Global Policy Forum

By Andrew Simms

Early next year, the Russian Federation and Canada are likely to ratify the key international treaty on global warming, the Kyoto protocol. By signing, they will provide the critical mass to bring the agreement into force. And this year provided plenty of evidence for just why it is needed.

India was parched by the worst drought in memory, and Britain was battered by murderous storms. Hurricanes blew in the Gulf of Mexico, shaking the region - and the fortune of Britain's biggest oil company, BP. But serious questions are being asked from every political perspective about whether the protocol can do the job it was designed for. And, if not, what else needs to happen? In Delhi, at the last global talks organised to speed up the process, the hints that nature was giving were being blindly ignored.

The best that delegates could manage was to resist pressure from the US to weaken a struggling process. A minimum 60%-80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions is needed, according to scientists. But, as it stands, by 2012 the protocol might reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between 1%-2% of their 1990 levels. Originally, a cut of over 5% was planned.

The urgency of the task stems from the fact that economic damage from global warming is doubling every decade, according to the UN environment programme. There is a growing belief among scientists that delaying action in wealthy high-polluting countries by even less than 10 years could lead to irreversible and devastating climate change. This, in turn, could cause the break-up of the west Antarctic ice sheet and a massive rise in the sea level. Benito Mueller of Oxford University suggests that many poor countries are at breaking point and will snap under the cost of more climate-related disasters.

Though weak, the protocol introduced the idea of binding emissions targets. And because the pollution gap between rich and poor countries is so great, it urged that the onus for reducing emissions should fall on the west.

From the stroke of new year to their evening meal on January 2, for example, an average US family will consume, per person, the same amount of fossil fuel as a Tanzanian family uses in a whole year.

Yet now there is a stalemate. Poor countries won't move until the rich countries promise both to take action at home, and provide realistic funds for adaptation. Yet the US won't take part in a deal that leaves out poor countries.

So how is it possible to get them both on board? First, there is the reasoned approach. Fortunately, any logical global framework that succeeds the Kyoto protocol will also create a resource base to finance sustainable development in developing countries, since over-consumers will have to buy spare emissions rights from under-consumers.

The successor to Kyoto, which needs to be quickly agreed in order to be ready in just over five years' time, faces two big challenges. It has to set a safe concentration level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, it must decide how big the carbon cake can be, and then set a timetable to reduce emissions to meet it. Secondly, it has to work out how to distribute that carbon cake. That process would meet the US demand for a science-based, global deal, as laid out in the landmark Byrd-Hagel resolution in the US senate.

There are two contending methods of dividing the carbon cake. The first proposes a "carbon aristocracy" of inherited natural resource wealth, in which the basis for talks is the greenhouse gas emissions, per person, that each country has today. The second, and a starting position for countries such as China, India and Brazil, is that the atmosphere is a global commons that we all need. So entitlements to emit, they argue, should be shared on a per capita basis.

Given the historical responsibility of industrialised countries, poor countries have a moral point but, more importantly, they have a logical point. It's hard to imagine anyone making the argument that geographical accident of birth - which conveys enormous carbon privileges - could form the basis of a global agreement. There would be an outcry from the majority world.

This means that the only workable basis for solving the threat pre-distributes our natural fossil-fuel capital, upon which up to 90% of economic activity depends. Such a model would over an agreed time frame give every person an equal entitlement.

Because of the link between national wealth and the burning of fossil fuels, this would represent a revolution in international economic relations. It would mean that the much-hyped millennium development goals for halving world poverty would be potentially achievable for the first time.

If the reasoned approach to getting the US on board fails there are two other options. Badly affected developing countries will use a variety of legal options to take the US, and others, to court. Alternatively, the EU could calculate the subsidy enjoyed by the US through its non-participation in the protocol and apply border taxes to US exports.

The current drought in Ethiopia was a foretaste of worse climate-driven disasters to come. Then there were the storms that flattened US towns, including the tragic, but appropriately named settlement of Carbon Hill. As things get worse, if the US won't take a hint from nature, things might have to turn nasty.

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