Talk of War Overshadows Climate Crisis

By Tom Athanasiou, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted October 28, 2002.

Calling All Realists

By Tom Athanasiou

FPIF

The abortive "Earth Summit" in Johannesburg is already fading from our overtaxed memories. Indeed, as I write this, the conference of the week is COP8, the Eighth Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And it may be a whole lot more important than Johannesburg, if only as a marker, a way to date another death of innocence. For COP8 comes only days after Al Qaeda, in its latest blast of apocalyptic warfare, destroyed a pair of Balinese discos, and with them hundreds of lives. We should not forget, those of us who follow the game of global environmental policy, that Johannesburg's final preparatory conference was also in Bali, and only a few short miles away.

COP8 comes on a calendar no activist would have chosen. It's not so much that the climate talks are in limbo, but that their progress -- just now we're waiting for Kyoto to enter into force, and looking forward to debating the globalization of the climate regime -- seems abstract and even unreal against the background of an ever more gruesome world. The brutal post-boom economy, Al Qaeda's mad utopianism, an imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq: together they announce a new and bloody chapter in the history of our strange civilization, and set a geopolitical context in which semi-rational negotiations like those at the COPs can only seem odd, brave, acts of faith.

As if the climate talks could someday really matter.

With the winds of war blowing, it's a big if indeed. But what choice, really, do we have but to continue? War takes center stage, war and the economy, but ecological crisis is also gathering its forces, and the terms by which we'll finally face it are becoming clear. Climate, of course, is our special subject, and a close reading of the IPCC's measured prose yields a clear, unwelcome conclusion: We don't have much time.

Here's the executive summary: The usual "best case scenario," in which we manage to stabilize the atmosphere before its carbon dioxide concentration rises above 450 parts per million, assumes a "climate sensitivity" of 2.5°C, but this is looking to be an unrealistically low estimate. Furthermore, even if the climate sensitivity is that low, 450 ppm (which we'll far overshoot in anything like "business as usual") would yield a long-term temperature increase of 2°C, or even more once non-CO2 gases are included. Far from being "safe," this, according to the IPCC's Second Assessment Report, would mean significant ecosystem damage and loss of biodiversity ("whole forests may disappear"), major damage to food production in the most vulnerable parts of the world (60 to 350 million more people at risk of hunger), "significant loss of life" due to indirect health effects, particularly in developing countries, and a large increase in sea level.

And if the climate sensitivity turns out to be higher, all bets are off.

Which brings us back to the climate talks, now on the cusp of Kyoto's entry into force, and to the problem: Despite a full decade of negotiations, COP8 still will not engage the climate crisis with anything like an appropriate level of urgency. No country, North or South, is prepared to accept new emission-reduction commitments, and even the long-deferred "review of adequacy" (wherein negotiators will have to face the paucity of their own accomplishments) is still not certain to occur.

But the signs of reckoning are everywhere. Only a few years remain before 2005, when the official negotiating schedule demands that attention turn to the post-Kyoto agreement. When it does, we'll face a future unclouded by the ritual optimism of the 1990's boom. And as the science is getting clearer, it's difficult to avoid the real issue--making it, or not making it, to a "soft landing corridor."

And doing so on a world roiling with hatred and bombs.

So dispense with equivocation, and draw the obvious conclusions: We need a global treaty, an adequate one that can actually work. And we need it soon. And this can only mean a strategic leap.

 A Strategic Leap?

The big questions, as we see them: Will Europe, economically fragile and geopolitically insecure, insist that its "financial" hands are tied, and that, absent the U.S., it cannot even begin to pay the true cost of carbon? Will Southern negotiators, divided, beset, and forced yet again to the weary realism of the weak, insist that they cannot hope to change the rules of the game? Or will the European and Southern elites join together to strengthen the "climate protection coalition" that they founded in Bonn back in the ancient days of pre-9/11, when they saved Kyoto from G.W. Bush's repudiation? Will they, even in the face of global economic stagnation, endless war, and a collapsing Atlantic Alliance, be able to find a way across a seemingly impossible divide?

It's going to be harder this time, because this time, the South too is going to have to accept emission reduction commitments. And as inescapably as day follows night, the North is going to have to pay for them.

But why would this be possible?

Perhaps it's not. But, perhaps, and just because the danger is now so clear, it may finally be time to look forward. This time, economic stagnation, institutional delegitimation, social division, idiot violence, and of course climate change all come wrapped in one dark package. This time, with oil dependence catalyzing if not actually causing global war, the need for a crash renewables transition as part of global New Deal is becoming obvious. All you need is eyes to see.

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