Bali roadmap

The negotiations at the Bali conference on climate change have yet again shown that people are still ready to sacrifice the future of human civilisation to make petty points on such issues as specific rates of emission reductions and commitments on clean technology transfer to poor economies. This is what the opposition of the US, Japan and a handful of other developed countries on the emission reduction issue amounts to, the tragedy being the strong possibility that, w hen the climate crisis worsens, the same scale of reductions will be agreed to but it may be too late.

In fact, to many observers, Washington’s objective vis-À-vis the climate-control issue appears to be to shift the multilateral effort to slow down climate change from the UN’s ambit to one where it can call the shots. This is probably why President Bush held a climate conference at the White House in September to which important energy consumers and carbon-emitters were invited. But the assumption that the international community will be more malleable to US demands rather than those proposed by the UN is unrealistic. Clearly, as far as climate change is concerned, far more critical issues are involved than transient political subjects of the day, the most important being that any effective solution to the problem will have to be drawn up only at the global level because climate is indivisible. The US objection (supported by Canada, Japan and Australia) to the Bali Declaration mandating specific emission reduction targets of 25-40 per cent by 2020 for developed economies to avoid the most severe effects of climate change reflects an inexplicable myopia for which, quite unacceptably, the rest of the world will have to suffer. Another issue that created ripples in Bali is the entirely justified insistence of the developing countries that the declaration include assurances of technological and financial assistance for their own efforts to switch over to “cleaner” production processes.

The term of the Kyoto Protocol — not accepted by Washington — ends in 2009 and one of the major objectives of the Bali meeting was to prepare a successor roadmap to battle climate change. In fact, the negotiations were structured in such a way that the entire package had to be agreed upon for the conference to be a success. It would be suicidal for the international community not to collectively agree on such a campaign, especially when the hurdles in the way relate to specific contributions to the overall effort from the rich. As a point of principle, on the ground of equity, the rich should always contribute more than the poor for any noble cause. When the stakes involve nothing less than the future of mankind, the principle becomes one of exigency with the onus on the rich becoming even bigger.