The agreement on climate change reached at Heiligendamm, Germany, by the G8 leaders merely sets the stage for the real debate to come: How will we divide up the diminishing capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our greenhouse gases?
The G8 leaders agreed to seek "substantial" cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and to give "serious consideration" to the goal of halving such emissions by 2050 -- an outcome hailed as a triumph by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Yet the agreement commits no one to any specific targets, least of all the US, whose leader, President George W. Bush, who will no longer be in office in 2009, when the tough decisions have to be made.
One could reasonably ask why anyone thinks such a vague agreement is any kind of advance at all. At the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 189 countries, including the US, China, India, and all the European nations, signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, thereby agreeing to stabilize greenhouse gases "at a low enough level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
Fifteen years later, no country has done that. US per capita greenhouse gas emissions, already the highest of any major nation when Bush took office, have continued to rise.
In March, a leaked Bush administration report showed that US emissions were expected to rise almost as fast over the next decade as they did during the previous decade. Now we have yet another agreement to do what these same nations said they would do 15 years ago. That's a triumph?
If Bush or his successor wants to ensure that the next round of talks fails, that will be easy enough. In justifying his refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, Bush has always referred to the fact that it did not commit China and India to mandatory emission limits.
Now, in response to suggestions by Bush and other G8 leaders that the larger developing nations must be part of the solution to climate change, Ma Kai (
Likewise, Indian Foreign Minister Navtej Sarna has said that his country would reject such mandatory restrictions.
Are China and India being unreasonable? Their leaders have consistently pointed out that our current problems are the result of the gases emitted by the industrialized nations over the past century. That is true: Most of those gases are still in the atmosphere, and without them the problem would not be nearly as urgent as it now is.
China and India claim the right to proceed with industrialization and development as the developed nations did, unhampered by limits on their greenhouse gas emissions.
China, India, and other developing nations, have a point -- or rather, three points.
First, if we apply the principle "You broke it, you fix it," then the developed nations have to take responsibility for our "broken" atmosphere, which can no longer absorb more greenhouse gases without the world's climate changing.
Second, even if we wipe the slate clean and forget about who caused the problem, it remains true that the typical US resident is responsible for about six times more greenhouse gas emissions than the typical Chinese, and as much as 18 times more than the average Indian.
Third, the richer nations are better able than less well-off nations to absorb the costs of fixing the problem without causing serious harm to their populations.
But it is also true that if China and India continue to increase their output of greenhouse gases, they will eventually undo all the good that would be achieved by deep emissions cuts in the industrialized nations.
This year or next, China will overtake the US as the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter -- on a national, rather than a per capita basis, of course. In 25 years, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, China's emissions could be double those of the US, Europe and Japan combined.
But there is a solution that is both fair and practical: Establish the total amount of greenhouse gases that we can allow to be emitted without causing the Earth's average temperature to rise more than 2oC, the point beyond which climate change could become extremely dangerous.
Divide that total by the world's population, thus calculating what each person's share of the total is. Allocate to each country a greenhouse gas emissions quota equal to the country's population, multiplied by the per person share.
Finally, allow countries that need a higher quota to buy it from those that emit less than their quota.
The fairness of giving every person on earth an equal share of the atmosphere's capacity to absorb our greenhouse gas emissions is difficult to deny.
Why should anyone have a greater entitlement than others to use the earth's atmosphere?
But, in addition to being fair, this scheme also has practical benefits. It would give developing nations a strong incentive to accept mandatory quotas, because if they can keep their per capita emissions low, they will have excess emissions rights to sell to the industrialized nations.
The rich countries will benefit, too, because they will be able to choose their preferred mix of reducing emissions and buying up emissions rights from developing nations.
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and