Reasonable
proposals to the Convention on Climate Change
Everyone now seems to agree that the
Earth’s climate is changing as a direct result of human activities
and that the social, environmental, political and economic consequences
will be catastrophic if nothing is done – and fast – to address
the problem.
The 12th Conference of the Parties to
the United Nations Convention on Climate Change will be meeting
in Nairobi, Kenya, from 6 to 17 November. Unfortunately, this
Convention has until now shown that human greed has prevailed
over human intelligence, and has been dominated by interests that
care too little about the environment and people and too much
about money.
It is therefore necessary to think in
terms of what really needs to be done to avoid the looming climatic
crisis and not about how much money there is to win or lose in
different scenarios.
It is a well known fact that the main
causes of climate change are related to fossil fuel consumption
(coal, oil and gas) and to a lesser extent to deforestation, and
that both result in the carbon emissions mainly responsible for
global warming.
Those two causes are, however, totally
different. The carbon stored in fossil fuels is not part of the
biospheric carbon cycle. Once extracted and burnt, that carbon
adds to the above-ground carbon pool and will not return back
to its original underground form of oil, coal or gas for eons.
Fossil fuel use is therefore, practically speaking, an irreversible
cause of climate change.
This is why fossil fuel use should by
now be considered an extreme environmental provocation which cannot
be “compensated for” in any way. If governments had taken this
approach when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed upon in 1997, we could
now be moving toward a fossil fuel-free world, with a much brighter
climatic future.
Carbon emissions resulting from deforestation
are different, because the carbon stored in forest biomass is
– and has always been – part of the above ground carbon pool.
This means that if deforestation is reversed through forest restoration
–which is not synonymous to monoculture tree plantations – the
growing forests are likely to “suck up” some of the carbon released
when the forest was destroyed or degraded.
In view of the above, if governments
are serious about tackling climate change, they must commit themselves
to:
- phasing out fossil fuels in a very
short time
- halting and reversing deforestation
in a very short time
However, not all countries are equally
responsible for climate change. The industrialized North holds
most of the responsibility for the problem, and is obliged to
implement solutions to the problem it created. As most experts
agree, it also has the financial and technical resources to make
the phase out of fossil fuels possible.
The North’s responsibility is very clear
in the case of fossil fuel-related carbon emissions, most of which
they have released into the atmosphere since the start of the
Industrial Revolution. But it is equally clear that most of the
deforestation that is taking place in the South is also related
to the North. Production of soya beans, meat, shrimp, palm oil,
timber, pulp and paper, minerals – all of which result in forest
loss – end up mostly in Northern markets, while Northern-led institutions
such as the IMF and the World Bank impose policies on the South
that necessarily result in further deforestation.
It is therefore necessary that Northern
governments commit themselves to:
- making available any financial and
technical resources required to phase out fossil fuels in a very
short time – in both North and South
- introducing relevant changes to their
economies and policies to make it possible to stop and reverse
deforestation in a very short time
- ensuring that Southern countries and
peoples benefit from and are in no way negatively impacted by
those changes. Among other things, this means that no large-scale
tree or biofuel monocultures are implemented on their lands
Accordingly, the Convention needs to
move away from the complicated and fraudulent carbon trading schemes
it has been involved in during the past nine years. As a sign
of change, it should cease to consider the use of tree plantations
as carbon sinks and immediately exclude the possibility of using
genetically modified trees in such plantations. At the same time,
it should begin to address seriously the issues of how to phase
out fossil fuels and how to stop deforestation.
All this is nothing more than common
sense – even though it is a far cry from the false solutions government
climate negotiators will probably spend most of their time discussing
when they meet in Nairobi.
Of course, many vested interests oppose
common sense. But the main vested interest that should be taken
into account is humanity as a whole, whose future depends on what
is done – or not – by the governments involved in this process.
