The taxi driver that took me from the Bali airport to my hotel in Nusa Dua, the secure "green zone" where the climate negotiations are taking place, didn't speak much English. Just well enough to say, haltingly, that he was "too stupid" to have a better job, he didn't drink, and he was very depressed because he was lonely, but too poor to get married. Oh, and that the Westin, where I was not staying, was the "best" place. Very "luxury." Very "Western."
Now, about a week later, I've been in lots more cabs. I can report that Third World beach resorts are very strange places. And that the negotiations are running in their usual courses: bitterness, bad faith, recriminations, pulling teeth, and rising tension. The Bush people, despite promises to play a constructive role, are making destructive interventions in a number of working groups. But the Bush people aren't what they used to be. And -- hope against hope -- the developing world is rising to the occasion.
China is being very flexible, and by many accounts positioning itself as a leader for the 21st century. This is making a difference. Come this weekend, we'll probably (knock on wood) be declaring victory. Which would mean -- this is not much, but it's still something -- that we'll have an agreement that calls for an aggressive global emissions reductions trajectory, something consistent with "IPCC science." A trajectory that can, if we hold it, deliver a global emissions peak by 2015, or 2020 at the latest.
Then comes the hard part: building bridges to that still painfully vague future. This is where we're all going to be have to rise to the occasion. Because if we want a crash program of global mitigation, we're going to have to listen, hard, to the developing country negotiators who want the same, but only as part of a "package" that includes meaningful technology transfer, significant adaptation funding, and, in general, the financial assistance that will be necessary to finesse an extremely bad situation in which -- surprise! -- it turns out that the developing world doesn't trust the North.
It won't be easy. Ultimately, trust is going to require a fair global "burden sharing" deal. Such a deal -- to get back to my first taxi driver -- is going to have to take real account of the rich-poor divide.
Real account. It's too late for rhetoric and promises. Too late for halfway analysis that stops at the North-South impasse. "Rich-poor" is what I said, and "rich-poor" is what I meant.
So, evidentially, did the Greenpeace India analysts who just released a new report that deserves huge kudos, and a great deal of attention. "Hiding Behind the Poor" shows that India -- in claiming that its emissions, measured in per-capita terms, are too low to demand mitigation obligations of any kind -- is actually relying on terribly misleading numbers, and by so doing allowing India's elites to "hide behind" their own poor.
The authors show this in just the right way, by doing their homework. They break India's population down into what, for lack of a better term, we might call "emission classes," and -- surprise -- it turns out that there are plenty of people within India who have emissions above, and sometimes far above, the sustainable global average.
Highly recommended. Let's hope it's a sign of the times, and not just in India. Last time I looked we had emissions classes here in the U.S. as well.
City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks
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GreenEngineer Posted 2:35 am
12 Dec 2007
This is good news, and it doesn't surprise me. The climate crisis has created an opportunity for any powerful nation that wants to be one of the Great Powers of the next century to rise to the occasion. Successful leadership on this issue will generate both tremendous global political capital and tremendous economic opportunities. Whichever nation emerges as the leader in green technology and design will be the America of the next century.
That could have been us (the US). It still could be, but that window of opportunity is closing day by day. As it stands, China has an opportunity to do to our entire country what Japan has done to the US auto industry: have a vision, take a chance, and leave the competition with its pants down wondering what just happened.
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GreenEngineer Posted 2:37 am
12 Dec 2007
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mat Posted 2:49 am
12 Dec 2007
oh no, America is definitely the bad guy here.
seriously.
and even though i've posted on other articles about China's horrible behavior and attitudes on ANY biodiversity or conservation topic, America is to blame for a lot of it.
i just think that there is enough blame to go around and not just the US and China.
America needs to own up to it's BAD environmental policies, but other countries (including China) need to own up to the fact that they are the new, emerging bad guys.
the US has helped to export the American way of life to otherwise, third world nations. in fact, other nations seem to covet ALL THE BAD STUFF we have and none of the good stuff in America.
historically, America has always been the good guys, but now with the Iraq fiasco and other right-wing political stances too numerous to list, we are in that position no longer, and primarily, it's all own fault.
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mat Posted 4:28 am
12 Dec 2007
ok, i'm going to amend my last paragraph above before everyone else does -
i think the USA has been perceived to be more a good guy than a bad guy, historically, at least as far as the end of WWII. we've at least been thought of as the ultimate land of opportunity, because of our more or less democratic way or life. (we are actually a plurality, i think)
anyway,
our founding fathers did know what they were doing.
that's my opinion anyway, and now i think we slip internationally into the bottomless negative abyss of public perception because the USA is no good at being a team player if we are not in charge. a pox has come upon us.....
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bookerly Posted 4:31 am
12 Dec 2007
Dear Mat,
Can you provide us with analysis of why you consider China as a new emerging bad guy? What are your sources of information?
Tom, thanks for the posting. I hope that the Bush people will finally get their act together and back off. One of the Grist news articles suggested that the US, Japan, Canada and Australia were blocking agreements on emissions cuts by developed countries.
