New Dramas at Copenhagen

New Dramas at Copenhagen
(Madan Menon Thottasseri)
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There were disagreements at the "informal" session of the summit called by the host, Denmark's Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard, in an effort to get at least a meaningful "political declaration" from the 192 countries gathered here.

India and China came under a concerted attack from rich nations on Monday December 14, 2009 for a three-hour suspension of the Dec 7-18 climate summit, though an Indian government delegate denied that the country had anything to do with it.

The group of African countries walked out of the session, with Kamel Djemouai, the Algerian representative as head of African group had talks and said that Hedegaard's attempts would meant "death of the Kyoto Protocol", the current international treaty to tackle climate change.

Delegates from the US and some EU accused India and China for motivating the Africans’for walkout, and some of them said that even Indian and Chinese delegates had too walked out. This was promptly reported by developed country media, leading to much confusion among the 3,000-plus journalists gathered to cover the summit.

But a senior member of the Indian delegation denied that India had walked out or had "put up" the African countries to stage a walkout. After three hours of intense closed-door negotiations, the "informal" session restarted.

But all this drama once again pushed back any chance of any strong outcome at Copenhagen, with rich countries still refusing any significant cuts in their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) - which are warming the planet - or to put any meaningful amount of money on the table to help poor countries cope with climate change effects.

The emission cuts promised by advanced economies will not keep the world within a two-degree rise of global temperature, a limit beyond which climate change effects will be "unpredictable and catastrophic", according to Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The informal session supposedly to programme the emission reductions, at a time when the developing nations were howling for funds to implement emission reductions as envisaged by the global community! EU gets silent support from U.S and disintegrated the unity amongst top growing economies from the rest of the globe. It is evident when Japan, Saudi Arabia, African nations etc are being wooed by EU and distancing from their moral responsibility to get along with India and China.

Negotiators will be restructuring drafts round the clock drafting when strategies are getting more biased, just to protect their own interests ready for the leaders to make the hard political decisions on carbon dioxide emissions targets and long-term financing.

The obstacles to an agreement are still momentous as on date especially when all key players EU and U.S evince indifference to the plight of developing nations.

It is to be noted that U.S, world's largest per capita CO2 emitter walked away from the Kyoto Protocol eight years ago, thus eligible to be the only major developed nation exempt from the obligations of that treaty. Of course, the present U.S regime will too never gets attracted to Kyoto while President Obama continues to reject the same despite showing good gestures by offering to cut emissions over the next decade. EU wants developed countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by 30 per cent by 2020, far beyond what the Americans are currently willing to accept.

The situation is complicated by the fact that there are two separate tracks in the negotiations for an extension of the Kyoto Protocol with another round of binding emissions targets, and for an entirely new agreement bringing in the Americans.

The Japanese, who hosted the Kyoto meeting 12 years ago had already threatened last week to walk away from that agreement if there is no significant progress on a new treaty, and there have been calls for Europe to do the same to renew the push at a later date.

World Bank’s lowest estimate to cope with climate change effects is $75 billion a year and in response to it developed nations could offer just $10 billion a year for the next three years!.There are hundreds of NGOs supported by top philanthropists and celebrities in the western world and if they are roped in, capital will be pumped into the exchequer to earmark the corpus for emission funds. There will not be any need for levying extra tax on fuel and luxuries then.

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