before they could become “dangerous.”
After 17 years of further meetings and negotiations (including the 1997 meeting in Kyoto and the protocol produced there) we are rapidly approaching the danger zone. We are already experiencing the loss of millions of square kilometres of Arctic ice, the retreat of glaciers around the world, persistent drought in much of the world, unprecedented shifts in rainfall patterns and sea level rise.
There are many excuses and reasons for the failure to act over the last two decades. Some nations, mostly within the European Union have achieved serious reductions. They have done so with improvements in their economy.
Germany is rapidly taking over the world market as the provider of solar, wind and other green economy technologies, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. China is catching up, this year investing $600 billion in green technologies. Sweden has de-coupled carbon reductions from economic growth, growing its economy while cutting greenhouse gases.
Yet, we have only taken baby steps toward the goal of avoiding dangerous levels of greenhouse gases. The planet’s atmosphere now has more than 30% more carbon dioxide (a powerful warming gas) than at any time in the last million years.
So what are the options for the outcome in Copenhagen?
A successful agreement will mean that the world stops the growth in greenhouse gases so they peak no later than 2016 and begin their decline from there. Overshooting 2016 could commit the world to a catastrophic runaway climate crisis. The world could experience accelerating temperature change leading to sea level rise of over nine metres for Canada, the stalling of the Gulf Stream, and the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people. That must be avoided and we have time to do so.
Failure in Copenhagen could look like two things: The decision of all leaders to call it a failure and admit they fell short.
This is less likely than the more dangerous form of failure: A happy photo op of world leaders smiling and calling their failure a “good first step.”
We are now 17 years past “good first steps.” The citizens of this world, our children and grandchildren will thank us only for embracing real success.
— Elizabeth May is leader of the Green Party of Canada, and executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada
Lorrie Goldstein: It’s not about the planet, it’s about bucks
The thing to understand about the 12-day UN meeting on climate change starting in Copenhagen today, is it’s not an environmental conference. It’s an economic mugging.
That it’s not about saving the planet. It’s about making you poorer.
And finally, that the “solutions” it proposes to “fix” the climate, far from being intended to succeed, are guaranteed to fail.
How do we know? Because they’ve already failed.
The two major initiatives that emerged out of the UN process that created the Kyoto accord, were the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which is a multi-billion-dollar European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, and several mechanisms to generate carbon credits for industry.
A carbon credit, the basic stock unit of cap-and-trade, entitles the bearer to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the daily price set by market trading, as occurs with any stock.
In the five years since Kyoto came into force in 2005, cap-and-trade and carbon credits have proven to be disasters.
The ETS hasn’t helped the environment. All it’s done is drive up energy costs, making ordinary people poorer, while showering Big Business and speculators with undeserved profits.
The carbon credit initiatives Kyoto established, such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), are riddled with profiteering and corruption.
To understand what’s going to happen in Copenhagen, what you need to know is this.
The purpose of this meeting is to replace Kyoto, which expires in 2012, with a much larger treaty.
The real-world impact of that will be to expand Europe’s cap-and-trade market into a global one, with far more carbon credits, and thus more opportunities for fraud.
But now there’s a new twist.
To get developing nations, led by China, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions — which they aren’t required to do under Kyoto — developed countries like Canada will have to transfer billions of dollars annually to the developing world, ostensibly to help it cope with climate change and lower its emissions.
But based on the actual performance of Kyoto — particularly the widespread corruption in the CDM, where developed countries invest in developing ones to obtain carbon credits — there’s no reason to think that will happen.
What will happen, based on real-world experience, is Big Business will make even more money — from us — without helping the environment.
That’s why major U.S. money houses that triggered the global recession with irresponsible lending practices — and who then received hundreds of billions of tax dollars in government bailouts — are lobbying fiercely for global cap-and-trade.
They know they will make a fortune brokering carbon trading, at least before the speculative bubbles burst yet again, costing millions more jobs.
As we prepare to endure 12 days of misleading rhetoric, painful self-righteousness and Canada-bashing in Copenhagen, remember this.
The biggest corporate backer of Kyoto in the U.S., which lobbied incessantly in favour of carbon-trading because it saw an easy way to make a killing was ... Enron.
Ring any bells?
— Lorrie Goldstein is a Sun Media national columnist
