Climate change debate hots up

By Terry Lacey

(September 04, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told a 155 nation warm-up meeting in Geneva preparing for the Copenhagen December Summit on climate change that the sea could surge up by over 2.5 meters by 2100. (Reuters and Jakarta Post 04.09.09).

He says “we are heading to an abyss” and not moving fast enough to stop an acceleration in the melting of vast icefields in Greenland and Antartica.

And it is coastal and island states in the Asia-Pacific region, including large archipelagic states like Indonesia , and small island states in the Pacific who will bear the brunt of the failure to act.

As if sensing the rise in temperature The Jakarta Post ran several stories and opinion pieces on the same day with the same message.

Hadi Soesastro at the Jakarta Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) quoted the Declarations of the G8 and the Major Economies Forum (MMF) held in L’Aquila Italy in July 2009 that world leaders agreed with “ the scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees C”.

He says the planet is already about half way down this road (at an estimated 0.8 degees C warmer on average). How on earth are we going to prevent the climate getting hotter, let alone try and cool it a bit?

One of the problems is that the first Kyoto Protocol will only have lasted from 2008 until 2012. The US stayed out of it under Bush and we can expect President Obama can pull the US in next time.

But meanwhile renewable energy project developers in Asia trying to fund project costs using carbon credits don’t really know where they stand after 2012.

How will the rules on carbon credits change? How soon can the Copenhagen Summit lead to a new Kyoto II system which developers can rely on, and for how long ?

Our over-complex and slow decision processes, and our bureaucratic log-jams make us look like puny in the face of the gigantic problem that we face. Millions of people will increasingly be hit by floods, droughts and storms while we blunder along.

Hadi Soesastro of CSIS argues that if the global economic crisis pushes us towards green or low carbon growth strategies in pursuing economic recovery then that would be a good thing. But green technologies, whether for renewable energy power plant or higher quality light bulbs costs more, not less than dirtier technologies. And green technologies require technology transfer and know-how.

Meanwhile China said in its May 2009 submission to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that its not fair to ask developing countries to make a big effort to change their technologies to mitigate climate change unless the rich Western countries provide supportive funding of between 0.5 and 1 percent of their GDP, on top of their existing official aid programs.

The West built its existing economic power on dirtier and earlier technologies. Why should Asia and the South pay through the nose for the privilege of cleaning up the environment to higher standards than before, just when the Asian and Southern economies need to recover from a Western-led global economic crisis ?

As Bill McKibben writing for CleanTech Asia Online said about the forthcoming Copenhagen Summit, “We don’t need an agreement. We need a solution.

How are we going to get politicians to agree the 2 degree benchmark ? This means we will try to hold the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million. Now some scientists say this is too old a benchmark and that anything above 350 parts per million means we are in real trouble. (The Jakarta Post 04.09.09).

That’s why a lot of NGOs, activists and governments from coastal and island states need to apply third degree tactics in the next three months, or the 2 degree target will fall, especially through lack of the financial means to achieve it. And maybe it was already too little too late.

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.

-Sri Lanka Guardian