Evidences are irrefutable. Everybody accepts climate change is a real danger and the issue is influencing the agenda of summits and hitting headlines, but in fact business instinct is prevailing over conservation instinct.
Valencia, Bali, Davos and more recently New Delhi summits were examples. But this year will be over and the next and governments, countries and enterprises will not reach a consensus.
One just has to look at the blockages of negotiations within the WTO. Trying to build consensus and not making it seems to be a successful worldwide way of losing time. It is almost a sport.
Commerce and conflicts of interests can wait for the probable end of slow and complicated negotiation rounds. The climate crisis cannot.
“We are running out time,” said UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon weeks ago at Davos summit.
“Climate change is a result of a world without a sustainable development. We need a worldwide policy,” said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri few days later, during the Sustainable Development Summit at New Delhi.
Time is running, we need worldwide regulations, sustainable economical practices and immediate actions. Those are key words.
But reality speaks a different language.
The compromised health of stock markets was the main issue at Davos summit. In the other hand, the European Union’s programme 20%-2020 has been widely criticized.
At international meetings, discussions revolve on the others’ responsibilities. For governments and enterprises, economical growth is first.
At this point, many countries are attracted by the elastic American view, which promotes an agreement with more flexible rules.
According to this view, each country should set its own goals, ways and mechanisms, which should not affect economical figures.
George Bush’s administration “takes seriously the issue of climate change,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said. “Each nation must face the problem in the way it considers the best.”
The two major CO2 emissions producers, the United States and China, share this approach.
It raises the question that should lead the way to the consensus: Is it possible to keep the current economical growth rates and consumption and at the same time tackle the global warming?
Nature does not take a seat at summits, nor it specially takes care of humankind. It follows its own ways.
Nature’s language does not include such words as economical growth, investments, profits, negotiations, consensus or obligations.
Nature speaks and works in terms of causes and effects. It is a language based on interconnected forces that, in the case of global warming, are being unleashed by humankind.
Change against climate change
Last September, a survey commissioned by BBC World Service found that most of people are willing to change their habits and ways of life in sight of climate change.
The research, conducted by the polling firm Globescan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa), surveyed more than 22.000 people in 21 countries, from Canada to Australia, including China, United States, the main European powers and Russia, Brazil and India.
-79% of respondents agreed that "human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change"
-Nine out of 10 people said action was necessary, and 65% said that "it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon"
According to this results, the majority deem necessary a change in the current ways of life and they support drastic measures like rises in energy prices if they contribute to promote energy saving and CO2 emissions decreasing.
What are the views of enterprises and those who oppose binding international schemes, emissions taxes and any drastic measure aiming to slow the drastic acceleration of climate change?
-Initiatives like the European Union package (reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent and increase use of renewable energies by 20 percent, energy efficiency by 20 percent and use of biofuels in vehicles by 10 percent by 2020) have a devastating cost for economy, are anti-democratic and do not take into account the cost-benefit relation
-The cost of required technologies and investments is astronomical
-To face the measures, energy-intensive industries such the steel, metallurgy, chemical and cement sectors would have to raise the prices. In fact, several industries have already threatened to move production offshore
-Industries and countries adopting environmental adjustment measures will face loss of competivity
-Emissions trading system and emissions taxes have failed to improve the situation
-The solution is an approach on market basis, avoiding any binding or centralizing goal and focusing on technology
-Stands like the European programme tend to fail by setting goals beyond the possibilities of the available technology
As time goes by
The fact is that immediate and alternative solutions are urgently needed if taxes and the Emissions trading system have failed, or if the use of biofuels put up the price of transport and food and worsen the global warming by generating more pressures over agriculture.
Perhaps the international community will start effectively facing the climate change once the governments and enterprises’ boards accept that economical cost is unavoidable, as well as changes in the ways of life and in the ways of measuring cost-benefit relation are essential.
Because nature will not wait nor will give us an undetermined grace period until we solve differences and develop cleaner and more efficient technologies “without affecting the economical growth rates”.
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