The world’s governments face a new battle in South Africa in 2011 between rich and poor about slowing climate change, buoyed by some progress in Mexico but with faded hopes for a new treaty in coming years.
In 2011, governments will try to build on a deal in Mexico to set up a Green Climate Fund to help channel $100 billion (63 billion pounds) in climate aid a year from 2020, along with new systems to protect tropical forests and share clean technologies.
The two-week meeting in the Caribbean resort that ended on Saturday showed an ever-broader belief that a legally binding deal is far off, partly because of opposition by China and the United States, the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases.
“We still have a long and challenging journey ahead of us,” said Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s Climate Commissioner, of hopes for a legally binding global deal.
Cancun rejected calls by small island states, which fear they will be washed off the map by rising sea levels, to set a deadline for a treaty when environment ministers next meet in Durban, South Africa, in a year’s time.
Opposition in the U.S. Senate to President Barack Obama’s calls to legislate curbs on U.S. emissions makes it hard to imagine a new U.N. treaty in coming years — it would need 67 of 100 Senate votes to be ratified.
Durban is likely to be the scene of a battle between developed and developing nations about how to extend or replace the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, which obliges nearly 40 developed nations to cut emissions until December 31, 2012.
Cancun made little progress towards resolving splits over Kyoto, long-term curbs on greenhouse gases or ways to bolster fragmented carbon markets that are intended to drive trillion-dollar shifts in investments from fossil fuels.
COPENHAGEN TO CANCUN
All sides agreed that a main success in Mexico was to get the 190-nation talks back on track after the U.N.’s Copenhagen summit in 2009 failed to agree a treaty and merely came up with a nonbinding deal among 140 countries.
Many of the goals adopted in Cancun — such as limiting a rise in world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above preindustrial levels, or the target of $100 billion (63 billion pounds) in aid from 2020 — were in the Copenhagen Accord last year.
“Another ‘failure’ would have been crippling, if not fatal, to the whole enterprise,” said Elliot Diringer of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change. Another step forward was that Washington and Beijing, at odds on issues ranging from trade to interest rates in 2010, did not bicker in Cancun.
Many nations say the talks lack urgency compared to threats such as desertification, floods and heatwaves.
On Kyoto, Japan has led calls for a new treaty beyond 2012 binding top emitters including China, the United States and India which have no binding targets for 2012 under Kyoto.
In a tussle over shifting global influences in the 21st century, when China has overtaken Japan in economic influence, emerging powers insist that rich nations must extend Kyoto first before they agree a less onerous deal.
Hedegaard said that deadlock in Cancun would have meant “we are headed to Doha rather than Durban.” An EU official clarified that she was alluding to the stalled Doha round of U.N. trade talks — not to the Qatari city that is vying to host the climate negotiations after Durban, in 2012.
Mark Says:
The problem facing international governmental and regulatory bodies is not the onset of nature’s reaction to hundreds of years of exploitation by industrialists feeding the bottomless hedonistic appetite of people devoid of critical thinking but it is the division among ‘scientists’ who cannot agree on which data set their rationale should depend.
Politicians, employing the expensive services of an ideologically vetted academic agency, depend on the expert called the ‘consultant’. Experts like Richard Dawkins who express their science under the duress of deeply held philosophical convictions send a mixed message to management cartels in the UN who share esoteric information with other contracted scientists who don’t like Mr Dawkins philosophy and who suspect that the data they are being presented with has been modified to fit the philosophy of a Darwinian view of human development.
One can see the editorial process at work as documents get transcribed from one medium to another – the end result is a confusing and conflicting array of ‘scientific fact’ that not only contradicts the maxim ‘science is based on proven facts and facts cannot be disputed’ but impoverishes the notion that scientists and their anchor men in the media can be trusted to tell the public the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Agreements between scientists holding diametrically opposed and deeply held convictions about the origins of life itself for example is but one of the fundamental reasons why the concept of a World Government meeting in various places around the globe to unify scientific endeavour yields so little in the way of political conviction.
I mean, let’s face it, why should those who believe passionately that life is sacrosanct, created not by man but by God, should want to be involved with those who believe life is not so sacrosanct and who use their esoteric knowledge in the application of a militaristic science that is directly harmful to humans?
Science is a commodity, a vehicle by which both the worst type of tyranny can evolve (as with Hitler’s scientific endeavours secreted into the American Military Industrial Complex after the Nuremburg trials) or the best type of socialism. The players in the middle of ideological and philosophical polars that steer research, who make up the bulk of the scientific community, are caught in the position of choosing which science serves mankind best but the reality is their choice is directly influenced by their view of life. The human centric view, that only humans rule the roost, that its about the survival of the most strong [President Truman] will facilitate an easy choice when it comes to applying personal scientific skills in an industry servicing weapons manufacturing for example. The question whether this scientific endeavour harms humans becomes a secondary issue, since the primary issue is military power = survival; the survival of the fittest, the Darwinian view.
Jesus Christ’s view of how knowledge should be used is the opposite to this kind or type of science. From the perspective of eternity it is the survival of the weak, the passive and the peace maker that ensures hope for the survival of this planet. Whereas the science of humanism, that argues man is the centre of life, has created a programme of indoctrination that teaches kids the idea that the supremacy of physical might ensures hope for survival. In actual fact, this ‘might is right’ philosophy correlates with the thinking behind Darwins theory of evolution, re the so-called competitiveness of organisms, and it is wholly destructive because it always incites the soul to embrace narcissism and aggression as normal behaviour.
Agreement on climate change policy in the hands of a section of the scientific community that can’t distinguish between good and evil? Nah.