I get the US and Canada, but I thought Australia had decided to become good on global warming, and what is Japan doing, they were below my radar on this (smile).
patrick in Beijing
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 4:37 am
12 Dec 2007
What I find worrisome is the way wealthy and powerful managers of economic globalization cannot see anything beyond wealth- and power-accumulation for themselves and their minions. The scientific facts that the Earth "has a fever" and could soon be on fire is everywhere ignored and denied by too many current leaders who have unmet responsibilities to assume and undischarged duties to perform, for the sake of our children.
Rather than acknowledge and address the global ecological challenges looming before humanity, these "economy first, last and always" leaders choose to forsake intellectual honesty and courage and instead deny reality and encourage others to spread misinformation so as to protect the money, power and privileges of a tiny minority of humanity, come whatsoever may.
In Bali on this very day we are hearing from a group of educated denialists and naysayers who are evidently being forced by circumstances at the Climate Change Conference in Indonesia to make up a pitiful "have the courage to do nothing defense" to buttress their "economic growth is all that matters" message.
Perhaps this duplicitous rear-guard action against necessary change is perpetrated by scholarly representatives of the wealthy, the powerful, and others who find riches, power and privileges to be all that really matter, come what may for our children, for biodiversity and the environment, for Earth as fit place for human habitation, and for the future of life as we know it.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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mat Posted 4:44 am
12 Dec 2007
http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/06sum/field.asp?r=n
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mat Posted 5:27 am
12 Dec 2007
"The world needs an alliance - especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they've taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.
But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters - most of all, my own country -- that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.
Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment."
from Al Gore's acceptance speech in Oslo Norway.
and a link to the RAN website which has published the whole speech:
http://understory.ran.org/2007/12/11/we-have-a-purpose-we ...
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sernya Posted 7:22 am
12 Dec 2007
Since China invaded deforestation has happened at an alarming rate, mining is uncontrolled, and they are polluting the source waters of most of the Asian continent, which originate in Tibet.
See this website for the most recent report of the environmental degradation caused by the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
http://www.tibet.net/en/diir/pubs/edi/tib2007/content.htm ...
I wouldn't say China is an emerging bad guy, I think we are finally recognizing what has been happening for the last 50 years.
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mat Posted 7:52 am
12 Dec 2007
but nothing, NOTHING absolves the USA of OUR responsibilities in this matter. we suck, we sabotaged the climate meetings in Bali practically single-handed even AFTER China was making weak squeaky sounds of possible cooperation maybe..... we should be ashamed of ourselves. pot calling the kettle black - doesn't work. in the long run, the public isn't THAT stupid.
i'm disgusted
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bookerly Posted 2:57 pm
12 Dec 2007
Mat, you say you should be ashamed of yourself, but still can't resist China bashing. Where is that coming from? I definitely get the idea that you don't like China. But you don't offer a clear explanation of why China as opposed to say, India, or Brazil, or Venezuela.
You should go and read your own link. While you see it as all negative, my reading is that a lot of people, inside and outside of China are working to try to solve some very difficult problems. How does that make the Chinese bad guys?
You might read Eric De Place's comments on why Al Gore's speech is wrong, and you might also explain why per capita CO2 production is less relevant than national totals.
Finally, you say that nothing absolves the US, yet you posted in another thread that you were in support of the US refusal to sign on any Global Warming actions UNLESS China and India agreed to suffer more. So, how is that different from George Bush's tactics at stalling, and denying?
All I really get from you is that you don't like China. Fair. Don't visit!! (smile).
But China in this debate is not just China, it is the symbol for the attitude of the developed (read rich) nations towards the developing (read poor) to say nothing of the undeveloped (read poorest).
Bashing China doesn't change it's dilemma. How to raise it's people out of poverty in a sustainable manner. It is trying and struggling, but so far the US is more interested in China as a scapegoat for it's own unwillingness to even try.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 3:00 pm
12 Dec 2007
Tibet is part of China. You can argue the history all you want, but it is part of China. That is not going to change.
If you start from that understanding, you will get further in discussing what is going on. China certainly plans to spend money to help Tibet develop. The fantasy of westerners about a perfect Tibet pre-1950 ignores the extreme poverty the people lived in then. And offers no solutions to poverty now. How do you alleviate poverty without development?
patrick in Beijing
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hank Posted 11:20 am
13 Dec 2007
"I'm gonna buy me a poor man's trouble
Yes Lord to help me home
I'm gonna buy me a poor man's trouble
Yes Lord to help me home
And when I get my trouble and woe
Then homeward I will go
I'm gonna get a little trouble and woe to get me home ...."
> it turns out that there are plenty of people
> within India who have emissions above, and
> sometimes far above, the sustainable global
> average.
> ...emissions classes here in the U.S. as well.
Yep. Good pointer, big elephants.
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hank Posted 11:41 am
13 Dec 2007
http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Featured+Market+Commentary/E ...
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